If a university wants to offer a course in C#, I'm cool with that. The problem is when they teach C# in place of another, more widely used language, like C or C++. University students don't know where they'll end up after graduation, so their skills need to be as broadly applicable as possible. Universities aren't doing their students any favors by limiting their student's educations to a language that only runs on the newest versions of a single platform.
A program's core curriculum should be taught in a language that's well-established, widely used, and versatile, like C or C++. Languages like Java and C# should then be offered as possible second languages.
"Or maybe they're just rolling our the new MSN - 'Microsoft' Version of the English language..."
That's correct -- it's called Microsoft Visual English.NET. It breaks compatibility with all currently existing spellcheckers, so you need to upgrade to Microsoft SpellChecker.NET, which only runs on Windows XP.
For people that find English to be complicated, confusing, and outdated (Slashdot editors), Microsoft is also working on Visual English-Sharp.NET. It streamlines the paragraph development cycle by eliminating the need to make verbs agree with their subjects and adjectives agree with the nouns they modify.
"...the college students are the ones most opposed to DRM technologies!"
Think about ALL college students, not just Slashdot geeks. On the whole, college students don't know enough about computers to even understand what DRM is. The average college student doesn't know the first thing about computers and has never heard of DRM or the DMCA. Sure there are some that know what's going on: some gamers, some CS students, and the like, but they are in a small minority. How do I know this? I used to have a work-study job at a college computing center, and not only were the students pretty ignorant, the other student workers (who were gamers and CS students), weren't any better off!
"I can put together a machine with an ATI All in Wonder Pro DVR and a massive disk without the DRM inhibitions. Funny thing is, college students are the ones to figure this out first."
The average college student CERTAINLY can't build his or her own box, and if you look around, you'll notice that, sure enough, they don't. They use Macs, Gateways, Dells, and Compaqs, but very few of them are generic component-based PCs. Of course, many of those in turn came preassembled from screwdriver shops and weren't built by their users.
The point is that the average college-aged Slashdot reader is not representative of the entire population of college students. You may be in college, but those bimbos in MTV's Sorority Life are in college too!
"From my understanding (I am not an economist) inflation comes from the fact that there is more money circulating."
You're correct to a point but its much more complicated than that.
Inflation is nothing more than rising prices across the economy. It can be caused by many things. Inflation is a necessary result of economic growth because when people have more money, they want to buy more stuff, but there is only so much stuff out there to buy. When demand outstrips supply, prices rise, and we have inflation. This can occur without tinkering with the money supply at all.
Money supply affects inflation but isn't the sole cause. The Federal Reserve can control money supply by buying and selling bonds, and by controlling interest rates. This gives them a limited ability to control inflation, but the Fed can only do so much.
It's actually even more complicated than what I have described. Macroeconomists still don't have a good system for describing and predicting the behavior of the economy as a whole, so no one really understands what's going on.
By the way, the practice of printing more money without removing the old money from circulation is called "devaluation." This results in inflation but it isn't the same thing as inflation. Governments devalue their own currency for a variety of reasons, but they usually do it to allow debtors (usually the government itself) to pay off their debts more easily.
Inflation is good for debtors and bad for lenders. The complicated thing is that the average person is both a lender and a debtor. When he applies for a mortgage to buy a house, he becomes a debtor. But when he puts money into savings he is, in effect, lending the money to the bank. When you invest money in the stock market and expect to earn it back, you can view that as lending your money to company (even though you really aren't). So the average person benefits and suffers from inflation simultaniously. However, the enormous expense of buying a home (which is still the norm in America) makes a mild inflation rate attractive to the average American.
"On a related note - anyone care to explain why the *economy* has to grow?"
Economic growth doesn't just benefit the wealthy -- even regular people depend on the economy to grow over time. Say a young person in his 30s bought an $85,000 house in 1983, with a 30 year morgage. Early on, the house payments are really expensive. But over time, as a result of inflation, that $85,000 begins to seem less and less expensive because everything else, including his salary, has risen. Meanwhile, the house has increased in value as well. So the guy who was paying off a $85,000 loan for an $85,000 house in 1983 is paying off an $85,000 loan for a $135,000 house right now, which is a pretty good deal. In the end, modest inflation is a good thing for regular people. And inflation, generally speaking, is a product of economic growth.
