There have been Linux OEMs around for six years. The reason the major OEMs didn't ship Linux before then was because the user base was somewhat smaller. I don't think it's reasonable to expect major OEMs to support a niche product. It's sort of like complaining because you can't buy your favourite Charlie Parker CDs at the local record store.
I'm not clear on what you mean by "not discount a system they pre-installed Linux on", most of them ship a Redhat box set which costs, so the difference comes out minimal.
The Linux OEMs certainly will charge you more if you ask for Windows.
RAtionalise all you like, but MS didn't "extort" anything from you. If your'e silly enough to pay for their stuff, it's not their fault. Who's "THE OEM" anyway ? Did it occur to you that there's more than one, and a lot of OEMs wil preload Linux. But you didn't buy from them, did you ? Why not ? Because the Windows OEMs were cheaper, right ? And then after refusing to support the Linux OEMs, you complain about the behaviour of the Windows-only OEMs who you consistently award your dollar vote.
MS don't owe you anything. Your "seizure of goods" is no more justified than the same committed by a common thug.
If you don't like their business practices, go use something else. But If you're not willing to support alternatives, don't grandstand on the moral high ground, while indulging in this thugery and expediency.
oe goes to the store, looks for the windows logo on all of his software and hardware, and makes all sorts of money for microsoft.
If he's not willing to pay for the OS, what makes you think he's willing to pay for other Microsoft software ? I think the "buyers" they lose are going to be the cheapskates who weren't going to buy anything anyway.
Going after a market that want everything for free is not a sound business practice and MS realise this. You remember when Corel talked about the "large number of downloads" they got with their office suite ? Too bad you don't make money by getting your software downloaded. Their stock price and their revenue have gone south and now they're trying to dump their Linux operations in the lap of anyone who will take them.
but because they're forcing people to move to linux for a free OS.
Windows never was a "free" OS.
while the Mandrake install I tried last year on the same machine catapulted me into hardware hell.
Probably because you tried installing Linux on a Windows machine. Try installing Windows on a SPARC some time.
but no piece of software is worth $200,
But maybe it is to some people. BTW, the OEM license is somewhat less than $200-.
I'm sure that they would rather have me use a free copy of win2000 rather than switch to linux and join their opposition.
I don't think it's a disadvantage to have dishonest users and cheapskates in your opposition at all.In fact the reason that Linux companies are having such a hard time is that they're targetting a market that want everything for free.
I agree with your post, but I can't resist the temptation to nitpick. First, your program is incorrect (cout and endl are
both in namespace std).
Secondly, you do actually use polymorphism there.
operator<< is defined in ios, not in ostream. it's just like calling gtk_widget_resize with arbitrary widget types, only it's operator<< with arbitrary stream types.
Who cares if 90% of your C++ program is horribly inefficient ? I only care about the 10% that represents a performance bottleneck, and by the time I'm done optimising it, that part of the code will be as fast as C. Sure, features like virtual methods etc come at a cost, but that's hardly a problem if you have 1 virtual method call to a thousand add or mult instructions.
Of course it "supports" them. It's just not as easy as it is in other languages. As has been pointed out before, creative use of function pointers in C can be used to implement polymorphism and "dynamic binding."
If you want to look at it that way, I suppose assembly language is "object oriented". It's important to distinguish between language features to support a concept, and the existence of idioms to do the same. The more complex the idioms, the more desirable it becomes to use a language that provides the functionality in the semantics of the language. That's why not many people write OO code in assembly.
Surely the output C code was no less "object-oriented" than the C++ code it was generated from.
I bet you wouldn't even want to write it or maintain it though.
This doesn't wash. It's one thing to have rules against viewing of porn in public labs (almost every place does because it's considered sexual harrassment) and viewing porn in (for example) ones own office
You'll note that one of the assumptions is that the percentage of whites who are white
supremecists remains constant.
