Multiple choice, standardized tests don't promote reasoning, just memorization. It's time we revamp the education system and our testing methods. Let's focus on students completing lengthy projects and being graded on their success.
And then teachers, professors, and TA's might actually have to think while grading.
Just look at the world around you. You'll get further towing the party line than you will asking too many questions.
This has been obvious to thinkers throughout the ages. Voltaire said "It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong." Heinlein expressed a similar sentiment when he said âoeBeing right too soon is socially unacceptable.â
Yeah, it really ticks off the managers of the Italian parent company where I work when we Americans ask questions, and don't just do what we're told like their Italian workers do without question. They don't understand it - even those that have worked abroad.
The problem is, teaching people to think isn't exactly a useful life skill. Being able to think is by and large less useful than being able to regurgitate facts, and much much less useful than being able to shmooze with the right people.
May be for the extremes in politics - both liberals and conservatives - that is true - they don't want people to think, just follow what they tell them. Doesn't matter whether your a communist or a fascist, just do as you're told.
This is also the problem for Science in education. Several studies of colleges and universities have found that colleges such as Calvin College and Messiah College where debate over the Theory of Evolution, Creationism, and Theistic Evolution are encouraged do far better in reasoning, etc. than at public colleges where the professors surpress anything other than the Theory of Evolution.
The public school system it appears isn't too different.
When you surpress view points or discussion in order to teach to tests, get students to regurgitate specific answers, etc, then their ability to reason diminishes. Who'd a thought?
The ASF seems to have become the dumping ground of unloved commercial software.
May be, but only for project sponsors that are seeking to exit the project sponsorship.
Oracle chose ASF for various legal reasons. APL was better suited to how Sun was using the OOorg code-base than GPL to start with, and Oracle realized that the community really doesn't like them, and that OOorg type software was not their strong point. ASF is a US organization, so it made it easy not just to get a tax write-off for the donation, but also easy to transfer legally as there were fewer laws to deal with.
Subversion moved to ASF as well; though I don't know the reasoning there, but the community transferred and has flourished just as much as it was under tigris.org.
SourceForge's though is a hub of open source software, and their website interface was originally GPL. They moved it to a pure Commercial several years back, at which point gForge, GNU Savannah, and a few others popped up and continued with the last GPL'd version. (Actually, I think gForge was around earlier, but kept in step with it.) They already provide a well respected hosting site for open source software; they've already had it under the GPL; so why hand it to ASF? Why not just put it back out under the GPL and host it again? Even going to the APL is not an issue for them hosting it on their own site, and ASF would mean an entirely different infrastructure. It makes no sense.
...they just start releasing the GPL version again. The removal of the GPL version is why there is Savannah, gForge, and a number of others. No need to go to the APL.
SharePoint is a billion dollar business. And the fastest growing product of Microsofts Portfolio. So a lost cause uh?
Well, SharePoint is only about document management, not commuciations in general; and even in document management it is pretty poor. In the few instances I've worked with it and its ilk (e.g. LiveLink) at major companies, I've never been able to find anything I needed because nothing was organized and the search was horrendous.
You'd ask someone where something was, and they'd just point you back to it without any guidance on where in it the document was actually located. As a result, there would be multiple versions of the document stored at multiple locations - one location might track it for a while before someone got in that didn't know the original location and couldn't find it so they put it somewhere else, rinse & repeat.
I agree that it's very bad news that Q2 isn't looking better, but isn't what Elop is doing exactly what he should do now? He's laying off people to bring the costs down, so that the chosen strategy can be implemented. The Windows move hasn't brought them to profitability yet, but it's way too early to say it won't work: the phones are just fine, Windows 8 is just around the corner. Any plan B would be much less likely to work at all and would also have a lesser best possible outcome.
Not quite. They're having a big problem selling phones. Their Symbian phones are selling quite well, but they're trying to move away from Symbian. They had another viable platform (Maemo/MeeGo), but ditch'd that to use Windows - a platform that was quite well behind where they were with the Maemo/MeeGo effort, and they are having a very hard time selling phones with Windows on them.
If they Board of Directors was smart, they'd can Elop, and either resurrect Maemo/MeeGo, or pull in Android. They'd have to can Elop to do so as he has a bigger interest in seeing Microsoft succeed than Nokia succeed (he's got far more invested in Microsoft than he ever will with Nokia).
Regardless they need to get their phone sales up, or get out of the business. But Windows is not helping them sell phones. So they need to look at other platforms.
The irony, of course, is that Windows is turning out to be the "burning platform" that Elop called Symbian when he first made the announcement - and the piers around it are quickly falling apart.
The UN is looking for a source of funding other than the US Government, because if the US Government pulled out of the UN it would go bankrupt and implode financially.
PC makers realize that the true value of the tablet functionality is not necessarily being a pure tablet, but that having the capability to interface with peripherals and *gasps* keyboards is something users actually want!
Seriously, I have no problem using a tablet as my primary device, for email, programming, novel writing, etc. But I need a keyboard to do that, and the ability to hook up a larger monitor at times would be useful.
So no, it's not an act of desparation (except the part about putting Windows on them, which is Microsoft's desparation, not OEMs), but responding to what the market wants.
The UN is looking for a source of funding other than the US Government, because if the US Government pulled out of the UN it would go bankrupt and implode financially.
