I would say Java's just a waste, actually, not that Java is wasted on Sun.
Good idea, piss poor implementation. To begin with, OO is not the end-all, and having a language force that down your throat when it isn't even necessary is a PITA.
Add in the horrendously slow execution times for _most_ Java apps (SWT apps, whatever. If I need that blasted JavaVM, it's a Java app.), the bloat the language has experienced, and the fact that it ties my hands six ways from Sunday when I try to write code, and you have a lose-lose situation.
Python isn't incredibly fast, either. And it can be a large pain in the arse to code for. But at least it isn't completely OO based, and I can use objects where I need to, and leave them the hell alone when I don't.
Don't forget that you can chain them to whatever equipment they will be operating by that age. You don't have to worry about them ripping the chain off yet!
Didn't he say "You've got the fastest hardware you can afford"??
There's no guarantee that the hardware will help, either. Some OSes **cough**Windows**cough** seem to like not using hardware effectively.
I don't know about his faith in his knowledge of English, but idiom and non-common use are difficult for a non-native speaker to pick up on. The fact that he bothered to look it up speaks more for him than your response.
I do, however, have great faith in you being an asshat.
Does that mean that I only have to keep waiting a couple years to get rid of all those stupid friggin dialog boxes that pop up as I attempt to do some decent online research, because apparently even the professionals can't use Java correctly?
Usually this results in me wishing to pull them through the computer screen and bash their heads against my desk repeatedly, and as much fun as that would be, I have yet to develop the awesome mental powers that it would require, and I have yet to get that bitchin' software that lets DATP (DumbAss Transport Protocol) packets through.
I'm going to have to assume that you were being humorous with this one, but just in case...
It's not that those things weren't happening, but they were happening on a smaller scale. Of course, I'm sure there are geographical areas where the statistics could be interpreted against this- lovely thing, statistics- but on the whole, they say it was less.
Maybe I also should have been a bit more specific, as well. If one looks back further in history, children were considered adults at an earlier age- in part, at least, because of a lower average life expectancy, so they had to become functional earlier to support themselves. Thanks to modern medicine, now people can live long enough to develop colon cancer and die slowly, instead of dying slowly of the old diseases at a younger age. I should have made the point that I was using ages to match a period of responsibility in someone's life, as opposed to 12 years always meaning 12 years of age. That's the problem with not always remembering that at one point, 12-15 year olds were functional members of society...
Not every 12 year old could handle them. What the grandparent is referring to is banning the sale of MA (in the US) rated games (18+) to anyone under the age of 18, the sale of T rated games to anyone under the age of 13, etc. I also think you are jumping to conclusions with your last sentance:
But my point being , 12 -15 year olds love smut , violent games and swearing,This is natural , it has always been this way and always will
This is not as black and white as you think. I'm only 22, but there is a bit of a generation gap between myself and my parents, and I have tales of a time, not too long ago- 30s and 40s- in which, while 12-15 year olds weren't innocent little lambs, weren't all swearing, watching smut, and looking for things to kill. Video games, and electronic media in general, have created a new progression in the youth.
For an even older example, if you've ever read Bram Stoker's Dracula, there is a scene in which a harpy "went down on her knees before me"- I may be hazy on the exact quote, but that was as "graphic" as it got- and that was seen as erotic and borderline smut at the time. Things have not always been as they are now.
Back on topic, parents could still purchase these games, and allow their children to play them, and that most likely means we'll be in the same boat we're in now: parents who don't care what their children see or hear, as long as they don't bug them while they're looking through the Macy's catalog with a piece of plastic in one hand and the cell phone in the other.
But, there is a statistical chance, however small, that all the parents will start caring enough to watch and supervise their children.
I'm not going to hold my breath, mind you.
On an unrelated note, what is so goddamn fun about GTA? In any of its incarnations? DOOM- that was a blast. Deus Ex- also fun, and violent as well. GTA? Take away the insane amounts of violence, and it loses its appeal. DOOM wasn't fun just because of the blood and gore- it was a visceral experience, where your heart would try to burst out of your chest when you turned the corner and saw a Cacodaemon. The violence contributed to the overall effect, but it wasn't necessary
Take the overt violence out of GTA, and what is left? A mediocre game with fairly shoddy control and gameplay. Repetative missions, a poor storyline- and usually its the storyline and missions that people say make it great: "Oh, I don't play it because it's violent, it has a great story." I call bullshit. But that's just my opinion.
