The Xbox was one bright spot in an otherwise bleak product landscape. And now they're hell-bent on ruining that? They got rid of Sinofsky. When are they going to get rid of Ballmer?
They're not losing a lot of business because of it. Apple is a publicly traded, for-profit company out to make money for themselves and their shareholders. I would assume then that if they were losing lots of business because they lacked a mini tower then they'd have a mini tower in their lineup. The fact they don't suggests that they're not losing a lot of business because of it.
"People who write software programs value control. The user, on the other hand, just wants something that's easy to operate.
To illustrate his point, he notes that computer programmers tend to prefer manual transmissions. But not even 15 percent of the cars sold in the United States last year had that feature."
I know I prefer manual transmissions. Is this really a trait of programmers? Does this mean anything?
I'm always hearing about the new office UI, but I'm more interested in new functionality. The only things I've heard about (and I've just searched Microsoft's Office site where you can get a free 60 day trial of office) are the live preview, context sensitive spell-checking and that Excel can handle 1 million rows. To me these features aren't compelling enough for an upgrade, though they may be for others, and frankly I'm cynical enough to therefore believe the whole point of the upgrade is for the new UI and keep Microsoft's coffers flush with cash. Or am I missing something?
Good comparison - however it's easier to detect whether you have a valid $20 bill than a valid version of windows. Plus the U.S. mint has a vested interest in ensuring counterfeit $20 bills are easy to detect. Microsoft needs to work harder to provide their users similar counterfeit protection tools if the intend to enforce WGA.
No - this is exactly the kind of problem everyone was afraid of: I've legitimately purchased a license of windows that turns out to be pirated and now I have to jump through a bunch of hoops in order to get everything straightened out. I'm not eating crow.
Scroll down to 'What is the Windows Genuine Advantage Notifications program?'. They're saying it's opt-in and anyway regardless of genuine status users will not be denied access to critical security updates - nothing is mentioned of their disabling your computer. That's not to say the story can't change in the fall, but that's not the current story.
You betcha. That's the situation at the company I'm working for, and we're attempting to rectify it. The problem is right now we have just about every language that's ever been used: COBOL, Fortran, C/C++, Delphi, PowerBuilder, VB, Java, VB/C#, Perl & Python. And those are the only ones I know about!
As a result we also want to standardize on a language - or at least a set of languages. The purist in me says you should use the right language for the right job. The practicalist in me says you should use a language that's easy to find developers with talent in that language and can handle any business application coming our way.
The fact we have a plethora of languages is indicative of a lack of management oversight. Developers can pretty much do whatever they want - as long as they meet their deadlines and functionality requirements. Some managers manage the technology more than others - but there's no overall consensus throughout the organization.
Our challenge now is we have a newly-formed group managing the development tools and languages and the developers are resistant to any changes in the status quo. Especially looming large is a potential showdown between Java and C#.
I don't mean to flame, but with all these religious wars going on in IT it's become apparent to me why so many companies have turned to outsourcing. How are other companies managing their technology without engaging in holy wars?
None of the articles in the post indicated exactly what Antoine did. Did he just post his own content on the P2P network so that he had access to it wherever he was? Or was he pulling content others had posted and thus obtained this content without paying a license? The articles don't make it clear what he did.
If it was the former case then this was a good decision. One of the articles likened this to a library purchasing books - it's not responsible for how the patrons use them.
If it's the latter then I disagree that he did nothing wrong - he stole. People are saying this is OK because you aren't making money from it, i.e. it's for private use? I'm not making any money when I steal a pair of pants from the store and I don't sell them - I'm only intending to wear them for my own private use. What's the difference?
I think the fact the Dvorak layout never caught on is proof enough that not everyone, in fact almost no one, is willing to relearn to type. Fact of the matter is most of us no longer know how to type - our fingers do it automatically without our thinking about it. Why would anyone want to change that?
The synopsis states Daniel Cuthbert was "worried that he'd been stung by a phishing scam" as the motive for his unauthorized access to the site. The article never mentions motive. The one thing the artcicle does make quite clear, which the synopsis doesn't, is the reason for his conviction was lying to the police. Seems as though he wasn't paying attention to the Martha Stewart case.
Businesses will switch to Vista as their leases expire. The typical business lease is 3 years so within 3 years of release a lot of business will have switched to Vista.
This seems to be the market Microsoft is going for anyway - I don't think they really expect people to rush out and pay $100-$200 for this upgrade that doesn't really buy them much. The upgrade is really only needed for when people go to buy new machines Windows is current with the most recent Mac OS so as to prevent defection to another platform.