Previously barring a lot of eye candy that could be turned off , MS did generally get their UI about right. Now with spillover effect from Win8 they seem to have completely lost the plot and this is simply an example of them reloading the gun once more to take aim at whatever is left of their feet.
It's not so much spillover from Win8 as the Ribbon UI and their general direction for UI design. It's all bad, and not in the bad ass kind of way - just plain bad.
First of all, if you are doing this kind of work then an accountant and a lawyer should be part of your cost of doing business. You can get both on budget so that you're not paying a lot; either, way you pass on the costs to your clients as part of the overhead of the contract. Talk to some lawyers and accountants, find out their payment structures, retainer fees, etc. It'll pay off big time in the long run.
Secondly, if you are paying a 3rd party to do the checks, etc. for a small fee; you could have your accountant and lawyers do that instead probably for the same small fee. Again, check their fee schedules. You'll probably be surprised.
Finally, there are some legal organizations out there that are flat fee charges. You pay a given amount a month, and then get unlimited help from them. That it so say - you are not without options for getting going.
In the end, it's the cost of doing business. If you're not willing to pay up, then don't be surprised when you get burned. Once you get burned a few times, you've probably lost as much money as you would have spent on the lawyer and accountant to start with.
SAMBA-nice, has its uses.
But if you want to do AD, do it with MS. Don't pretend that it can be done with SAMBA (at least not without pain). At the very least, SAMBA trades its own mad ranting about being interoperable while setting everything internally so its not.
If you want all the latest features provided by Microsoft for the SMB/CIFS/AD implementation, then yes by all means use MS servers and pay lots of money for CAL licenses for each server so that you can host everyone, and be prepared to have keep all your workstations in sync with the version on the server because their backwards compatibility sucks.
If you want a version that works, continues to work through Windows upgrades, and provides login compatibility with Unix/Linux systems, then use SAMBA; or if you have Linux/Unix clients that you want to authenticate to a Microsoft server - use SAMBA. They continue to produce versions that remain compatible with older versions of Windows when Microsoft does not. Since Win95, every major release of the OS has had major differences in the SMB/CIFS/AD protocol that means patching older versions to keep compatible (Win95->Win98->WinME->Win2k->WinXP->Vista, or tweaking settings to make the new versions work with the old version (Win7).
And bottom line, the squeeling, crying and whining about MS interoperability never struck a cord at all with me. SAMBA came about because open source and its structures offered nothing that came close. If Novell and MS can offer a client and a back end server, it seems to me that Linux and open source could have providided a best of breed method of its own.
You run afoul of your own words. Novell did a great job with NetWare and GroupWare for a long time; that is, until Microsoft started doing things to make the login managers for Windows unstable. This pushed a lot of people over to using Microsoft DC/AD solutions as it did not crash Windows.
in other words, it's no simple job to keep compatibility with Microsoft products as Microsoft actively tries to subvert compatibility. Just look at all the various slight (and undocumented) adjustments to the MS Office Binary formats used until MS Office 2007, or all the undocumented extensions to the OOXML format they came up with after that. Or look at Microsoft's Kerberos and LDAP implementations used for AD, which have a lot of minor changes from their respective standards so that you can't just pull a standard Kerberos or LDAP implementation out and use it to do AD.
Instead, all I ever saw was that MS was evil and Linux and open source had to be given access to it. To my mind this was nothing much more than legally enforced theft of technology and I never thought it was right.
Several years later - and having had access to all they wanted, this is where we are?
Given the fuss kicked up, and the legal demands, I think MS should turn round and issue a counter case and state 'where is the interoperable product people put us through a legal case for?' You said we were the case of the failure of this in the market place, we complied and where is the product?
And no, don't get me wrong, I really like open source, and I like Samba and so on, but I never liked or thought that legal case had any merit, and I never thought open source really got its shit together in providing anything, it just seemed to want to steal someone else's work in this particular area.
The SAMBA team has done a great job of keeping compatibility with Windows despite Microsoft's efforts to change the protocol and break compatibility. They even won an Anti-trust lawsuit over it in Europe and were able to get explicit technical documentation from Microsoft to build better compatibility - with free license to do it (e.g. no patent fees).
Android and iOS both have permissions and protections in place to prevent apps from accessing personal data such as Contacts and Location. Although there have been incidents of breaches, the protections work most of the time. Android also sandboxes the apps, and although I'm not 100% sure I believe that iOS does so as well.
What is it about the Windows Phone implementation specifically that is so different and presumably better?
And for Android the user has to give permission for the app to be able to do things like access the Contacts, SD Card, and such - any inter-app communication must be approved by the user when the app is installed. Too often, people don't pay attention to what they are granting though.
A theory is a falsafiable working set based on observable data. It is what you call "facts", but subject to revision as we gain more data.
No it is not. A fact is not subject to being falsafiable. It is more akin to something that is ingrained in stone that can never be changed no matter how you look at it. For instance, the chemical structure of the Oxygen molecule is very much a fact. You may learn more about the fact by observing it from different angles, or disecting it in different ways, but it is nonetheless immutable.
A "theory" is a working set of ideas about a hypothesis on which to build a model. It is not fact in any sense. Those working ideas are revised as more information about the hypothesis is discovered and the model is revised accorrdingly; however, that does not change the fact that it is still a theory about how something works.
Remember that gravity is a theory, just like evolution. That doesn't make it optional.