That's imprecise. You are assuming that the proportion of white supremacists who work for Microsoft is the same as that in the rest of the population. Moreover, your assertion that the proportion ogf whites is higher is possibly wrong (hint: consider the number of Indian and Chinese employees).
This is an enormous, and completely unsupported assumption. On one hand, you acknowledge the possibility that one factor could have an impact on the attitudes of workers (the fact that there are more fewer blacks), but assume that there are no other factors (here's a few possible other factors: number of Chinese/Indian employees, working environment with a lot of foreign workers, high levels of education among employees, geography of the workplace,... )
I'm not asserting that the cross section of MS is the same as that as the rest of the population.
Indeed, it's most certainly different.
My point is that it's disingenious to assume that the cross section would be either more or less sympathetic to minorities than the general population.
Re:Engineering is as ?white? as hip-hop is ?black?
on
Racism At Microsoft?
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· Score: 1
Do you think that an aspiring
black engineer should have to prove himself (or herself) more than a white one, or be at
a disadvantage?
In an interview, every applicant has to prove him/herself better, or "be at a disadvantage". That's the point of the interview.
are you completely sure that your conviction that "Engineering
is largely the sport of white males" would never influence your judgment if you had
decide between hiring a black applicant and a white applicant who looks like what you
think an engineer or project manager should look like?
I couldn't care less if he was black AND had purple hair AND had a bone through his nose, as long as he could write code. But that's just me.
The point of the lawsuit is that those blacks who do decide to become engineers should
not be discriminated against.
I've seen MS's job page, and they actively recruit minorities by holding career fairs at various minority student group conventions. I think this law suit is a load of cr*p. I'm not denying discrimination exists, but this lawsuit does appear to be without merit. No evidence is presented for example that MS employ less minorities than anyone else in the tech business, or that they reject more qualified minorities in favour of "majority" applicants.
For example, very few blacks are white supremecists. If there are more whites at
Microsoft than in the general population, and the percentace of whites who are white
supremecists remains constant, there will be more white supremecists at Microsoft
than in the general population.
This is illogical, because it ignores other factors. If Microsoft have more black employees than most other high tech companies, the klansmen most likely will leave and get a job with a company that's more "white".
I don't deny that discrimination exists. For example, there are companies that do most of their hiring through priveliged "white" schools.
But a quick look at Microsofts job pages reveals that they do actively and aggressively recruit minorities. The "percentages" are completely without merit unless they compare them with other companies in the same sector. What do the lawyers want, quotas ?
I'd suppose that there's no camera in his bathroom. He could probably sneak in there for a quickie. BTW, does this mean that he didn't get laid for a whole year ???
Ummmmm, actually, saying that you cant get at the disasm of VB code isnt true.
I didn't say you couldn't. My point was that you couldn't easily guess what it'd look like off the top of your head, because you're further from the metal.
Why use a try/catch in C++, when you have compile time checking ? I thought the point of compile time checks was that you didn't need the overhead to put everything in try/catch blocks.
If he believes this, why doesn't he
have the guts to give up his Phillipine citizenship and stick it out in the US on a full time basis? *That* is
essentially what my ancestors did; they gave up their original citizenship to take a shot.
I don't think you'll find any shortage of foreigners who are "unwilling" to give up their citizenship. Have you ever tried getting a tourist visa with a third world passport ??? Getting US citizenship is not on anyone's short-term agenda -- you need to hold a green card for five years before you can even apply.
Do you mind if I settle down in your living room for a while?
Sure -- if you abide by the house rules and pay appropriate "taxes". No, you can't stop paying rent. What, do you think foreign workers all get free government housing or something ?
Everyone seems to dis VB cause they think its slow, but nowadays, with VB 6 and higher, its approaching
speeds of compiled C++ code.
And the java advocates will tell you that java is "almost as fast as C++". I'll believe it when I see it. The difference with C++ is that you can profile it and optimise the performance critical chunks of code until they're as fast as C. In fact using tricks like reference counts, you can sometimes make it faster.