This misses the point of the article - it's not about whether morse code is slower or faster than texting it's about being able to compose your message without having to look at the phone. Morse code clearly has the advantage in that case.
Why bother with any of this home theatre crap? It costs a lot of money and the standards are always changing, so there's always going to be something new/better on the horizon. Thank goodness I have decent theatres near where I live - I'm simply going to ignore home theatres and continue to enjoy taking my wife out on movie dates.
Last week/. had an article Japanese Agency Plan for Robot Lunar Base where they said NASA plans to have a robot-driven mining colony established on the moon by 2020. Now we know what they're going to be doing with what they mine: building a ring around the earth!
Late binding interfaces, IDispatch, are incompatible with early binding interfaces, IUnknown.
Lack of common data types accross different environments. For example the C++ notion of a string is markedly different from VB's notion of a string. Don't even get me going about arrays!
Inconsistent runtime documentation. C++ projects weren't required to produce a TLB file. Plus the TLB documentation file was separate from the DLL implementation file and the TLB file required special tools to view its contents.
Interface definition via IDL was awkward and made COM interfaces different from their environment.
Apartments. I knew what they were and how to use them, alas most other developers did not - not that Microsoft did a good job of documenting them anyway. Remoting (which arose via apartments in the COM world) is handled much better in.NET when needed.
Thread models. Exactly, don't need to worry about them in.NET do you?
Unless you lived in the world of COM,.NET won't make any sense to you and I can see where one would get the notion that.NET is Microsoft's copy of Java - which it isn't.
How is that any different from any other XP machine?:)
On a normal XP machine it only takes 2-3 minutes to boot up and get everything started and Norton Antivirus only consumes half your resources during a scan instead of all.;)
Slashdot Mirror
The Xbox was one bright spot in an otherwise bleak product landscape. And now they're hell-bent on ruining that? They got rid of Sinofsky. When are they going to get rid of Ballmer?
"There is a reason we don't have and use just 4-5 letter words for everything."
Apparently you don't use Twitter...
They're not losing a lot of business because of it. Apple is a publicly traded, for-profit company out to make money for themselves and their shareholders. I would assume then that if they were losing lots of business because they lacked a mini tower then they'd have a mini tower in their lineup. The fact they don't suggests that they're not losing a lot of business because of it.
I don't know anything about music social networking sites - they sound interesting. Can you name a few, please?
Here's what ECMA says:t ml
m
m
http://www.ecma-international.org/memento/index.h
Checkout the chairpersons for the following technical committees:
Programming and Scripting Languages:
http://www.ecma-international.org/memento/TC39.ht
Office Open XML Formats:
http://www.ecma-international.org/memento/TC45.ht
This statement from TFA really struck me:
"People who write software programs value control. The user, on the other hand, just wants something that's easy to operate.
To illustrate his point, he notes that computer programmers tend to prefer manual transmissions. But not even 15 percent of the cars sold in the United States last year had that feature."
I know I prefer manual transmissions. Is this really a trait of programmers? Does this mean anything?
I'm always hearing about the new office UI, but I'm more interested in new functionality. The only things I've heard about (and I've just searched Microsoft's Office site where you can get a free 60 day trial of office) are the live preview, context sensitive spell-checking and that Excel can handle 1 million rows. To me these features aren't compelling enough for an upgrade, though they may be for others, and frankly I'm cynical enough to therefore believe the whole point of the upgrade is for the new UI and keep Microsoft's coffers flush with cash. Or am I missing something?
Just google the quote. Here's the first result: http://www.insanely-great.com/news.php?id=6726
Good comparison - however it's easier to detect whether you have a valid $20 bill than a valid version of windows. Plus the U.S. mint has a vested interest in ensuring counterfeit $20 bills are easy to detect. Microsoft needs to work harder to provide their users similar counterfeit protection tools if the intend to enforce WGA.
No - this is exactly the kind of problem everyone was afraid of: I've legitimately purchased a license of windows that turns out to be pirated and now I have to jump through a bunch of hoops in order to get everything straightened out. I'm not eating crow.
If you want more information then go straight to the source:
p x?displaylang=en
http://www.microsoft.com/genuine/downloads/FAQ.as
Scroll down to 'What is the Windows Genuine Advantage Notifications program?'. They're saying it's opt-in and anyway regardless of genuine status users will not be denied access to critical security updates - nothing is mentioned of their disabling your computer. That's not to say the story can't change in the fall, but that's not the current story.
If Microsoft has the ability to remotely disable Windows then so does the U.S. Government. Now think of all the possibilities for mischief.
