Jeez. I said BUSINESS. As in REAL WORLD. Not university. IT/CS/MIS whatever. I don't mean majors. I mean what you department is.
What I meant (translated for people who haven't gotten out of school) is: I've yet to meet one non-computer hobbyist, i.e., a person who, while they may be very computer literate, doesn't view them as a hobby, but merely a tool, who has ever heard of Linux. Is that clear enough?
I tell ya, I was a died in the wool Mac OS user for a long time (for good reason: I was a graphic designer. There are STILL a few good reasons a Mac is a better tool for GD's. In those days there were lots).
A big thing was, there is TONS of software for the Mac. Like 11,000 titles (and that was a few years ago). But no one I talked to believed it. Why? Becuase when you went into a computer store in middle America, you would see MAYBE a few titles and that's it. None of the numerous Hybrid CD's would be separately labeled or even with a sticker. Ditto with the hardware. There was a fair amount of hardware that would work just fine with a mac (external modems come to mind, with the proper adapter cable), but it wasn't labeled.
In short, it's tough to fight the perception that there isn't software. Maybe on-line shopping has picked up enough that it isn't as big an issue. But I don't think so.
It's one of those "mindshare" problems. I STILL have yet to meet ONE non-geek (i.e., not in the IT business) who has heard of Linux.
I found your comment about Business Programming being "programmed programing" interesting. A fair amount of what I do is repetitive (I would argue that some is not. That some businesses are so specialized in what they do and so convuluted in how they go to market that no AI computer program could ever replace a talented System Analyst and programming team).
This dovetails nicely with something I came across on the web the other day. General Office. It's an Open Source Accounting package. Many different modules. Ability to use a large variety of data sources (Access, SQL server, Oracle), although with the source you could use anything without too much problem. Written in VB6, source included. LIcensing options for resellers. I thought "man, we can start with that, customize for the client, and it'd be like doing a whole custom app for them!" I think this is a GREAT idea.
I like the part about customer feedback (i.e., end user feedback). That is often hard to come by in projects I work on. The tricky part is balancing it with management feedback. A typical situation is one where the users of the software want ultimate flexibility, but management wants software that adheres to certain business rules. As in "you can't set a ship date for whatever you want, it has to be within five weeks of the order date."
BTW, all this is from the perspecitive of "business apps," which some twit said wasn't "real programming" here a while back. Whatever.
They lack common sense and conscience because people keep pressuring their legislators to pass "reform laws" which take away the power of choice from the individual workers to apply common sense. It's the same with almost every bureaucracy.
Geez. Do you know how many organizations have custom software to work with word & vba? That is not, I assure you, a "trivial feature" for many folks. If they have already written said software the cost of rewriting it in wordperfect's macro language would be substantial.
This is ridiculous. If this suit were against anyone but microsoft, you guys would be howling at what a stupid lawsuit this is.
especially when there's a better way. Put a small flash movie on the first page which just loads the front page of the flashed site. Auto refresh in 3 seconds or so to the non-flashed site. If they have flash, they'll go to the flash site, else they'll go to the other. I don't understand why people go nuts with the javascript.
Agreed. I'm not saying I don't like my kid's "strangeness" either. I can't wait until they start telling me to put him on ritalin. No thanks. I like my kids' hyperactivity. All I was saying was, this guy obviously doesn't get the thought that such a thing might be attractive. It's like someone saying "I just don't understand how someone could ever hit their kids!". Obviously, they are not a parent, or they would understand how someone with a low tolerance for frustration could hit a kid. Not that it is OK or right, but it is not unfathomable to me that someone could hit a kid. Similarly, it's not completely foreign that the thought of having a compliant kid when you have three hellions could be comforting.
Agreed. I'm not saying I don't like my kid's "strangeness" either. I can't wait until they start telling me to put him on ritalin. No thanks. I like my kids' hyperactivity.
