The writing is on the wall folks.....Office is moving towards an Internet application and away from a desktop application. It will all be about XML and SOAP and Web Services.
The client, whether its a Mac, *nix, Windows etc...won't matter. As long as the client can talk SOAP.
....that all this computer stuff, while insanely interesting, is secondary to the people behind it.
I guess when you have muscular distrophy you cant get around much. That doesn't mean you stop thinking however. Apparently he used his talents for a wonderfully productive purpose...something we all should take not of. As the old saying goes, when life gives you lemons, make lemonade.
As a kid (I am 33) I used to watch the Jerry Lewis telethon and donate $5 because I had a few dollars from birthday presents (my birthday is at the end of August and the telethon normally runs at the beginning of September). There is something inside of me that says perhaps I should have given $10.
I have never visited their site and I am amazed that so much hoopla has been raised over these guys.
It seems though, that as artists "grow into" the internet age they will demand their stuff be out on the web. They simply will bypass all the big labels, realizing that they are, in effect, unnecessary. Digital bits are alot easier to distribute than CD's. Perhaps this is the beginning of that phase.
You know....last I heard they were supposed to port Star Office into an Internet application. I guess the code is: 1) A wreck and/or 2)Sun cannot compete in the software space.
I do not know a single person who uses Star Office and by the time Linux gets a working office suite, MS will have moved on to.NET.
Once again Linux will be playing a gee wizz thats a good idea catchup game.
The reason kids don't get the results back is that no one kid takes the entire test. Any one kid is typically given 3 blocks worth of questions. For math that means between 20 and 50 questions, depending on grade level and the type of questions in the block. The entire math assessment however, is approximately 200-300 questions.
Why not give each kid all the questions? Because it is intrusive and expensive to do so.
Instead, each student actually gets 5 estimated scores based on his/her performance on the blocks they completed. The five scores are estimated based on their performance on the blocks they complete plus the demographic questions they answer. How those stats are computed is beyond me, I am a humble programmer.
Also a very small sample of kids is actuallly used in each state (approximately 2,000). This is again to minimize intrusion and keep costs low. Its enough to get a decent sample though. In effect nobody really cares who takes the test, as long as we can get 2,000 kids to do so.
Thats why results are posted for entire groups of people. For example: males who watch 5 hours of tv a day, or kids who have students that has a teacher that knows about a computer. yadda yadda yadda.
On a more personal note, you sound like a conservative to me. Thats cool. I consider myself one as well. I don't send my kids to public school and I wish there was some system in place that afforded me a choice of where I send my kids. I find it offensive the gov't thinks their schools are the only ones that can teach. Incidentally...NAEP has shown that Private school/Catholic school kids do better in most subjects.
NAEP is useful because it does look at things at a high level and say what things are working and what things aren't. The computer study I mentioned was one of the good things to come out of NAEP.
Yes I am sure there are states who decide what programs get funded and what don't based on NAEP. Is that so bad? I mean if a program isn't helping the kids then why not discontinue it? Its your money...why waste it! I just hope they are using the data correctly.
Actually there is quite a bit of what you said that I agree with.
The study I referenced, however, was based on a test called NAEP, which is not a standardized test like the SAT is a standardized test. It is a low stakes test (i.e. nobody's future is at stake, scores for individual students are not reported....just for groups of students etc...) Not everyone has to take this test either. Its a small sample. Basically its a test designed for research purposes.
What the research said, for math, was that what the kids did with the computers was more important than having them.
Basically what researchers here have decided is that the use of computers to teach mind numbing things like multiplication tables or addition tables is negatively correlated to performance on national tests. That is if you use a computer like flash cards, kids are not helped....they are done a diservice.
However, the use of computers to play educational games (e.g. Math Rabbit or Treasure Math Storm or any other math game that requires a child to think about what they are doing) is positively correlated with performance on national tests.
So its not just that they have computers in the classroom, its what they use them for.
Quake2 runs well on several platforms because they wrote good C code to make that happen. Still though, C is compiled and that helps...alot. If they wanted to make it SCREAM on any one platform they would have coded it against a specific architecture, using quite a bit of assembly I bet. They chose not to.
There is no rule that says MS has to make stuff work well on other platforms. They will, however, have to start cooperating better with other platforms if they want to continue to succeed as an entity. Thats what SOAP is all about.
MS will never care about portability. They will start caring about interoperability.