Not everything is coded in OOP. And what about when I'm using your code as a library? Maybe it wasn't intended to be a library, and there is something concerning system state between function calls, or little things like is it a blocking function or not, etc. that I might need to know, now that The Pointy Haired Boss wants me to use it in my code.
A few lines at the top of each function/procedure/class at least tell the other guy what the known effects of the function are would be nice. I don't want to have to look into your specific code unless something goes wrong. I want to be able to call foo() with baz and bar as parameters, and know that if baz happens to be of the format "xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx" instead of as a long int, it will be translated to a long int for the socket library (This is especially useful in such languages as Python, PHP, etc, that are not strongly typed). And I'd rather not have to take the time to dig through your code to make sure you're doing it.
I'm not saying comment the process, I'm saying comment the functionality. Preconditions, postconditions, undefined behavior, etc. The best part is, there are tools out there that can rip those out to generate paper docs later, if you want to have a nifty reference. "Oh! You need a function that gives pigs wings? I have one of those- its in file whenPigsFly.py. Here's the doc for the function, its got all you need to know."
No, I just had to purchase a new 200 cd flipbook for the car to keep up. I don't agree with the idea of getting it illegally for free (unless, perhaps, the disc is no longer in production). This isn't "civil disobedience", folks, its piracy. I'm also not going to mess with anything that puts a DRM system on the file. I buy the CD, rip it (190 kbps), and then backup my.ogg files to removable media. I make mix CDs, yeah, but I own the CD for damn near every compressed audio file I have.
A lack of basic fellowship with our fellow American might be part of it.
Race, religion, philosophy...America is such a melting pot of all of this, and members of each group tend to stick together against "the others". What you end up with is almost straight out of a horror movie: "Us v. the monsters". People who don't agree with you aren't even people.
At least, that's the attitude I see on a daily basis. I've even caught myself thinking such things as "Where the hell is Darwin, and why isn't natural selection working to remove these people from the gene pool!"
The biggest problem with this whole debacle (and yes, I say debacle, because the people who will come out on top are the scum-sucking lawyers, not the people who may have been injured in some way by this, either emotionally or physically) is that nobody wants to admit that, as a people, Americans are pretty heartless. Sure, we talk the talk, and some of us even walk the walk, but for crying out loud, we have pro-life people killing doctors. We have people who want better schools but don't want to spend any money getting there. We have people who want a balanced budget as long as they don't pay more.
It's just a bigger version of NIMBY, only now it has been reduced to "as long as it doesn't hurt me it's okay", instead using the little bit of compassion necessary to say "okay, this won't hurt me, but will it be hurting someone else?"
I don't think that the lack of compassion can be blamed on the media. I think it goes much further than that. I think it is part of the festering that has been occuring on our soil, in our schools, our communities. It is something that started from the beginning, and nobody noticed.
Violence can desensitize someone to violence. I won't argue this, its been debated and debated enough. The other half of the coin, though, is the inability of the average American to step into someone else's shoes for a while. We're an arrogant nation, and our citizens are arrogant as well, towards each other and other nation's citizens. We're "better". We're "smarter". And dammit, we dress better than you too. This didn't come from violent media. It came from the "American Spirit" speeches given to the school children about how great America is. It came from the "White Power" speeches. It came from the "Black Power" speeches. It comes from every organization that tries to say it is superior to the "others" due to some inherent attribute. If you look at the number of different groups there are like this, you'll notice something. Everybody is better than everybody else.
Is it violent media that promotes some violent acts? Maybe. Causality (sp?) needs to be proved. Deeper than that, though, is the real smoking gun question: Why do we look at everyone else as being less important than us? Why is it that, even outside violent crime, we can't grasp that nobody is more important than anybody else?
Note: The "we're better" speech above contains the word "we", meant to refer to the general American attitude, and not my personal beliefs.
