First, you spout off about how you should be able to control every aspect of your employees' lives no matter whether they are on the clock or not or even if it's legal (not to mention moral or decent) for you to do.
Now you come out with this gem:
Incidentally, no, I have no savings -- welcome to starting a business. I've re-invested just about everything I've got. Simply put, n% at a bank is not as good as growing the business another 10% next year.
Let me give you a piece of very valuable advice for free. *Always* leave yourself an out. *Always* have that money in the bank to fall back on if the world goes sideways because, at some point, it will.
What you are doing by re-investing everything you have in the business is literally putting all of your eggs in one very fragile basket. You can't count on the business growing x% in a given year. It just doesn't work like that. The way you're going about things, you'd be ruined with one or two bad quarters, and that's not just good business sense.
You, sir (and I put no respect into that word in your case), seem to be a worthless and even downright stupid person and I hope that I never have business dealings with you.
By the way, I have been a manager, and I have been a partner in a business. Heck, I went into the whole thing with the benefit of experience I've gained over the years from being around my family members who have owned their own businesses.
to include being, black, gay, female, Catholic, hairy, blonde, and/or disabled?
Hm. Didn't think so.
He's already stated that he should be able to fire people because of their religion or because they were mothers as opposed to single men. It's elsewhere in his postings for this story.
Re-read my comment. I was talking about individuals, not companies. I have no problems with people of any faith provided they don't try to shove it at everyone or convert people.
As far as companies, or their representatives, doing it goes, I think the manager/owner/etc who does it or tries to do it should be tossed into a box of rabid weasels and ticked off badgers.
Granted, an individual doing it could be said to be creating a hostile working environment whether they were a manager or your average worker and could be considered legitimate cause for termination. However, I also stated that this was said in the context of "legal issues aside".
I agree. Though, realistically, I've known far too many managers who have behaved in a similar fashion and then wondered why they can't get or keep good people (or why their clients dropped them like a stone when they found out about the manager's/business' practices).
He most certainly did say that. I pulled all of the quotes that I said are his from his posts on just *this* article and posted them without any alterations.
It's the same one where he says "My refusing to hire a programmer because of her religion is perfectly reasonable. "
As for "So if you work for me, you're going to have to understand that yeah, I'll have to restrict your religious activity, and your political out-cry.", that one was posted here:
Perhaps a few courses on project management are in order.
I would also suggest a reality check, a severe beating followed by a rabid badger down the trousers for being a bigoted (despite his supposed reasoning) piece of garbage who wants to rule over every aspect of the lives of the people around him, and several well placed lawsuits by afflicted employees provided he actually owns/runs a business (which I seriously doubt).
I can't see anyone with his seriously screwed up world view running a successful business for all that long. Even assuming that he didn't get sued into oblivion, he'd only be left with people who don't have any better options as far as jobs go.
I hope I speak for everyone when I say: we are pleased to invite you to come live on the west-coast.
Thanks for the invitation. I have a number of old friends who have extended the same invitation. I hope to take them up on it at some point as I rather miss them. =]
Leave your shame in the south,
Ironically, I'm technically in the north. In fact, I'm in one of the states that shares a water boarder with Canada (Ohio), though I'm only about an hour from the Mason-Dixon line (the Ohio River).
I've actually had the opportunity to interview with a couple of companies on the west coast. Unfortunately, they fell through.
. We have snow to sand, high mountains to deep seas
All things I like a great deal. You also have forests, which I love (it's one of my favorite things about the area where I currently find myself). I'm one of those weird people who loves both cities and wilderness and wants access to both.
conservatives and liberals,
Funny you mention that. Most of the aforementioned people here of the fundamentalist sort accuse anyone who isn't as conservative as them as being "dirty liberals". Yes, I am frequently accused of being a "dirty liberal" despite the fact that I'm a moderate. =]
If you firmly believe that you also have just cause to fire them for any reason you choose then what do you make of the anti-discrimination laws preventing you from firing people because you (or your clients) don't like their race, religion, chances of getting pregnant and so on?
Well, he's already stated that:
So if you work for me, you're going to have to understand that yeah, I'll have to restrict your religious activity, and your political out-cry.
and again:
My refusing to hire a programmer because of her religion is perfectly reasonable. In my case, our development schedules often include days that are religious holidays. I can't lose my employees to "a higher power". So while I don't care about their god, I need to ensure that they don't all share the same god because I can't lose them all on the same day.