All I was saying was, this guy obviously doesn't get the thought that such a thing might be attractive. It's like someone saying "I just don't understand how someone could ever hit their kids!". Obviously, they are not a parent, or they would understand how someone with a low tolerance for frustration could hit a kid. Not that it is OK or right, but it is not unfathomable to me that someone could hit a kid. Similarly, it's not completely foreign that the thought of having a compliant kid when you have three hellions could be comforting.
For a whole variety of reasons. I, for example, definitely don't want my kids to be cheerful and pliant consumer-drones. In my book being "strange" is good.
HAH! coming from a person who, obviously, is not a parent. Try living with a five year old while you're making the above decision. I assure you, it looks a whole lot more tempting.
If they do that, it puts them in position of being responsible, I think. See, if they say "Well, we don't carry alt.binaries.pedophilia, 'cause it obviously has child porn", then I think it makes them responsible for stuff that DOES get through. There have been some legal precedents for this. So the ISP industry as a whole has decided they don't really do this (although some do).
It sounds ridiculous, but there are still people in the "deaf culture" who oppose cochlear implants to mimic/restore hearing.. (see here, for instance, and this article as well)
I deal with highly successful local businesses that are on on Win16 all the time. Unfortunately, most of those apps are not Y2k compliant, so they are being forced to upgrade, which means all sorts of hardware upgrades to win32....
XML will allow software written to Microsoft's Com object model to interact with non-Windows objects. In essence, Microsoft is replacing the DCOM RPC messaging technology with an XML/HTTP technology that allows for remote method invocation.
This is what M$ is all about. There saying everything is gonna be XML. Communication between COM objects (whether distributed or not) is gonna be through XML. They don't care about Java.
See The M$ XML development center and, more importantly The XML manifesto for a good look at what M$ is trying to accomplish. I'm not saying I agree with everything in it, but I think it explains why they are not all that interested in java. I think any programmer (whether you use M$ dev tools or not, should give it a read, as it is a good overview of component technology and where M$ think it fits in. I'll quote a few relevant pieces here:
the conclusion:Each year or so, the computer industry anoints a new technology as the "holy grail" of software development. The trade press happily bangs the drum, encouraging upper-management to hand down edicts outlining grand technology visions according to the pundit du jour. XML is bound to fall prey to this nonsense. Despite the hype, XML will not solve all of your problems. XML may or may not help you ship software faster. XML will never replace programming languages such as C++ or Java. XML will probably never replace programming technologies such as COM or Java either. XML will, however, become widely used as a way for software components to interoperate, in essence acting as a gateway between autonomous, heterogeneous systems. It is in this role that XML really excels.
other piecesDue to Windows NT's heavy orientation towards the Open Software Foundation's Distributed Computing Environment (DCE) RPC mechanism, COM leverages the DCE RPC protocol for framing and transport and uses the Network Data Representation (NDR) for parameter encoding. The Distributed COM (DCOM) protocol simply defines a handful of DCE RPC interfaces that are used for object activation, type coercion, and life cycle management. In essence, DCOM is just another DCE RPC application...
However, it is also unlikely that any of these three technologies will dominate the Internet. The network protocols used by these three technologies tend to require a non-trivial amount of run-time support to function properly. Ironically, while Microsoft and the Object Management Group (OMG) were arguing over whether the Internet would be run on DCOM or CORBA, the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) took over as the dominant Internet protocol. Like many other successful Internet protocols, HTTP is simple, text-based, and requires very little run-time support to work properly. Additionally, many corporate firewalls block DCOM and CORBA traffic, while happily allowing HTTP packets into their (mostly) guarded networks. Finally, when you consider the amount of engineering effort dedicated to making HTTP servers (for example, Internet Information Server (IIS) and Apache) scalable, reliable and easy to administer, it becomes harder to justify not exposing your software components using HTTP technology....
Many view XML as a fourth component integration technology. While originally designed as a solution for adding extensions to HTML, XML is rapidly becoming the technology of choice for integrating heterogeneous component-based systems. Here's why.