By the way...I didn't see Sun lining up to license COM. Why not? They thought Java was better. Thats good. Thats healthy competition. That will make MS work harder.
Unfortunately for use developers...thats one more thing we will have to learn:(
Thats ok fedos, this moderation crap is worthless anyway. I write what I write, and I realize there is a hostile crowd here. There are also many open minds.
Everyone talks about platform independnce, but what I really think what people want is interoperability. The funny thing is you don't need java to do that. Well written C/C++ code can easily interoperate on multiple platforms (look at Quake). Heck I have been hacking at some REALLY OLD fortran code written for an IBM mainframe 30 years ago and it compiles just fine on my PC.
So you don't need Java to interoperate. Stick to the standards and your code will fly on whatever platform is standards compliant.
Unfortunately Sun thinks they are a standards body. MS is not going to allow another company dictate how they create their software no matter how much we bitch and moan.
I like the fact that MS went out of their way to bring me Java the language, not Java the religion. If I wanted to program for an MS platform, and I wanted to use Java, I would have chosen J++ because it was optimed for Windows. If I wanted my code to run somewhere else, I would have chosen Cafe or JBuilder.
I don't think this language is about developing new versions of desktop software. I think it has something to do with the previously announced.net strategy.
If portability is a design goal then so be it. However, at some point, when you want speed, you will have to forsake platform interoperability and go with a platform you like. At that point you should use a tool that will produce something optimized on the platform you chose.
You cant blame MS for building stuff that runs great on their platform. Yu cant blame MS for not developing tools that help development on other platforms.
I was at a J++ talk two years ago at Tech Ed and MS made it crystal clear to all of us there that they were ceding the cross platform developer tools to other companies (Inprise/Symantec).
The ironic thing is that if they did build that tool I am sure many people in this forum would say they were acting in bad faith.
.....he likes arcane command line tools......doesn't care about productivity (intellisense, integrated debuggers, debugging a web page, its server side scripts, its client side scripts, and binary server side code simultaneously)......wants to manually create his own MAKE files.....wants to be stuck in a world without a component architecture (i.e. libraries and code sharing vs. binary level object oriented reuse) Then by all means, develop under Linux. Some might consider this s troll, but what the Linux developer community doesn't get is that Microsoft goes out of its way to take the chore out of programming and allow you to concentrate on the problem you are trying to solve. In many ways you can trace Microsoft's success as a platform to the toolset that allows business developers to get their job done. I would also lke to point out that Id software used Visual Studio to create Q3. Here is a quote from Carmack as found in this slashdot article: There are plenty of reasons to have issues with MS, but to just make a blanket statement like "everything that comes from microsoft is crap" is just not rational. There are a lot of smart people at microsoft, and they sometimes produce some nice things. There are some damn useful features of MSDEV that I have not seen on any other platform - all the intellisense pop up information and edit-and-continue, for instance.
You see its round. It makes things go faster. Its the coolest thing since sliced bread! What? Someone already invented the wheel? But my wheel is better!! Yeah I know I know its just a wheel. Can you say OLE? Can you say COM?
I'm at Microsoft Tech Ed right now and I can say with certainty that it will not be clear what is an application and what is an OS. MS will be releasing a series of products over the next few months that can be considered both an add-on to the OS AND products in their own right.
The government can't figure these things out. Its best left up to us as techies to decide. Leave MS as is. If the PC is on the way out, and MS is not making any inroads anywhere else (Palm is kicking its ass, Transmeta, web pads, Linux, Java etc...), and other businesses don't trust them, then the pc model will become obsolete and Microsoft will obsolete with it.
Slashdot Mirror
Theer was nothing in my post that indicated I advocated web based apps...I like PC's because they are "Personal" computers.
I was just commenting on MS's strategic direction thats all, and it ain't about porting to various apps.
Steve
The writing is on the wall folks.....Office is moving towards an Internet application and away from a desktop application. It will all be about XML and SOAP and Web Services.
The client, whether its a Mac, *nix, Windows etc...won't matter. As long as the client can talk SOAP.
Is anyone in the Linux world looking at SOAP?
....that all this computer stuff, while insanely interesting, is secondary to the people behind it.
I guess when you have muscular distrophy you cant get around much. That doesn't mean you stop thinking however. Apparently he used his talents for a wonderfully productive purpose...something we all should take not of. As the old saying goes, when life gives you lemons, make lemonade.