Oh, and he covered the mothers vs single men thing too:
Same goes for a mother versus a single man. And hey, if they wine and dine potential customers often, a vegetarian simply isn't acceptable. Now I'm not going to write the job description to include the expected diet, but I am going to expect my employee to eat when my client takes them to a steak house.
Maybe I make a slightly paranoid case, but self expression is highly important to me; I'd hate to live half a life for fear of losing my job.
You don't make a paranoid case. I live in the Bible Belt, and you would be amazed at the sheer amount of fundamentalist Christians who, when they interview, try to figure out if the person they are talking to is like them or not and use that as an unspoken basis for who to hire.
Legal issues aside, personally, I think that religion is a private thing and is the business of the person practicing it, and that person alone, provided they don't try to shove it in the faces of everyone around them (which I consider tacky) or try to convert people (which I consider downright rude).
I have friends from a great many places around the world who belong to a large number of faiths. I've known and am welcomed around groups as diverse as Benedictine priests (as well as other sects), Tibetan monks, and even Native American Medicine societies. I don't have a problem with any of them provided they don't try to convert people, etc. I even enjoy the company. It makes for really interesting conversations on occasion.
It's funny. Despite the fact that I'm not, I get called an atheist rather frequently where I am because I express distaste for the locals trying to use government to endorse their religion. I even wrote a displeased letter to our governor (whom, once upon a time, I used to know) this year for endorsing the placement of Christian iconography in state parks while refusing to allow other faiths to place theirs there as well.
Then again, a lot of the locals seem to think that anyone who isn't Christian (or, rather, isn't the kind of Christian that shows everyone how Christian they are) is a godless atheist. I really wish I was joking, but a lot of them take the mere existence of other religions as proof that they are being repressed and persecuted.
Let's go there. Straight to the root of the problem. You don't get to decide what is "weird" and what is "acceptable to a public face".
Oh, he already went there in another one of his posts on this story. To quote him:
My refusing to hire a programmer because of her religion is perfectly reasonable. In my case, our development schedules often include days that are religious holidays. I can't lose my employees to "a higher power". So while I don't care about their god, I need to ensure that they don't all share the same god because I can't lose them all on the same day.
Anyone employee who exercises that particular right against me, doesn't see the problems with which I am faced. So when I refuse to hire her because her schedule doesn't accomodate the job's requirements -- or potential requirements -- her lawyer can easily swing that into a religious issue, which simply isn't fair to me.
It seems like far too many people think that Ruby is just for web stuff because of Rails. They don't realize that it's a really good general purpose scripting language.
I think my two favorite things about Ruby when compared to Perl (which, like you, I used to use for scripting) are: 1) I can actually *read* it because it doesn't look like I rolled my head around on the keyboard 2) It behaves in Windows the same way it does in Linux (with the obvious exception of having to change any hard-coded filenames you use). Perl had a few quirks in that regard. Heck, let's be honest - the Windows implementation was not what you'd call complete (or at least wasn't the last time I bothered to check).
He was a favorite teacher of the students at my high school even long after we were out of his class. The painting of the truck was done by students in all the grades, not just the freshman class.
It is indeed impressive that the administration agreed to allow this.
Our annual end-of-year fun project in high school was painting the freshman English teacher's truck.
Yes, it was with his permission. He was a decent guy with an interesting sense of humor. I did a double take on the first day of classes when he got in the room without walking past me as I was sitting next to the door. He used the window to come in the room in the morning.
I think the most impressive one we did was zebra stripes and a tail one year.
So while it may have improved upon speed, the question still is whether it can scale without having to rely upon PHP and JAVA and PYTHON consistently to help it out in this regard.
You seem to be thinking of Rails, which is a framework for Ruby used for making web apps.
Ruby itself is quite nice for general development work.
Like it's a sport to go rummaging through the trash... LOL
There's a lot more to it than just rummaging through the trash.
When you're going for sensitive information and not just things like parts, common sense dictates that you pick your targets carefully and have a plan for executing the dive (though most of the following would apply to diving for equipment as well): Knowing which dumpsters and containers are more than likely to have sensitive information. Knowing how to get in and out of the area without getting caught. Knowing how best to get out of the area if someone is after you (which may not be the same as the best way to get out undetected). Knowing *when* to go for the information (which would involve some recon to know when the security patrols routinely pass). Having a plan for getting the information (usually by the bag full) out of the area. Knowing how to go through it in order to find what you need. Sometimes even spending a great deal of time piecing together sheets that have been fed through a strip shredder.