You betcha. That's the situation at the company I'm working for, and we're attempting to rectify it. The problem is right now we have just about every language that's ever been used: COBOL, Fortran, C/C++, Delphi, PowerBuilder, VB, Java, VB/C#, Perl & Python. And those are the only ones I know about!
As a result we also want to standardize on a language - or at least a set of languages. The purist in me says you should use the right language for the right job. The practicalist in me says you should use a language that's easy to find developers with talent in that language and can handle any business application coming our way.
The fact we have a plethora of languages is indicative of a lack of management oversight. Developers can pretty much do whatever they want - as long as they meet their deadlines and functionality requirements. Some managers manage the technology more than others - but there's no overall consensus throughout the organization.
Our challenge now is we have a newly-formed group managing the development tools and languages and the developers are resistant to any changes in the status quo. Especially looming large is a potential showdown between Java and C#.
I don't mean to flame, but with all these religious wars going on in IT it's become apparent to me why so many companies have turned to outsourcing. How are other companies managing their technology without engaging in holy wars?
None of the articles in the post indicated exactly what Antoine did. Did he just post his own content on the P2P network so that he had access to it wherever he was? Or was he pulling content others had posted and thus obtained this content without paying a license? The articles don't make it clear what he did.
If it was the former case then this was a good decision. One of the articles likened this to a library purchasing books - it's not responsible for how the patrons use them.
If it's the latter then I disagree that he did nothing wrong - he stole. People are saying this is OK because you aren't making money from it, i.e. it's for private use? I'm not making any money when I steal a pair of pants from the store and I don't sell them - I'm only intending to wear them for my own private use. What's the difference?
I think the fact the Dvorak layout never caught on is proof enough that not everyone, in fact almost no one, is willing to relearn to type. Fact of the matter is most of us no longer know how to type - our fingers do it automatically without our thinking about it. Why would anyone want to change that?
The synopsis states Daniel Cuthbert was "worried that he'd been stung by a phishing scam" as the motive for his unauthorized access to the site. The article never mentions motive. The one thing the artcicle does make quite clear, which the synopsis doesn't, is the reason for his conviction was lying to the police. Seems as though he wasn't paying attention to the Martha Stewart case.
Businesses will switch to Vista as their leases expire. The typical business lease is 3 years so within 3 years of release a lot of business will have switched to Vista.
This seems to be the market Microsoft is going for anyway - I don't think they really expect people to rush out and pay $100-$200 for this upgrade that doesn't really buy them much. The upgrade is really only needed for when people go to buy new machines Windows is current with the most recent Mac OS so as to prevent defection to another platform.
Point taken. You're clearly a better sms man than I am! ;)
This misses the point of the article - it's not about whether morse code is slower or faster than texting it's about being able to compose your message without having to look at the phone. Morse code clearly has the advantage in that case.
Why bother with any of this home theatre crap? It costs a lot of money and the standards are always changing, so there's always going to be something new/better on the horizon. Thank goodness I have decent theatres near where I live - I'm simply going to ignore home theatres and continue to enjoy taking my wife out on movie dates.
Last week /. had an article Japanese Agency Plan for Robot Lunar Base where they said NASA plans to have a robot-driven mining colony established on the moon by 2020. Now we know what they're going to be doing with what they mine: building a ring around the earth!
Here are some of the problems with COM:
- Late binding interfaces, IDispatch, are incompatible with early binding interfaces, IUnknown.
- Lack of common data types accross different environments. For example the C++ notion of a string is markedly different from VB's notion of a string. Don't even get me going about arrays!
- Inconsistent runtime documentation. C++ projects weren't required to produce a TLB file. Plus the TLB documentation file was separate from the DLL implementation file and the TLB file required special tools to view its contents.
- Interface definition via IDL was awkward and made COM interfaces different from their environment.
- Apartments. I knew what they were and how to use them, alas most other developers did not - not that Microsoft did a good job of documenting them anyway. Remoting (which arose via apartments in the COM world) is handled much better in
.NET when needed.
- Thread models. Exactly, don't need to worry about them in
.NET do you?
Unless you lived in the world of COM,Now I'm picturing a sun shade surrounding the earth as a solution to global warming. Thanks a lot! ;)
People switched to Google because it provided relevant, quick and non-biased search results - the minimalist interface was a nice touch.
I hope Google doesn't lose sight of their strengths in their attempt to become the next Yahoo!
How is that any different from any other XP machine? :)
;)
On a normal XP machine it only takes 2-3 minutes to boot up and get everything started and Norton Antivirus only consumes half your resources during a scan instead of all.