Remember that the need for Microsoft developers will soon decline, if it has not already done so.
Most devices run Linux.
Mobile phones are dominated by Linux, as are most other mobile devices such as eBooks, and Linux is gaining ground in tables with Android & Chrome O/S. Linux dominates servers: note that essentially all Valve, Dig, and Google servers (I expect that they probably do run the odd Microsoft server, although I have no evidence of this) run Linux - not Microsoft. At least 95% of the top 500 supercomputers run Linux.
More and more companies and organisations are adopting Linux as their primary O/S on the desktop like the French Gendarmerie (http://www.zdnet.com/french-police-move-from-windows-to-ubuntu-linux-7000021479) and the local Government of a region in Spain (https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/community/osor/news/spains-extremadura-starts-switch-40000-government-pcs-open-source).
At home we have 2 Linux workstations (3, if you count my old development box I normally keep powered down), 2 Linux laptops, 2 Android phones, an Apple desktop, and an iPhone - for 2 adults and a teenager. Note no Microsoft boxen.
So for professional reasons, you should at least be investigating moving your skill base to Linux!
A woman can get pregnant and still be a virgin, scientific fact - though I expect this to be quite rare.
To get a woman pregnant, just one sperm needs to fertilize one egg. The further away that sperm is deposited the less likely - assuming the sperm is deposited either near or in her vagina.
No superstition is required to explain virgin births.
I used to use GNOME 2 & found that the GNOME devs kept dropping useful features, then GNOME 3 came along and was essentially a triumph of FASHION over FUNCTIONALITY. I initially fled to xfce, now I use MATE.
I have 30" monitor, I have 35 virtual desktops of which about half are in use. An unused virtual desktop is blank with a bland background, and my 2 highly customised panels are always hidden unless I need to access them.
GNOME 3 is very cluttered. and gets in the way of easy use. GNOME devs seems to think that what they want is more important than letting me do things the way I find best - they have Apple's disease! I am glad that I was not supporting clients with GNOME 2 - as the change from a sort of working Desktop Environment, to the total disaster of GNOME 3 was the most depressing & annoying change I've ever had to suffer in Linux.
MATE started as a clone of GNOME 2 with the useful parts added back in, but now they are adding new features in there own right.
Linux had usb3 drivers years before any Microsoft O/S.
Can anyone tell me: with the latest Microsoft O/S, do you still need to install drivers before you install a webcam or printer?
Over 4 years ago I installed a webcam on my Linux box, and it just worked - a few months later I found I had to install drivers before a webcam could be used on my mother's Microsoft box (XP). It must have been many years since I had to install printer driver on Linux for a new printer.
And on Linux you have a choice of several Desktop Environment Managers, each far more customisable than the one (or two?) you get with the latest Microsoft O/S's!
Build the spaceship on the Moon - plenty of mass for shielding and fuel on the moon (use sunlight to extract water and separate into H2 & O2).
Get the basic structure and fuel into Linar orbit, and mate with components from Earth. Only rocket engines and some minimal control & guidance stuff would have to get from Earth to the Moon's surface.
The crew for the voyage to Mars would join in Lunar orbit.
You would a few people on the Moon to oversee construction, but a lot of the hard work could be automated
Any long term exploration and./or colonisation of space, must go via the Moon to be sustainable.
During the second world war, in New Zealand, someone was tasked with reading laundry lists over the radio. Hidden in ththis was coded information for secret agents, embedded observers, and the like. They may have told something like: listen for private Scotty's list at 1605 hours and do this if he has 3 pairs of underpants washed, do this if it is 5 pairs, and also this if his green shirt was starched...
So it would be a near certainty that agencies in a lot of countries use spam to communicate to deep cover agents. Tens of thousands of people might have spam about a particular brand of viag... that has a coded message for selected agents - but those agents who read the spam could not be distinguished from non-agents.
I am sure that the NSA, and other agencies (not just in the USA) have programs to try and sort out the spam to detect this - which is yet another type of arms race. How do nyiou know some is a message & not straight spam???
I'm not suggesting Calc be written in Java, there are MANY reasons why it should not be - even assuming everyone had Java & ignoring 'political' considerations!