As a kid (I am 33) I used to watch the Jerry Lewis telethon and donate $5 because I had a few dollars from birthday presents (my birthday is at the end of August and the telethon normally runs at the beginning of September). There is something inside of me that says perhaps I should have given $10.
I have never visited their site and I am amazed that so much hoopla has been raised over these guys.
It seems though, that as artists "grow into" the internet age they will demand their stuff be out on the web. They simply will bypass all the big labels, realizing that they are, in effect, unnecessary. Digital bits are alot easier to distribute than CD's. Perhaps this is the beginning of that phase.
Just my opinion.
I am not a MS hater by any streth, but after I read this yesterday I downloaded and installed Eudora on my wife's pc last night.
Outlook, while a great e-mail client, is not something I will ever hook directly up to an internet account ever again.
I think, when it comes to Outlook, in the flexibility vs. security decision, MS has weighted too much towards flexibility.
You know....last I heard they were supposed to port Star Office into an Internet application. I guess the code is:
.NET.
1) A wreck and/or
2)Sun cannot compete in the software space.
I do not know a single person who uses Star Office and by the time Linux gets a working office suite, MS will have moved on to
Once again Linux will be playing a gee wizz thats a good idea catchup game.
and thats why this story was even allowed on /.
Great Another Browser.....how innovative.
I just volunteered for a tech thing. Thanks for the reference to VolunteerMatch.org
The reason kids don't get the results back is that no one kid takes the entire test. Any one kid is typically given 3 blocks worth of questions. For math that means between 20 and 50 questions, depending on grade level and the type of questions in the block. The entire math assessment however, is approximately 200-300 questions.
Why not give each kid all the questions? Because it is intrusive and expensive to do so.
Instead, each student actually gets 5 estimated scores based on his/her performance on the blocks they completed. The five scores are estimated based on their performance on the blocks they complete plus the demographic questions they answer. How those stats are computed is beyond me, I am a humble programmer.
Also a very small sample of kids is actuallly used in each state (approximately 2,000). This is again to minimize intrusion and keep costs low. Its enough to get a decent sample though. In effect nobody really cares who takes the test, as long as we can get 2,000 kids to do so.
Thats why results are posted for entire groups of people. For example: males who watch 5 hours of tv a day, or kids who have students that has a teacher that knows about a computer. yadda yadda yadda.
On a more personal note, you sound like a conservative to me. Thats cool. I consider myself one as well. I don't send my kids to public school and I wish there was some system in place that afforded me a choice of where I send my kids. I find it offensive the gov't thinks their schools are the only ones that can teach. Incidentally...NAEP has shown that Private school/Catholic school kids do better in most subjects.
NAEP is useful because it does look at things at a high level and say what things are working and what things aren't. The computer study I mentioned was one of the good things to come out of NAEP.
Yes I am sure there are states who decide what programs get funded and what don't based on NAEP. Is that so bad? I mean if a program isn't helping the kids then why not discontinue it? Its your money...why waste it! I just hope they are using the data correctly.
All the best.
Actually there is quite a bit of what you said that I agree with.
The study I referenced, however, was based on a test called NAEP, which is not a standardized test like the SAT is a standardized test. It is a low stakes test (i.e. nobody's future is at stake, scores for individual students are not reported....just for groups of students etc...) Not everyone has to take this test either. Its a small sample. Basically its a test designed for research purposes.
What the research said, for math, was that what the kids did with the computers was more important than having them.
This link is a summary of some work done here at Educational Testing Service .
/.'ed!!!
Basically what researchers here have decided is that the use of computers to teach mind numbing things like multiplication tables or addition tables is negatively correlated to performance on national tests. That is if you use a computer like flash cards, kids are not helped....they are done a diservice.
However, the use of computers to play educational games (e.g. Math Rabbit or Treasure Math Storm or any other math game that requires a child to think about what they are doing) is positively correlated with performance on national tests.
So its not just that they have computers in the classroom, its what they use them for.
ps: I hope ets.org can handle being
The new Star Wars might seem childish to us, but could it be that we just grew up? Could it be that we just wished the story grew up with us?
It is ironic that, despite the general community's disdain for MS, Slashdot certainly benefits from the existence of MS.
The MS stories on Slashdot consistently get a huge number of posts.
Easy there Tex!!
:(
Quake2 runs well on several platforms because they wrote good C code to make that happen. Still though, C is compiled and that helps...alot. If they wanted to make it SCREAM on any one platform they would have coded it against a specific architecture, using quite a bit of assembly I bet. They chose not to.