I'd agree that the slower languages (compile-to-vm) are fast enough for a lot of things, but it's dishonest to call them as fast as C++ or C.
Pop-quiz: how many CPU instructions does function x in VB (or java or eiffel or Smalltalk or perl... ) use ? What does the program look like when converted to assembly ?
This is the kind of question that one can often answer very quickly in C++ or C code, and is impossible to answer with the other languages.
I don't think a book would be chosen as a course book before it was published/priced, so I don't think the
publishers are taking direct advantage of that,
Many titles are marketted as course books, and the publisher knows in advance that this will be the main source of revenue.
Say you're the author of a high priced low volume technical book (priced high because you know it's going
to be low volume) - how would you feel if every purchaser was offered the choice of buy it new for $60
(you get your cut), or buy it used for $20 (you get zip)?
How much does the author get anyway ? Just curious. Books aren't always "priced high" because they're "low volume" -- they're often priced high because they're textbooks, and the students don't have any other choice besides the "official text" since classes in the US depend heavily on this. So they squeeze the college kids for all they're worth. Books that are likely to be sold second hand are second rate textbooks. Good technical books are unlikely to be dumped until they're obsolete (and hence out of print).
Re:Regrets, I've had a few.
on
CS vs CIS
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· Score: 1
CS will get you a foot-in-the-door for the purposes of dealing with math. Most of the specifics would be completely different, but the way-of-thinking is fairly close. Some of the algorithm theory would possibly be fairly familiar.
I agree that you'd need to be a genius to pick up this sort of stuff (intellectual discipline) on your own though (and as you say, most of the CIS dolts who struggled through college algebra aren't up to it)
Slashdot Mirror
MS don't owe you anything. Your "seizure of goods" is no more justified than the same committed by a common thug. If you don't like their business practices, go use something else. But If you're not willing to support alternatives, don't grandstand on the moral high ground, while indulging in this thugery and expediency.
HTH,
If he's not willing to pay for the OS, what makes you think he's willing to pay for other Microsoft software ? I think the "buyers" they lose are going to be the cheapskates who weren't going to buy anything anyway.
Going after a market that want everything for free is not a sound business practice and MS realise this. You remember when Corel talked about the "large number of downloads" they got with their office suite ? Too bad you don't make money by getting your software downloaded. Their stock price and their revenue have gone south and now they're trying to dump their Linux operations in the lap of anyone who will take them.
Windows never was a "free" OS.
while the Mandrake install I tried last year on the same machine catapulted me into hardware hell.
Probably because you tried installing Linux on a Windows machine. Try installing Windows on a SPARC some time.
but no piece of software is worth $200,
But maybe it is to some people. BTW, the OEM license is somewhat less than $200-.
I'm sure that they would rather have me use a free copy of win2000 rather than switch to linux and join their opposition.
I don't think it's a disadvantage to have dishonest users and cheapskates in your opposition at all.In fact the reason that Linux companies are having such a hard time is that they're targetting a market that want everything for free.
Cheers,
Classes without inheritence are not OO either.
Who cares if 90% of your C++ program is horribly inefficient ? I only care about the 10% that represents a performance bottleneck, and by the time I'm done optimising it, that part of the code will be as fast as C. Sure, features like virtual methods etc come at a cost, but that's hardly a problem if you have 1 virtual method call to a thousand add or mult instructions.
I would have thought that factories and prototypes meant that one could instantiate objects "with regard to context".
But how does one do interface reuse in C ? Perhaps you should study OO more carefully ( in particular, polymorphism )
If you want to look at it that way, I suppose assembly language is "object oriented". It's important to distinguish between language features to support a concept, and the existence of idioms to do the same. The more complex the idioms, the more desirable it becomes to use a language that provides the functionality in the semantics of the language. That's why not many people write OO code in assembly.
Surely the output C code was no less "object-oriented" than the C++ code it was generated from.
I bet you wouldn't even want to write it or maintain it though.