However, with the server side JIT, anything really heavily used will be in-lined, converted to native machine code (even if at the end of a longer chain of object references), and optimised by the current run time profile. So if you had this approach on a heavily used server app, it may be roughly as efficient either way. However, I probably still would NOT treat each cell as an object, except perhaps as a prototype while I explored the required functionality.
I know gcc has whole program optimisations, but I don't know how that compares to Java's JIT - apart from being compile, rather run time, optimisation.
Not withstanding the above, my gut feeling would be to treat cells as entries in a sparse matrix - and look up the appropriate algorithms and real world use cases. But I've been around long enough (40+ years programming) to know that 'best programming' practices in one era, may not be so good in a later era - so I try to avoid being too dogmatic!
My mother, who is 84, finds LibreOffice easier to use than Microsoft Office, and she has Microsoft XP.
One place I worked had Microsoft Office as standard, but I found the way it presented fonts for selection clumsy & difficult to use, so I installed OpenOffice (this was prior to LibreOffice in 2002) and exported in.doc format with no complaints from anybody receiving my documents.
Microsoft Office does not come standard on most Linux distributions, and is harder to use.
LibreOffice is freely available for all major Operating Systems, and also for Microsoft's Operating Systems.
All Word Processors have problems, and there are things I don't like about LibreOffice - but I still prefer LibreOffice to Microsoft Office, even when I have to use a box with a Microsoft Operating System.
Microsoft is on the way out, its market share has dropped below 20%. Note that Linux is on over 90 of super computers (the rest are mainly Unix), most mobile phones are either Linux (i.e Android) or Unix (iPhone) based, eBooks are based on Linux, and so are smart TV's. Embedded devices almost invariably use a Linux kernel. Automotive electronic systems are standardising on Linux. The vast majority of computer graphics for special effects in films is done using Linux, with Apple holding the bulk of the balance. If you fly on an A380, the entertainment system runs on Linux. The International Space station converted totally to Linux a month or two back. Note that Valve has found that Linux is the future of gaming. Only on desktops & Laptops, does Microsoft still dominate - but Linux and Apple are eating away at that.
Linux tends to be a lot more efficient than Microsoft and a lot more secure. Plus it is a lot more configurable, even by mere mortals - and for power users, it generally has more to offer. Companies can bring devices to market with Linux faster than they can with a Microsoft Operating System (due to its Open Source nature and better design), and they can make a profit in a market that is to smaller niche for a Microsoft product to be commercially viable.
So, even in the United States, I expect that most people will be using Linux or Apple on desktops & laptops within 5 years.
The LibreOffice spreadsheet (Calc) has had performance improvements in most major releases.
However, I have recently read that a massive amount of effort is now going in to make the LibreOffice spreadsheet very much faster (amongst several other useful enhancements), though this might not show up significantly before LibreOffice 4.2. One of the key things is changing from handling each cell as an individual instance of an object to a more efficient approach.
Anything that could create the Universe as we know it must be Awesome in both sophistication and power - so could not have come about by blind chance, so would have had to be created, and such a thing would need a creator...
So postulating a Creator of the Universe does not solve anything, it 'merely' defers the question.
Hence, the notion of God the Creator conflicts with Reality.
Slashdot Mirror
Remember that the need for Microsoft developers will soon decline, if it has not already done so.
Most devices run Linux.
Mobile phones are dominated by Linux, as are most other mobile devices such as eBooks, and Linux is gaining ground in tables with Android & Chrome O/S. Linux dominates servers: note that essentially all Valve, Dig, and Google servers (I expect that they probably do run the odd Microsoft server, although I have no evidence of this) run Linux - not Microsoft. At least 95% of the top 500 supercomputers run Linux.
More and more companies and organisations are adopting Linux as their primary O/S on the desktop like the French Gendarmerie (http://www.zdnet.com/french-police-move-from-windows-to-ubuntu-linux-7000021479) and the local Government of a region in Spain (https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/community/osor/news/spains-extremadura-starts-switch-40000-government-pcs-open-source).
At home we have 2 Linux workstations (3, if you count my old development box I normally keep powered down), 2 Linux laptops, 2 Android phones, an Apple desktop, and an iPhone - for 2 adults and a teenager. Note no Microsoft boxen.
So for professional reasons, you should at least be investigating moving your skill base to Linux!
A woman can get pregnant and still be a virgin, scientific fact - though I expect this to be quite rare.