Not sure if the following belongs in a MS- and C++ article on parallel programming, and also not wanting to sound like a fanboy
Don't sweat it. It's always nice to be able to compare with people in other groups. It lets you know what you're doing right that others may or may not be, shows you places where you might be deficient, and generally gives you the ability to look at the issues from a different angle.
Those, in my opinion, are positive things because they're one of the ways we learn to do what we do better.
We bash in attempt to convince those smart people to leave MS and work in a more open way.
In doing so, you prove yourself a fool. It is a childish action that only hurts your cause, and Microsoft (as well as most people with any business or social sense) knows it.
You see Microsoft as some great evil to be overcome without seeing that a large part of your problem is yourself.
Companies see people like you bash anything that isn't open source or "free" and they quite rightly think that you haven't really thought things out or lack the business acumen to realize why all of the world can't work that way. (Not to mention the extreme lack of social skills that it shows)
I like open source, I use it, I occasionally write it, and I've championed the cause in a sane way.
What you are missing is that Microsoft is giving a lot of people and companies what they want - software that is relatively easy to use and which everyone else is already using ("best" doesn't matter most of the time, which a lot of you have problems understanding).
At the same time, they treat their employees well, paying them well with good benefits (from what I've heard from people I know who work there), and maintain well-respected research labs.
You do not draw good people from a good environment by telling them it's not a good environment because they don't make everything open source. You draw good people by being a better environment in terms of pay, benefits, culture, work-life balance etc *and* appealing to their sensibilities.
If you can't do that, and instead simply bash anyone for associating with "the enemy", you are doomed to fail because, at best, people will work on it as a hobby. The lion's share of good open source software is done by people being paid to do it. Bashing the company of people you want to work for you does not help.
Not all of the world cares about open source, and many of us who do are not fanatical about it and realize that, while it is good for some things, is absolutely horrible for other things from a business standpoint. We like working on things that we see as important, but we also like being able to pay our bills and having a life outside of work.
I haven't seen a school with just one IT person in over a decade.
I saw one a couple of years ago. Their IT person was retiring and they found my resume and gave me a call.
I had experience in basically everything they had/needed, so I went in to talk to them.
I found myself sitting across the table from a group of 50-60 year old administrators who basically decided that, experience be damned, someone in their mid 20s was just too young to do that job.
The looks on their faces when they met me were mildly amusing. I guess they were expecting someone about a decade or two older.
Not to mention that, from what I've seen and heard from people who have worked there, they pay pretty well with decent benefits, the place is relatively relaxed, and they actually encourage their people to have a life outside of work.
How horrible and terrible that must be for them. Can't imagine why *anyone* would want to work there (for the less observant of you, this was meant as sarcasm)
I hate to burst the gp's bubble, but they do actually make a lot of good things there (I, for one, am quite fond of Visual Studio. It makes my life a great deal easier). Like every company, there are good products and products that need some work, but on the whole their stuff is pretty good.
Also, as you said, a lot of the *really* smart people are in their R&D labs, working on things that are 5+ years in the future.
The bigger question I am asking is, why cannot teachers learn from students everyone once a while?
Because, in the minds of a great many teachers, they are *the* authority and admitting that they don't know something is an insult they can't bear. This is especially true when they are dealing with a student (or his/her parents).
A lot of them don't like to be questioned or made to feel inferior in any way and will come down hard on anyone that even looks like they might do that. There are, of course, exceptions, but, sadly, it's been my experience that they're fairly rare.
A guy who's on the C++ standards committee AND works for Microsoft.
Actually, according to the latest Dr Dobbs, Herb is the *chair* of the ISO C++ Standards committee. (He had an article on lock hierarchies being used to avoid deadlock)
He's really going to know what he's talking about, then.
As chair of the committee, I'd say there's a pretty fair chance that he *does*.
I really love people who bash things just because Microsoft is involved. Contrary to what seems to be a popular belief here, they have some incredibly intelligent people who are very good at what they do there.
Slashdot Mirror
"Once again, don't call me Eugene" :P
You also had to love the dumbing down of what happened to the super tanker training vessel.
"Excuse me?"
"The little boat...flipped...over..."
Some people don't get the point of entertainment.
Personally, I liked the movie. Always have. It amuses the heck out of me.
Besides, you have to love Penn getting called a "Hapless techno-weenie" *grin*
You keep proving how bloody foolish you are.
First, you spout off about how you should be able to control every aspect of your employees' lives no matter whether they are on the clock or not or even if it's legal (not to mention moral or decent) for you to do.