This is all grossly oversimplified, and I'm certainly no expert on the subject. But that's why everyone wants the economy to grow. The problem is when companies grow too fast....
One of the largest privately held companies in the country is headquartered in my town. Their success (especially as a textile company in a time when the textile industry is in the toilet) has convinced me that the world would be a better place if fewer companies went public. Since stock price isn't an issue, there's no pressure to grow rapidly. As a result, the company has no debt whatsoever. The company is still all about growing and making money, but their goal is sustainable long-term growth. You don't see that in larger, publicly held corporations that are only concerned with the next five years.
Most importantly, since the company is privately held and run by one family, the company adheres to the personal values of its owners. Corporate executives use shareholders as scapegoats to justify all sorts of sleazy shit. All they have to say is that they're a public corporation and that they have a duty to protect their shareholders investments. If a privately held corporation does something dirty, the owners are held morally accountable. What this means in practical terms is that the company doesn't capriciously lay off workers, and that employees tend to be paid well. One of their factories in Georgia burned down several years ago, and everyone just knew that the workers there would be laid off. However, the company offered everyone a new position in the company and promised to rebuild the factory. You can't expect a publicly held corporation to do something like that just out of principle.
A better prediction would be that there will soon be 20 posts about how this new technology will allow folks to enlarge their pr0n collections by a factor of 10,000. I'll bet they're rolling in even as I type.
"I use, and will continue to use, Mozilla strictly based on the principal alone."
I use Linux exclusively and don't own any Microsoft products. However, we're unusual. Most people won't move away from Microsoft simply out of principle.
I don't want to troll, but I for one have lost hope that anything good will come out of the Microsoft trial. Their stranglehold on the Desktop market is pretty invincible, in my view. The penalties proposed by the States are too little, too late.
If they release a stripped-down version of Windows without a web browser, what good will it do? Microsoft already owns something like 95% of that market, and its only competitor, Mozilla, isn't so much better than IE that anyone will switch back. I suppose that they haven't won the "Media-Format War," for lack of a better term, so maybe a version of Windows without WMP might help. But I don't think it'll make that much difference.
The real reason that the Microsoft monopoly is invincible is that there are no competitors. Linux on the desktop isn't working out too well. BeOS is out of business, and while there are Open-Source BeOS clones, they aren't ready yet. OS X is frickin' sweet but it doesn't run on i386 hardware. None of these options, even if viable, would allow users to run their old Windows programs.
The best case situation is that Microsoft behaves a little better towards the folks they've already beaten. Nothing in the proposed penalties (that I've heard about, anyway) will keep Microsoft from crushing competition in the server/Enterprise area, or from implementing their Palladium project.
In my view, an effective set of penalties that solves current and future problems would contain the following:
Full Disclosure of their APIs. There should be a mandatory waiting period between the release of a modified API and the release of MS software that implements that API (so that competitors have time to implement them too). Proprietary HTML extensions count as an API for this purpose.
Ensure that Palladium is a fully open system. It should be compatible with Linux and other Open Source projects both at the technical level and at the legal level. In other words, GPLed software should run on Palladium-enabled hardware without violating the GPL.
Ensure that.NET runs on UNIX. Even the graphical applications.
Anyone should be able to write software that understands Microsoft file formats.
Windows network protocols should be well documented in such a way that other companies can write software that interfaces with Windows clients (like SAMBA) and Windows servers (like Ximian Connector).
These are the penalties that the states should be demanding. These are the penalties that will allow for the creation of competitive alternatives to Windows. Until this happens, we're fucked.
I think this is a cool project, and I wish them the best of luck. However, the article failed to mention how Red Hat would be making money off of this. Selling support packages doesn't seem to work. And since the article says that the product will be distributed free of charge, they can't make money that way either. I suppose that they could sell boxed copies, but I don't know anyone who actually buys those (I just DL the ISOs).
Can someone who knows more than me explain how they hope to profit off this project?
"[T]he company has gone to considerable lengths to train it's actors to avoid detection [as Ericsson spokespeople.]"
Just look for the totally lame assholes at the bar. On second thought, think of the potential for false positives. Damn...back to the drawing board.
