You know you only need to use blackslash on the command line, right? And that's because Windows originally used - and still does, in many cases - forward slash to indicate command options. Changing that would break their users' stuff.
In most places other than the command line, forward slashes work fine; in C, "c:/Users/Jeff" works just as well as "c:\\Users\\Jeff".
So, just from the Inspiron line, we have 3x4x3 options to choose from. That's 36 options. Alienware is a little more sane at only 16 options total, and XPS has 8 additional options.
The problem is not too much choice, but that none of the choices is exactly what you want; or you can find exactly what you want, but you can't afford it. In my experience, this is true for most things, and technology, especially.
...and they want their 3-letter filename extensions back. Seriously, "br" would be fine, as well as "brot" or even "brotli". It amazes me that, 20 years after MS/DOS basically reached its end-of-life, people are still thinking within those constraints.
FWIW, it's still being actively used by some big/important places
While I'd debate your use of "big/important", I know it's still being used; I have to deal with it every day. I was kind of hoping to stimulate a discussion where I could complain about it, but it seems there aren't enough people still using PL/B.
Datapoint's 8-bit computers could not fit COBOL into their limited memory.
Given the rough estimate of a company's value (if it's not publicly traded) is about 4 times its yearly profits, I'd say Slashdot is worth somewhere between $12m and $16m.
With the.NET platform now being available for cross platform development I can't see how there could be a decline in C#.
You'd have to be an idiot to use.NET for cross-platform development. In five or so years, Microsoft will discontinue cross-platform support, giving some BS excuse, like "no one was using it." What will the cross-platform developers do then, rewrite their code in a language that's really cross-platform? Doubt it.
As I've said here, before, this is just more Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
AMD did make a 133 MHz version, but called it "Am5x86-P75"
That may have been the official name, but many people who sold them called them DX4/133s. I've certainly never heard them called "Am5x86-P75" before, and I've been in the business since the early 80s.
The US mortgage industry single-handedly is keeping facsimile alive and well.
I wouldn't say single-handedly... the healthcare industry is certainly helping. I work for a health insurance company (about 350 employees) and we receive between 500 and 1000 faxes every day.
The jump from a 486DX/2-66 to a Pentium 75 was very ho-hum back in the day
Maybe for some workloads. For others, a Pentium was a significant upgrade. I used to play Quake, a lot, and upgrading from a 486DX4/133 to a Pentium 133 was like night and day.
Having used powershell a few times, it really just feels like a kludged attempt to bring CMD.exe to something closer to bash.... 20 years later.
I think it's cute, how Windows people gave Unix (and Linux) people grief, for 20+ years, because they thought the command line was "archaic". Now that Microsoft has a halfway-decent shell, it's the best thing ever.
At least most people have heard of that language. Check out Databus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_Language_for_Business), sometime. Yes, people still use it; I had to go to work early, this morning, to fix a problem that was caused by one of its many limitations.
Wow, you don't come across people who've even heard of Ohio Scientific that often, much less actually used one. The first computer I ever used was a C2-OEM, with 8" floppies, and I have a (still working) C4P in my garage.
I think it will be helpful to everybody if they can get.Net code to compile for iOS, Android, Windows, and Linux. It will make cross platform development so much easier.
Except that it'll only be cross-platform for as long as Microsoft wants it to be. What will happen to non-Microsoft platforms if, say five years from now, they decide to say, "Sorry, we're done supporting other platforms." Will software companies that have been using VS all that time re-write their (possibly entire) code base in another language that's actually cross-platform? Not likely.
This is just another round of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
A consumption tax is inherently regressive. Those with smaller incomes must use a larger proportion of it on consumption. The wealthy will spend a comparatively tiny fraction of their income on tax and continue to amass vast piles of money.
I dunno... it might work, if we taxed everything that was bought and sold, including stocks and other financial instruments, but you know that'll never happen.
There's a reason why Pascal and Java made good teaching languages for so long.
I'm going to have to disagree with you, there, as far as Pascal is concerned. Pascal has always been a terrible teaching language: it's too complicated for beginners and not nearly powerful enough for experts.
It is a complex and fairly large chunk of code that "fixes" a nonexistent problem
I have to disagree with you, there. Unix-type systems have needed a new, dependency-based init system for at least 20 years, now. I'm amazed it took as long as it did to replace. I won't argue that systemd breaks the Unix philosophy of doing one thing well, and suffers from some overreach, but at least someone took some initiative.