Now you come out with this gem:
Incidentally, no, I have no savings -- welcome to starting a business. I've re-invested just about everything I've got. Simply put, n% at a bank is not as good as growing the business another 10% next year.
Let me give you a piece of very valuable advice for free. *Always* leave yourself an out. *Always* have that money in the bank to fall back on if the world goes sideways because, at some point, it will.
What you are doing by re-investing everything you have in the business is literally putting all of your eggs in one very fragile basket. You can't count on the business growing x% in a given year. It just doesn't work like that. The way you're going about things, you'd be ruined with one or two bad quarters, and that's not just good business sense.
You, sir (and I put no respect into that word in your case), seem to be a worthless and even downright stupid person and I hope that I never have business dealings with you.
By the way, I have been a manager, and I have been a partner in a business. Heck, I went into the whole thing with the benefit of experience I've gained over the years from being around my family members who have owned their own businesses.
to include being, black, gay, female, Catholic, hairy, blonde, and/or disabled?
Hm. Didn't think so.
He's already stated that he should be able to fire people because of their religion or because they were mothers as opposed to single men. It's elsewhere in his postings for this story.
And in the context of labor laws, ILLEGAL.
Re-read my comment. I was talking about individuals, not companies. I have no problems with people of any faith provided they don't try to shove it at everyone or convert people.
As far as companies, or their representatives, doing it goes, I think the manager/owner/etc who does it or tries to do it should be tossed into a box of rabid weasels and ticked off badgers.
Granted, an individual doing it could be said to be creating a hostile working environment whether they were a manager or your average worker and could be considered legitimate cause for termination. However, I also stated that this was said in the context of "legal issues aside".
I agree. Though, realistically, I've known far too many managers who have behaved in a similar fashion and then wondered why they can't get or keep good people (or why their clients dropped them like a stone when they found out about the manager's/business' practices).
He actually SAID that?
He most certainly did say that. I pulled all of the quotes that I said are his from his posts on just *this* article and posted them without any alterations.
Here's the link for that particular post:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=401966&cid=21862130
It's the same one where he says "My refusing to hire a programmer because of her religion is perfectly reasonable. "
As for "So if you work for me, you're going to have to understand that yeah, I'll have to restrict your religious activity, and your political out-cry.", that one was posted here:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=401966&cid=21862412
Perhaps a few courses on project management are in order.
I would also suggest a reality check, a severe beating followed by a rabid badger down the trousers for being a bigoted (despite his supposed reasoning) piece of garbage who wants to rule over every aspect of the lives of the people around him, and several well placed lawsuits by afflicted employees provided he actually owns/runs a business (which I seriously doubt).
I can't see anyone with his seriously screwed up world view running a successful business for all that long. Even assuming that he didn't get sued into oblivion, he'd only be left with people who don't have any better options as far as jobs go.
I hope I speak for everyone when I say: we are pleased to invite you to come live on the west-coast.
Thanks for the invitation. I have a number of old friends who have extended the same invitation. I hope to take them up on it at some point as I rather miss them. =]
Leave your shame in the south,
Ironically, I'm technically in the north. In fact, I'm in one of the states that shares a water boarder with Canada (Ohio), though I'm only about an hour from the Mason-Dixon line (the Ohio River).
I've actually had the opportunity to interview with a couple of companies on the west coast. Unfortunately, they fell through.
. We have snow to sand, high mountains to deep seas
All things I like a great deal. You also have forests, which I love (it's one of my favorite things about the area where I currently find myself). I'm one of those weird people who loves both cities and wilderness and wants access to both.
conservatives and liberals,
Funny you mention that. Most of the aforementioned people here of the fundamentalist sort accuse anyone who isn't as conservative as them as being "dirty liberals". Yes, I am frequently accused of being a "dirty liberal" despite the fact that I'm a moderate. =]
If you firmly believe that you also have just cause to fire them for any reason you choose then what do you make of the anti-discrimination laws preventing you from firing people because you (or your clients) don't like their race, religion, chances of getting pregnant and so on?
Well, he's already stated that:
So if you work for me, you're going to have to understand that yeah, I'll have to restrict your religious activity, and your political out-cry.
and again:
My refusing to hire a programmer because of her religion is perfectly reasonable. In my case, our development schedules often include days that are religious holidays. I can't lose my employees to "a higher power". So while I don't care about their god, I need to ensure that they don't all share the same god because I can't lose them all on the same day.