While this is kind of underhanded, it's an interesting idea -- I guess the suits are beginning to realize that glittery (but really lame) advertising campaigns don't penetrate our bullshit detectors.
I have a question for folks that know more than me. If trends continue, we can expect Apple processors to become more powerful, meaning OS X will run faster on the newest Apple hardware. We can also expect more and more software, like OpenOffice, to be ported to OS X.
Could the Macintosh reach the point of becoming a viable alternative to the traditional UNIX workstation (like a Sun or an SGI)? I know that the old-school workstations are popular for scientific and mathematical work, but OS X could provide the convenience of a regular desktop OS and still let folks run their custom UNIX software. Do you think Sun is worried about losing market share to Apple?
"It's a device I like to call a "speaker" and you're going to see a lot of these around over the coming years... This amazing device can be yours for a minimal price... [of] $2000...."
Over my dead body! My company, Stevetech.com, has been awarded a patent for our revolutionary "speaker" technology. You'll be hearing from my army of lawyers soon!
The computers in the article are just glorified case mods. When you plug a modern keyboard monitor and mouse into those old cases and boot Windows 2000, you totally lack the retro look and feel. The coolest artifacts from the old days are green-screen monitors and heavy, loud keyboards. They are what create the retro look-and-feel that we remember from the old days.
In middle school, we had these Apple IIe computers with green-screen monitors that tilted up and down in a stationary case. Those were sweet. At the time, we had a computer at home with a color screen (CGA graphics, baby). Even though the CGA screen was technically superior to the Apple's, I thought the Apple monitor was way cooler. Now I have a 19 inch Viewsonic monitor and its infinitely more useful than the old Apple screen -- but the Apple monitor is still cooler.
Likewise, I miss those big-ass keyboards that click when you type. These flimsy, wussy keyboards that come with modern PCs are terrible! My favorite keyboard was an old IBM AT keyboard from 1984. My dad found it at work, and I used it for several years. The keys are covered with plastic caps, which are what the letters are printed on -- if you want remap your keyboard to Dvorak, you can reposition the printed letters by removing and rearranging the little caps. Pretty sweet. I had to retire it when, while moving from one dorm room to another, I broke off some of the caps that cover the keys. I've still got it in my closet, though.
I guess my point is that, while this is a cool idea, it's somewhat misguided. Creating a retro look and feel is much more important than having a retro case, which you're just going to shove under your desk anyway. And to have the retro look-and-feel, you need cool-looking screens and clicky keyboards.
I know that its the responsibility of the voters to ensure that we get good leadership. However, the problem is this -- if Hollings goes, who will take his place? Hollings is one of the last important Democrats in office in this state and overwhelmingly the most influential. No Democrat will challenge Fritz Hollings in a primary.
The challenger would have to be a Republican. My rights to use technology are important to me, but there are other issues that are important to me, too. And while I despise the Entertainment lobby, I also despise everything that the Republican party stands for. If I vote for the Democrat (Hollings), I lose. If I vote for the Republican, I lose. In either case, by saying "no" to evil, I say "yes" to more evil.
I don't think many people in SC are fond of Hollings -- those that vote for him do so either out of party loyalty or out of fear of what the Republican challenger would do should he get elected. Perhaps Hollings' days are numbered, though -- he loses ground each time he runs for relection.
The one thing you can count on is this: whoever eventually gets Hollings seat will be just as bad as he is. The guy will have a different hidden agenda, but he'll still be good old-fashioned home-grown South Carolinian slime.
Slashdot Mirror
Note: please ignore my spelling errors....
If a university wants to offer a course in C#, I'm cool with that. The problem is when they teach C# in place of another, more widely used language, like C or C++. University students don't know where they'll end up after graduation, so their skills need to be as broadly applicable as possible. Universities aren't doing their students any favors by limiting their student's educations to a language that only runs on the newest versions of a single platform.
A program's core curriculum should be taught in a language that's well-established, widely used, and versatile, like C or C++. Languages like Java and C# should then be offered as possible second languages.
"Or maybe they're just rolling our the new MSN - 'Microsoft' Version of the English language..."
.NET. It breaks compatibility with all currently existing spellcheckers, so you need to upgrade to Microsoft SpellChecker .NET, which only runs on Windows XP.