To use your example of gravity - gravity itself is a fact. Our understanding of it is a theory. That is not the case with evolution. Evolution is not fact; but pure theory and wholly untestable as to proving its value as the origin of everything. Yes, it is revised to match evidence such that scientifically it is accepted. But that still does not make it any more provable than, say, Creationism - both are wholly unprovable as an mechanism of creation to an equal degree; both can provide working models that explain all the evidence around.
But those who say that science is based on observed data are wrong too. It's enough that it's observable. We can have science and theories around Higgs' boson, dark matter and the future even if we have observed neither.
Those theories around Higgs' boson, dark matter, etc. are based on observed data from other things. There's a hypothesis and theory for them; finding a way to show evidence for those theories to prove the hypothesis is what is lacking and currently in the works in many cases. Yet they are at the limit of our technological capabilities, so it will be some time before they will be able to really revise the models.
So that is to say - it's not that they are not observed. They are just not directly observed at this time. The observations that led to the hypotheses and theories around them are very much based on observations.
Please familiarize yourself with the scientific use of the word "Theory" (vs. the colloquial use) before you start throwing it about.
And that is part of the public's problem with science. When you start redefining things to meet your own needs, and subvert the public you have a problem.
The term "theory" is very much what I mean - and science's actual use of it very much is what the public understands it to be, though they redefine it to be something else so that they can present theories as facts when they are not. That is, after all, the only way they can get some things (like Evolution, the Big Bang, etc.) proven scientifically, and in the same course discount other ideas on the same subject matter as not being scientific.
Every few years we have people trying to legislate science out of the class room because it conflicts with their vision of religion. Of course our science classes are messed up, people have a vested interest in them being so. Frankly, much of what is taught is not even science. Anyone who comes out of high school thinking that science is about facts has been done a disservice.
Science is about finding facts through experimentation; however, facts are rarely found by science as it mostly puts out theories that may or may not lead to facts.
And on the science vs religion front. Religion has rewritten itself often to adjust to realities that science has postulated. Science has never changed based on belief. So as a betting man, my money is on science. But as a scientist, I accept the possibility that I could be wrong.
Science has very well changed based on beliefts. For example - the Theory of Evolution has had a dramatic change on Science both in relation to finding facts and beliefs, and what Science is willing to accept as Science (if it doesn't link to the Theory of Evolution then Science throws it out as non-Science).
I think the parent want a little more than a lock screen policy. I want:
1) disable outside market instalation of apps
2) disable installation of market apps or restrict them to a whitelist
3) Be able to setup a corporate store for internal developed apps, this could work but you must enable installation of outside market applications (see 2)
4) Lock Google accounts addition and removal
So what you need to do is setup your own AppStore where you can place vetted apps by your IT staff, then for all the Android/iOS/WP7/BB devices out there that you own, you configure them to use your Corporate AppStore that is hosted on your network. Then lock out the ability to install other AppStores, and provide users with the ability to request apps from other app stores to be vetted and placed in your AppStore.
If need be, pickup a Cryogen mod and mod it for your phones to give you that capability.
Doable? Yes.
A PITA to do? Certainly.
Worth the security and control? Definitely.
Are you willing to? not likely, so stop complaining.
First, Whatever you do make sure residents have the option to not use your service and contract directly - e.g. DSL, Cable. This will let them decide between your service and other services that are available.
Second, contract for a high speed Fibre connection to the building, probably an OC-16, with a full SLA and 1:1 download/upload ratio. Have it come to a central office, and then dispence 1Gb/10Gb ethernet to each unit, to a central office in the unit itself. Each unit should be in its own subnet.
Third, wire each unit so that there are ethernet jacks in each room that connects back to the central office in the unit. Provide a phone line that suports DLS, and a cable connection to the same central office so that residents can make use of the ethernet in the unit even if they don't use your service.
Fourth, offer a wireless router with support for their unit at a nominal cost if they want it. Otherwise, they can maintain it themselves.
If you have a common area, provide some connectivity for residents - e.g. so kids can do lan parties, or people could have a small get together. Perhaps provide some support so they can access their unit network (e.g. to retrieve files) easily.
If you do it right, and price it right, then your residents will want to use your services instead of DSL or Cable and the expenditures will repay themselves quite well.
Consumers are used to paying next to no initial outlay for a handset
Perhaps the majority would stay there, but I'd be there is a big market for people like me (and my parents, my wife, etc) that would rather buy the phone ourselves and not be beholden to the contract of the provider.
GNU typically follows pretty closely to the standards for the various languages; the "superset" is typically in the compiler space reserved by each language (e.g. __attribute()__ in C/C++).
Aside from the __attribute__() - which typically should be ignored any way - those are all things that a parser could easily pick up, and GCC/G++ is not likely the only one that supports them. So that shouldn't necessarily be an issue.
If CLang isn't doing that, then (i) it's limited in what languages it can support on the front end (evidenced by their sole focus on C, C++, Objective-C, and Objective-C++)
Clang is a frontend to LLVM. Other frontends exist for other languages.
True. And LLVM still relies a lot on GCC for those other languages, and back-end work.
I also don't see anything mentioning architecture support for CLang - compared with GCC's multitude of architectures.
LLVM targets at least these architectures. Production-quality backends include x86, ARM, PowerPC, SPARC, MIPS, and Hexagon (whatever that is).
