The "freedom" isn't freedom from having to pay, or from having to do work for free. It's the freedom to not have to reinvent the wheel every time you want to do something that someone else has done before.
You may not have realized this, but in the real world, the "freedom" you are talking about generally causes the end result to be "free" as in price.
You see, in the real world, not every piece of software can be profitable as open source. In fact, a lot of it can't. The ways to make money off of it are pretty few (documentation, customization, support, and a few others), and a lot of software doesn't really require any of that. Despite that, people who write software for a living still need to be paid in order to, you know, *live*.
Don't get me wrong. I support open source software. However, I realize that it's not the answer for everything (in fact, it isn't the answer for a lot of things). Anyone who thinks that it is is deluding themselves. You can go on about "freedom" all you want, but the "freedom" you clamor for comes at a price paid for by others.
That has got to be one of the most ludicrous arguments I've heard. Letting your 6 year old handle a gun? That's only going to teach him that it's ok to handle a gun whenever he wants to.
I'm going to step in here on a semi-related note to give you an example of why you're off base.
I started training martially at about the age of 6. It wasn't long after that that I was using various types of weapons besides hands and feet. Heck, I started having my *own* weapons by the time I was 10.
Letting a kid handle weaponry and know how to use it responsibly does *not* teach him or her that it's okay to run around madly with one. Danger more often comes with fear and unfamiliarity in that sort of thing than it does with knowledge.
This is assuming you were a crack shot and that you checked your background for innocent people first.
In this case, more people on the ground, and closer to the shooter, would be likely to be armed as well, so the chances are that *someone* could get off a clean shot.
Also, just because you have a gun it doesn't mean you are bullet proof. As easily as you could shoot the killer, the killer can shoot you.
Life is full of risks. We take them every day. The question you have to ask yourself is whether or not it's a risk you're willing to take and if, to you, the reason is good enough.
A lot of sheep-like people would say "no! any danger is bad!". Someone with their head on straight would do a quick rundown of their chances of getting off a shot vs their chances of getting shot and the possibility of moving to a better position in order to get off the shot without getting shot themselves.
WTF is aggressiveness? Why can't anyone use 'aggression' anymore in the news?
aggressiveness
noun 1. the quality of being bold and enterprising 2. a feeling of hostility that arouses thoughts of attack [syn: aggression] 3. a natural disposition to be hostile
Aggression is only a synonym for *one* definition of the word.
Dictionaries are wonderful things. Try using one sometime...
Are we so blind by national pride that we cannot see the faults in our own government and our own people?
A large portion of the populace is, yes. They believe what they are told to believe - namely that what the government of this country does is good and in the best interest of the people and that the people who question that are working for the enemy at the gates which wants nothing more than to destroy our way of life.
Nevermind that the things this government is doing *are* destroying our way of life. Enemies at the gates! Barbarians! Terrorists! Godless Heathens! etc etc etc.
Don't question or we won't win.
Besides, since when did criticizing America become unpatriotic? I would think it's the most patriotic thing to do.
That happened a long time ago.
This country was founded in order to gain freedom from an oppressive monarchy. The last hundred years or so, it's been trying to work it's way to *becoming* an oppressive monarchy (of sorts).
1) Of course Bush endorsed McCain. Who's he going to endorse, Clinton? That says NOTHING about McCain.
No, the fact that McCain hasn't *rejected* the endorsement of one of the most hated presidents in history says something about McCain. In reality, if he didn't support Bush's policies, he should want to distance himself from Bush as much as he possibly can. Instead, he wants to stay the course.
Making it nonpunishable for a company to comply with what the government tells it to do is different than supporting the Government's ability to make illegal requests on companies.
I disagree. The Federal Government can only be sued if it lets you sue it (I know it sounds twisted and screwed up, but it's true), and the government is NOT going to let you sue it over this. They'll wave the "National Security" card (and have already) and say that you don't have the right to know what they're doing because "it's for your own good. Trust us. We're the good guys"
The only recourse people had in order to protect their rights with regard to this issue was to sue the communications companies that complied with illegal requests since they can't sue the government for it.
Not letting the companies be sued (and/or the people responsible be tried and jailed if found guilty) effectively *is* giving the government a free pass to kill your 4th amendment rights and letting the communications companies off the hook for being willing participants in extremely illegal acts.
Doing something illegal because someone asks you to do it does NOT make it legal (especially when it wasn't legal for the *government* to do either!)
Gen Y == Millennials the oldest millenial is about 28 (born in 1980), so they could have about five years experience after college.
