Now that M$ has been granted license to use their monopoly as they see fit, it is only right that they go after their competators with a vengence. Which buy the way if you havent noticed is down to less than a handful. Adobe seems to be the first target, Oracle and Semantic will be next then... Oh shit that's pretty all the big software vendors that I can think of. I guess when they are dead the medium and small companies will have to be next.
Old discontinued $80 3com product. Yes it's not supported by the manufacture, but it's well supported on the net eg. www.audreyhacking.com. For the price you will not get a better little machine anywhere.
Then this guy who says he communicated with the publisher and they indicated that it would be coming out in three parts starting next July, must be telling a story:
I'd fire the bastard that bought exchange here. I work for a large investment bank and we had several multiday email outages over the last year. Must have cost the firm millions.
Lots of people here are saying Why bother wasting your time porting Linux to the Xbox, you can create a better cheaping Linux platform using, blah, blah, blah... But the Xbox is really a trial run for Palladium, i.e. an M$ only hardware platform designed to only run software authorized by the Bill himself. This is where we are heading folks, so any R&D done now will be valuble when the real thing comes along.
In a word, no. I have never had any form if o/s decay in the 7 or 8 years i've been running Linux on all my machines. This is with active installing and upgrading of packages.
Windows decays in a matter of days, hours sometimes with little more than turning the machine on and off.
A long time ago before Usenet was only useful for p0rn and warez there was the Usenet Cookbook. It was distributed in the newsgroup rec.food.recipes. The moderator put together a set of troff macros and templates and people posted recipes to the group. The moderator would edit the postings and release a couple of recipes a week (to save bandwidth).
Copies are still floating around the net this seems like a good place to start. I printed the whole thing out several years ago and it took a couple of packages of paper.
A decent version control system should provide support for change packages - (atomic groups of changes that must be promoted through the system as an single unit). It also needs to provide support to manage a set of stages in the developement cycle so that changes can travel through development, qa, and production in an easily manageable manner. Hooks to integrate with issue tracking systems is also importand. Perforce has most of these features but they are somewhat cumbersome to use. MKS Source Integrity probably also has these features.
The only chance you have to stop this nonsense is to make a big fuss. Complain to the advertisers, teach them that associating their product with a feeling of outrage and annoyance does not sell more product it sells less.
I absolutely agree that the key to refactoring is good unit tests. XP is an excellent idea. But i still maintain that it is hard to implement unless your group fully embraces it. I introduced a unit test framework to my group 6 months ago and even convinced the powers that be to invest in JTest. Today there is only one developer that has ever written a unit test.. me.
This might be true, but i've run into the problem with my own code where i have stuff the I wrote with general usage in mind but specific to a certain task. Later i've come back to reuse it for something else and see that while it is close to what i need for the new task it needs some modification and am faced with the big problem. Should i refactor it and spend a couple of days going back throught the other stuff to rework it, or not. Sure the right answer is that i should rework the existing code, but the reality is that it is really hard to push a pending project on the stack, refactor some code and rework everything that uses it. In fact it is quite a risk.
I like many of the concepts of XP because it is a more realistic model of how developers actually work. The big problem however is that it does not account for programmer laziness and time constraints. One of the premises of XP is that you should develop objects for your current needs today. If tommorrow or next week, those objects nolonger suit your needs, refactor them until they do. In real life many/most programmers are too lazy or don't have time to refactor a class and then work through the code base to insure that every thing still works. Yes i know there are tools and the unit tests help. But the fact is most programmers will just write new code rather than rework existing stuff, especially if someone else wrote the original.
The other big problem with XP is the working in pairs bit. Most developers smell bad, who wants to be stuck in a cubie with one.
I believe that there is a period around 2019 when Mars is at it's closest to earth. Picking the right time to go can make a big difference in terms of cost and flight time. I think is covered in a recent Wired article.
There is no easier way to make code ugly and unreadable than to use hungarian notiation. nCount is not in anyway more readable that cnt, it clutters the code and is very annoying. If your code really needs to encode the data type in the variable name then there is something horribly wrong with it.
Slashdot Mirror
Now that M$ has been granted license to use their monopoly as they see fit, it is only right that they go after their competators with a vengence. Which buy the way if you havent noticed is down to less than a handful. Adobe seems to be the first target, Oracle and Semantic will be next then... Oh shit that's pretty all the big software vendors that I can think of. I guess when they are dead the medium and small companies will have to be next.
