I'm always terribly amused at how my refusal to waste my time explaining why some adolescent jackass is stupid makes me bitter, or cynical, or a corporate shill.
The problem is that IP law in this country is massively and irrevocably broken. Only a protracted and expensive court battle will provide any answer as to whether a given use of open source code was or was not in violation of the license, and most companies cannot afford one. Even those that can, when they examine the reality of the legal minefield that is IP law, end up simply unable to determine with any real certainty what the outcome will be.
So one developer who doesn't understand the actual legal meaning of some terminology in the license can say something that leads a company into a multiple-year court battle that may conceivably cost them millions.
The upside is you save a few bucks on developers, but the downside is just a bottomless pit of suck. It's simply not worth it.
Oh, no, I know what I'm talking about. It's just that I'd have to write a fucking book to correct all your dumbass misconceptions, and I don't have time. Besides, you'd just enlarge the argument in various inappropriate directions - like whether M4 is a programming language - so you wouldn't have to deal with the reality that Linux sucks and nobody is doing anything about it.
Which is retarded. Therefore, so are you. It may be temporary, but you're still retarded.
> I think the bottom line is that you either > know how to do something or you don't.
Actually, the bottom line is that you don't have the slightest clue what you're saying. You don't know what M4 is, you couldn't be arsed to look it up, and you have no comprehension of what system administrators actually do. Come back when you have a sensible line of argument.
I don't agree. Not that KOTOR wasn't a great game, but a tremendous amount of KOTOR's goodness was comparing it to all the other Star Wars games that SUCKED! "I want to play a Star Wars game, ooh here's one AAAAAAA OMG MY EYES WTF!!!!"
So I played KOTOR, and it was a great game, and I had great fun. And then I played it again, so I could be evil this time. And then I tried to play it again, and... and... hey, this game sucks.
Meanwhile, I've played through Fable about thirty times. It helps that I can complete the game in a weekend. It helps that the NPCs have more than ONE THING to say. I can start a game of Fable and run around for hours paying zero attention to the main storyline. KOTOR? Not so much.
I do have to agree that the good/evil thing in Fable was pants. It was a neat idea, but... well, ultimately, suck.
> George Lucas has shown us what can happen
I think you also have to add into *that* equation twenty years of obscene wealth, a collection of quantum leaps in the fields of technology he helped create, and an utter failure to create anything new whatsoever. Molyneux doesn't labor under that particular yoke, so I expect he's less likely to go ABSOLUTELY BATSHIT INSANE.
> you've provided no reason to think this > will necessarily be the case
If it was necessarily the case, the prediction would be unnecessary. Sort of like predicting Sundance Head isn't going to be the American Idol this year; since he's already been eliminated (and good riddance), that's necessarily the case and it's pointless to say it.
According to Microsoft's press archive, 2 million sold as of April 6 last year. I don't know, maybe we sold a half million this year. It's possible. I think Molyneux said in a recent interview that it sold 2.5 million, but I don't want to go searching for it.
> The pickle you find yourself in is the fact that > all (AFAIK) Gnu-Linux experts are at least > familiar with Windows and it's discrepencies.
No, the problem is more that Linux has a much longer and more complex list of discrepancies - but the expert has a similarly long and complex list of solutions.
On Windows, he doesn't have such a list. He is frustrated and confused by even the simplest things, because he does not understand how to resolve his problems. He generates a long list of discrepancies precisely because these discrepancies are minor. The average discrepancy is something like "the CSS support in IE7 is not 100% compliant with the standard". You can still browse around dozens of sites and compile a massive list of exactly how and where IE7 doesn't do what you expect.
Linux frustrates and confuses the Windows user, too. But the Windows user cannot generate a very long list, because he rapidly finds the system impossible to use productively. He doesn't start generating a list of solutions, because he's not accustomed to this. These discrepancies are more like "I don't know how to do what I want". That's the whole list: "I wanted to change the routing for my email, but sendmail.cf was incomprehensible". Of course, you're not supposed to use sendmail.cf, you're supposed to do an M4 config... but he never figures that out. He can't proceed to explain why M4 sucks, because he doesn't know there is an M4 in the first place.