Oh, and he covered the mothers vs single men thing too:
Same goes for a mother versus a single man. And hey, if they wine and dine potential customers often, a vegetarian simply isn't acceptable. Now I'm not going to write the job description to include the expected diet, but I am going to expect my employee to eat when my client takes them to a steak house.
So if you work for me, you're going to have to understand that yeah, I'll have to restrict your religious activity, and your political out-cry.
*bzzt* incorrect. I'd love to see you try it with an employee that's willing to drag you kicking and screaming into court over it as well.
It sounds like you treat your people like dirt and really need a reality check.
Maybe I make a slightly paranoid case, but self expression is highly important to me; I'd hate to live half a life for fear of losing my job.
You don't make a paranoid case. I live in the Bible Belt, and you would be amazed at the sheer amount of fundamentalist Christians who, when they interview, try to figure out if the person they are talking to is like them or not and use that as an unspoken basis for who to hire.
Legal issues aside, personally, I think that religion is a private thing and is the business of the person practicing it, and that person alone, provided they don't try to shove it in the faces of everyone around them (which I consider tacky) or try to convert people (which I consider downright rude).
I have friends from a great many places around the world who belong to a large number of faiths. I've known and am welcomed around groups as diverse as Benedictine priests (as well as other sects), Tibetan monks, and even Native American Medicine societies. I don't have a problem with any of them provided they don't try to convert people, etc. I even enjoy the company. It makes for really interesting conversations on occasion.
It's funny. Despite the fact that I'm not, I get called an atheist rather frequently where I am because I express distaste for the locals trying to use government to endorse their religion. I even wrote a displeased letter to our governor (whom, once upon a time, I used to know) this year for endorsing the placement of Christian iconography in state parks while refusing to allow other faiths to place theirs there as well.
Then again, a lot of the locals seem to think that anyone who isn't Christian (or, rather, isn't the kind of Christian that shows everyone how Christian they are) is a godless atheist. I really wish I was joking, but a lot of them take the mere existence of other religions as proof that they are being repressed and persecuted.
Let's go there. Straight to the root of the problem. You don't get to decide what is "weird" and what is "acceptable to a public face".
Oh, he already went there in another one of his posts on this story. To quote him:
My refusing to hire a programmer because of her religion is perfectly reasonable. In my case, our development schedules often include days that are religious holidays. I can't lose my employees to "a higher power". So while I don't care about their god, I need to ensure that they don't all share the same god because I can't lose them all on the same day.
Anyone employee who exercises that particular right against me, doesn't see the problems with which I am faced. So when I refuse to hire her because her schedule doesn't accomodate the job's requirements -- or potential requirements -- her lawyer can easily swing that into a religious issue, which simply isn't fair to me.
It seems like far too many people think that Ruby is just for web stuff because of Rails. They don't realize that it's a really good general purpose scripting language.
I think my two favorite things about Ruby when compared to Perl (which, like you, I used to use for scripting) are:
1) I can actually *read* it because it doesn't look like I rolled my head around on the keyboard
2) It behaves in Windows the same way it does in Linux (with the obvious exception of having to change any hard-coded filenames you use). Perl had a few quirks in that regard. Heck, let's be honest - the Windows implementation was not what you'd call complete (or at least wasn't the last time I bothered to check).
twice - once in high school and once in college :P
He was a favorite teacher of the students at my high school even long after we were out of his class. The painting of the truck was done by students in all the grades, not just the freshman class.
According to the article on BBC, the Luxor Hotel pyramid is exempt because it isn't an exact copy.
I considered submitting the story myself earlier today, but I figured it was already in the pipeline from someone else.
It is indeed impressive that the administration agreed to allow this.
Our annual end-of-year fun project in high school was painting the freshman English teacher's truck.
Yes, it was with his permission. He was a decent guy with an interesting sense of humor. I did a double take on the first day of classes when he got in the room without walking past me as I was sitting next to the door. He used the window to come in the room in the morning.
I think the most impressive one we did was zebra stripes and a tail one year.
So while it may have improved upon speed, the question still is whether it can scale without having to rely upon PHP and JAVA and PYTHON consistently to help it out in this regard.
You seem to be thinking of Rails, which is a framework for Ruby used for making web apps.
Ruby itself is quite nice for general development work.
Like it's a sport to go rummaging through the trash... LOL
There's a lot more to it than just rummaging through the trash.
When you're going for sensitive information and not just things like parts, common sense dictates that you pick your targets carefully and have a plan for executing the dive (though most of the following would apply to diving for equipment as well):
Knowing which dumpsters and containers are more than likely to have sensitive information.