Indeed, and some of us had experience during college. I know I worked in IT for 4 years while I was there as a sysadmin, dev, and team lead (not to mention being effectively a liaison and diplomat between IT and the various departments). A number of my friends have similar stories.
Symbolset, I have to say, I'd *love* to see you argue your point in person to someone who actually knows what they're talking about, because it would be absolutely hilarious to watch you squirm and wriggle and grow increasingly angry and red-faced as it became clear what a clueless idiot you were.
I don't know. I think it's been pretty funny doing it here. =]
I'm not screaming. This is the internet, so THIS IS SCREAMING.
Okay, you don't like screaming. Would you prefer whining? Perhaps blathering? Grousing? Bitching endlessly? Take your pick....NET is the COBOL of the modern era, except that COBOL at least survived 50 years. The best hope.NET has is 5. 'Twere better not to learn it.
Sorry, kid, but you're wrong again. The first public beta for.NET came out in 2000, so it's already been around longer than 5 years. Besides, as others have already told you, MS doesn't just abandon things - they really are the kings of backwards compatibility and conversion tools (sometimes to a fault).
Mastering the nuances of usage is essential to security. You cannot deny that is important.
Mastering nuances of things you use every day is not the same thing as mastering every part of a tool created to do a great deal of other things (and allow them to be done with a fair degree of ease) as well. That's part of what you're missing, and I think you're doing it deliberately.
If I have trouble with inheritance in C++ I know there are better people to take it up with than you.
Yet you refuse to listen to me on a point where I apparently know a heck of a lot more than you do - productivity and mastery lie not in knowing everything about everything but rather in having a solid basis in the fundamentals and knowing where to look for knowledge which you will only use infrequently instead of wasting mental space on memorizing things which will be largely useless to you on a day-to-day basis.
Have a cookie and be a good kid. The rest of us have work to do.
C/C++ isn't in the same niche as C#. You'd want to compare C# with say Java or python. Of course both platforms have an extensive standard library, but they seem less prone to whimsical changes which another poster has mentioned.
If you look at his postings, the changes are only part of the thing he is screaming against. He's also screaming about the libraries, claiming that they are complexity for complexity's sake when that honestly isn't the case.
That said, I agree that C and C++ tend to fill a different need than C# or Java. I even stated so earlier. However, he's going about this in an "every problem is a nail" manner and bemoaning the complexity of, say, a circular saw as opposed to a hammer.
I agree that he has something of a point wrt deprecation. However, as I said, every language does that. The trick is not to obsess over knowing everything about everything - have a solid basis in the tools, know where to look to find answers that you don't have off the top of your head, and document.
Flexibility is a wonderful thing in a lot of situations.
What he's doing is arguing from an emotional standpoint and claiming that you need to know everything about every aspect of a language, it's libraries, namespaces, etc in order to be any good with it, and that just isn't true. He wants to be rigid, and, honestly, that's not a virtue most of the time.
Yes, changing the APIs for some things is a pain in the arse, and it annoys me. If they do it to lock out competitors, I wish they'd knock it off. If they do it because they honestly think that it's better, that's different. Either way, it's their sandbox to manage as they see fit. If they screw over too much of their user base, people will go elsewhere tool wise and I think that they know that.
I also agree with you about C# being good for windows (I wouldn't be using it otherwise), but not cross platform. I used to do Java for that reason. I changed because most of my clients ended up being windows shops after a while and the increase in productivity that came with not having to screw around with swing was well worth the change.
This way lies madness. Knowing just enough about your tools to not cut yourself is not how you become a good craftsman.
You're confusing "knowing just enough about your tools to not cut yourself" and knowing the basics and overall use of a set of tools without memorizing every single nuance so that you are capable and comfortable to use them effectively, looking for more information when needed and knowing basically where to find it, without wasting your productive time on trivia.
Given your attitude, somehow I'm not surprised that you don't understand the difference. The first is being a novice (a state that some people never get out of). The second is mastery.
The rest of your post is flawed and based on your foolish view that true mastery requires knowing everything about everything rather than knowing when to look something up and remembering to document what you do.
At the risk of repeating myself, you want to bash tools on an idealogical and emotional basis. It's time to grow up and realize that the use of a tool depends on the situation instead of on $X is evil because it might change or because it comes from $Y.
Anyway, part of being a professional software developer, and just having a lifetime-learning attitude, is not letting your brain and skills grow stale. Rather than complain about the plethora of APIs from which you can freely pick if you so choose, why not celebrate the possibility of letting someone else making your life easier?
But that kills their arguments that everything Microsoft does is garbage and not worth looking at.
They have the view of, at best, a first or second year undergrad CS student whose longest project has taken them a day or two tops and never has to be touched again.