So a short list isn't necessarily good, and a long one isn't necessarily bad.
> I have three Linux boxes I like to play with.
There will come a time when you don't want to play with the system. You just want it to STFU and get out of your way. Windows does that. Linux doesn't.
Samba is every bit as good as anything else for running a file server, and if you're setting your file servers up correctly, nobody will know or care what they're running. They either work or they don't.
I would still recommend that you use Windows, because I'm at Microsoft. We like people to use Windows. You should use Windows more often. You should install it on everything. I'd be happy to explain how you could do the same things you already do with more Windows licenses. But it's sort of your job to think about what's best for your company, not ours.
Fable was cut. Massively. Even the Lost Chapters expansion was heavily cut.
And it still made everything else in the RPG market look like garbage.
Now Lionhead's got major corporate backing that frees up Molyneux to concentrate on the GAME instead of running the company.
So pardon me if I think it doesn't really matter how much they cut. Fable 2 is going to beat the everloving shit out of everything else. Between F2 and GTA4, Microsoft is going to pwn Sony.
Yeah, I know, Sony has GTA4 too. But they won't have the downloadable content.
> Mostly I'd be happy if people who don't embrace OSS > [even enough to learn about it] would just shut their > gobs so others could make up their minds for themselves.
This is precisely what I'm on about. When Microsoft has a problem with some code, and we don't say enough about it, we get criticised by the open source community. We should be discussing this. Consumers have a right to know.
But when some OSS product has a problem, we should shut up?
Face it, when your competitor has a problem, you don't shut up. You wave flags and sound horns and put up big neon signs. And now that someone who doesn't work for Microsoft is starting to say some of the same things that Microsoft's engineers and partners and customers were saying, you want them to shut up.
Face it, boys. Information wants to be free. You can't keep the flaws of Linux secret forever. The truth will out. And in the end, it will turn out to be unreliable and problematic, just like everything else. You simply pick the problems you can live with.
A line I use frequently with no real knowledge of how well it works:
"I'm looking for something in the [hourly expectation + 50%] to [hourly expectation * 2] range. Roughly [annual salary equivalent of midpoint]. I understand that I may need to start slightly lower and demonstrate my value before you can justify this rate, but I'm willing to do that."
This tends to get me something slightly more than I'm expecting; usually in the 15-20% range. These results are pretty consistent across my last four job offers. Currently, I'm looking for something in the $50 an hour range, so I'm quoting $75-100 and $170K. This should get me something around $57-60 an hour.
> you don't get to define what open source means. > The Open Source Initiative has that luxury
Excuse me, but no, they don't.
OSI doesn't get to tell me what "open" means. We agree on what "source" means, but that word "open" is sort of like that word "free". I think "open" means "you can get the source whether you pay or not". (PHPFox doesn't meet this definition, and I take issue with their use of the term "open source".) If I say my project is "open source", that means you get to look at the source even if you never pay me a dime or even agree to any license. If you need a license to see the source, it's not open.
It's that easy. It's that simple. It's that basic.
Now, the open source licenses we have are not really about seeing the source. They're about CHANGING the source and DISTRIBUTING the source. That's not part of what I think "open" means. I think those are a whole different question. So an "open source" project, in my opinion, might still not be something you're explicitly allowed to change and redistribute. It might require a license to change and redistribute, just like OSI says - that's what the existing open source licenses cover.
But it's NOT what makes them open. And OSI doesn't get to say it is, no matter how much they stomp and whine.
Besides, Russ Nelson rocks, and anyone who would oust him as president for politically incorrect views is just retarded. Sure, he "resigned", but only under pressure from the dipshits who were more worried about his political credentials than his skill and insight as an open source philosopher.
Not really. It's more like breaking into a house to install a complicated machine that unlocks the door from the inside, so you can come back later and rob it. It may be a bad situation, but it's never really going to happen, is it? If you already broke into the house, you're just going to go ahead and rob it.
Everybody wants to believe that the people installing botnets are hackers, but they're not. They're criminals. The people running security companies are hackers. They think building these fantastic scenarios is fun, because it is, so they spend all day doing it. Meanwhile, the criminals on the street don't give a shit. Lockpicks? Shotguns? Fuck that, I got BOOTS. Boots can open a door REAL good.