To get a woman pregnant, just one sperm needs to fertilize one egg. The further away that sperm is deposited the less likely - assuming the sperm is deposited either near or in her vagina.
No superstition is required to explain virgin births.
In the Harry Potter books they talk about England and many things that are true, but that does not make the books non-fiction.
The Harry Potter books are better than the bible, as I've never met anyone who has insisted that the Harry Potter books are the Truth.
What about those dreaded gravitationalists!
Gravity is only a theory!!
Every right thinking individual knows that we fall back to the Earth solely due to the Grace of God!!!
Pointing a solar panel South is daft, the Sun shines mostly from the North!
Here in New Zealand, we are way South of the equator.
Just try and remember not everyone lives in the USA, nor even in the Northern Hemisphere.
One minor problem, Exchange requires Microsoft...
I used to use GNOME 2 & found that the GNOME devs kept dropping useful features, then GNOME 3 came along and was essentially a triumph of FASHION over FUNCTIONALITY. I initially fled to xfce, now I use MATE.
I have 30" monitor, I have 35 virtual desktops of which about half are in use. An unused virtual desktop is blank with a bland background, and my 2 highly customised panels are always hidden unless I need to access them.
GNOME 3 is very cluttered. and gets in the way of easy use. GNOME devs seems to think that what they want is more important than letting me do things the way I find best - they have Apple's disease! I am glad that I was not supporting clients with GNOME 2 - as the change from a sort of working Desktop Environment, to the total disaster of GNOME 3 was the most depressing & annoying change I've ever had to suffer in Linux.
MATE started as a clone of GNOME 2 with the useful parts added back in, but now they are adding new features in there own right.
My youngest son started become a teenager when he was 6, he is almost 15 now and usually more mature than a lot of people 20+.
100X == 100X
100X == 10,000%
100X != 100%
I must have missed the point raymorris was trying to make...
Linux had usb3 drivers years before any Microsoft O/S.
Can anyone tell me: with the latest Microsoft O/S, do you still need to install drivers before you install a webcam or printer?
Over 4 years ago I installed a webcam on my Linux box, and it just worked - a few months later I found I had to install drivers before a webcam could be used on my mother's Microsoft box (XP). It must have been many years since I had to install printer driver on Linux for a new printer.
And on Linux you have a choice of several Desktop Environment Managers, each far more customisable than the one (or two?) you get with the latest Microsoft O/S's!
Why is Microsoft so far behind?
argh!
second to last line should read
"the light took 33 nanoseconds to reach your eyes"
Light only travels about 300 km per millisecond.
which is about a nanosecond per foot
(while I prefer metric measurements,
this a kind of cool non-metric factoid!)
so if you see someone 10 metres away,
the light took 10 nanoseconds to reach your eyes
(and a 100 or more milliseconds for your brain to process!)
Just keep Microsoft and Apple away from your car's computers!
FIRST: Make sure your program works, before considering optimisation - is almost always good advice!
The version I was given, about 40 years ago: was keep doubling the estimate until it appears unreasonable, and then double it again.
Unfortunately, that is often too optimistic!
Build the spaceship on the Moon - plenty of mass for shielding and fuel on the moon (use sunlight to extract water and separate into H2 & O2).
Get the basic structure and fuel into Linar orbit, and mate with components from Earth. Only rocket engines and some minimal control & guidance stuff would have to get from Earth to the Moon's surface.
The crew for the voyage to Mars would join in Lunar orbit.
You would a few people on the Moon to oversee construction, but a lot of the hard work could be automated
Any long term exploration and./or colonisation of space, must go via the Moon to be sustainable.
During the second world war, in New Zealand, someone was tasked with reading laundry lists over the radio. Hidden in ththis was coded information for secret agents, embedded observers, and the like. They may have told something like: listen for private Scotty's list at 1605 hours and do this if he has 3 pairs of underpants washed, do this if it is 5 pairs, and also this if his green shirt was starched...
So it would be a near certainty that agencies in a lot of countries use spam to communicate to deep cover agents. Tens of thousands of people might have spam about a particular brand of viag... that has a coded message for selected agents - but those agents who read the spam could not be distinguished from non-agents.