I realize that you're one of those "Anything but Microsoft at any cost" people, but I have some news for you.
1) You don't have to memorize what is in every namespace in *any* language. You just have to have a good enough overview of them to know where to look effectively for something you need. Spending all of your time trying to memorize everything in libraries is a waste of time and usually only done by undergads who think that they know it all.
2) These are just toys to keep you occupied I hate to break it to you, but there is a great deal of business that is done on Microsoft software. There are a number of reasons for that (admittedly, not all of them are good reasons). One of them is that MS has done something Linux and the others haven't - they make software that makes it fairly simple for most businesses and people to do 80% of what they need to easily. In addition, needs which are not met by MS itself, and a number of needs which are, are covered by various 3rd parties.
As for "toys to keep you occupied", I'm one heck of a lot more productive using C# in Visual Studio for most of the things that I have to do than I was using C or C++ in xemacs. C and C++ are fine tools for doing things closer to the metal. Most applications don't need that.
In addition, dealing with deprecation in.NET isn't really any worse than when I was dealing with it in C, C++, or any other language that I've used.
You need to learn to use the right tools for the job. Instead, you want to bash tools on an idealogical basis. It's a sign that you really need to grow up.
By the by, those are the ones that I considered an actual threat to life on my part. There are a number of others who were very serious about it that I didn't give much thought to because they weren't very good.
As a swordsman, may I just say first that I'd want one and second, that most people would probably cut their own heads/arms/random other body parts off with them... lol
Slashdot Mirror
The "freedom" isn't freedom from having to pay, or from having to do work for free. It's the freedom to not have to reinvent the wheel every time you want to do something that someone else has done before.
You may not have realized this, but in the real world, the "freedom" you are talking about generally causes the end result to be "free" as in price.
You see, in the real world, not every piece of software can be profitable as open source. In fact, a lot of it can't. The ways to make money off of it are pretty few (documentation, customization, support, and a few others), and a lot of software doesn't really require any of that. Despite that, people who write software for a living still need to be paid in order to, you know, *live*.
Don't get me wrong. I support open source software. However, I realize that it's not the answer for everything (in fact, it isn't the answer for a lot of things). Anyone who thinks that it is is deluding themselves. You can go on about "freedom" all you want, but the "freedom" you clamor for comes at a price paid for by others.
It's Freedom that counts folks, not features or functions or shiney... Freedom.
Sorry, kiddo, but I'm going to have to disagree.
The "freedom" aspects are nice and everything, but without needed features or functions, you don't have jack.
Not all software has to be "free" (and not everything *should* be).
That has got to be one of the most ludicrous arguments I've heard. Letting your 6 year old handle a gun? That's only going to teach him that it's ok to handle a gun whenever he wants to.
I'm going to step in here on a semi-related note to give you an example of why you're off base.
I started training martially at about the age of 6. It wasn't long after that that I was using various types of weapons besides hands and feet. Heck, I started having my *own* weapons by the time I was 10.
Letting a kid handle weaponry and know how to use it responsibly does *not* teach him or her that it's okay to run around madly with one. Danger more often comes with fear and unfamiliarity in that sort of thing than it does with knowledge.
This is assuming you were a crack shot and that you checked your background for innocent people first.
In this case, more people on the ground, and closer to the shooter, would be likely to be armed as well, so the chances are that *someone* could get off a clean shot.
Also, just because you have a gun it doesn't mean you are bullet proof. As easily as you could shoot the killer, the killer can shoot you.
Life is full of risks. We take them every day. The question you have to ask yourself is whether or not it's a risk you're willing to take and if, to you, the reason is good enough.
A lot of sheep-like people would say "no! any danger is bad!". Someone with their head on straight would do a quick rundown of their chances of getting off a shot vs their chances of getting shot and the possibility of moving to a better position in order to get off the shot without getting shot themselves.
WTF is aggressiveness? Why can't anyone use 'aggression' anymore in the news?
aggressiveness
noun
1. the quality of being bold and enterprising
2. a feeling of hostility that arouses thoughts of attack [syn: aggression]
3. a natural disposition to be hostile
Aggression is only a synonym for *one* definition of the word.
Dictionaries are wonderful things. Try using one sometime...
Are we so blind by national pride that we cannot see the faults in our own government and our own people?
A large portion of the populace is, yes. They believe what they are told to believe - namely that what the government of this country does is good and in the best interest of the people and that the people who question that are working for the enemy at the gates which wants nothing more than to destroy our way of life.
Nevermind that the things this government is doing *are* destroying our way of life. Enemies at the gates! Barbarians! Terrorists! Godless Heathens! etc etc etc.