"It would start with a user falling for any one of the current hacker tricks."
Now, call me dense, but... why exactly doesn't the hacker use this trick to DO WHAT HE WANTED?
I mean, think about it. Assume you can convince a user to run any program once, and you want to set up a botnet.
Should you:
A. Send the user a program that sets up an elaborate trust circumvention mechanism so he can be convinced to run the program which installs the botnet?
or:
B. Just send him the program that installs the botnet?
I'm always fascinated by the ability of studies to say things that anyone who has been paying attention already knows.
Whenever I try to get more than three people to work on a development team for over a week, they split into two teams. One team tries to do everything. The other team tries to do "this half" while they expect the first team to do "that half". In the end, the first team doesn't produce quality work because the workload was too high, and the second doesn't produce quality work because "this half" doesn't interface with "that half". The original team split is because they couldn't agree on whether to divide the work. For even MORE irony, the team that divides the work is the one that didn't want to divide it. (Yes, this EXACT situation happened to me more than once. Four times, in fact, and with completely different teams.)
But if I make two teams of three, and explicitly divide the work into "this half" and "that half", I tend to get quality work. The team members *want* to be team players. You just have to set it up so that they *become* team players. The size of the team matters. Beyond three members, you start needing some of the team to STFU and just do as they're told. If you have smart creative people, none of them will do that, so you get conflict.
Most meetings perceive this and structure things so most of the group has to STFU while the others talk. Unfortunately, they tend to do it backwards - they tell the smart creative people to STFU while the dumbasses talk.
> Would you let another adult verbally torture someone?
It's called a "job interview". Here's a real world example from a recent interview I had.
1. You have five minutes to write a test plan for this large web site. 2. You have five minutes to tell me where this landscape photograph was taken. 3. You have five minutes to write a trouble ticket for this system boot failure. 4. You have twenty-five minutes to build a dynamic web site attached to this database.
None of the above is in any way related to the actual duties of the job for which I applied.
In general, a job interview is socially accepted torture. You can't determine anything from it. You can't get any real feel for someone's ability to do the job. You mostly just poke the applicant with a stick and see when he jumps.
Amusingly, when you look at it this way, the bullies in school tend to end up in jobs like auto mechanics and security - where there is no real interview process. You fill out a piece of paper, and they say "can you work weekends?" and you say "yes" and you're hired. The bullied, on the other hand, end up in jobs like engineering and management... where the interview process is long and arduous and significantly more torture.
It would be interesting to examine whether this is a development where the bullied suffer in school as preparation for the job market, or where the job market bullies applicants because it's how they think you select people. Either way, bullying isn't going away.
I've been in agreement with the negative half of this story for years. I just didn't have anything on the positive half; while there were certainly many distros that seemed better, I didn't have enough long-term experience with them to decide where I should go.
ESR's recommendation is more than enough to get me started migrating machines, when I add it to all the other Ubuntu recommendations I've had. I've got just short of three dozen servers, though, so it will take some time.
Signature notwithstanding, I personally run a lot of Linux. It's entirely possible for the two systems to coexist peacefully, and I think that would be an overall positive.
> It's not like your app won't work if it's > not certified
Certification is primarily a way for small companies to assure customers that their product is indeed of sufficient quality to play with the big boys.
If you aren't SUPPOSED to be one of the big boys, e.g. you make a slightly more capable calculator, certification is largely a waste of time and money. Many of the tests simply don't apply, so eighty percent of the process becomes a confirmation that you don't do these things. Your calculator app needs to save documents by default in the user's document folder. What? You don't save docs? Well, now the test is "confirm app does not save documents". It's somewhat stupid to pay someone several thousand dollars for looking at your menus.
If you ARE one of the big boys, certification is largely a waste of time and money. Many applications - especially those with custom UIs, like pretty much all games - do not actually comply with the guidelines, not because they're inferior, but because they're actively attempting to transcend the state of the art. This is accounted for in the process, but it's time-consuming to get Microsoft's stamp of approval on your digression from the standard.