Yeah, most people didn't have a mainframe in their house.
While it's true that microprocessors never really acquired mainframe I/O, they've had virtual machine support as far back as the 680x0 series, back in the 80s.
A few months ago, I was having lunch with two of my coworkers. Let's say their names are "Sean" and "Nate". Nate is a seriously hard core conservative; I'm guessing he's a Tea Partier, but he may be just your typical Republican.
At one point, Sean notices Nate is wearing a jacket in the style of a uniform from the original Star Trek - a blue one. Sean asks, "Why blue?". Nate replies, "Science officer."
By definition, a laptop has to compromise, for space and for weight.
That may be true, but some companies are better at compromise than others. I have an Asus GX-something-or-other. It's almost five years old, but it runs almost everything I've tried, and the fan hardly ever turns on, as long as I keep it clean. The laptop ran Minecraft perfectly well, with an HD texture pack, until the 1.8 update (but I think that's a Java garbage collection problem). It chokes on Kerbal Space Program, but then, it's five years old.
The irony is that it's only taken 40+ years to get to display resolutions for raster graphics to approximate vector graphics.
I'm not sure why that's ironic. When you're only displaying the outlines of objects, you don't need nearly as much memory (or memory bandwidth) as you do with a raster display. On top of that, vector displays only get that resolution in monochrome; you lose it when you try to do color. (A color display can't exceed the resolution of its shadow mask.) I can tell you from experience: Quake looks better on a 640x480x8 raster display than it could ever look on a vector display.
I agree. Other than greed, I can't understand why they don't just make an agreement with Google or Mozilla - preferably both - to have one of their browsers automatically installed with Windows. Writing a browser from scratch is a huge project, and while I'm sure it's a tiny fraction of Microsoft's output, that's a fair amount of resources that could be directed elsewhere, while generating a fair amount of good will in the software community.
if you're not willing to build a bunch of nuclear power plants and shut down a bunch of coal plants, then yes you ARE arguing global warming to advance a political agenda
Others are a little more cautious, but still think nuclear is an important part of an overall strategy to reduce global warming: http://www.ucsusa.org/our-work...
Yeah... My guess is that, after this announcement, developers are going to say to themselves, "Great, now we don't have to learn how to use new tools to create software for Linux", and do all their work on Windows. Fewer people will work on development tools for Linux, too, because they can use tools that already exist on Windows to create software for Linux.
Then, in five or ten years, when everyone's using Microsoft's tools, they'll claim no one's using them to port to Linux, anyway, and drop support. Developers will have no choice but to use Linux's (poor or non-existant) development tools, or drop support for Linux, altogether.
Slashdot Mirror
You know you only need to use blackslash on the command line, right? And that's because Windows originally used - and still does, in many cases - forward slash to indicate command options. Changing that would break their users' stuff.
In most places other than the command line, forward slashes work fine; in C, "c:/Users/Jeff" works just as well as "c:\\Users\\Jeff".
The problem is not too much choice, but that none of the choices is exactly what you want; or you can find exactly what you want, but you can't afford it. In my experience, this is true for most things, and technology, especially.
...and they want their 3-letter filename extensions back. Seriously, "br" would be fine, as well as "brot" or even "brotli". It amazes me that, 20 years after MS/DOS basically reached its end-of-life, people are still thinking within those constraints.
While I'd debate your use of "big/important", I know it's still being used; I have to deal with it every day. I was kind of hoping to stimulate a discussion where I could complain about it, but it seems there aren't enough people still using PL/B.
That actually explains a lot.
http://www.sysmaker.com/infopr...
Oh, wait... you wanted an important obscure language. Sorry. Carry on...
Given the rough estimate of a company's value (if it's not publicly traded) is about 4 times its yearly profits, I'd say Slashdot is worth somewhere between $12m and $16m.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
You'd have to be an idiot to use .NET for cross-platform development. In five or so years, Microsoft will discontinue cross-platform support, giving some BS excuse, like "no one was using it." What will the cross-platform developers do then, rewrite their code in a language that's really cross-platform? Doubt it.