What would be a bad thing, however, would be to have a bunch of guys dressed up as Squaresoft characters running around with swords that are too big for anyone of their size to even lift, let alone swing effectively.
**shudder**
I really didn't need to picture my roommate running around looking like Sephiroth with Cloud's sword...excuse me while I find a grapefruit spoon...must remove eyes...
I think the difference is that when you signed the TOS for your internet connection, part of that consists of some verbage similar to the follow (your exact milage may vary):
I am your httpd god, and thou shalt not have any other httpd gods before me.
Thou shalt keep holy the smtp server that I have provided.
Thou shalt not kill thy neighbor's bandwidth with thine own ftp service.
I think my old cable connection even included the following:
Thou shalt sacrifice thy first born son in my name, as I am mighty, and thou art but a puny mortal before me.
The biggest difference I can see (and IANAL) is that you agreed to have these things blocked when you signed up with your ISP, whereas this is them deciding to do it "behind the scenes" and in such a manner that they are stifling competition. You hosting a website at home doesn't count as competition in the FCC's eyes.
It sucks, yeah, but the difference is that they aren't stiffling innovation here, they're setting terms of what you can host on your local machine. Hosting anything can cause tremendous bandwidth usage, much more so than making a VoIP call. And imagine the uproar if someone was running an open-relay smtp service on an IP that belonged to an ISP...lawyer's would probably need something to clean up with once the shock of how many lucrative lawsuits were available wore off.
Its been a while, but wasn't that from The Colossal Cave? (Or was TCC a remake of something called Adventure? There's so damn many clones that I'm a little fuzzy on the details...)
I also am curious as to how !(x-x) is always false. X-X, if X is any integer type, should result in 0, and !0 should be the same as !false in most languages. !false should return to true.
Files should go over FTP. Hands down. That's what FTP is there for. Images in a web page? I can see a legitimate use there. Static content. Animated GIFs are annoying, yes, but I can get around them. Images are easy to disable.
DHTML, to me, is more than just text. I would almost call it a virus. (This is not intended to point fingers at those of you who use DHTML. I'm sure you write decent code that isn't causing me problems. I still don't like it.) It quit being "text" when it became code. Its still in text format, sure. It also is code that is being executed on my system that I didn't authorize to run. I didn't install it. I didn't sign an agreement. And I sure as hell don't want to run most of it, because it serves no purpose other than to make the page slower.
I realize/. uses Javascript. I can't say I approve, but I still come here because I enjoy the/. experience. Was my experience enhanced by the Javascript? No. Could this page work just as well as static HTML that backends form submissions off a server-side app? Yes. Would I prefer that? Hells yeah.
I just don't see a legitimate reason to need client-side scripting. At all. Advertising? A linked image or text works just fine. Blocking my right-click access? Bullshit. Menus? What's wrong with the menu on the left side of/.? It's easy to naviage. Most people I know who are basic PC users find menus in apps confusing. "Why is this here? Shouldn't it be over there?" I'm not against casual users, I just don't see what the point is of having this. It is unnecessary.
Of course, at this point I've realized that trying to explain my reasoning/position has become difficult, probably due to my poor response earlier in the thread. So I'm going to let this die after this post.
I'm not against these things happening, merely their using HTTP- Hyper Text Transfer Protocol. Online applications? Good idea. Online applications on my web page? Bad idea. I don't care if the browser is what's used to render it, I guess. Just use a different protocol. So I can check the link properties, and decide if I want to deal with it or not.
If you disallow divs to overlap any other content, then you have just disabled a lot of non-offending uses of dhtml. For example, drop down menus that don't use flash (really, I'd rather have dhtml menus than flash menus). Lots of different types of animation effects (like, for example, maybe a web-app would use a 'slide-out' notifier to alert you when you have new messages, like when using a web-forum with private messaging built in).
Why do we even need drop-down menus on websites? Whatever happened to decently laid out sites that didn't contact the server every 10 seconds to see if there was an update? Web-forums with private messages? Let them notify me of a new message when I request a new page. Real-time dynamic content does not belong in a browser window.