It has some value to be certified for the latest Windows, because it makes your customers feel warm and fuzzy about upgrading. If you know you're going to pass the certification, and you're big enough not to care about the cost, and you have space in the schedule for the turnaround (an important question), getting certified will pay for itself in added business. After all, Microsoft just sent out a list of 800 applications that got mentioned on Slashdot, and that's some expensive advertising. So if your application isn't big enough to make its own rules, but it is big enough that customer businesses depend on it, certification is a Good Idea.
Like the parent says, certification just verifies that you're following Known Good Practices in your application. It doesn't guarantee that what you do is any good... just that you're doing it in an acceptable fashion.
I have Vista installed on a total of 18 machines between home and the office, and every last one of them has 1GB. Maybe I'm inured to the performance difference, but honestly, I still have a couple XP SP2 boxes as well - licensing issue, I only have 5 Vista licenses at home, but I got XP licenses when I bought the machines - and they have slightly worse performance than the Vista machines.
I also have crap video on the Vista boxes at my house, it being the onboard Intel graphics adapter that uses main memory as video memory. I expect I could realise a massive performance boost by offloading video and graphics onto an EPCI card, but I may be wrong... several of my work machines have dedicated graphics cards, and it doesn't seem to make a huge difference.
I don't work with large files, so that might significantly impact performance. I know historically there were plenty of machines where I could write code just fine, but I wouldn't even try to do multimedia editing on them. Since I almost never mess with massive multimedia files these days, I don't know how large file sizes affect Vista in day-to-day usage.
Generally speaking, I think MOST people will be happy running Vista with 1GB. Power users may want more, and if you work with massive multimedia files I suspect you'll NEED more. And that's my two cents from behind the blue curtain.
Slashdot Mirror
A joke? Aren't those supposed to be funny?
I'm always terribly amused at how my refusal to waste my time explaining why some adolescent jackass is stupid makes me bitter, or cynical, or a corporate shill.
The problem is that IP law in this country is massively and irrevocably broken. Only a protracted and expensive court battle will provide any answer as to whether a given use of open source code was or was not in violation of the license, and most companies cannot afford one. Even those that can, when they examine the reality of the legal minefield that is IP law, end up simply unable to determine with any real certainty what the outcome will be.
So one developer who doesn't understand the actual legal meaning of some terminology in the license can say something that leads a company into a multiple-year court battle that may conceivably cost them millions.
The upside is you save a few bucks on developers, but the downside is just a bottomless pit of suck. It's simply not worth it.
...says the guy with the "will work for experience" sig.
Oh, no, I know what I'm talking about. It's just that I'd have to write a fucking book to correct all your dumbass misconceptions, and I don't have time. Besides, you'd just enlarge the argument in various inappropriate directions - like whether M4 is a programming language - so you wouldn't have to deal with the reality that Linux sucks and nobody is doing anything about it.
Which is retarded. Therefore, so are you. It may be temporary, but you're still retarded.
> M4 is a programing language AFAIK
Use a fucking search engine, retard.
Try "sendmail m4".
There are roughly 40 RPGs available for the original XBox.
Fable is one of the top five.
That blows away the competition.
> I think the bottom line is that you either
> know how to do something or you don't.
Actually, the bottom line is that you don't have the slightest clue what you're saying. You don't know what M4 is, you couldn't be arsed to look it up, and you have no comprehension of what system administrators actually do. Come back when you have a sensible line of argument.
Excuse me, but you do realise that those figures say Fable outsold KOTOR, right?
Hardly "meh".
> KOTOR kicked its ass up and down the street
I don't agree. Not that KOTOR wasn't a great game, but a tremendous amount of KOTOR's goodness was comparing it to all the other Star Wars games that SUCKED! "I want to play a Star Wars game, ooh here's one AAAAAAA OMG MY EYES WTF!!!!"
So I played KOTOR, and it was a great game, and I had great fun. And then I played it again, so I could be evil this time. And then I tried to play it again, and... and... hey, this game sucks.
Meanwhile, I've played through Fable about thirty times. It helps that I can complete the game in a weekend. It helps that the NPCs have more than ONE THING to say. I can start a game of Fable and run around for hours paying zero attention to the main storyline. KOTOR? Not so much.
I do have to agree that the good/evil thing in Fable was pants. It was a neat idea, but... well, ultimately, suck.