XML Is Platform, Language, and Vendor Agnostic Despite the hopes of platform vendors or open-source zealots, the computing world will always be comprised of different programming languages, operating systems, and computing hardware. As XML is only a wire representation, it has no particular affinity to one operating system, programming language, or hardware architecture. As long as two systems can exchange XML messages, they can potentially interoperate despite their differences. Because XML does not mandate an API or in-memory representation, it is fairly simple to host XML in an application. There are XML parsers freely available for most (if not all) programming languages. While there are several standardized programmatic interfaces for parsing XML (for example, the W3C, DOM, and SAX), there is no mandate that one must support that API in order to interoperate with other XML-based systems
American Beauty not only had some great societal criticism and some great acting (Spacey up for oscar, I think, and Benning was pretty damn good, plus that dude from Pleasantville as the kid drug dealer neighbor)... It was also funny as hell. There were a couple a points where my wife & I were just ROTFL.... Spacey's character after buying the old Camaro "I rule!"
it's marketing the name, not the name itself...
on
$7.5m for Domain Name
·
· Score: 4
Yeah, a good name doesn't hurt, BUT..
I'll take three examples. Ebay, Amazon, Yahoo. Hmmmmmmmmmm... anyone tell me what ebay is? What the excalamation yahoo! has to do with searching? What large, tall, strong women and/or a river has to do with books? And yet, those are highly successful internet companies, each really breaking some new ground and are pretty recognizable names.
You know, AOL could at least have the decency to just write a session and not close the disk. The last one I actually bothered to look at only had 150 meg or so of crap....... I mean, I could pop it in the ole burner and use 'em for backups.
THIS would be nice marketing... "Use this disk, we left 400 meg of free space!" You'd see there log every time you picked the damn thing up.
Slashdot Mirror
Jeez. I said BUSINESS. As in REAL WORLD. Not university. IT/CS/MIS whatever. I don't mean majors. I mean what you department is.
What I meant (translated for people who haven't gotten out of school) is: I've yet to meet one non-computer hobbyist, i.e., a person who, while they may be very computer literate, doesn't view them as a hobby, but merely a tool, who has ever heard of Linux. Is that clear enough?
I tell ya, I was a died in the wool Mac OS user for a long time (for good reason: I was a graphic designer. There are STILL a few good reasons a Mac is a better tool for GD's. In those days there were lots).
A big thing was, there is TONS of software for the Mac. Like 11,000 titles (and that was a few years ago). But no one I talked to believed it. Why? Becuase when you went into a computer store in middle America, you would see MAYBE a few titles and that's it. None of the numerous Hybrid CD's would be separately labeled or even with a sticker. Ditto with the hardware. There was a fair amount of hardware that would work just fine with a mac (external modems come to mind, with the proper adapter cable), but it wasn't labeled.
In short, it's tough to fight the perception that there isn't software. Maybe on-line shopping has picked up enough that it isn't as big an issue. But I don't think so.
It's one of those "mindshare" problems. I STILL have yet to meet ONE non-geek (i.e., not in the IT business) who has heard of Linux.
He probably drinks Budweiser (and thinks its "the king of beers")
/.?
[OT]Any other homebrewers on
I got 3 cases of Honey black spruce lager aging in the garage and a batch of Porter I just racked to secondary last week... mmmmmmm.... HomeBrew.....
I found your comment about Business Programming being "programmed programing" interesting. A fair amount of what I do is repetitive (I would argue that some is not. That some businesses are so specialized in what they do and so convuluted in how they go to market that no AI computer program could ever replace a talented System Analyst and programming team).
This dovetails nicely with something I came across on the web the other day. General Office. It's an Open Source Accounting package. Many different modules. Ability to use a large variety of data sources (Access, SQL server, Oracle), although with the source you could use anything without too much problem. Written in VB6, source included. LIcensing options for resellers. I thought "man, we can start with that, customize for the client, and it'd be like doing a whole custom app for them!" I think this is a GREAT idea.
I like the part about customer feedback (i.e., end user feedback). That is often hard to come by in projects I work on. The tricky part is balancing it with management feedback. A typical situation is one where the users of the software want ultimate flexibility, but management wants software that adheres to certain business rules. As in "you can't set a ship date for whatever you want, it has to be within five weeks of the order date."