Maybe I'm just old fashioned here, but I don't see "the web" as something I want to turn into application software. Not over HTTP. Leave my HTTP alone, let me browse through information, maybe hit some server-side app here and there for quasi-dynamic content. Enough with the client-side stuff. The only thing I can even see running client side is a validation script that just checks to see values are entered into a form. Not that they are right (other than format, like ###-###-#### for a US phone #). Other than that, keep it on your damn server.
I know that Michigan State has MS labs, Solaris labs, and Mac labs. Most of their CS research was done on Solaris. Same thing at University of Michigan.
Granted, not everyone has to use the non-MS labs. But people still do.
There are enough GUI environments that mirror Windows that they won't have to "relearn" the whole OS. And OpenOffice does a good job at being very similar to Word.
If they're learning to admin systems, however, yeah, there is a world of difference...
You're probably right about the sophisticaiton thing. And yet again, its not an issue to me because I build my own boxes, rather than use a factory one. I'd rather do it that way, anyway, so OEM deals aren't something I look for. It is just one of those things that bug me.
My biggest reason for deeming MS evil isn't that their OS doesn't support Linux software out-of-the-box. I don't expect it to. If it did, they would be using Linux. Just like I don't expect Linux to support Windows software out-of-the-box. *nix != Windows, Windows != *nix.
I lose some choices no matter which OS I run. Yeah, yeah, *nix has a lot of replacements for Windows apps. I still lose choices. I don't think them selling Windows is an "evil" act. I chose not to buy it, so they are safe from my wrath in terms of taking away my freedom of choice.
What they are doing, however, is taking away freedom of choice from society as a whole. OEM distributions. Including things that are not OS specific in the OS- IE, for a while, and Media Player. Both of which I avoid as best I can. I don't want them to throw competitor's products in with the OS. I want the choice to not install their software at all. So, I don't install Windows as my base OS. It gets a VM, so I can play WoW. And check my work e-mail without the cludgy web interface. Stupid Domino. I still got to make my choice, though.
Until MS learns to play nicely, they will be construed as evil. They have yet to learn that.
Their actions are what makes me think they are evil. MS, to me, is the big kid on the playground. He gets his way, and sure, there are times he's nice to you, but when he wants something...
In my eyes, what would make MS be much less evil, would be to be able to install just the core OS. Nothing more. No IE. No media player. Just the OS. No calculator. No notepad. Have those on a companion cd I can install, by package, later. That would do a lot to mitigate my displeasure.
They make the choice not to, I make the choice not to use Windows when at all possible. In this case, to me, their evil factor isn't about not being upfront, its about applying force upon me.
BTW, I agree. I'm amazed someone hasn't flamed yet.
Slashdot Mirror
I would say Java's just a waste, actually, not that Java is wasted on Sun.
Good idea, piss poor implementation. To begin with, OO is not the end-all, and having a language force that down your throat when it isn't even necessary is a PITA.
Add in the horrendously slow execution times for _most_ Java apps (SWT apps, whatever. If I need that blasted JavaVM, it's a Java app.), the bloat the language has experienced, and the fact that it ties my hands six ways from Sunday when I try to write code, and you have a lose-lose situation.
Python isn't incredibly fast, either. And it can be a large pain in the arse to code for. But at least it isn't completely OO based, and I can use objects where I need to, and leave them the hell alone when I don't.
Don't forget that you can chain them to whatever equipment they will be operating by that age. You don't have to worry about them ripping the chain off yet!
Didn't he say "You've got the fastest hardware you can afford"?? There's no guarantee that the hardware will help, either. Some OSes **cough**Windows**cough** seem to like not using hardware effectively.
I don't know about his faith in his knowledge of English, but idiom and non-common use are difficult for a non-native speaker to pick up on. The fact that he bothered to look it up speaks more for him than your response.
I do, however, have great faith in you being an asshat.
Amen. If only I could bill those two numbskulls for the time I can never get back for that bomb of a movie.
Man, we use a Lotus Domino server for internal stuff. If only you knew how slow that beast was...
That's worse than saying "Santa's hacking code again!" At least with Santa, it's singular- but to see girls in one place hacking?!? Unpossible!