That's still a relatively small list compared to GCC's list of architectures.
Without a doubt, Mr. Ballmer is the worst CEO of a large publicly traded American company today. Not only has he singlehandedly steered Microsoft out of some of the fastest growing and most lucrative tech markets (mobile music, handsets and tablets) but in the process he has sacrificed the growth and profits of not only his company but âoeecosystemâ companies such as Dell, Hewlett Packard and even Nokia. The reach of his bad leadership has extended far beyond Microsoft when it comes to destroying shareholder value â" and jobs.
And that is bad how? What I mean by that is that I sympathize with Microsoft share holders but I also regularly thank a long list of deities that Microsoft does not dominate the mobile music, handset, and tablet markets as well as desktop computing.
Well, honestly he's getting some blame for policies enacted under Gates - namely the whole Windows at all costs management that always degraded mobile/etc so as not to canabilize the desktop market. He's finally got enough standing to actually try it (Win8), but even so - he's doing it wrong.
And yes, I'm quite glad to Microsoft's end is coming. It's just nice irony that Ballmer is at the helm too.
The GCC compiler suite supports a variety of languages
Each of which is a superset of the standard language on which it is based: GNU C based on C, GNU C++ on C++, etc. This means a third-party parser that supports only a standard language will fail to parse any program that uses the GNU extensions present in GCC's superset but not in the standard language.
No more than any other compiler. GNU typically follows pretty closely to the standards for the various languages; the "superset" is typically in the compiler space reserved by each language (e.g. __attribute()__ in C/C++). Any parser that understands the standard language (e.g. C, C++, etc.) will do pretty well with parsing anything that the GCC suite parses.
I know of at least 3 levels of modularity - front-end-input (language), optimization, and back-end-output (binary)
But use of the result of GCC's front-end-input (language) is deliberately obfuscated, unlike in Clang.
The output of GCC's front-end-input (language) is their custom machine independent development language. It has nothing to do with being obfuscated and everything to do with converting the source code into something that is easier to optimize and catch problems with - and something that is language independent. So the C++/C/Java/Ada sources all get converted to the single well understood internal language that the profilers, optimizers, etc can uniformly work on. It's not meant for use by other components.
If CLang isn't doing that, then (i) it's limited in what languages it can support on the front end (evidenced by their sole focus on C, C++, Objective-C, and Objective-C++), and (ii) it'll have to do that before moving to the next stage at some point. I also don't see anything mentioning architecture support for CLang - compared with GCC's multitude of architectures.
Comparatively, GCC will be to compilers like Linux is for operating systems. The two both support more architectures and systems than anything else in their respective classes. As a result, they both tend to do things that others find inconvenient but they do them for a reason as they are designed to do more than what others are doing. (Couldn't find the info respectively for LLVM either.)
And if you want a browser on your Windows RT phone/tablet, it must be Internet Explorer. Others won't be allowed.
They are allowed, actually. What's not allowed is a third-party browser running in desktop mode. In Metro, everything goes (within the limits of the sandbox).
What's not allowed is a third-party application registered as a "Browser" class application under Win8. It can be registered as a "Metro" application class (access to WinRT APIs) or a "Desktop" application class (access to Win32 APIs, except on Win8 RT where applications can only be "Metro" applications except the few that Microsoft provides under the "Desktop" application class - namely MS Office). And the problem for web-browsers is that they require the ability to do some extra stuff that the "Metro" applications are forbidden from doing, but "browser" applications can.
The problem is that they don't need to do it the exact same was as GCC. They need to do it based more on the language (C, C++, D, A, B, Java, Modula, etc),
If the compiler is GCC, the language is GNU C, which is a superset of standard C, or the language is GNU C++, which is a superset of standard C++. So the parser needs to accept the GNU C and GNU C++ languages. I thought proving that two parsers accept the same language was halting-complete.
The GCC compiler suite supports a variety of languages. Which one use used depends on which command you call - gcc vs g++ vs gjc vs a number of others.
Bloating the compiler to generate the additional output information - which will be very specific to each IDE - makes no sense.
True, which is why have suggested making the compiler more modular so that its parser can be reused by either the compiler, which needs "useful information for the internals", or an IDE, which needs "something useful for the IDE to provide useful functionality for the user." The GCC team has steadfastly resisted making GCC more modular and more maintainable for fear that a non-free IDE might use the output of its parser.
The GCC compiler suite is quite modular already. It's just that the modularity is not provided for external tools to link into; nor it is necessarily broken down along the lines of where others want it to be. I know of at least 3 levels of modularity - front-end-input (language), optimization, and back-end-output (binary) - and I'm sure they have more that that.
GCC has a front end that takes a computer language (e.g. C, C++, Java, Ada, Modula, Fortran, etc.) and converts it into an intermediarly language that is then used by the rest of the internals for doing various things like optimizing and eventually binary code generation, which again has numerous modules for various platforms (x86, x86-64, ppc, etc) and binary formats (a.out, elf, PE, etc).
So it's not that GCC is not modular or maintainable in that respect; it's that they don't want to publish their internal APIs for others to use. Since the code is open source, people could figure that out, but then they run any risk of it changing without being notified since they are not published or guaranteed to remain stable.
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Multiple choice, standardized tests don't promote reasoning, just memorization. It's time we revamp the education system and our testing methods. Let's focus on students completing lengthy projects and being graded on their success.
