You submitted an article to a website hosted in the US. The website is generally US-centric due to the large number of US users. The article submitted regarded a US company. Your submission contained words that were incorrect in US English spelling. The US-based editor corrected the spelling to be consistent with most of the rest of the site.
Now you are complaining.
I mean, don't get me wrong; it's really silly when people attack (clearly British) people using British spellings. But this was a pretty straightforward editorial call. Slashdot could use *more* grammar editing, not less.
There are more people out there hacking OSS on Linux in C than C++ -- while I have a fair number of things depending on C++ on my system, it's much smaller than the number of C apps on my system.
This means that there are more developers tending toward the GNOME camp. This means more apps for GNOME.
Most applications have some sort of KDE and some sort of GNOME implementations; however, of the remainder, there are more GNOME-only apps than KDE-only apps.
Nobody is going to make you stop using KDE. There are still people using GNUStep happily (and it continues to be steadily developed). However, the "business-oriented" distros, the ones that are trying to address the bulk of regular-old-users out there, are choosing GNOME. This does not need to impact your life; those users aren't going to use emacs either, yet I continue to use emacs. It's just not a big deal, unless you're worried about being with the most popular crowd -- and if that were the case, you'd probably be using Windows.
1. Sex is *not* primarily for producing children... you'll produce a sprog maybe a couple of times in your life. You'll normally have sex at least a few times more than that (well maybe your church won't let you, but most people will). Sex is *fun*. Enjoy it while you're young.
Let's eliminate the whole moralistic and religious side of the thing, as well as assertions based on someone's feelings about whether sex is "for" or "not for" producing children.
Sex is an action that (a) is pleasurable, (b) can produce children, and (c) with modern technology, can be prevented from producing children.
Now, given that you have something that is pleasurable, it's going to be used as a source of entertainment. You can try to *stop* people from using it as entertainment, but generally people who do that are viewed the same way as people who try to prevent people from engaging in any other form of entertainment that they'd like to participate in. Having sex for fun may be a "waste of time". It may have some dangers associated with it, much like hunting or driving a car, or most other activities.
As for one-man-one-woman, unbreakable marriage, we know that this system works, at least to some extent. We also have seen people who grew up with other systems do well. Randomly claiming that one is better without citing any reasonable data to support your claim is just ridiculous.
(I'm quite suspicious that being married or not being married plays all that major a role in the development of someone's kids minds, just because it doesn't constantly impinge on someone's mind all day and doesn't really impact the experiences that said kid has all that much. But that's just a guess.)
However you overstate the case for Windows: most Windows apps look different because they WANT to look different
I seriously doubt that an end user cares what was in the head of a developer. Whether or not WinAmp, Mozilla, Office XP, Lotus Notes, and so forth "want" to look different doesn't make a damn bit of difference. I don't see any users having trouble using the things.
Lousiana has occasional immigrants and people from the outside world. West Virginia has some of the worst poverty, most isolated people, highest rates of lung cancer (Tobacco and steel were big industries in WV, before they collapsed), lowest rates of education, highest rates of obesity, and so forth.
This statement is only true (assuming the most common meaning of "average") if there are an even number of people and no such ideal average person actually exists.
Give it a decade or a few to allow reputations to be built and things to settle and the Indian industry will probably be a lot more promising from a quality standpoint.
Our advantage never came from having the brightest of populations, it came from having an economic and legal system that placed few barriers in the paths of the talented, which also made this country an attractive place for talented foreigners to migrate to as well (think Andy Grove, Albert Einstein or Andrew Carnegie).
I'd say that it came more from having abundant natural resources and a placement between only two neighboring countries, neither of which had a chance of a successful invasion. The US got to weather out two World Wars in relative comfort, whereas a lot of the world got knocked back during that time.
It's not even your general culture. It's your public education system, which sucks every imaginable mode of ass. It is a union-captured mediocrity-ruled Prussian-designed system absolutely intended to hammer the individual flat to the collective.
If you are going to excel, it's not going to be from the bare minimum that schools dole out. It's from getting interested and *reading* about physics beyond whatever worksheets the teacher hands out in highschool, studying image processing algorithms beyond what your college professor *forces* you to study.