> George Lucas has shown us what can happen
I think you also have to add into *that* equation twenty years of obscene wealth, a collection of quantum leaps in the fields of technology he helped create, and an utter failure to create anything new whatsoever. Molyneux doesn't labor under that particular yoke, so I expect he's less likely to go ABSOLUTELY BATSHIT INSANE.
> you've provided no reason to think this
> will necessarily be the case
If it was necessarily the case, the prediction would be unnecessary. Sort of like predicting Sundance Head isn't going to be the American Idol this year; since he's already been eliminated (and good riddance), that's necessarily the case and it's pointless to say it.
Wasn't it 2.5 million? Checking...
According to Microsoft's press archive, 2 million sold as of April 6 last year. I don't know, maybe we sold a half million this year. It's possible. I think Molyneux said in a recent interview that it sold 2.5 million, but I don't want to go searching for it.
> The pickle you find yourself in is the fact that
> all (AFAIK) Gnu-Linux experts are at least
> familiar with Windows and it's discrepencies.
No, the problem is more that Linux has a much longer and more complex list of discrepancies - but the expert has a similarly long and complex list of solutions.
On Windows, he doesn't have such a list. He is frustrated and confused by even the simplest things, because he does not understand how to resolve his problems. He generates a long list of discrepancies precisely because these discrepancies are minor. The average discrepancy is something like "the CSS support in IE7 is not 100% compliant with the standard". You can still browse around dozens of sites and compile a massive list of exactly how and where IE7 doesn't do what you expect.
Linux frustrates and confuses the Windows user, too. But the Windows user cannot generate a very long list, because he rapidly finds the system impossible to use productively. He doesn't start generating a list of solutions, because he's not accustomed to this. These discrepancies are more like "I don't know how to do what I want". That's the whole list: "I wanted to change the routing for my email, but sendmail.cf was incomprehensible". Of course, you're not supposed to use sendmail.cf, you're supposed to do an M4 config... but he never figures that out. He can't proceed to explain why M4 sucks, because he doesn't know there is an M4 in the first place.
So a short list isn't necessarily good, and a long one isn't necessarily bad.
> I have three Linux boxes I like to play with.
There will come a time when you don't want to play with the system. You just want it to STFU and get out of your way. Windows does that. Linux doesn't.
I say what I actually think. Full-stop. If you have a problem with that, fuck you. If Microsoft has a problem with that, fuck them.
If you think that makes me a corporate shill, you're retarded.
Samba is every bit as good as anything else for running a file server, and if you're setting your file servers up correctly, nobody will know or care what they're running. They either work or they don't.
I would still recommend that you use Windows, because I'm at Microsoft. We like people to use Windows. You should use Windows more often. You should install it on everything. I'd be happy to explain how you could do the same things you already do with more Windows licenses. But it's sort of your job to think about what's best for your company, not ours.
Fable was cut. Massively. Even the Lost Chapters expansion was heavily cut.
And it still made everything else in the RPG market look like garbage.
Now Lionhead's got major corporate backing that frees up Molyneux to concentrate on the GAME instead of running the company.
So pardon me if I think it doesn't really matter how much they cut. Fable 2 is going to beat the everloving shit out of everything else. Between F2 and GTA4, Microsoft is going to pwn Sony.
Yeah, I know, Sony has GTA4 too. But they won't have the downloadable content.
> Mostly I'd be happy if people who don't embrace OSS
> [even enough to learn about it] would just shut their
> gobs so others could make up their minds for themselves.
This is precisely what I'm on about. When Microsoft has a problem with some code, and we don't say enough about it, we get criticised by the open source community. We should be discussing this. Consumers have a right to know.
But when some OSS product has a problem, we should shut up?
Face it, when your competitor has a problem, you don't shut up. You wave flags and sound horns and put up big neon signs. And now that someone who doesn't work for Microsoft is starting to say some of the same things that Microsoft's engineers and partners and customers were saying, you want them to shut up.
Face it, boys. Information wants to be free. You can't keep the flaws of Linux secret forever. The truth will out. And in the end, it will turn out to be unreliable and problematic, just like everything else. You simply pick the problems you can live with.