.NET. It streamlines the paragraph development cycle by eliminating the need to make verbs agree with their subjects and adjectives agree with the nouns they modify.
That's correct -- it's called Microsoft Visual English
For people that find English to be complicated, confusing, and outdated (Slashdot editors), Microsoft is also working on Visual English-Sharp
Very exciting stuff...
To quote Strong Bad, "too much of a good thing is an awesome thing. But too much of an awesome thing is ... umm ... really, really dumb."
This is almost too much of an awesome thing. But it's awesome nonetheless.
Dude, I bet you could purchase at least four Senators with $1,000,000. If not, then I'm sure there's a rent-to-own plan out there...
"...the college students are the ones most opposed to DRM technologies!"
Think about ALL college students, not just Slashdot geeks. On the whole, college students don't know enough about computers to even understand what DRM is. The average college student doesn't know the first thing about computers and has never heard of DRM or the DMCA. Sure there are some that know what's going on: some gamers, some CS students, and the like, but they are in a small minority. How do I know this? I used to have a work-study job at a college computing center, and not only were the students pretty ignorant, the other student workers (who were gamers and CS students), weren't any better off!
"I can put together a machine with an ATI All in Wonder Pro DVR and a massive disk without the DRM inhibitions. Funny thing is, college students are the ones to figure this out first."
The average college student CERTAINLY can't build his or her own box, and if you look around, you'll notice that, sure enough, they don't. They use Macs, Gateways, Dells, and Compaqs, but very few of them are generic component-based PCs. Of course, many of those in turn came preassembled from screwdriver shops and weren't built by their users.
The point is that the average college-aged Slashdot reader is not representative of the entire population of college students. You may be in college, but those bimbos in MTV's Sorority Life are in college too!
"it feels like it's aimed squarely at the geeks' demographic"
Nothing with word "demographic" in it could truly appeal to the geek demographic.
Wait a minute....
Steve
"From my understanding (I am not an economist) inflation comes from the fact that there is more money circulating."
You're correct to a point but its much more complicated than that.
Inflation is nothing more than rising prices across the economy. It can be caused by many things. Inflation is a necessary result of economic growth because when people have more money, they want to buy more stuff, but there is only so much stuff out there to buy. When demand outstrips supply, prices rise, and we have inflation. This can occur without tinkering with the money supply at all.
Money supply affects inflation but isn't the sole cause. The Federal Reserve can control money supply by buying and selling bonds, and by controlling interest rates. This gives them a limited ability to control inflation, but the Fed can only do so much.
It's actually even more complicated than what I have described. Macroeconomists still don't have a good system for describing and predicting the behavior of the economy as a whole, so no one really understands what's going on.
By the way, the practice of printing more money without removing the old money from circulation is called "devaluation." This results in inflation but it isn't the same thing as inflation. Governments devalue their own currency for a variety of reasons, but they usually do it to allow debtors (usually the government itself) to pay off their debts more easily.
Inflation is good for debtors and bad for lenders. The complicated thing is that the average person is both a lender and a debtor. When he applies for a mortgage to buy a house, he becomes a debtor. But when he puts money into savings he is, in effect, lending the money to the bank. When you invest money in the stock market and expect to earn it back, you can view that as lending your money to company (even though you really aren't). So the average person benefits and suffers from inflation simultaniously. However, the enormous expense of buying a home (which is still the norm in America) makes a mild inflation rate attractive to the average American.
Steve
"On a related note - anyone care to explain why the *economy* has to grow?"
Economic growth doesn't just benefit the wealthy -- even regular people depend on the economy to grow over time. Say a young person in his 30s bought an $85,000 house in 1983, with a 30 year morgage. Early on, the house payments are really expensive. But over time, as a result of inflation, that $85,000 begins to seem less and less expensive because everything else, including his salary, has risen. Meanwhile, the house has increased in value as well. So the guy who was paying off a $85,000 loan for an $85,000 house in 1983 is paying off an $85,000 loan for a $135,000 house right now, which is a pretty good deal. In the end, modest inflation is a good thing for regular people. And inflation, generally speaking, is a product of economic growth.