I am sure that the NSA, and other agencies (not just in the USA) have programs to try and sort out the spam to detect this - which is yet another type of arms race. How do nyiou know some is a message & not straight spam???
OpenOffice was derived from StarOffice.
Possibly the decision was made a long time ago in a galaxy far away! :-)
I suspect that you are right - get something out that works on Linux ASAP, and worry about optimisation later...
I'm not suggesting Calc be written in Java, there are MANY reasons why it should not be - even assuming everyone had Java & ignoring 'political' considerations!
However, with the server side JIT, anything really heavily used will be in-lined, converted to native machine code (even if at the end of a longer chain of object references), and optimised by the current run time profile. So if you had this approach on a heavily used server app, it may be roughly as efficient either way. However, I probably still would NOT treat each cell as an object, except perhaps as a prototype while I explored the required functionality.
I know gcc has whole program optimisations, but I don't know how that compares to Java's JIT - apart from being compile, rather run time, optimisation.
Not withstanding the above, my gut feeling would be to treat cells as entries in a sparse matrix - and look up the appropriate algorithms and real world use cases. But I've been around long enough (40+ years programming) to know that 'best programming' practices in one era, may not be so good in a later era - so I try to avoid being too dogmatic!
I assume you were being sarcastic.
In case you were not, could you please elaborate on what you meant.
I have programmed in a variety of languages, not all of them Object Oriented... :-)
Hmm...
My mother, who is 84, finds LibreOffice easier to use than Microsoft Office, and she has Microsoft XP.
One place I worked had Microsoft Office as standard, but I found the way it presented fonts for selection clumsy & difficult to use, so I installed OpenOffice (this was prior to LibreOffice in 2002) and exported in .doc format with no complaints from anybody receiving my documents.
Microsoft Office does not come standard on most Linux distributions, and is harder to use.
LibreOffice is freely available for all major Operating Systems, and also for Microsoft's Operating Systems.
All Word Processors have problems, and there are things I don't like about LibreOffice - but I still prefer LibreOffice to Microsoft Office, even when I have to use a box with a Microsoft Operating System.
Microsoft is on the way out, its market share has dropped below 20%. Note that Linux is on over 90 of super computers (the rest are mainly Unix), most mobile phones are either Linux (i.e Android) or Unix (iPhone) based, eBooks are based on Linux, and so are smart TV's. Embedded devices almost invariably use a Linux kernel. Automotive electronic systems are standardising on Linux. The vast majority of computer graphics for special effects in films is done using Linux, with Apple holding the bulk of the balance. If you fly on an A380, the entertainment system runs on Linux. The International Space station converted totally to Linux a month or two back. Note that Valve has found that Linux is the future of gaming. Only on desktops & Laptops, does Microsoft still dominate - but Linux and Apple are eating away at that.
Linux tends to be a lot more efficient than Microsoft and a lot more secure. Plus it is a lot more configurable, even by mere mortals - and for power users, it generally has more to offer. Companies can bring devices to market with Linux faster than they can with a Microsoft Operating System (due to its Open Source nature and better design), and they can make a profit in a market that is to smaller niche for a Microsoft product to be commercially viable.
So, even in the United States, I expect that most people will be using Linux or Apple on desktops & laptops within 5 years.
The LibreOffice spreadsheet (Calc) has had performance improvements in most major releases.
However, I have recently read that a massive amount of effort is now going in to make the LibreOffice spreadsheet very much faster (amongst several other useful enhancements), though this might not show up significantly before LibreOffice 4.2. One of the key things is changing from handling each cell as an individual instance of an object to a more efficient approach.
Please read my comment more carefully, you're the one that doesn't get it!
You seem to have just read my first paragraph without understanding it, and ignored the last two. :-)
Note that my first paragraph implies an infinite lop of creators are required, if you buy into the Creationist Mindset.
Anything that could create the Universe as we know it must be Awesome in both sophistication and power - so could not have come about by blind chance, so would have had to be created, and such a thing would need a creator...
So postulating a Creator of the Universe does not solve anything, it 'merely' defers the question.
Hence, the notion of God the Creator conflicts with Reality.
GNOME 3 is a "Triumph of Fashion over Functionality".
I I used to use GNOME 2, and noticed that useful features were often removed in "upgrades" - GNOME 3 was a disaster.
I fled to xfce, now I use mate.