There is no rule that says MS has to make stuff work well on other platforms. They will, however, have to start cooperating better with other platforms if they want to continue to succeed as an entity. Thats what SOAP is all about.
MS will never care about portability. They will start caring about interoperability.
By the way...I didn't see Sun lining up to license COM. Why not? They thought Java was better. Thats good. Thats healthy competition. That will make MS work harder.
Unfortunately for use developers...thats one more thing we will have to learn
I never said "first" I said ActiveX wasn't a language, but a technology.
Thats ok fedos, this moderation crap is worthless anyway. I write what I write, and I realize there is a hostile crowd here. There are also many open minds.
Everyone talks about platform independnce, but what I really think what people want is interoperability. The funny thing is you don't need java to do that. Well written C/C++ code can easily interoperate on multiple platforms (look at Quake). Heck I have been hacking at some REALLY OLD fortran code written for an IBM mainframe 30 years ago and it compiles just fine on my PC.
So you don't need Java to interoperate. Stick to the standards and your code will fly on whatever platform is standards compliant.
Unfortunately Sun thinks they are a standards body. MS is not going to allow another company dictate how they create their software no matter how much we bitch and moan.
I like the fact that MS went out of their way to bring me Java the language, not Java the religion. If I wanted to program for an MS platform, and I wanted to use Java, I would have chosen J++ because it was optimed for Windows. If I wanted my code to run somewhere else, I would have chosen Cafe or JBuilder.
I don't think this language is about developing new versions of desktop software. I think it has something to do with the previously announced .net strategy.
If portability is a design goal then so be it. However, at some point, when you want speed, you will have to forsake platform interoperability and go with a platform you like. At that point you should use a tool that will produce something optimized on the platform you chose.
You cant blame MS for building stuff that runs great on their platform. Yu cant blame MS for not developing tools that help development on other platforms.
I was at a J++ talk two years ago at Tech Ed and MS made it crystal clear to all of us there that they were ceding the cross platform developer tools to other companies (Inprise/Symantec).
The ironic thing is that if they did build that tool I am sure many people in this forum would say they were acting in bad faith.
Dammed if they do, dammed if they don't.
Just to be sure you know what you are talking about, ActiveX is a technology not a language. ActiveX is what Java beans was patterned of off.
.....he likes arcane command line tools. .....doesn't care about productivity (intellisense, integrated debuggers, debugging a web page, its server side scripts, its client side scripts, and binary server side code simultaneously). .....wants to manually create his own MAKE files .....wants to be stuck in a world without a component architecture (i.e. libraries and code sharing vs. binary level object oriented reuse)
Then by all means, develop under Linux.
Some might consider this s troll, but what the Linux developer community doesn't get is that Microsoft goes out of its way to take the chore out of programming and allow you to concentrate on the problem you are trying to solve. In many ways you can trace Microsoft's success as a platform to the toolset that allows business developers to get their job done.
I would also lke to point out that Id software used Visual Studio to create Q3. Here is a quote from Carmack as found in this slashdot article:
There are plenty of reasons to have issues with MS, but to just make a blanket statement like "everything that comes from microsoft is crap" is just not rational. There are a lot of smart people at microsoft, and they sometimes produce some nice things. There are some damn useful features of MSDEV that I have not seen on any other platform - all the intellisense pop up information and edit-and-continue, for instance.
You see its round.
It makes things go faster.
Its the coolest thing since sliced bread!
What?
Someone already invented the wheel?
But my wheel is better!!
Yeah I know I know its just a wheel.
Can you say OLE? Can you say COM?
....it would be round.
....it would make things go faster more efficiently.
It would be great!!
What...someone else invented it already?
But My wheel is different...its rounder...its made of different colors...and....
Yeah I know I know, its just another wheel.
Even SUN says the network is the computer.
I'm at Microsoft Tech Ed right now and I can say with certainty that it will not be clear what is an application and what is an OS. MS will be releasing a series of products over the next few months that can be considered both an add-on to the OS AND products in their own right.
The government can't figure these things out. Its best left up to us as techies to decide. Leave MS as is. If the PC is on the way out, and MS is not making any inroads anywhere else (Palm is kicking its ass, Transmeta, web pads, Linux, Java etc...), and other businesses don't trust them, then the pc model will become obsolete and Microsoft will obsolete with it.
My 2 cents
Woops...I didn't realize this guy was talking and this was a transcript.
I thought he was sent the questions and then he wrote his replies.
My apologies to Lars.