Usually this results in me wishing to pull them through the computer screen and bash their heads against my desk repeatedly, and as much fun as that would be, I have yet to develop the awesome mental powers that it would require, and I have yet to get that bitchin' software that lets DATP (DumbAss Transport Protocol) packets through.
It's not that those things weren't happening, but they were happening on a smaller scale. Of course, I'm sure there are geographical areas where the statistics could be interpreted against this- lovely thing, statistics- but on the whole, they say it was less.
Maybe I also should have been a bit more specific, as well. If one looks back further in history, children were considered adults at an earlier age- in part, at least, because of a lower average life expectancy, so they had to become functional earlier to support themselves. Thanks to modern medicine, now people can live long enough to develop colon cancer and die slowly, instead of dying slowly of the old diseases at a younger age. I should have made the point that I was using ages to match a period of responsibility in someone's life, as opposed to 12 years always meaning 12 years of age. That's the problem with not always remembering that at one point, 12-15 year olds were functional members of society...
Oh well.
This is not as black and white as you think. I'm only 22, but there is a bit of a generation gap between myself and my parents, and I have tales of a time, not too long ago- 30s and 40s- in which, while 12-15 year olds weren't innocent little lambs, weren't all swearing, watching smut, and looking for things to kill. Video games, and electronic media in general, have created a new progression in the youth.
For an even older example, if you've ever read Bram Stoker's Dracula, there is a scene in which a harpy "went down on her knees before me"- I may be hazy on the exact quote, but that was as "graphic" as it got- and that was seen as erotic and borderline smut at the time. Things have not always been as they are now.
Back on topic, parents could still purchase these games, and allow their children to play them, and that most likely means we'll be in the same boat we're in now: parents who don't care what their children see or hear, as long as they don't bug them while they're looking through the Macy's catalog with a piece of plastic in one hand and the cell phone in the other.
But, there is a statistical chance, however small, that all the parents will start caring enough to watch and supervise their children.
I'm not going to hold my breath, mind you.
On an unrelated note, what is so goddamn fun about GTA? In any of its incarnations? DOOM- that was a blast. Deus Ex- also fun, and violent as well. GTA? Take away the insane amounts of violence, and it loses its appeal. DOOM wasn't fun just because of the blood and gore- it was a visceral experience, where your heart would try to burst out of your chest when you turned the corner and saw a Cacodaemon. The violence contributed to the overall effect, but it wasn't necessary
Take the overt violence out of GTA, and what is left? A mediocre game with fairly shoddy control and gameplay. Repetative missions, a poor storyline- and usually its the storyline and missions that people say make it great: "Oh, I don't play it because it's violent, it has a great story." I call bullshit. But that's just my opinion.
/me grabs flame-retardant suit
Not everything is coded in OOP. And what about when I'm using your code as a library? Maybe it wasn't intended to be a library, and there is something concerning system state between function calls, or little things like is it a blocking function or not, etc. that I might need to know, now that The Pointy Haired Boss wants me to use it in my code.
A few lines at the top of each function/procedure/class at least tell the other guy what the known effects of the function are would be nice. I don't want to have to look into your specific code unless something goes wrong. I want to be able to call foo() with baz and bar as parameters, and know that if baz happens to be of the format "xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx" instead of as a long int, it will be translated to a long int for the socket library (This is especially useful in such languages as Python, PHP, etc, that are not strongly typed). And I'd rather not have to take the time to dig through your code to make sure you're doing it.
I'm not saying comment the process, I'm saying comment the functionality. Preconditions, postconditions, undefined behavior, etc. The best part is, there are tools out there that can rip those out to generate paper docs later, if you want to have a nifty reference. "Oh! You need a function that gives pigs wings? I have one of those- its in file whenPigsFly.py. Here's the doc for the function, its got all you need to know."
No, I just had to purchase a new 200 cd flipbook for the car to keep up. I don't agree with the idea of getting it illegally for free (unless, perhaps, the disc is no longer in production). This isn't "civil disobedience", folks, its piracy. I'm also not going to mess with anything that puts a DRM system on the file. I buy the CD, rip it (190 kbps), and then backup my .ogg files to removable media. I make mix CDs, yeah, but I own the CD for damn near every compressed audio file I have.