Don't question or we won't win.
Besides, since when did criticizing America become unpatriotic? I would think it's the most patriotic thing to do.
That happened a long time ago.
This country was founded in order to gain freedom from an oppressive monarchy. The last hundred years or so, it's been trying to work it's way to *becoming* an oppressive monarchy (of sorts).
1) Of course Bush endorsed McCain. Who's he going to endorse, Clinton? That says NOTHING about McCain.
No, the fact that McCain hasn't *rejected* the endorsement of one of the most hated presidents in history says something about McCain. In reality, if he didn't support Bush's policies, he should want to distance himself from Bush as much as he possibly can. Instead, he wants to stay the course.
Making it nonpunishable for a company to comply with what the government tells it to do is different than supporting the Government's ability to make illegal requests on companies.
I disagree. The Federal Government can only be sued if it lets you sue it (I know it sounds twisted and screwed up, but it's true), and the government is NOT going to let you sue it over this. They'll wave the "National Security" card (and have already) and say that you don't have the right to know what they're doing because "it's for your own good. Trust us. We're the good guys"
The only recourse people had in order to protect their rights with regard to this issue was to sue the communications companies that complied with illegal requests since they can't sue the government for it.
Not letting the companies be sued (and/or the people responsible be tried and jailed if found guilty) effectively *is* giving the government a free pass to kill your 4th amendment rights and letting the communications companies off the hook for being willing participants in extremely illegal acts.
Doing something illegal because someone asks you to do it does NOT make it legal (especially when it wasn't legal for the *government* to do either!)
Your router is constantly saying "Here I am! Connect to me! I am OPEN! I am AVAILABLE!"
Its lights are on, but you're not home
Your network is not your own
packets fly, and data flows
where it goes, no one knows
You might as well face it - your router's a slut
(Yes, I could probably spoof the whole song. I am really trying not to do so as I have other things that I need to do) =]
It's been my experience that, after a while, your real friends become a closer family to you than the family that you were born into.
Gen Y == Millennials the oldest millenial is about 28 (born in 1980), so they could have about five years experience after college.
Indeed, and some of us had experience during college. I know I worked in IT for 4 years while I was there as a sysadmin, dev, and team lead (not to mention being effectively a liaison and diplomat between IT and the various departments). A number of my friends have similar stories.
Symbolset, I have to say, I'd *love* to see you argue your point in person to someone who actually knows what they're talking about, because it would be absolutely hilarious to watch you squirm and wriggle and grow increasingly angry and red-faced as it became clear what a clueless idiot you were.
I don't know. I think it's been pretty funny doing it here. =]
I'm not screaming. This is the internet, so THIS IS SCREAMING.
.NET is the COBOL of the modern era, except that COBOL at least survived 50 years. The best hope .NET has is 5. 'Twere better not to learn it.
.NET came out in 2000, so it's already been around longer than 5 years. Besides, as others have already told you, MS doesn't just abandon things - they really are the kings of backwards compatibility and conversion tools (sometimes to a fault).
Okay, you don't like screaming. Would you prefer whining? Perhaps blathering? Grousing? Bitching endlessly? Take your pick...
Sorry, kid, but you're wrong again. The first public beta for
Tell me, does it hurt being so wrong so often?
Mastering the nuances of usage is essential to security. You cannot deny that is important.
Mastering nuances of things you use every day is not the same thing as mastering every part of a tool created to do a great deal of other things (and allow them to be done with a fair degree of ease) as well. That's part of what you're missing, and I think you're doing it deliberately.
If I have trouble with inheritance in C++ I know there are better people to take it up with than you.
Yet you refuse to listen to me on a point where I apparently know a heck of a lot more than you do - productivity and mastery lie not in knowing everything about everything but rather in having a solid basis in the fundamentals and knowing where to look for knowledge which you will only use infrequently instead of wasting mental space on memorizing things which will be largely useless to you on a day-to-day basis.
Have a cookie and be a good kid. The rest of us have work to do.
C/C++ isn't in the same niche as C#. You'd want to compare C# with say Java or python. Of course both platforms have an extensive standard library, but they seem less prone to whimsical changes which another poster has mentioned.
If you look at his postings, the changes are only part of the thing he is screaming against. He's also screaming about the libraries, claiming that they are complexity for complexity's sake when that honestly isn't the case.
That said, I agree that C and C++ tend to fill a different need than C# or Java. I even stated so earlier. However, he's going about this in an "every problem is a nail" manner and bemoaning the complexity of, say, a circular saw as opposed to a hammer.