A line I use frequently with no real knowledge of how well it works:
"I'm looking for something in the [hourly expectation + 50%] to [hourly expectation * 2] range. Roughly [annual salary equivalent of midpoint]. I understand that I may need to start slightly lower and demonstrate my value before you can justify this rate, but I'm willing to do that."
This tends to get me something slightly more than I'm expecting; usually in the 15-20% range. These results are pretty consistent across my last four job offers. Currently, I'm looking for something in the $50 an hour range, so I'm quoting $75-100 and $170K. This should get me something around $57-60 an hour.
> you don't get to define what open source means.
> The Open Source Initiative has that luxury
Excuse me, but no, they don't.
OSI doesn't get to tell me what "open" means. We agree on what "source" means, but that word "open" is sort of like that word "free". I think "open" means "you can get the source whether you pay or not". (PHPFox doesn't meet this definition, and I take issue with their use of the term "open source".) If I say my project is "open source", that means you get to look at the source even if you never pay me a dime or even agree to any license. If you need a license to see the source, it's not open.
It's that easy. It's that simple. It's that basic.
Now, the open source licenses we have are not really about seeing the source. They're about CHANGING the source and DISTRIBUTING the source. That's not part of what I think "open" means. I think those are a whole different question. So an "open source" project, in my opinion, might still not be something you're explicitly allowed to change and redistribute. It might require a license to change and redistribute, just like OSI says - that's what the existing open source licenses cover.
But it's NOT what makes them open. And OSI doesn't get to say it is, no matter how much they stomp and whine.
Besides, Russ Nelson rocks, and anyone who would oust him as president for politically incorrect views is just retarded. Sure, he "resigned", but only under pressure from the dipshits who were more worried about his political credentials than his skill and insight as an open source philosopher.
Not really. It's more like breaking into a house to install a complicated machine that unlocks the door from the inside, so you can come back later and rob it. It may be a bad situation, but it's never really going to happen, is it? If you already broke into the house, you're just going to go ahead and rob it.
Everybody wants to believe that the people installing botnets are hackers, but they're not. They're criminals. The people running security companies are hackers. They think building these fantastic scenarios is fun, because it is, so they spend all day doing it. Meanwhile, the criminals on the street don't give a shit. Lockpicks? Shotguns? Fuck that, I got BOOTS. Boots can open a door REAL good.
Here's my paraphrasing. (Admittedly biased.)
"It would start with a user falling for any one of the current hacker tricks."
Now, call me dense, but... why exactly doesn't the hacker use this trick to DO WHAT HE WANTED?
I mean, think about it. Assume you can convince a user to run any program once, and you want to set up a botnet.
Should you:
A. Send the user a program that sets up an elaborate trust circumvention mechanism so he can be convinced to run the program which installs the botnet?
or:
B. Just send him the program that installs the botnet?
Am I off base here?
I'm always fascinated by the ability of studies to say things that anyone who has been paying attention already knows.
Whenever I try to get more than three people to work on a development team for over a week, they split into two teams. One team tries to do everything. The other team tries to do "this half" while they expect the first team to do "that half". In the end, the first team doesn't produce quality work because the workload was too high, and the second doesn't produce quality work because "this half" doesn't interface with "that half". The original team split is because they couldn't agree on whether to divide the work. For even MORE irony, the team that divides the work is the one that didn't want to divide it. (Yes, this EXACT situation happened to me more than once. Four times, in fact, and with completely different teams.)
But if I make two teams of three, and explicitly divide the work into "this half" and "that half", I tend to get quality work. The team members *want* to be team players. You just have to set it up so that they *become* team players. The size of the team matters. Beyond three members, you start needing some of the team to STFU and just do as they're told. If you have smart creative people, none of them will do that, so you get conflict.
Most meetings perceive this and structure things so most of the group has to STFU while the others talk. Unfortunately, they tend to do it backwards - they tell the smart creative people to STFU while the dumbasses talk.
> These groups often go on to careers in business and
;)
> management
Where they do the job interviews! See, it's training for them! QED.
> is adult society just replicating everything we
> learned in school?
More or less. It's very regimented. Kind of sad, really.
> Would you let another adult verbally torture someone?