And then teachers, professors, and TA's might actually have to think while grading.
Just look at the world around you. You'll get further towing the party line than you will asking too many questions.
This has been obvious to thinkers throughout the ages. Voltaire said "It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong." Heinlein expressed a similar sentiment when he said âoeBeing right too soon is socially unacceptable.â
Yeah, it really ticks off the managers of the Italian parent company where I work when we Americans ask questions, and don't just do what we're told like their Italian workers do without question. They don't understand it - even those that have worked abroad.
The problem is, teaching people to think isn't exactly a useful life skill. Being able to think is by and large less useful than being able to regurgitate facts, and much much less useful than being able to shmooze with the right people.
May be for the extremes in politics - both liberals and conservatives - that is true - they don't want people to think, just follow what they tell them. Doesn't matter whether your a communist or a fascist, just do as you're told.
This is also the problem for Science in education. Several studies of colleges and universities have found that colleges such as Calvin College and Messiah College where debate over the Theory of Evolution, Creationism, and Theistic Evolution are encouraged do far better in reasoning, etc. than at public colleges where the professors surpress anything other than the Theory of Evolution.
The public school system it appears isn't too different.
When you surpress view points or discussion in order to teach to tests, get students to regurgitate specific answers, etc, then their ability to reason diminishes. Who'd a thought?
The ASF seems to have become the dumping ground of unloved commercial software.
May be, but only for project sponsors that are seeking to exit the project sponsorship.
Oracle chose ASF for various legal reasons. APL was better suited to how Sun was using the OOorg code-base than GPL to start with, and Oracle realized that the community really doesn't like them, and that OOorg type software was not their strong point. ASF is a US organization, so it made it easy not just to get a tax write-off for the donation, but also easy to transfer legally as there were fewer laws to deal with.
Subversion moved to ASF as well; though I don't know the reasoning there, but the community transferred and has flourished just as much as it was under tigris.org.
SourceForge's though is a hub of open source software, and their website interface was originally GPL. They moved it to a pure Commercial several years back, at which point gForge, GNU Savannah, and a few others popped up and continued with the last GPL'd version. (Actually, I think gForge was around earlier, but kept in step with it.) They already provide a well respected hosting site for open source software; they've already had it under the GPL; so why hand it to ASF? Why not just put it back out under the GPL and host it again? Even going to the APL is not an issue for them hosting it on their own site, and ASF would mean an entirely different infrastructure. It makes no sense.
...they just start releasing the GPL version again. The removal of the GPL version is why there is Savannah, gForge, and a number of others. No need to go to the APL.
SharePoint is a billion dollar business. And the fastest growing product of Microsofts Portfolio. So a lost cause uh?
Well, SharePoint is only about document management, not commuciations in general; and even in document management it is pretty poor. In the few instances I've worked with it and its ilk (e.g. LiveLink) at major companies, I've never been able to find anything I needed because nothing was organized and the search was horrendous.
You'd ask someone where something was, and they'd just point you back to it without any guidance on where in it the document was actually located. As a result, there would be multiple versions of the document stored at multiple locations - one location might track it for a while before someone got in that didn't know the original location and couldn't find it so they put it somewhere else, rinse & repeat.
I agree that it's very bad news that Q2 isn't looking better, but isn't what Elop is doing exactly what he should do now? He's laying off people to bring the costs down, so that the chosen strategy can be implemented. The Windows move hasn't brought them to profitability yet, but it's way too early to say it won't work: the phones are just fine, Windows 8 is just around the corner. Any plan B would be much less likely to work at all and would also have a lesser best possible outcome.
Not quite. They're having a big problem selling phones. Their Symbian phones are selling quite well, but they're trying to move away from Symbian. They had another viable platform (Maemo/MeeGo), but ditch'd that to use Windows - a platform that was quite well behind where they were with the Maemo/MeeGo effort, and they are having a very hard time selling phones with Windows on them.
If they Board of Directors was smart, they'd can Elop, and either resurrect Maemo/MeeGo, or pull in Android. They'd have to can Elop to do so as he has a bigger interest in seeing Microsoft succeed than Nokia succeed (he's got far more invested in Microsoft than he ever will with Nokia).
Regardless they need to get their phone sales up, or get out of the business. But Windows is not helping them sell phones. So they need to look at other platforms.
The irony, of course, is that Windows is turning out to be the "burning platform" that Elop called Symbian when he first made the announcement - and the piers around it are quickly falling apart.
The UN is looking for a source of funding other than the US Government, because if the US Government pulled out of the UN it would go bankrupt and implode financially.
And that would be a bad thing?
I leave that to the reader.
PC makers realize that the true value of the tablet functionality is not necessarily being a pure tablet, but that having the capability to interface with peripherals and *gasps* keyboards is something users actually want!
Seriously, I have no problem using a tablet as my primary device, for email, programming, novel writing, etc. But I need a keyboard to do that, and the ability to hook up a larger monitor at times would be useful.
So no, it's not an act of desparation (except the part about putting Windows on them, which is Microsoft's desparation, not OEMs), but responding to what the market wants.
The UN is looking for a source of funding other than the US Government, because if the US Government pulled out of the UN it would go bankrupt and implode financially.
Previously barring a lot of eye candy that could be turned off , MS did generally get their UI about right. Now with spillover effect from Win8 they seem to have completely lost the plot and this is simply an example of them reloading the gun once more to take aim at whatever is left of their feet.