Race, religion, philosophy...America is such a melting pot of all of this, and members of each group tend to stick together against "the others". What you end up with is almost straight out of a horror movie: "Us v. the monsters". People who don't agree with you aren't even people.
At least, that's the attitude I see on a daily basis. I've even caught myself thinking such things as "Where the hell is Darwin, and why isn't natural selection working to remove these people from the gene pool!"
The biggest problem with this whole debacle (and yes, I say debacle, because the people who will come out on top are the scum-sucking lawyers, not the people who may have been injured in some way by this, either emotionally or physically) is that nobody wants to admit that, as a people, Americans are pretty heartless. Sure, we talk the talk, and some of us even walk the walk, but for crying out loud, we have pro-life people killing doctors. We have people who want better schools but don't want to spend any money getting there. We have people who want a balanced budget as long as they don't pay more.
It's just a bigger version of NIMBY, only now it has been reduced to "as long as it doesn't hurt me it's okay", instead using the little bit of compassion necessary to say "okay, this won't hurt me, but will it be hurting someone else?"
I don't think that the lack of compassion can be blamed on the media. I think it goes much further than that. I think it is part of the festering that has been occuring on our soil, in our schools, our communities. It is something that started from the beginning, and nobody noticed.
Violence can desensitize someone to violence. I won't argue this, its been debated and debated enough. The other half of the coin, though, is the inability of the average American to step into someone else's shoes for a while. We're an arrogant nation, and our citizens are arrogant as well, towards each other and other nation's citizens. We're "better". We're "smarter". And dammit, we dress better than you too. This didn't come from violent media. It came from the "American Spirit" speeches given to the school children about how great America is. It came from the "White Power" speeches. It came from the "Black Power" speeches. It comes from every organization that tries to say it is superior to the "others" due to some inherent attribute. If you look at the number of different groups there are like this, you'll notice something. Everybody is better than everybody else.
Is it violent media that promotes some violent acts? Maybe. Causality (sp?) needs to be proved. Deeper than that, though, is the real smoking gun question: Why do we look at everyone else as being less important than us? Why is it that, even outside violent crime, we can't grasp that nobody is more important than anybody else?
Note: The "we're better" speech above contains the word "we", meant to refer to the general American attitude, and not my personal beliefs.
**shudder**
I really didn't need to picture my roommate running around looking like Sephiroth with Cloud's sword...excuse me while I find a grapefruit spoon...must remove eyes...
I think the difference is that when you signed the TOS for your internet connection, part of that consists of some verbage similar to the follow (your exact milage may vary):
I am your httpd god, and thou shalt not have any other httpd gods before me.
Thou shalt keep holy the smtp server that I have provided.
Thou shalt not kill thy neighbor's bandwidth with thine own ftp service.
I think my old cable connection even included the following:
Thou shalt sacrifice thy first born son in my name, as I am mighty, and thou art but a puny mortal before me.
The biggest difference I can see (and IANAL) is that you agreed to have these things blocked when you signed up with your ISP, whereas this is them deciding to do it "behind the scenes" and in such a manner that they are stifling competition. You hosting a website at home doesn't count as competition in the FCC's eyes.
It sucks, yeah, but the difference is that they aren't stiffling innovation here, they're setting terms of what you can host on your local machine. Hosting anything can cause tremendous bandwidth usage, much more so than making a VoIP call. And imagine the uproar if someone was running an open-relay smtp service on an IP that belonged to an ISP...lawyer's would probably need something to clean up with once the shock of how many lucrative lawsuits were available wore off.
Its been a while, but wasn't that from The Colossal Cave? (Or was TCC a remake of something called Adventure? There's so damn many clones that I'm a little fuzzy on the details...)
Can I beat it with a stick?
I also am curious as to how !(x-x) is always false. X-X, if X is any integer type, should result in 0, and !0 should be the same as !false in most languages. !false should return to true.