Old discontinued $80 3com product. Yes it's not supported by the manufacture, but it's well supported on the net eg. www.audreyhacking.com. For the price you will not get a better little machine anywhere.
Then this guy who says he communicated with the publisher and they indicated that it would be coming out in three parts starting next July, must be telling a story:
I predict the end of Slate before the end of Tivo.
I'm sick of these woosy winters in New Jersey. It's not winter if there is no snow and last year sucked.
So much for big iron, snicker.
Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft.
I'd fire the bastard that bought exchange here. I work for a large investment bank and we had several multiday email outages over the last year. Must have cost the firm millions.
What are they giving out? I like to give any Microsoft T-shirts i get to homeless people. Puts them to a good cause :)
Lots of people here are saying Why bother wasting your time porting Linux to the Xbox, you can create a better cheaping Linux platform using, blah, blah, blah... But the Xbox is really a trial run for Palladium, i.e. an M$ only hardware platform designed to only run software authorized by the Bill himself. This is where we are heading folks, so any R&D done now will be valuble when the real thing comes along.
Linus and Alan Cox
In a word, no. I have never had any form if o/s decay in the 7 or 8 years i've been running Linux on all my machines. This is with active installing and upgrading of packages.
Windows decays in a matter of days, hours sometimes with little more than turning the machine on and off.
A long time ago before Usenet was only useful for p0rn and warez there was the Usenet Cookbook. It was distributed in the newsgroup rec.food.recipes. The moderator put together a set of troff macros and templates and people posted recipes to the group. The moderator would edit the postings and release a couple of recipes a week (to save bandwidth).
Copies are still floating around the net this seems like a good place to start. I printed the whole thing out several years ago and it took a couple of packages of paper.
www.altonbrown.com is pretty good. Read the rant's and raves section for funny stories from his book tour.
A decent version control system should provide support for change packages - (atomic groups of changes that must be promoted through the system as an single unit). It also needs to provide support to manage a set of stages in the developement cycle so that changes can travel through development, qa, and production in an easily manageable manner. Hooks to integrate with issue tracking systems is also importand. Perforce has most of these features but they are somewhat cumbersome to use. MKS Source Integrity probably also has these features.
The only chance you have to stop this nonsense is to
make a big fuss. Complain to the advertisers, teach
them that associating their product with a feeling
of outrage and annoyance does not sell more product
it sells less.
This format has lasted very well throughout the ages and still has the best outlook for the next several thousand years.
It's unusable until then.
I absolutely agree that the key to refactoring is good unit tests. XP is an excellent idea. But i still maintain that it is hard to implement unless your group fully embraces it. I introduced a unit test framework to my group 6 months ago and even convinced the powers that be to invest in JTest. Today there is only one developer that has ever written a unit test .. me.
This might be true, but i've run into the problem with my own code where i have stuff the I wrote with general usage in mind but specific to a certain task. Later i've come back to reuse it for something else and see that while it is close to what i need for the new task it needs some modification and am faced with the big problem. Should i refactor it and spend a couple of days going back throught the other stuff to rework it, or not. Sure the right answer is that i should rework the existing code, but the reality is that it is really hard to push a pending project on the stack, refactor some code and rework everything that uses it. In fact it is quite a risk.
I like many of the concepts of XP because it is a more realistic model of how developers actually work. The big problem however is that it does not account for programmer laziness and time constraints. One of the premises of XP is that you should develop objects for your current needs today. If tommorrow or next week, those objects nolonger suit your needs, refactor them until they do. In real life many/most programmers are too lazy or don't have time to refactor a class and then work through the code base to insure that every thing still works. Yes i know there are tools and the unit tests help. But the fact is most programmers will just write new code rather than rework existing stuff, especially if someone else wrote the original.
The other big problem with XP is the working in pairs bit. Most developers smell bad, who wants to be stuck in a cubie with one.
RMS should be appointed to their board of directors
M$ should be forced to pay one million ... no one billion dollars to the FSF.
I believe that there is a period around 2019 when Mars is at it's closest to earth. Picking the right time to go can make a big difference in terms of cost and flight time. I think is covered in a recent Wired article.
There is no easier way to make code ugly and unreadable than to use hungarian notiation. nCount is not in anyway more readable that cnt, it clutters the code and is very annoying. If your code really needs to encode the data type in the variable name then there is something horribly wrong with it.
Dos
Windows 1.x
Windows 2.x
Windows 3.x
Windows 9.x
Windows Me
Windows nt
Windows 2000
Windows XP
And the worst technology desaster...
Microsoft Bob