BTW, all this is from the perspecitive of "business apps," which some twit said wasn't "real programming" here a while back. Whatever.
Well, anyone who gets their "news" from TV is ignorant, in the truest sense of the word. Unfortunately, that is most people today.
They lack common sense and conscience because people keep pressuring their legislators to pass "reform laws" which take away the power of choice from the individual workers to apply common sense. It's the same with almost every bureaucracy.
You've got to be kidding. I checked out Star Office, and let me tell you, comparing it to M$ Office is a joke.
Geez. Do you know how many organizations have custom software to work with word & vba? That is not, I assure you, a "trivial feature" for many folks. If they have already written said software the cost of rewriting it in wordperfect's macro language would be substantial.
This is ridiculous. If this suit were against anyone but microsoft, you guys would be howling at what a stupid lawsuit this is.
especially when there's a better way. Put a small flash movie on the first page which just loads the front page of the flashed site. Auto refresh in 3 seconds or so to the non-flashed site. If they have flash, they'll go to the flash site, else they'll go to the other. I don't understand why people go nuts with the javascript.
ummm, I just gotta say, that's damn funny... you need to keep that up, just so I can link to it in one of my .sigs....
Just the other day I got into a discussion of why anonymity on the net is good. This article says it better than I ever could.
Looks like I found my new sig.
Agreed. I'm not saying I don't like my kid's "strangeness" either. I can't wait until they start telling me to put him on ritalin. No thanks. I like my kids' hyperactivity. All I was saying was, this guy obviously doesn't get the thought that such a thing might be attractive. It's like someone saying "I just don't understand how someone could ever hit their kids!". Obviously, they are not a parent, or they would understand how someone with a low tolerance for frustration could hit a kid. Not that it is OK or right, but it is not unfathomable to me that someone could hit a kid. Similarly, it's not completely foreign that the thought of having a compliant kid when you have three hellions could be comforting.
Agreed. I'm not saying I don't like my kid's "strangeness" either. I can't wait until they start telling me to put him on ritalin. No thanks. I like my kids' hyperactivity.
All I was saying was, this guy obviously doesn't get the thought that such a thing might be attractive. It's like someone saying "I just don't understand how someone could ever hit their kids!". Obviously, they are not a parent, or they would understand how someone with a low tolerance for frustration could hit a kid. Not that it is OK or right, but it is not unfathomable to me that someone could hit a kid. Similarly, it's not completely foreign that the thought of having a compliant kid when you have three hellions could be comforting.
Well, one more thing for the control freaks. People insist on living in the strange world where they like to be in control of everything.
Have we learned nothing? we SUCK at controlling. So many time, humans try to control the chaos with serious unintended consequences.
For a whole variety of reasons. I, for example, definitely don't want my kids to be cheerful and pliant consumer-drones. In my book being "strange" is good.
HAH! coming from a person who, obviously, is not a parent. Try living with a five year old while you're making the above decision. I assure you, it looks a whole lot more tempting.
"It is the single most insidious Web site I've ever seen--it's like a burglar's tool,"
DORK! it's not a web site. Geez. It's a different protocol. If you're gonna get quoted, know what the fsck you're talking about!
If they do that, it puts them in position of being responsible, I think. See, if they say "Well, we don't carry alt.binaries.pedophilia, 'cause it obviously has child porn", then I think it makes them responsible for stuff that DOES get through. There have been some legal precedents for this. So the ISP industry as a whole has decided they don't really do this (although some do).
It sounds ridiculous, but there are still people in the "deaf culture" who oppose cochlear implants to mimic/restore hearing.. (see here, for instance, and this article as well)
I deal with highly successful local businesses that are on on Win16 all the time. Unfortunately, most of those apps are not Y2k compliant, so they are being forced to upgrade, which means all sorts of hardware upgrades to win32....
Where's it say he gets a free shirt?
This is what M$ is all about. There saying everything is gonna be XML. Communication between COM objects (whether distributed or not) is gonna be through XML. They don't care about Java.