It's not so much spillover from Win8 as the Ribbon UI and their general direction for UI design. It's all bad, and not in the bad ass kind of way - just plain bad.
First of all, if you are doing this kind of work then an accountant and a lawyer should be part of your cost of doing business. You can get both on budget so that you're not paying a lot; either, way you pass on the costs to your clients as part of the overhead of the contract. Talk to some lawyers and accountants, find out their payment structures, retainer fees, etc. It'll pay off big time in the long run.
Secondly, if you are paying a 3rd party to do the checks, etc. for a small fee; you could have your accountant and lawyers do that instead probably for the same small fee. Again, check their fee schedules. You'll probably be surprised.
Finally, there are some legal organizations out there that are flat fee charges. You pay a given amount a month, and then get unlimited help from them. That it so say - you are not without options for getting going.
In the end, it's the cost of doing business. If you're not willing to pay up, then don't be surprised when you get burned. Once you get burned a few times, you've probably lost as much money as you would have spent on the lawyer and accountant to start with.
SAMBA-nice, has its uses. But if you want to do AD, do it with MS. Don't pretend that it can be done with SAMBA (at least not without pain). At the very least, SAMBA trades its own mad ranting about being interoperable while setting everything internally so its not.
If you want all the latest features provided by Microsoft for the SMB/CIFS/AD implementation, then yes by all means use MS servers and pay lots of money for CAL licenses for each server so that you can host everyone, and be prepared to have keep all your workstations in sync with the version on the server because their backwards compatibility sucks.
If you want a version that works, continues to work through Windows upgrades, and provides login compatibility with Unix/Linux systems, then use SAMBA; or if you have Linux/Unix clients that you want to authenticate to a Microsoft server - use SAMBA. They continue to produce versions that remain compatible with older versions of Windows when Microsoft does not. Since Win95, every major release of the OS has had major differences in the SMB/CIFS/AD protocol that means patching older versions to keep compatible (Win95->Win98->WinME->Win2k->WinXP->Vista, or tweaking settings to make the new versions work with the old version (Win7).
And bottom line, the squeeling, crying and whining about MS interoperability never struck a cord at all with me. SAMBA came about because open source and its structures offered nothing that came close. If Novell and MS can offer a client and a back end server, it seems to me that Linux and open source could have providided a best of breed method of its own.
You run afoul of your own words. Novell did a great job with NetWare and GroupWare for a long time; that is, until Microsoft started doing things to make the login managers for Windows unstable. This pushed a lot of people over to using Microsoft DC/AD solutions as it did not crash Windows.
in other words, it's no simple job to keep compatibility with Microsoft products as Microsoft actively tries to subvert compatibility. Just look at all the various slight (and undocumented) adjustments to the MS Office Binary formats used until MS Office 2007, or all the undocumented extensions to the OOXML format they came up with after that. Or look at Microsoft's Kerberos and LDAP implementations used for AD, which have a lot of minor changes from their respective standards so that you can't just pull a standard Kerberos or LDAP implementation out and use it to do AD.
Instead, all I ever saw was that MS was evil and Linux and open source had to be given access to it. To my mind this was nothing much more than legally enforced theft of technology and I never thought it was right.
Several years later - and having had access to all they wanted, this is where we are? Given the fuss kicked up, and the legal demands, I think MS should turn round and issue a counter case and state 'where is the interoperable product people put us through a legal case for?' You said we were the case of the failure of this in the market place, we complied and where is the product?
And no, don't get me wrong, I really like open source, and I like Samba and so on, but I never liked or thought that legal case had any merit, and I never thought open source really got its shit together in providing anything, it just seemed to want to steal someone else's work in this particular area.
The SAMBA team has done a great job of keeping compatibility with Windows despite Microsoft's efforts to change the protocol and break compatibility. They even won an Anti-trust lawsuit over it in Europe and were able to get explicit technical documentation from Microsoft to build better compatibility - with free license to do it (e.g. no patent fees).
Android and iOS both have permissions and protections in place to prevent apps from accessing personal data such as Contacts and Location. Although there have been incidents of breaches, the protections work most of the time. Android also sandboxes the apps, and although I'm not 100% sure I believe that iOS does so as well.
What is it about the Windows Phone implementation specifically that is so different and presumably better?
And for Android the user has to give permission for the app to be able to do things like access the Contacts, SD Card, and such - any inter-app communication must be approved by the user when the app is installed. Too often, people don't pay attention to what they are granting though.
A theory is a falsafiable working set based on observable data. It is what you call "facts", but subject to revision as we gain more data.
No it is not. A fact is not subject to being falsafiable. It is more akin to something that is ingrained in stone that can never be changed no matter how you look at it. For instance, the chemical structure of the Oxygen molecule is very much a fact. You may learn more about the fact by observing it from different angles, or disecting it in different ways, but it is nonetheless immutable.
A "theory" is a working set of ideas about a hypothesis on which to build a model. It is not fact in any sense. Those working ideas are revised as more information about the hypothesis is discovered and the model is revised accorrdingly; however, that does not change the fact that it is still a theory about how something works.
Remember that gravity is a theory, just like evolution. That doesn't make it optional.