This is all grossly oversimplified, and I'm certainly no expert on the subject. But that's why everyone wants the economy to grow. The problem is when companies grow too fast....
Steve
One of the largest privately held companies in the country is headquartered in my town. Their success (especially as a textile company in a time when the textile industry is in the toilet) has convinced me that the world would be a better place if fewer companies went public. Since stock price isn't an issue, there's no pressure to grow rapidly. As a result, the company has no debt whatsoever. The company is still all about growing and making money, but their goal is sustainable long-term growth. You don't see that in larger, publicly held corporations that are only concerned with the next five years.
Most importantly, since the company is privately held and run by one family, the company adheres to the personal values of its owners. Corporate executives use shareholders as scapegoats to justify all sorts of sleazy shit. All they have to say is that they're a public corporation and that they have a duty to protect their shareholders investments. If a privately held corporation does something dirty, the owners are held morally accountable. What this means in practical terms is that the company doesn't capriciously lay off workers, and that employees tend to be paid well. One of their factories in Georgia burned down several years ago, and everyone just knew that the workers there would be laid off. However, the company offered everyone a new position in the company and promised to rebuild the factory. You can't expect a publicly held corporation to do something like that just out of principle.
Steve
"Perhaps MS deserves a non-bill-the-borg icon for this story today?"
Perhaps, but an image of Bill Gates on the bridge of a Romulan Warbird is too large for a Slashdot icon.
A better prediction would be that there will soon be 20 posts about how this new technology will allow folks to enlarge their pr0n collections by a factor of 10,000. I'll bet they're rolling in even as I type.
Steve
I don't know anything about theoretical CS. What's polynomial time?
Steve
"I use, and will continue to use, Mozilla strictly based on the principal alone."
I use Linux exclusively and don't own any Microsoft products. However, we're unusual. Most people won't move away from Microsoft simply out of principle.
Steve
If they release a stripped-down version of Windows without a web browser, what good will it do? Microsoft already owns something like 95% of that market, and its only competitor, Mozilla, isn't so much better than IE that anyone will switch back. I suppose that they haven't won the "Media-Format War," for lack of a better term, so maybe a version of Windows without WMP might help. But I don't think it'll make that much difference.
The real reason that the Microsoft monopoly is invincible is that there are no competitors. Linux on the desktop isn't working out too well. BeOS is out of business, and while there are Open-Source BeOS clones, they aren't ready yet. OS X is frickin' sweet but it doesn't run on i386 hardware. None of these options, even if viable, would allow users to run their old Windows programs.
The best case situation is that Microsoft behaves a little better towards the folks they've already beaten. Nothing in the proposed penalties (that I've heard about, anyway) will keep Microsoft from crushing competition in the server/Enterprise area, or from implementing their Palladium project.
In my view, an effective set of penalties that solves current and future problems would contain the following:
- Full Disclosure of their APIs. There should be a mandatory waiting period between the release of a modified API and the release of MS software that implements that API (so that competitors have time to implement them too). Proprietary HTML extensions count as an API for this purpose.
- Ensure that Palladium is a fully open system. It should be compatible with Linux and other Open Source projects both at the technical level and at the legal level. In other words, GPLed software should run on Palladium-enabled hardware without violating the GPL.
- Ensure that
.NET runs on UNIX. Even the graphical applications. - Anyone should be able to write software that understands Microsoft file formats.
- Windows network protocols should be well documented in such a way that other companies can write software that interfaces with Windows clients (like SAMBA) and Windows servers (like Ximian Connector).
These are the penalties that the states should be demanding. These are the penalties that will allow for the creation of competitive alternatives to Windows. Until this happens, we're fucked.I think this is a cool project, and I wish them the best of luck. However, the article failed to mention how Red Hat would be making money off of this. Selling support packages doesn't seem to work. And since the article says that the product will be distributed free of charge, they can't make money that way either. I suppose that they could sell boxed copies, but I don't know anyone who actually buys those (I just DL the ISOs).
Can someone who knows more than me explain how they hope to profit off this project?
Steve
"[T]he company has gone to considerable lengths to train it's actors to avoid detection [as Ericsson spokespeople.]"
Just look for the totally lame assholes at the bar. On second thought, think of the potential for false positives. Damn...back to the drawing board.