I agree that he has something of a point wrt deprecation. However, as I said, every language does that. The trick is not to obsess over knowing everything about everything - have a solid basis in the tools, know where to look to find answers that you don't have off the top of your head, and document.
Flexibility is a wonderful thing in a lot of situations.
What he's doing is arguing from an emotional standpoint and claiming that you need to know everything about every aspect of a language, it's libraries, namespaces, etc in order to be any good with it, and that just isn't true. He wants to be rigid, and, honestly, that's not a virtue most of the time.
Yes, changing the APIs for some things is a pain in the arse, and it annoys me. If they do it to lock out competitors, I wish they'd knock it off. If they do it because they honestly think that it's better, that's different. Either way, it's their sandbox to manage as they see fit. If they screw over too much of their user base, people will go elsewhere tool wise and I think that they know that.
I also agree with you about C# being good for windows (I wouldn't be using it otherwise), but not cross platform. I used to do Java for that reason. I changed because most of my clients ended up being windows shops after a while and the increase in productivity that came with not having to screw around with swing was well worth the change.
This way lies madness. Knowing just enough about your tools to not cut yourself is not how you become a good craftsman.
You're confusing "knowing just enough about your tools to not cut yourself" and knowing the basics and overall use of a set of tools without memorizing every single nuance so that you are capable and comfortable to use them effectively, looking for more information when needed and knowing basically where to find it, without wasting your productive time on trivia.
Given your attitude, somehow I'm not surprised that you don't understand the difference. The first is being a novice (a state that some people never get out of). The second is mastery.
The rest of your post is flawed and based on your foolish view that true mastery requires knowing everything about everything rather than knowing when to look something up and remembering to document what you do.
At the risk of repeating myself, you want to bash tools on an idealogical and emotional basis. It's time to grow up and realize that the use of a tool depends on the situation instead of on $X is evil because it might change or because it comes from $Y.
Anyway, part of being a professional software developer, and just having a lifetime-learning attitude, is not letting your brain and skills grow stale. Rather than complain about the plethora of APIs from which you can freely pick if you so choose, why not celebrate the possibility of letting someone else making your life easier?
But that kills their arguments that everything Microsoft does is garbage and not worth looking at.
They have the view of, at best, a first or second year undergrad CS student whose longest project has taken them a day or two tops and never has to be touched again.
I realize that you're one of those "Anything but Microsoft at any cost" people, but I have some news for you.
.NET isn't really any worse than when I was dealing with it in C, C++, or any other language that I've used.
1) You don't have to memorize what is in every namespace in *any* language. You just have to have a good enough overview of them to know where to look effectively for something you need. Spending all of your time trying to memorize everything in libraries is a waste of time and usually only done by undergads who think that they know it all.
2) These are just toys to keep you occupied
I hate to break it to you, but there is a great deal of business that is done on Microsoft software. There are a number of reasons for that (admittedly, not all of them are good reasons). One of them is that MS has done something Linux and the others haven't - they make software that makes it fairly simple for most businesses and people to do 80% of what they need to easily. In addition, needs which are not met by MS itself, and a number of needs which are, are covered by various 3rd parties.
As for "toys to keep you occupied", I'm one heck of a lot more productive using C# in Visual Studio for most of the things that I have to do than I was using C or C++ in xemacs. C and C++ are fine tools for doing things closer to the metal. Most applications don't need that.
In addition, dealing with deprecation in
You need to learn to use the right tools for the job. Instead, you want to bash tools on an idealogical basis. It's a sign that you really need to grow up.
No, kid. You're barking up the wrong tree.
I actually *did* start training over 20 years ago (it sounds weird to think about). I've also taught.
It's been an interesting trip so far, and it doesn't really show signs of slowing down any time soon.
You can go slink off back under your bridge now.
By the by, those are the ones that I considered an actual threat to life on my part. There are a number of others who were very serious about it that I didn't give much thought to because they weren't very good.
How many have *you* been in?
so, how many life and deaths combats have you been in? even read a first person perspective?
Two. One was unarmed on my part. Both people didn't like me and wanted to split my head open.
I know more than you think. For the record, I started training in kung fu over 20 years ago.
"Duuude... why're we staring into a bong?"
Obligatory Van Wilder quote:
"That's no bong! That's for my schlong!"
(Sorry, just watched it again last night =])
As a swordsman, may I just say first that I'd want one and second, that most people would probably cut their own heads/arms/random other body parts off with them... lol
Sounds like a win to me all around *grin*
I'd be tempted to buy several cases and distribute it to certain people...
The swords and spears from Museum Replicas are decent as well.
The quality didn't used to be so great (about 10 years ago), but they're worthy of use now.