Files should go over FTP. Hands down. That's what FTP is there for. Images in a web page? I can see a legitimate use there. Static content. Animated GIFs are annoying, yes, but I can get around them. Images are easy to disable.
DHTML, to me, is more than just text. I would almost call it a virus. (This is not intended to point fingers at those of you who use DHTML. I'm sure you write decent code that isn't causing me problems. I still don't like it.) It quit being "text" when it became code. Its still in text format, sure. It also is code that is being executed on my system that I didn't authorize to run. I didn't install it. I didn't sign an agreement. And I sure as hell don't want to run most of it, because it serves no purpose other than to make the page slower.
I realize /. uses Javascript. I can't say I approve, but I still come here because I enjoy the /. experience. Was my experience enhanced by the Javascript? No. Could this page work just as well as static HTML that backends form submissions off a server-side app? Yes. Would I prefer that? Hells yeah.
I just don't see a legitimate reason to need client-side scripting. At all. Advertising? A linked image or text works just fine. Blocking my right-click access? Bullshit. Menus? What's wrong with the menu on the left side of /.? It's easy to naviage. Most people I know who are basic PC users find menus in apps confusing. "Why is this here? Shouldn't it be over there?" I'm not against casual users, I just don't see what the point is of having this. It is unnecessary.
Of course, at this point I've realized that trying to explain my reasoning/position has become difficult, probably due to my poor response earlier in the thread. So I'm going to let this die after this post.
I'd rather not put myself out to pasture at 22...
Why do we even need drop-down menus on websites? Whatever happened to decently laid out sites that didn't contact the server every 10 seconds to see if there was an update? Web-forums with private messages? Let them notify me of a new message when I request a new page. Real-time dynamic content does not belong in a browser window.
Maybe I'm just old fashioned here, but I don't see "the web" as something I want to turn into application software. Not over HTTP. Leave my HTTP alone, let me browse through information, maybe hit some server-side app here and there for quasi-dynamic content. Enough with the client-side stuff. The only thing I can even see running client side is a validation script that just checks to see values are entered into a form. Not that they are right (other than format, like ###-###-#### for a US phone #). Other than that, keep it on your damn server.
I know that Michigan State has MS labs, Solaris labs, and Mac labs. Most of their CS research was done on Solaris. Same thing at University of Michigan.
Granted, not everyone has to use the non-MS labs. But people still do.
There are enough GUI environments that mirror Windows that they won't have to "relearn" the whole OS. And OpenOffice does a good job at being very similar to Word.
If they're learning to admin systems, however, yeah, there is a world of difference...
You're probably right about the sophisticaiton thing. And yet again, its not an issue to me because I build my own boxes, rather than use a factory one. I'd rather do it that way, anyway, so OEM deals aren't something I look for. It is just one of those things that bug me.
I didn't say it looked good. It runs, and that's enough for me.
I lose some choices no matter which OS I run. Yeah, yeah, *nix has a lot of replacements for Windows apps. I still lose choices. I don't think them selling Windows is an "evil" act. I chose not to buy it, so they are safe from my wrath in terms of taking away my freedom of choice.
What they are doing, however, is taking away freedom of choice from society as a whole. OEM distributions. Including things that are not OS specific in the OS- IE, for a while, and Media Player. Both of which I avoid as best I can. I don't want them to throw competitor's products in with the OS. I want the choice to not install their software at all. So, I don't install Windows as my base OS. It gets a VM, so I can play WoW. And check my work e-mail without the cludgy web interface. Stupid Domino. I still got to make my choice, though.
Until MS learns to play nicely, they will be construed as evil. They have yet to learn that. Their actions are what makes me think they are evil. MS, to me, is the big kid on the playground. He gets his way, and sure, there are times he's nice to you, but when he wants something...
In my eyes, what would make MS be much less evil, would be to be able to install just the core OS. Nothing more. No IE. No media player. Just the OS. No calculator. No notepad. Have those on a companion cd I can install, by package, later. That would do a lot to mitigate my displeasure.
They make the choice not to, I make the choice not to use Windows when at all possible. In this case, to me, their evil factor isn't about not being upfront, its about applying force upon me.
BTW, I agree. I'm amazed someone hasn't flamed yet.