To use your example of gravity - gravity itself is a fact. Our understanding of it is a theory. That is not the case with evolution. Evolution is not fact; but pure theory and wholly untestable as to proving its value as the origin of everything. Yes, it is revised to match evidence such that scientifically it is accepted. But that still does not make it any more provable than, say, Creationism - both are wholly unprovable as an mechanism of creation to an equal degree; both can provide working models that explain all the evidence around.
But those who say that science is based on observed data are wrong too. It's enough that it's observable. We can have science and theories around Higgs' boson, dark matter and the future even if we have observed neither.
Those theories around Higgs' boson, dark matter, etc. are based on observed data from other things. There's a hypothesis and theory for them; finding a way to show evidence for those theories to prove the hypothesis is what is lacking and currently in the works in many cases. Yet they are at the limit of our technological capabilities, so it will be some time before they will be able to really revise the models.
So that is to say - it's not that they are not observed. They are just not directly observed at this time. The observations that led to the hypotheses and theories around them are very much based on observations.
Please familiarize yourself with the scientific use of the word "Theory" (vs. the colloquial use) before you start throwing it about.
And that is part of the public's problem with science. When you start redefining things to meet your own needs, and subvert the public you have a problem. The term "theory" is very much what I mean - and science's actual use of it very much is what the public understands it to be, though they redefine it to be something else so that they can present theories as facts when they are not. That is, after all, the only way they can get some things (like Evolution, the Big Bang, etc.) proven scientifically, and in the same course discount other ideas on the same subject matter as not being scientific.
Every few years we have people trying to legislate science out of the class room because it conflicts with their vision of religion. Of course our science classes are messed up, people have a vested interest in them being so. Frankly, much of what is taught is not even science. Anyone who comes out of high school thinking that science is about facts has been done a disservice.
Science is about finding facts through experimentation; however, facts are rarely found by science as it mostly puts out theories that may or may not lead to facts.
And on the science vs religion front. Religion has rewritten itself often to adjust to realities that science has postulated. Science has never changed based on belief. So as a betting man, my money is on science. But as a scientist, I accept the possibility that I could be wrong.
Science has very well changed based on beliefts. For example - the Theory of Evolution has had a dramatic change on Science both in relation to finding facts and beliefs, and what Science is willing to accept as Science (if it doesn't link to the Theory of Evolution then Science throws it out as non-Science).
I think the parent want a little more than a lock screen policy. I want:
1) disable outside market instalation of apps 2) disable installation of market apps or restrict them to a whitelist 3) Be able to setup a corporate store for internal developed apps, this could work but you must enable installation of outside market applications (see 2) 4) Lock Google accounts addition and removal
So what you need to do is setup your own AppStore where you can place vetted apps by your IT staff, then for all the Android/iOS/WP7/BB devices out there that you own, you configure them to use your Corporate AppStore that is hosted on your network. Then lock out the ability to install other AppStores, and provide users with the ability to request apps from other app stores to be vetted and placed in your AppStore.
If need be, pickup a Cryogen mod and mod it for your phones to give you that capability.
Doable? Yes.
A PITA to do? Certainly.
Worth the security and control? Definitely.
Are you willing to? not likely, so stop complaining.
First, Whatever you do make sure residents have the option to not use your service and contract directly - e.g. DSL, Cable. This will let them decide between your service and other services that are available.
Second, contract for a high speed Fibre connection to the building, probably an OC-16, with a full SLA and 1:1 download/upload ratio. Have it come to a central office, and then dispence 1Gb/10Gb ethernet to each unit, to a central office in the unit itself. Each unit should be in its own subnet.
Third, wire each unit so that there are ethernet jacks in each room that connects back to the central office in the unit. Provide a phone line that suports DLS, and a cable connection to the same central office so that residents can make use of the ethernet in the unit even if they don't use your service.
Fourth, offer a wireless router with support for their unit at a nominal cost if they want it. Otherwise, they can maintain it themselves.
If you have a common area, provide some connectivity for residents - e.g. so kids can do lan parties, or people could have a small get together. Perhaps provide some support so they can access their unit network (e.g. to retrieve files) easily.
If you do it right, and price it right, then your residents will want to use your services instead of DSL or Cable and the expenditures will repay themselves quite well.
Perhaps the majority would stay there, but I'd be there is a big market for people like me (and my parents, my wife, etc) that would rather buy the phone ourselves and not be beholden to the contract of the provider.
GNU typically follows pretty closely to the standards for the various languages; the "superset" is typically in the compiler space reserved by each language (e.g. __attribute()__ in C/C++).
True. But for code using __attribute()__, such as code running in certain embedded architectures, a third-party parser is still going to have to recognize those attributes. And attributes aren't the only extension to C that GCC implements; other things include statement expressions, nested functions, 128-bit integer types, the binary ?: operator that acts like or in Scheme or Python, named address spaces, and ranges in case statements and array initializers.
Aside from the __attribute__() - which typically should be ignored any way - those are all things that a parser could easily pick up, and GCC/G++ is not likely the only one that supports them. So that shouldn't necessarily be an issue.
If CLang isn't doing that, then (i) it's limited in what languages it can support on the front end (evidenced by their sole focus on C, C++, Objective-C, and Objective-C++)
Clang is a frontend to LLVM. Other frontends exist for other languages.
True. And LLVM still relies a lot on GCC for those other languages, and back-end work.
I also don't see anything mentioning architecture support for CLang - compared with GCC's multitude of architectures.