See The M$ XML development center and, more importantly The XML manifesto for a good look at what M$ is trying to accomplish. I'm not saying I agree with everything in it, but I think it explains why they are not all that interested in java. I think any programmer (whether you use M$ dev tools or not, should give it a read, as it is a good overview of component technology and where M$ think it fits in. I'll quote a few relevant pieces here:
the conclusion: Each year or so, the computer industry anoints a new technology as the "holy grail" of software development. The trade press happily bangs the drum, encouraging upper-management to hand down edicts outlining grand technology visions according to the pundit du jour. XML is bound to fall prey to this nonsense. Despite the hype, XML will not solve all of your problems. XML may or may not help you ship software faster. XML will never replace programming languages such as C++ or Java. XML will probably never replace programming technologies such as COM or Java either. XML will, however, become widely used as a way for software components to interoperate, in essence acting as a gateway between autonomous, heterogeneous systems. It is in this role that XML really excels.
other piecesDue to Windows NT's heavy orientation towards the Open Software Foundation's Distributed Computing Environment (DCE) RPC mechanism, COM leverages the DCE RPC protocol for framing and transport and uses the Network Data Representation (NDR) for parameter encoding. The Distributed COM (DCOM) protocol simply defines a handful of DCE RPC interfaces that are used for object activation, type coercion, and life cycle management. In essence, DCOM is just another DCE RPC application...
However, it is also unlikely that any of these three technologies will dominate the Internet. The network protocols used by these three technologies tend to require a non-trivial amount of run-time support to function properly. Ironically, while Microsoft and the Object Management Group (OMG) were arguing over whether the Internet would be run on DCOM or CORBA, the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) took over as the dominant Internet protocol. Like many other successful Internet protocols, HTTP is simple, text-based, and requires very little run-time support to work properly. Additionally, many corporate firewalls block DCOM and CORBA traffic, while happily allowing HTTP packets into their (mostly) guarded networks. Finally, when you consider the amount of engineering effort dedicated to making HTTP servers (for example, Internet Information Server (IIS) and Apache) scalable, reliable and easy to administer, it becomes harder to justify not exposing your software components using HTTP technology. ...
Many view XML as a fourth component integration technology. While originally designed as a solution for adding extensions to HTML, XML is rapidly becoming the technology of choice for integrating heterogeneous component-based systems. Here's why.
XML Is Platform, Language, and Vendor Agnostic Despite the hopes of platform vendors or open-source zealots, the computing world will always be comprised of different programming languages, operating systems, and computing hardware. As XML is only a wire representation, it has no particular affinity to one operating system, programming language, or hardware architecture. As long as two systems can exchange XML messages, they can potentially interoperate despite their differences. Because XML does not mandate an API or in-memory representation, it is fairly simple to host XML in an application. There are XML parsers freely available for most (if not all) programming languages. While there are several standardized programmatic interfaces for parsing XML (for example, the W3C, DOM, and SAX), there is no mandate that one must support that API in order to interoperate with other XML-based systems
American Beauty not only had some great societal criticism and some great acting (Spacey up for oscar, I think, and Benning was pretty damn good, plus that dude from Pleasantville as the kid drug dealer neighbor)... It was also funny as hell. There were a couple a points where my wife & I were just ROTFL.... Spacey's character after buying the old Camaro "I rule!"
Yeah, a good name doesn't hurt, BUT..
I'll take three examples. Ebay, Amazon, Yahoo. Hmmmmmmmmmm... anyone tell me what ebay is? What the excalamation yahoo! has to do with searching? What large, tall, strong women and/or a river has to do with books? And yet, those are highly successful internet companies, each really breaking some new ground and are pretty recognizable names.
In short, "it's the marketing, stupid." Next.
You know, AOL could at least have the decency to just write a session and not close the disk. The last one I actually bothered to look at only had 150 meg or so of crap....... I mean, I could pop it in the ole burner and use 'em for backups.
THIS would be nice marketing... "Use this disk, we left 400 meg of free space!" You'd see there log every time you picked the damn thing up.