It's called a "job interview". Here's a real world example from a recent interview I had.
1. You have five minutes to write a test plan for this large web site.
2. You have five minutes to tell me where this landscape photograph was taken.
3. You have five minutes to write a trouble ticket for this system boot failure.
4. You have twenty-five minutes to build a dynamic web site attached to this database.
None of the above is in any way related to the actual duties of the job for which I applied.
In general, a job interview is socially accepted torture. You can't determine anything from it. You can't get any real feel for someone's ability to do the job. You mostly just poke the applicant with a stick and see when he jumps.
Amusingly, when you look at it this way, the bullies in school tend to end up in jobs like auto mechanics and security - where there is no real interview process. You fill out a piece of paper, and they say "can you work weekends?" and you say "yes" and you're hired. The bullied, on the other hand, end up in jobs like engineering and management... where the interview process is long and arduous and significantly more torture.
It would be interesting to examine whether this is a development where the bullied suffer in school as preparation for the job market, or where the job market bullies applicants because it's how they think you select people. Either way, bullying isn't going away.
I've been in agreement with the negative half of this story for years. I just didn't have anything on the positive half; while there were certainly many distros that seemed better, I didn't have enough long-term experience with them to decide where I should go.
;p
ESR's recommendation is more than enough to get me started migrating machines, when I add it to all the other Ubuntu recommendations I've had. I've got just short of three dozen servers, though, so it will take some time.
Signature notwithstanding, I personally run a lot of Linux. It's entirely possible for the two systems to coexist peacefully, and I think that would be an overall positive.
Not that I'm holding my breath.
> It's not like your app won't work if it's
> not certified
Certification is primarily a way for small companies to assure customers that their product is indeed of sufficient quality to play with the big boys.
If you aren't SUPPOSED to be one of the big boys, e.g. you make a slightly more capable calculator, certification is largely a waste of time and money. Many of the tests simply don't apply, so eighty percent of the process becomes a confirmation that you don't do these things. Your calculator app needs to save documents by default in the user's document folder. What? You don't save docs? Well, now the test is "confirm app does not save documents". It's somewhat stupid to pay someone several thousand dollars for looking at your menus.
If you ARE one of the big boys, certification is largely a waste of time and money. Many applications - especially those with custom UIs, like pretty much all games - do not actually comply with the guidelines, not because they're inferior, but because they're actively attempting to transcend the state of the art. This is accounted for in the process, but it's time-consuming to get Microsoft's stamp of approval on your digression from the standard.
It has some value to be certified for the latest Windows, because it makes your customers feel warm and fuzzy about upgrading. If you know you're going to pass the certification, and you're big enough not to care about the cost, and you have space in the schedule for the turnaround (an important question), getting certified will pay for itself in added business. After all, Microsoft just sent out a list of 800 applications that got mentioned on Slashdot, and that's some expensive advertising. So if your application isn't big enough to make its own rules, but it is big enough that customer businesses depend on it, certification is a Good Idea.
Like the parent says, certification just verifies that you're following Known Good Practices in your application. It doesn't guarantee that what you do is any good... just that you're doing it in an acceptable fashion.
I have Vista installed on a total of 18 machines between home and the office, and every last one of them has 1GB. Maybe I'm inured to the performance difference, but honestly, I still have a couple XP SP2 boxes as well - licensing issue, I only have 5 Vista licenses at home, but I got XP licenses when I bought the machines - and they have slightly worse performance than the Vista machines.
I also have crap video on the Vista boxes at my house, it being the onboard Intel graphics adapter that uses main memory as video memory. I expect I could realise a massive performance boost by offloading video and graphics onto an EPCI card, but I may be wrong... several of my work machines have dedicated graphics cards, and it doesn't seem to make a huge difference.
I don't work with large files, so that might significantly impact performance. I know historically there were plenty of machines where I could write code just fine, but I wouldn't even try to do multimedia editing on them. Since I almost never mess with massive multimedia files these days, I don't know how large file sizes affect Vista in day-to-day usage.
Generally speaking, I think MOST people will be happy running Vista with 1GB. Power users may want more, and if you work with massive multimedia files I suspect you'll NEED more. And that's my two cents from behind the blue curtain.