Knowing how to get in and out of the area without getting caught.
Knowing how best to get out of the area if someone is after you (which may not be the same as the best way to get out undetected).
Knowing *when* to go for the information (which would involve some recon to know when the security patrols routinely pass).
Having a plan for getting the information (usually by the bag full) out of the area.
Knowing how to go through it in order to find what you need.
Sometimes even spending a great deal of time piecing together sheets that have been fed through a strip shredder.
It's not as easy as you seem to think.
Not sure if the following belongs in a MS- and C++ article on parallel programming, and also not wanting to sound like a fanboy
Don't sweat it. It's always nice to be able to compare with people in other groups. It lets you know what you're doing right that others may or may not be, shows you places where you might be deficient, and generally gives you the ability to look at the issues from a different angle.
Those, in my opinion, are positive things because they're one of the ways we learn to do what we do better.
We bash in attempt to convince those smart people to leave MS and work in a more open way.
In doing so, you prove yourself a fool. It is a childish action that only hurts your cause, and Microsoft (as well as most people with any business or social sense) knows it.
You see Microsoft as some great evil to be overcome without seeing that a large part of your problem is yourself.
Companies see people like you bash anything that isn't open source or "free" and they quite rightly think that you haven't really thought things out or lack the business acumen to realize why all of the world can't work that way. (Not to mention the extreme lack of social skills that it shows)
I like open source, I use it, I occasionally write it, and I've championed the cause in a sane way.
What you are missing is that Microsoft is giving a lot of people and companies what they want - software that is relatively easy to use and which everyone else is already using ("best" doesn't matter most of the time, which a lot of you have problems understanding).
At the same time, they treat their employees well, paying them well with good benefits (from what I've heard from people I know who work there), and maintain well-respected research labs.
You do not draw good people from a good environment by telling them it's not a good environment because they don't make everything open source. You draw good people by being a better environment in terms of pay, benefits, culture, work-life balance etc *and* appealing to their sensibilities.
If you can't do that, and instead simply bash anyone for associating with "the enemy", you are doomed to fail because, at best, people will work on it as a hobby. The lion's share of good open source software is done by people being paid to do it. Bashing the company of people you want to work for you does not help.
Not all of the world cares about open source, and many of us who do are not fanatical about it and realize that, while it is good for some things, is absolutely horrible for other things from a business standpoint. We like working on things that we see as important, but we also like being able to pay our bills and having a life outside of work.
I haven't seen a school with just one IT person in over a decade.
I saw one a couple of years ago. Their IT person was retiring and they found my resume and gave me a call.
I had experience in basically everything they had/needed, so I went in to talk to them.
I found myself sitting across the table from a group of 50-60 year old administrators who basically decided that, experience be damned, someone in their mid 20s was just too young to do that job.
The looks on their faces when they met me were mildly amusing. I guess they were expecting someone about a decade or two older.
Not to mention that, from what I've seen and heard from people who have worked there, they pay pretty well with decent benefits, the place is relatively relaxed, and they actually encourage their people to have a life outside of work.
How horrible and terrible that must be for them. Can't imagine why *anyone* would want to work there (for the less observant of you, this was meant as sarcasm)
I hate to burst the gp's bubble, but they do actually make a lot of good things there (I, for one, am quite fond of Visual Studio. It makes my life a great deal easier). Like every company, there are good products and products that need some work, but on the whole their stuff is pretty good.
Also, as you said, a lot of the *really* smart people are in their R&D labs, working on things that are 5+ years in the future.
The bigger question I am asking is, why cannot teachers learn from students everyone once a while?
Because, in the minds of a great many teachers, they are *the* authority and admitting that they don't know something is an insult they can't bear. This is especially true when they are dealing with a student (or his/her parents).
A lot of them don't like to be questioned or made to feel inferior in any way and will come down hard on anyone that even looks like they might do that. There are, of course, exceptions, but, sadly, it's been my experience that they're fairly rare.
A guy who's on the C++ standards committee AND works for Microsoft.
Actually, according to the latest Dr Dobbs, Herb is the *chair* of the ISO C++ Standards committee. (He had an article on lock hierarchies being used to avoid deadlock)
He's really going to know what he's talking about, then.
As chair of the committee, I'd say there's a pretty fair chance that he *does*.
I really love people who bash things just because Microsoft is involved. Contrary to what seems to be a popular belief here, they have some incredibly intelligent people who are very good at what they do there.