LLVM targets at least these architectures. Production-quality backends include x86, ARM, PowerPC, SPARC, MIPS, and Hexagon (whatever that is).
That's still a relatively small list compared to GCC's list of architectures.
Without a doubt, Mr. Ballmer is the worst CEO of a large publicly traded American company today. Not only has he singlehandedly steered Microsoft out of some of the fastest growing and most lucrative tech markets (mobile music, handsets and tablets) but in the process he has sacrificed the growth and profits of not only his company but âoeecosystemâ companies such as Dell, Hewlett Packard and even Nokia. The reach of his bad leadership has extended far beyond Microsoft when it comes to destroying shareholder value â" and jobs.
And that is bad how? What I mean by that is that I sympathize with Microsoft share holders but I also regularly thank a long list of deities that Microsoft does not dominate the mobile music, handset, and tablet markets as well as desktop computing.
Well, honestly he's getting some blame for policies enacted under Gates - namely the whole Windows at all costs management that always degraded mobile/etc so as not to canabilize the desktop market. He's finally got enough standing to actually try it (Win8), but even so - he's doing it wrong.
And yes, I'm quite glad to Microsoft's end is coming. It's just nice irony that Ballmer is at the helm too.
The GCC compiler suite supports a variety of languages
Each of which is a superset of the standard language on which it is based: GNU C based on C, GNU C++ on C++, etc. This means a third-party parser that supports only a standard language will fail to parse any program that uses the GNU extensions present in GCC's superset but not in the standard language.
No more than any other compiler. GNU typically follows pretty closely to the standards for the various languages; the "superset" is typically in the compiler space reserved by each language (e.g. __attribute()__ in C/C++). Any parser that understands the standard language (e.g. C, C++, etc.) will do pretty well with parsing anything that the GCC suite parses.
I know of at least 3 levels of modularity - front-end-input (language), optimization, and back-end-output (binary)
But use of the result of GCC's front-end-input (language) is deliberately obfuscated, unlike in Clang.
The output of GCC's front-end-input (language) is their custom machine independent development language. It has nothing to do with being obfuscated and everything to do with converting the source code into something that is easier to optimize and catch problems with - and something that is language independent. So the C++/C/Java/Ada sources all get converted to the single well understood internal language that the profilers, optimizers, etc can uniformly work on. It's not meant for use by other components.
If CLang isn't doing that, then (i) it's limited in what languages it can support on the front end (evidenced by their sole focus on C, C++, Objective-C, and Objective-C++), and (ii) it'll have to do that before moving to the next stage at some point. I also don't see anything mentioning architecture support for CLang - compared with GCC's multitude of architectures.
Comparatively, GCC will be to compilers like Linux is for operating systems. The two both support more architectures and systems than anything else in their respective classes. As a result, they both tend to do things that others find inconvenient but they do them for a reason as they are designed to do more than what others are doing. (Couldn't find the info respectively for LLVM either.)
And if you want a browser on your Windows RT phone/tablet, it must be Internet Explorer. Others won't be allowed.
They are allowed, actually. What's not allowed is a third-party browser running in desktop mode. In Metro, everything goes (within the limits of the sandbox).
What's not allowed is a third-party application registered as a "Browser" class application under Win8. It can be registered as a "Metro" application class (access to WinRT APIs) or a "Desktop" application class (access to Win32 APIs, except on Win8 RT where applications can only be "Metro" applications except the few that Microsoft provides under the "Desktop" application class - namely MS Office). And the problem for web-browsers is that they require the ability to do some extra stuff that the "Metro" applications are forbidden from doing, but "browser" applications can.
The problem is that they don't need to do it the exact same was as GCC. They need to do it based more on the language (C, C++, D, A, B, Java, Modula, etc),
If the compiler is GCC, the language is GNU C, which is a superset of standard C, or the language is GNU C++, which is a superset of standard C++. So the parser needs to accept the GNU C and GNU C++ languages. I thought proving that two parsers accept the same language was halting-complete.
The GCC compiler suite supports a variety of languages. Which one use used depends on which command you call - gcc vs g++ vs gjc vs a number of others.
Bloating the compiler to generate the additional output information - which will be very specific to each IDE - makes no sense.
True, which is why have suggested making the compiler more modular so that its parser can be reused by either the compiler, which needs "useful information for the internals", or an IDE, which needs "something useful for the IDE to provide useful functionality for the user." The GCC team has steadfastly resisted making GCC more modular and more maintainable for fear that a non-free IDE might use the output of its parser.
The GCC compiler suite is quite modular already. It's just that the modularity is not provided for external tools to link into; nor it is necessarily broken down along the lines of where others want it to be. I know of at least 3 levels of modularity - front-end-input (language), optimization, and back-end-output (binary) - and I'm sure they have more that that.
GCC has a front end that takes a computer language (e.g. C, C++, Java, Ada, Modula, Fortran, etc.) and converts it into an intermediarly language that is then used by the rest of the internals for doing various things like optimizing and eventually binary code generation, which again has numerous modules for various platforms (x86, x86-64, ppc, etc) and binary formats (a.out, elf, PE, etc).
So it's not that GCC is not modular or maintainable in that respect; it's that they don't want to publish their internal APIs for others to use. Since the code is open source, people could figure that out, but then they run any risk of it changing without being notified since they are not published or guaranteed to remain stable.