No, it's just a coincidence
That's imprecise. You are assuming that the proportion of white supremacists who work for Microsoft is the same as that in the rest of the population. Moreover, your assertion that the proportion ogf whites is higher is possibly wrong (hint: consider the number of Indian and Chinese employees). This is an enormous, and completely unsupported assumption. On one hand, you acknowledge the possibility that one factor could have an impact on the attitudes of workers (the fact that there are more fewer blacks), but assume that there are no other factors (here's a few possible other factors: number of Chinese/Indian employees, working environment with a lot of foreign workers, high levels of education among employees, geography of the workplace, ... )
I'm not asserting that the cross section of MS is the same as that as the rest of the population. Indeed, it's most certainly different. My point is that it's disingenious to assume that the cross section would be either more or less sympathetic to minorities than the general population.
In an interview, every applicant has to prove him/herself better, or "be at a disadvantage". That's the point of the interview.
are you completely sure that your conviction that "Engineering is largely the sport of white males" would never influence your judgment if you had decide between hiring a black applicant and a white applicant who looks like what you think an engineer or project manager should look like?
I couldn't care less if he was black AND had purple hair AND had a bone through his nose, as long as he could write code. But that's just me.
The point of the lawsuit is that those blacks who do decide to become engineers should not be discriminated against.
I've seen MS's job page, and they actively recruit minorities by holding career fairs at various minority student group conventions. I think this law suit is a load of cr*p. I'm not denying discrimination exists, but this lawsuit does appear to be without merit. No evidence is presented for example that MS employ less minorities than anyone else in the tech business, or that they reject more qualified minorities in favour of "majority" applicants.
This is illogical, because it ignores other factors. If Microsoft have more black employees than most other high tech companies, the klansmen most likely will leave and get a job with a company that's more "white".
But a quick look at Microsofts job pages reveals that they do actively and aggressively recruit minorities. The "percentages" are completely without merit unless they compare them with other companies in the same sector. What do the lawyers want, quotas ?
I didn't say you couldn't. My point was that you couldn't easily guess what it'd look like off the top of your head, because you're further from the metal.
Why use a try/catch in C++, when you have compile time checking ? I thought the point of compile time checks was that you didn't need the overhead to put everything in try/catch blocks.
I don't think you'll find any shortage of foreigners who are "unwilling" to give up their citizenship. Have you ever tried getting a tourist visa with a third world passport ??? Getting US citizenship is not on anyone's short-term agenda -- you need to hold a green card for five years before you can even apply.
Sure -- if you abide by the house rules and pay appropriate "taxes". No, you can't stop paying rent. What, do you think foreign workers all get free government housing or something ?
And the java advocates will tell you that java is "almost as fast as C++". I'll believe it when I see it. The difference with C++ is that you can profile it and optimise the performance critical chunks of code until they're as fast as C. In fact using tricks like reference counts, you can sometimes make it faster. I'd agree that the slower languages (compile-to-vm) are fast enough for a lot of things, but it's dishonest to call them as fast as C++ or C.
Pop-quiz: how many CPU instructions does function x in VB (or java or eiffel or Smalltalk or perl ... ) use ? What does the program look like when converted to assembly ?
This is the kind of question that one can often answer very quickly in C++ or C code, and is impossible to answer with the other languages.
Many titles are marketted as course books, and the publisher knows in advance that this will be the main source of revenue.
How much does the author get anyway ? Just curious. Books aren't always "priced high" because they're "low volume" -- they're often priced high because they're textbooks, and the students don't have any other choice besides the "official text" since classes in the US depend heavily on this. So they squeeze the college kids for all they're worth. Books that are likely to be sold second hand are second rate textbooks. Good technical books are unlikely to be dumped until they're obsolete (and hence out of print).
I agree that you'd need to be a genius to pick up this sort of stuff (intellectual discipline) on your own though (and as you say, most of the CIS dolts who struggled through college algebra aren't up to it)