A school is designed to force you to at least maintain some kind of bare minimum standard, so that we have a population of people that aren't completely ignorant. You aren't going to be the next Newton if your approach to education is to sit back and hope that the public or private education system magically makes you knowledgeable.
Home schooling has some appeal, but you know what? Maybe public school teachers aren't perfect, but they've spent years learning how to handle the problems students run into. A random parent is pretty damn unlikely to be a whole lot better -- they can offer an individualized rate of study and a higher teacher-to-student ratio, but that's about it. And home schooling does some bad stuff socially, IMHO. Going to public school often sucked in my memory, because people were assholes. The thing is, they were often assholes because they hadn't yet learned how to deal nicely and reasonably with society. But you know what? You need to learn how to deal with people too, unless you plan to live in a cave for the rest of your life, and that's a big chunk of what school does for you -- it *forces* you to interact with and deal with people that you might not really want to work with. It's a lot better that you learn how to handle interaction now than discover that you've no idea what to do fifteen years later on the job, where your employer is going to be a lot less lenient.
The other thing that really irks me is the fact that home-schooling is frusteratingly tied up in the issue of secular/religious education. A lot of people who I don't really agree with have realized that they aren't going to have any luck indoctrinating their kid in Christianity unless they isolate them from other people -- otherwise, the kid's going to have the good sense to take one look and say "this is nonsense, and my friends think so too". Schools won't teach Christianity? Yank the kid out of school! Definitely not a good way to build the pillars of the next generation...
Sorry, the Intel/Microsoft/Cisco "We want the top 10%, and only the top 10%" isn't sustainable, even with a surplus of cheap H1B's.
Intel, Microsoft, and Cisco don't give a rat's ass whether or not they hire the "top 10%". There's no benefit to them in hiring a certain percentage. What they want is competent employees. The unfortunate reality is that a pretty large chunk (maybe 90% is hyperbole, but it's up there) of the people in the software development world just plain aren't competent. And a lot of the people griping about "there being no jobs" are just not competent. Harsh to say it, perhaps, but true.
Someone walking out and doing the bare minimum to get a degree simply does not make them a competent worker (and that goes for prestigious universities as well, like Stanford, CMU, MIT, etc). It is quite possible to get a degree and simply not *know* enough to be particularly useful.
As Joel Spolsky put itThird, and trust me on this, there's still an incredible shortage of the really good programmers, here and in India. Yes, there are a bunch of out of work IT people making a lot of noise about how long they've been out of work, but you know what? At the risk of pissing them off, really good programmers do have jobs.
I think the culture argument is mostly baloney, and the state of IP in the US contributes substantially.
Look back forty or more years, and you will notice masses of childrens' books (Tom Swift, Danny Dunn, and so forth) that gushed over scientist heroes and the use of new technologies. Look at amateur radio and electronics kits -- how many kids do you see playing with these any more? They've been supplanted by the Playstation and other alluring time-wasters. Some of this is just plain evolution of technology -- fifty years ago, consumer electronics just weren't all that far from the hobbyist stage, so if you were interested in playin with tech, you had to learn to be more than a simple user.
I don't think that movies are a great example. Being a "geek" is viewed as a better thing now than before companies like Microsoft started getting a lot of press. A lot of action heroes now have the obligatory computer-guy-hacker-type sidekick on their team. I *do* think that the emphasis has shifted away from learning about science and engineering and using those skills to *using* products produced by science and engineering.
There have been some attempts to chip people, but there is a pretty strong public dislike of it. There's a pretty strong business motivation for it, though -- lots of money at stake (look at e-voting, for instance). Putting chips in other things is a good way to get people used to the idea.
There have already been moves in this direction, towards tagging prisoners in Mexico (the Mexican AG is tagged to help people get used to the idea), towards tagging schoolchildren in part of Japan, and so forth.
On the whole, I don't really like the idea of tagging. We have a pretty robust social system precisely because it's not possible for a single group to tightly monitor and everyone in a state -- he'd be facing almost instant rebellion. However, at least tagging is better than biometrics (at least if someone compromises your chip, you can just get a new chip -- if someone compromises an iris scan, you have a problem).
The other problem is the huge number of companies who are trying badly to sell RFID tags for everything. RFID is the most oversold technology since XML. Not that RFID isn't useful -- it's convenient for a specific (not *that* common) case of having to scan unusually-shaped objects, where retrying a scan is acceptable, where the speed is not that high, where there are not multiple objects close together, and where the range is very short (a foot or two). This pretty closely describes what happens at a retail checkout counter, which is the big killer app for RFID. On many similar boxes you can have scannable labels, on high-speed packages you need to be able to do a read faster, and so forth.
The thing is, Wal-Mart has backed RFID in its products (which makes sense from its standpoint -- to handle that inventory problem), and now that there's a market, there are eight zillion companies trying to convince every business out there that they *need* RFID yesterday, which is absurd -- in many ways, RFID is a step *backwards* from less-complex technology.
As you can tell, I'm not really thrilled about the motivations of most of the people pushing stuffing chips into everything either -- if there's a direct, measurable, pragmatic benefit, then it's worth evaluating something like this. Otherwise, it's just technology without a purpose.
You can chalk this one up to the fact that almost all modern history is written from a Western point of view (read: European and occasionally Middle Eastern outlook).
You mean most *Western* history is written from a Western point of view. Go to China and I suspect that you'll find somewhat different history texts.
Dvorak is an entertainer who makes a good living out of writing controversial articles. His predictions haven't had a good chance of coming out right, but that's totally besides the point. He ensures that he pisses off enough people or intrigues enough people to generate conversation about him and his work.
Dvorak is what you'd get if you took a Slashdot troll and paid him to go pro and slapped his work in the back of various magazines and on websites.
Listening to people argue about whether or not Dvorak is a visionary or an idiot is like listening to people argue about whether or not their favorite pro wrestler is better or worse than some other pro wrestler. It's *all entertainment*. Dvorak doesn't need to have accurate predictions -- if he's got you arguing, he's already got publicity...and he's won.
(1) Is a severe problem, and while I can understand why Microsoft kept tying the shell to apps and making apps act like the shell (good business practice, easier to add functionality without having to worry about security, few people can realize that they're asking for trouble) this is certainly something that they can be blamed on.
(2) Microsoft sucks on, at least relative to the competition. Win32 has a massive amount of shittily-designed API that's very easy to screw up with. I'm *much* happier with the POSIX API. Also, where there have been easy pitfalls in POSIX, they are made more obvious by the tools (tmpnam(), for example, is warned about by gcc, there are various lint-style tools that will yell about other coding practices, etc). You ever tried working with, say, CryptoAPI? It *sucks*.
(3) Microsoft *has* done a good job of working on user behavior, including working with the feds to come up with a best practices for Windows document. However, I'd say that fixing problems at the user level is pretty much impossible.
I'm pretty sure, having read the occasional Dvorak article for over a decade, that Dvorak knows what he's talking about, but makes deliberately insulting/stupid/controversial statements, just to foster discussion about his work.
You just have to realize that Dvorak is just doing the same thing that Slashdot trolls do -- but because he sells magazines by generating controversy, he gets *paid* for trolling.
What's wrong with the registry? Sure there are better ways to do it from an end-user point of view, but you can't blame the registry for all of windows problems. All the registry is is a database of configuration options for applications, system, etc. What would you rather have, a mess of unorganized and inconsistent files in/etc and ~/.appname?
I agree with you that the registry is not inherently a security hole (while there *are* security issues associated with the registry, they are not inherent to the fact that a registry is used instead of config files), I'm a little dubious that config files are "unorganized and inconsistent". The formats do differ to some extent, but the formats are pretty straightforward when you see them for almost all files (though there are a couple of infamous exceptions, like sendmail). I'd say that it's a *lot* easier to read and edit Unix config files (which were designed to actually, y'know, be edited by the end user) than it is to figure out how (and where) a bunch of settings are stored in the Windows registry.
Guys who claim to be girls or guys who are playing female characters without making any claim of being female in real life? There is, you know, a difference.
but we all know how open source is "good" at reuse and standartization (basically almsot everyone suffers from NIH syndrome and reinvents the wheel , in the end we have half a hundred wheels and still no working carts).
Bullshit.
Open source is one of the *best* sources of software reuse. You just don't see most of the reimplemented wheels in closed source. I'll bet that there are over 100 http servers on Freshmeat. I'll bet that there are many *thousands* of closed source http servers. Cross-platform compatibility libraries? Maybe twenty open source ones (winelib, glib/gtk, Qt, etc). Just about every closed source company that's had to produce a cross-platform product has written their own (halfassed, incomplete) compatibility library. C++ string classes, pre-STL? C utility libraries?
Believe me, much of the efficiency benefits of open source, the reason that a small percentage (if a skilled group) of the programmers out there working a little bit in their free time can generally produce better software than the entire set of professional programmers working full time is that open source types reuse code like *mad*. Unix is built so that every shell scripter can reuse tons of written programs, and easily tie them together to make larger applications, and this helps too.
Take, for instance, pan. It's a pretty straightforward Unix newsreader for Gnome. Just looking at my system, it's using a library for spell-checking, a utility library (glib, which is the best-designed C utility library I've ever used), an advanced font rendering library, a regular expression library, an XML parsing library, and a compression library. Plus some others, but these are the major ones. Those libraries, in turn, rely on other libraries.
Under Windows, on the other hand, you have to either use the libc and Win32 APIs that Microsoft provides plus a small assortment of APIs that they provide apart from Windows (new DirectX implementations, Internet Explorer APIs, etc). You can also license libraries, but that often means restrictions, bugs, and drives up your costs.
Even when we have forks, the codebases are reused, not reimplemented, and even when we have different clients functionality is often pulled out into a library shared between them (for example, there are many IM clients, but many of them use libgaim to do their work).
No, I think that open source does a good job of reuse of code.
Okay, yes, gaim is much better than nothing. But file transfer (and unlike all the smilies and embedded HTML stuff, this is pretty important to most folks) has never, ever worked in my experience, on either my Jabber or ICQ account, even to other gaim users.
I started using tar cz filenames|nc remotehost portnumber to my buddies and having them use nc -l portnumber| tar xz.
Slashdot Mirror
You submitted an article to a website hosted in the US. The website is generally US-centric due to the large number of US users. The article submitted regarded a US company. Your submission contained words that were incorrect in US English spelling. The US-based editor corrected the spelling to be consistent with most of the rest of the site.
Now you are complaining.
I mean, don't get me wrong; it's really silly when people attack (clearly British) people using British spellings. But this was a pretty straightforward editorial call. Slashdot could use *more* grammar editing, not less.
There is no conspiracy.
There are more people out there hacking OSS on Linux in C than C++ -- while I have a fair number of things depending on C++ on my system, it's much smaller than the number of C apps on my system.
This means that there are more developers tending toward the GNOME camp. This means more apps for GNOME.
Most applications have some sort of KDE and some sort of GNOME implementations; however, of the remainder, there are more GNOME-only apps than KDE-only apps.
Nobody is going to make you stop using KDE. There are still people using GNUStep happily (and it continues to be steadily developed). However, the "business-oriented" distros, the ones that are trying to address the bulk of regular-old-users out there, are choosing GNOME. This does not need to impact your life; those users aren't going to use emacs either, yet I continue to use emacs. It's just not a big deal, unless you're worried about being with the most popular crowd -- and if that were the case, you'd probably be using Windows.
1. Sex is *not* primarily for producing children... you'll produce a sprog maybe a couple of times in your life. You'll normally have sex at least a few times more than that (well maybe your church won't let you, but most people will). Sex is *fun*. Enjoy it while you're young.
Let's eliminate the whole moralistic and religious side of the thing, as well as assertions based on someone's feelings about whether sex is "for" or "not for" producing children.
Sex is an action that (a) is pleasurable, (b) can produce children, and (c) with modern technology, can be prevented from producing children.
Now, given that you have something that is pleasurable, it's going to be used as a source of entertainment. You can try to *stop* people from using it as entertainment, but generally people who do that are viewed the same way as people who try to prevent people from engaging in any other form of entertainment that they'd like to participate in. Having sex for fun may be a "waste of time". It may have some dangers associated with it, much like hunting or driving a car, or most other activities.
As for one-man-one-woman, unbreakable marriage, we know that this system works, at least to some extent. We also have seen people who grew up with other systems do well. Randomly claiming that one is better without citing any reasonable data to support your claim is just ridiculous.
(I'm quite suspicious that being married or not being married plays all that major a role in the development of someone's kids minds, just because it doesn't constantly impinge on someone's mind all day and doesn't really impact the experiences that said kid has all that much. But that's just a guess.)
Why do you care where a binary is? It's in your path, right? How many Windows users care where their applications are installed (or know?)
However you overstate the case for Windows: most Windows apps look different because they WANT to look different
I seriously doubt that an end user cares what was in the head of a developer. Whether or not WinAmp, Mozilla, Office XP, Lotus Notes, and so forth "want" to look different doesn't make a damn bit of difference. I don't see any users having trouble using the things.
Bear in mind that big software outfits don't want their stuff to just run on Linux, they want it to run well and with a guaranteed "user experience".
:-)
And they sure as hell don't want to have to release their *source* in order for their software to run on different distros.
Lousiana has occasional immigrants and people from the outside world. West Virginia has some of the worst poverty, most isolated people, highest rates of lung cancer (Tobacco and steel were big industries in WV, before they collapsed), lowest rates of education, highest rates of obesity, and so forth.
This statement is only true (assuming the most common meaning of "average") if there are an even number of people and no such ideal average person actually exists.
Give it a decade or a few to allow reputations to be built and things to settle and the Indian industry will probably be a lot more promising from a quality standpoint.
Our advantage never came from having the brightest of populations, it came from having an economic and legal system that placed few barriers in the paths of the talented, which also made this country an attractive place for talented foreigners to migrate to as well (think Andy Grove, Albert Einstein or Andrew Carnegie).
I'd say that it came more from having abundant natural resources and a placement between only two neighboring countries, neither of which had a chance of a successful invasion. The US got to weather out two World Wars in relative comfort, whereas a lot of the world got knocked back during that time.
Dropouts are not reading the bible. They are playing X-box, vandalizing their neighborhood, and buying gangster rap CDs marketed to suburban kids.
You need to visit rural West Virginia. They do all the above (except maybe not the X-Box) and *do* read the Bible.
It's not even your general culture. It's your public education system, which sucks every imaginable mode of ass. It is a union-captured mediocrity-ruled Prussian-designed system absolutely intended to hammer the individual flat to the collective.
If you are going to excel, it's not going to be from the bare minimum that schools dole out. It's from getting interested and *reading* about physics beyond whatever worksheets the teacher hands out in highschool, studying image processing algorithms beyond what your college professor *forces* you to study.
A school is designed to force you to at least maintain some kind of bare minimum standard, so that we have a population of people that aren't completely ignorant. You aren't going to be the next Newton if your approach to education is to sit back and hope that the public or private education system magically makes you knowledgeable.
Home schooling has some appeal, but you know what? Maybe public school teachers aren't perfect, but they've spent years learning how to handle the problems students run into. A random parent is pretty damn unlikely to be a whole lot better -- they can offer an individualized rate of study and a higher teacher-to-student ratio, but that's about it. And home schooling does some bad stuff socially, IMHO. Going to public school often sucked in my memory, because people were assholes. The thing is, they were often assholes because they hadn't yet learned how to deal nicely and reasonably with society. But you know what? You need to learn how to deal with people too, unless you plan to live in a cave for the rest of your life, and that's a big chunk of what school does for you -- it *forces* you to interact with and deal with people that you might not really want to work with. It's a lot better that you learn how to handle interaction now than discover that you've no idea what to do fifteen years later on the job, where your employer is going to be a lot less lenient.
The other thing that really irks me is the fact that home-schooling is frusteratingly tied up in the issue of secular/religious education. A lot of people who I don't really agree with have realized that they aren't going to have any luck indoctrinating their kid in Christianity unless they isolate them from other people -- otherwise, the kid's going to have the good sense to take one look and say "this is nonsense, and my friends think so too". Schools won't teach Christianity? Yank the kid out of school! Definitely not a good way to build the pillars of the next generation...
Sorry, the Intel/Microsoft/Cisco "We want the top 10%, and only the top 10%" isn't sustainable, even with a surplus of cheap H1B's.
Intel, Microsoft, and Cisco don't give a rat's ass whether or not they hire the "top 10%". There's no benefit to them in hiring a certain percentage. What they want is competent employees. The unfortunate reality is that a pretty large chunk (maybe 90% is hyperbole, but it's up there) of the people in the software development world just plain aren't competent. And a lot of the people griping about "there being no jobs" are just not competent. Harsh to say it, perhaps, but true.
Someone walking out and doing the bare minimum to get a degree simply does not make them a competent worker (and that goes for prestigious universities as well, like Stanford, CMU, MIT, etc). It is quite possible to get a degree and simply not *know* enough to be particularly useful.
As Joel Spolsky put it Third, and trust me on this, there's still an incredible shortage of the really good programmers, here and in India. Yes, there are a bunch of out of work IT people making a lot of noise about how long they've been out of work, but you know what? At the risk of pissing them off, really good programmers do have jobs.
I think the culture argument is mostly baloney, and the state of IP in the US contributes substantially.
Look back forty or more years, and you will notice masses of childrens' books (Tom Swift, Danny Dunn, and so forth) that gushed over scientist heroes and the use of new technologies. Look at amateur radio and electronics kits -- how many kids do you see playing with these any more? They've been supplanted by the Playstation and other alluring time-wasters. Some of this is just plain evolution of technology -- fifty years ago, consumer electronics just weren't all that far from the hobbyist stage, so if you were interested in playin with tech, you had to learn to be more than a simple user.
I don't think that movies are a great example. Being a "geek" is viewed as a better thing now than before companies like Microsoft started getting a lot of press. A lot of action heroes now have the obligatory computer-guy-hacker-type sidekick on their team. I *do* think that the emphasis has shifted away from learning about science and engineering and using those skills to *using* products produced by science and engineering.
There have been some attempts to chip people, but there is a pretty strong public dislike of it. There's a pretty strong business motivation for it, though -- lots of money at stake (look at e-voting, for instance). Putting chips in other things is a good way to get people used to the idea.
There have already been moves in this direction, towards tagging prisoners in Mexico (the Mexican AG is tagged to help people get used to the idea), towards tagging schoolchildren in part of Japan, and so forth.
On the whole, I don't really like the idea of tagging. We have a pretty robust social system precisely because it's not possible for a single group to tightly monitor and everyone in a state -- he'd be facing almost instant rebellion. However, at least tagging is better than biometrics (at least if someone compromises your chip, you can just get a new chip -- if someone compromises an iris scan, you have a problem).
The other problem is the huge number of companies who are trying badly to sell RFID tags for everything. RFID is the most oversold technology since XML. Not that RFID isn't useful -- it's convenient for a specific (not *that* common) case of having to scan unusually-shaped objects, where retrying a scan is acceptable, where the speed is not that high, where there are not multiple objects close together, and where the range is very short (a foot or two). This pretty closely describes what happens at a retail checkout counter, which is the big killer app for RFID. On many similar boxes you can have scannable labels, on high-speed packages you need to be able to do a read faster, and so forth.
The thing is, Wal-Mart has backed RFID in its products (which makes sense from its standpoint -- to handle that inventory problem), and now that there's a market, there are eight zillion companies trying to convince every business out there that they *need* RFID yesterday, which is absurd -- in many ways, RFID is a step *backwards* from less-complex technology.
As you can tell, I'm not really thrilled about the motivations of most of the people pushing stuffing chips into everything either -- if there's a direct, measurable, pragmatic benefit, then it's worth evaluating something like this. Otherwise, it's just technology without a purpose.
You can chalk this one up to the fact that almost all modern history is written from a Western point of view (read: European and occasionally Middle Eastern outlook).
You mean most *Western* history is written from a Western point of view. Go to China and I suspect that you'll find somewhat different history texts.
Honey lasts forever.
Well, a long time.
There is a mild antibiotic in honey, and the sugar content is too high for anything to live in it unless the honey becomes diluted.
Do linux distro websites scan for security intrusions on their website computers, or not?
Yes.
Dvorak is an entertainer who makes a good living out of writing controversial articles. His predictions haven't had a good chance of coming out right, but that's totally besides the point. He ensures that he pisses off enough people or intrigues enough people to generate conversation about him and his work.
Dvorak is what you'd get if you took a Slashdot troll and paid him to go pro and slapped his work in the back of various magazines and on websites.
Listening to people argue about whether or not Dvorak is a visionary or an idiot is like listening to people argue about whether or not their favorite pro wrestler is better or worse than some other pro wrestler. It's *all entertainment*. Dvorak doesn't need to have accurate predictions -- if he's got you arguing, he's already got publicity...and he's won.
(1) Is a severe problem, and while I can understand why Microsoft kept tying the shell to apps and making apps act like the shell (good business practice, easier to add functionality without having to worry about security, few people can realize that they're asking for trouble) this is certainly something that they can be blamed on.
(2) Microsoft sucks on, at least relative to the competition. Win32 has a massive amount of shittily-designed API that's very easy to screw up with. I'm *much* happier with the POSIX API. Also, where there have been easy pitfalls in POSIX, they are made more obvious by the tools (tmpnam(), for example, is warned about by gcc, there are various lint-style tools that will yell about other coding practices, etc). You ever tried working with, say, CryptoAPI? It *sucks*.
(3) Microsoft *has* done a good job of working on user behavior, including working with the feds to come up with a best practices for Windows document. However, I'd say that fixing problems at the user level is pretty much impossible.
I'm pretty sure, having read the occasional Dvorak article for over a decade, that Dvorak knows what he's talking about, but makes deliberately insulting/stupid/controversial statements, just to foster discussion about his work.
You just have to realize that Dvorak is just doing the same thing that Slashdot trolls do -- but because he sells magazines by generating controversy, he gets *paid* for trolling.
What's wrong with the registry? Sure there are better ways to do it from an end-user point of view, but you can't blame the registry for all of windows problems. All the registry is is a database of configuration options for applications, system, etc. What would you rather have, a mess of unorganized and inconsistent files in /etc and ~/.appname?
I agree with you that the registry is not inherently a security hole (while there *are* security issues associated with the registry, they are not inherent to the fact that a registry is used instead of config files), I'm a little dubious that config files are "unorganized and inconsistent". The formats do differ to some extent, but the formats are pretty straightforward when you see them for almost all files (though there are a couple of infamous exceptions, like sendmail). I'd say that it's a *lot* easier to read and edit Unix config files (which were designed to actually, y'know, be edited by the end user) than it is to figure out how (and where) a bunch of settings are stored in the Windows registry.
Guys who claim to be girls or guys who are playing female characters without making any claim of being female in real life? There is, you know, a difference.
but we all know how open source is "good" at reuse and standartization (basically almsot everyone suffers from NIH syndrome and reinvents the wheel , in the end we have half a hundred wheels and still no working carts) .
Bullshit.
Open source is one of the *best* sources of software reuse. You just don't see most of the reimplemented wheels in closed source. I'll bet that there are over 100 http servers on Freshmeat. I'll bet that there are many *thousands* of closed source http servers. Cross-platform compatibility libraries? Maybe twenty open source ones (winelib, glib/gtk, Qt, etc). Just about every closed source company that's had to produce a cross-platform product has written their own (halfassed, incomplete) compatibility library. C++ string classes, pre-STL? C utility libraries?
Believe me, much of the efficiency benefits of open source, the reason that a small percentage (if a skilled group) of the programmers out there working a little bit in their free time can generally produce better software than the entire set of professional programmers working full time is that open source types reuse code like *mad*. Unix is built so that every shell scripter can reuse tons of written programs, and easily tie them together to make larger applications, and this helps too.
Take, for instance, pan. It's a pretty straightforward Unix newsreader for Gnome. Just looking at my system, it's using a library for spell-checking, a utility library (glib, which is the best-designed C utility library I've ever used), an advanced font rendering library, a regular expression library, an XML parsing library, and a compression library. Plus some others, but these are the major ones. Those libraries, in turn, rely on other libraries.
Under Windows, on the other hand, you have to either use the libc and Win32 APIs that Microsoft provides plus a small assortment of APIs that they provide apart from Windows (new DirectX implementations, Internet Explorer APIs, etc). You can also license libraries, but that often means restrictions, bugs, and drives up your costs.
Even when we have forks, the codebases are reused, not reimplemented, and even when we have different clients functionality is often pulled out into a library shared between them (for example, there are many IM clients, but many of them use libgaim to do their work).
No, I think that open source does a good job of reuse of code.
Okay, yes, gaim is much better than nothing. But file transfer (and unlike all the smilies and embedded HTML stuff, this is pretty important to most folks) has never, ever worked in my experience, on either my Jabber or ICQ account, even to other gaim users.
I started using tar cz filenames|nc remotehost portnumber to my buddies and having them use nc -l portnumber| tar xz.