As I've said here, before, this is just more Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
That may have been the official name, but many people who sold them called them DX4/133s. I've certainly never heard them called "Am5x86-P75" before, and I've been in the business since the early 80s.
I wouldn't say single-handedly... the healthcare industry is certainly helping. I work for a health insurance company (about 350 employees) and we receive between 500 and 1000 faxes every day.
Maybe for some workloads. For others, a Pentium was a significant upgrade. I used to play Quake, a lot, and upgrading from a 486DX4/133 to a Pentium 133 was like night and day.
I think it's cute, how Windows people gave Unix (and Linux) people grief, for 20+ years, because they thought the command line was "archaic". Now that Microsoft has a halfway-decent shell, it's the best thing ever.
At least most people have heard of that language. Check out Databus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_Language_for_Business), sometime. Yes, people still use it; I had to go to work early, this morning, to fix a problem that was caused by one of its many limitations.
Wow, you don't come across people who've even heard of Ohio Scientific that often, much less actually used one. The first computer I ever used was a C2-OEM, with 8" floppies, and I have a (still working) C4P in my garage.
Except that it'll only be cross-platform for as long as Microsoft wants it to be. What will happen to non-Microsoft platforms if, say five years from now, they decide to say, "Sorry, we're done supporting other platforms." Will software companies that have been using VS all that time re-write their (possibly entire) code base in another language that's actually cross-platform? Not likely.
This is just another round of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
I dunno... it might work, if we taxed everything that was bought and sold, including stocks and other financial instruments, but you know that'll never happen.
I'm going to have to disagree with you, there, as far as Pascal is concerned. Pascal has always been a terrible teaching language: it's too complicated for beginners and not nearly powerful enough for experts.
I have to disagree with you, there. Unix-type systems have needed a new, dependency-based init system for at least 20 years, now. I'm amazed it took as long as it did to replace. I won't argue that systemd breaks the Unix philosophy of doing one thing well, and suffers from some overreach, but at least someone took some initiative.
While it's true that microprocessors never really acquired mainframe I/O, they've had virtual machine support as far back as the 680x0 series, back in the 80s.
A few months ago, I was having lunch with two of my coworkers. Let's say their names are "Sean" and "Nate". Nate is a seriously hard core conservative; I'm guessing he's a Tea Partier, but he may be just your typical Republican.
At one point, Sean notices Nate is wearing a jacket in the style of a uniform from the original Star Trek - a blue one. Sean asks, "Why blue?". Nate replies, "Science officer."
That may be true, but some companies are better at compromise than others. I have an Asus GX-something-or-other. It's almost five years old, but it runs almost everything I've tried, and the fan hardly ever turns on, as long as I keep it clean. The laptop ran Minecraft perfectly well, with an HD texture pack, until the 1.8 update (but I think that's a Java garbage collection problem). It chokes on Kerbal Space Program, but then, it's five years old.
I'm not sure why that's ironic. When you're only displaying the outlines of objects, you don't need nearly as much memory (or memory bandwidth) as you do with a raster display. On top of that, vector displays only get that resolution in monochrome; you lose it when you try to do color. (A color display can't exceed the resolution of its shadow mask.) I can tell you from experience: Quake looks better on a 640x480x8 raster display than it could ever look on a vector display.
I agree. Other than greed, I can't understand why they don't just make an agreement with Google or Mozilla - preferably both - to have one of their browsers automatically installed with Windows. Writing a browser from scratch is a huge project, and while I'm sure it's a tiny fraction of Microsoft's output, that's a fair amount of resources that could be directed elsewhere, while generating a fair amount of good will in the software community.
Some of the most prominent AGW scientists are strongly in favor of nuclear power: http://www.scientificamerican....
Others are a little more cautious, but still think nuclear is an important part of an overall strategy to reduce global warming: http://www.ucsusa.org/our-work...
Yeah... My guess is that, after this announcement, developers are going to say to themselves, "Great, now we don't have to learn how to use new tools to create software for Linux", and do all their work on Windows. Fewer people will work on development tools for Linux, too, because they can use tools that already exist on Windows to create software for Linux.
Then, in five or ten years, when everyone's using Microsoft's tools, they'll claim no one's using them to port to Linux, anyway, and drop support. Developers will have no choice but to use Linux's (poor or non-existant) development tools, or drop support for Linux, altogether.
Brilliant!