While this is kind of underhanded, it's an interesting idea -- I guess the suits are beginning to realize that glittery (but really lame) advertising campaigns don't penetrate our bullshit detectors.
Steve
I have a question for folks that know more than me. If trends continue, we can expect Apple processors to become more powerful, meaning OS X will run faster on the newest Apple hardware. We can also expect more and more software, like OpenOffice, to be ported to OS X.
Could the Macintosh reach the point of becoming a viable alternative to the traditional UNIX workstation (like a Sun or an SGI)? I know that the old-school workstations are popular for scientific and mathematical work, but OS X could provide the convenience of a regular desktop OS and still let folks run their custom UNIX software. Do you think Sun is worried about losing market share to Apple?
Steve
"It's a device I like to call a "speaker" and you're going to see a lot of these around over the coming years ... This amazing device can be yours for a minimal price ... [of] $2000...."
Over my dead body! My company, Stevetech.com, has been awarded a patent for our revolutionary "speaker" technology. You'll be hearing from my army of lawyers soon!
Only kidding,
Steve
"Hey baby, this is your appetite speaking"
Case in point. I've got the TV on in the background. Right as I read your post, the Barry White ad came on TV. I felt violated somehow.
Steve
The computers in the article are just glorified case mods. When you plug a modern keyboard monitor and mouse into those old cases and boot Windows 2000, you totally lack the retro look and feel. The coolest artifacts from the old days are green-screen monitors and heavy, loud keyboards. They are what create the retro look-and-feel that we remember from the old days.
In middle school, we had these Apple IIe computers with green-screen monitors that tilted up and down in a stationary case. Those were sweet. At the time, we had a computer at home with a color screen (CGA graphics, baby). Even though the CGA screen was technically superior to the Apple's, I thought the Apple monitor was way cooler. Now I have a 19 inch Viewsonic monitor and its infinitely more useful than the old Apple screen -- but the Apple monitor is still cooler.
Likewise, I miss those big-ass keyboards that click when you type. These flimsy, wussy keyboards that come with modern PCs are terrible! My favorite keyboard was an old IBM AT keyboard from 1984. My dad found it at work, and I used it for several years. The keys are covered with plastic caps, which are what the letters are printed on -- if you want remap your keyboard to Dvorak, you can reposition the printed letters by removing and rearranging the little caps. Pretty sweet. I had to retire it when, while moving from one dorm room to another, I broke off some of the caps that cover the keys. I've still got it in my closet, though.
I guess my point is that, while this is a cool idea, it's somewhat misguided. Creating a retro look and feel is much more important than having a retro case, which you're just going to shove under your desk anyway. And to have the retro look-and-feel, you need cool-looking screens and clicky keyboards.
Steve
"Well, then the Axis of Evil would be able to put a lot more information on their optical storage devices, now wouldn't they?
They need the superior technology if Dr. Mindbender is to clone Serpentor from the DNA of history's great warriors.
Steve
"Tom Lord, the author of the revolutionary arch revision control system . . . needs some monetary help."
He should just make a website or something.
Steve
I know that its the responsibility of the voters to ensure that we get good leadership. However, the problem is this -- if Hollings goes, who will take his place? Hollings is one of the last important Democrats in office in this state and overwhelmingly the most influential. No Democrat will challenge Fritz Hollings in a primary.
The challenger would have to be a Republican. My rights to use technology are important to me, but there are other issues that are important to me, too. And while I despise the Entertainment lobby, I also despise everything that the Republican party stands for. If I vote for the Democrat (Hollings), I lose. If I vote for the Republican, I lose. In either case, by saying "no" to evil, I say "yes" to more evil.
I don't think many people in SC are fond of Hollings -- those that vote for him do so either out of party loyalty or out of fear of what the Republican challenger would do should he get elected. Perhaps Hollings' days are numbered, though -- he loses ground each time he runs for relection.
The one thing you can count on is this: whoever eventually gets Hollings seat will be just as bad as he is. The guy will have a different hidden agenda, but he'll still be good old-fashioned home-grown South Carolinian slime.
Steve
My representative in government is Fritz Hollings. I'm screwed!
Steve
PIZZA
Ingredients:
- Money
- Telephone
- Phone Book
Directions: