Microsoft seems bound and determined to trigger another antitrust lawsuit with the release of XP/.NET. The first suit lost them 60% of their stock value... I wonder what the next DoJ action will cost them?
Speaking of.NET, would you trust Microsoft with your data?
Correction: they have stolen/borrowed/appropriated some really tight ideas... the only idea I know that was actually original to the boyz in Redmond was Bob... can anybody think of any others?
So Adolph Hitler (TM) brand computers should sell real well, right? I mean, it's a name everyone will recognize, right? Exxon should cause an oil spill at least once as month, thus keeping it's name in the paper and increasing sales! O. J. Simpson should run for president -- now there's a man with name recognition!
Could there possibly be a flaw somewhere in the logic that "there is no such thing as bad publicity"?
Personally, I do refuse to buy products from companies with annoying ads, but I'm probably in the minority.
The heck with that, make 'em program a KIM 1 (like I had to) instead! The KIM was was basically a 6502, hex keypad, and LCD. That's it. Smarter students used the Apple ][ assembler to translate assembly into hex, then punched the hex into memory via the keypad...
You forgot 4) Don't put your real email address in your/. user profile. Those old postings are archived forever, and easily accessable by any web spider...
This just seems like one more indication of Microsoft's self-destructive behaviour. They appear to be betting the company on the.NET initiative, but as I see it, the success of.NET depends on other companies trusting Microsoft to take care of thier data, and trusting Microsoft to NOT use the fact that they control the servers that the data is stored on for Microsoft's competitive advantage. Now, given Microsoft's past history, and given the fact that the Microsoft octopus is expanding into so many different areas that potentially EVERY high-technology company will become a direct competitor with Microsoft in some field, ask your self: "Do I trust Microsoft with my data?" Then ask yourself how many successful companies are going to answer "yes" to that question. My suspicion is that any company naive and gullible enough to fall for the.NET/XP trojan horse hook, line, and sinker probably is too poorly managed to stay in business for long anyway. Prediction:.NET early adopters will experience a phenomenon simular to the.com fiasco, e.g. 80% will be out of business within 2 years. Sell any MSFT stock you still own now...
When given ultimatums, I always choose the opposite of what the person issuing the ultimatums wants me to do. I guess I WON'T be renewing my MSDN membership! Yes, it appears to me that MICROS~1 is shooting themselves in both feet with their current initiatives, but only time will tell...
Yes, the current situation, with the same company allowed to control both phone lines and cable lines in the same region sucks. But (provided anyone can get spectrum) wireless would open it up to competition again.
I've asked the phone company, and they say it will cost me $10,000 to run another cable to my house. You sure you want this to come out of your tax dollars? Wouldn't it make a lot more sense to just let me buy a $500 wireless box and hang it on the side of my house? They've the technology to do this for years, and I'm line of sight to virtually all of Beaverton, OR. But no phone company will sell me this service! Wouldn't providing a kick in the pants to existing communications monopolies to provide wireless make a lot more sense then running a fiber to every house in the country?
Truth be known, I'd pay big bucks to drive on a private highway, if it didn't have the arbitrary and capricious speed limits I'm subjected to on the public ones. Which brings up a point: do you really want to have the cyber equivalent of getting pulled over for speeding on the information superhighway? That which the government funds, it controls. If a censored, limited, highly taxed internet is what you want, you're welcome to it. I sorta prefer the current anarchic situation myself.
Duh. Read the comment again. I was comparing Linux and Windows, not open source and Windows.
Your criticism is complete bullshit. What about removing your head from you arse before hitting that submit button next time, eh?
You come across as both an immature and arrogant zealot, and a wienie to boot!
The most competent programmers spend their time coding, not making ill-conceived flames whose only purpose is to demonstrate the author's ignorance. Again, if you'll read the original comment, I made it crystal clear I was speaking from my own personal experience. Your mileage may differ. Yes, a lot of times the best choice is open source, a lot of the time it isn't.
Anyone who true beleives the original posting stated or implied that "all good engineers develop with open source products" should stop smoking crack for a few days, then re-read the original comment. You, my dear friend, are obviously a severely deluded, funny little troll!
If you haven't diligently reviewed the source and then compiled it yourself, _any_ software could contain trojans... even say, software coming out of a certain monolithic company in Redmond. In the Open Source community we rely on many eyes examining the code to detect malicious insertions, but even this isn't foolproof. In general, it's good idea to assume that any code that hasn't been running for several months _may_ contain back doors. The assumption is that if the software is running on enough machines, within a few months to a year _somebody_ should have detected the problem, although there are no guarantees. In this case, running a new update of the SETI code DOES represent a security risk.
My personal experience is that for the same programmer writing network software using Linux was at least TWICE as productive as using M$ development tools, although more that 5 times as productive is a bit suprising. I think what we have here is more due to the most competent programmers choosing to work with open source, and the least competent, most gullible ones choosing to work with Windows.
The point of diminishing returns is the point where your own ear can no longer tell the difference between a system and a more expensive system. For me, this is probably about the $2000 range. For others, electrostatic speakers and absurdly large tube amps may be worth it. But I suspect it's a lot like wine; can they _really_ tell the difference in a blind side-by-side compairison?
One thing that may be worth it because you can actually _feel_ the difference is subwoofers. These should preferably shake the entire house when "Alzo Spake Zarathustra" is played at high volume (for those of you that don't recognize the name: you have heard the music, it's usually refered to as "2001").
Actually, Java is not that slow, and there is nothing to stop you from compiling Java to machine code, in which case it should run as fast as C++. However, in an educational environment, it is good that you're code run slow enough so that the effects of good vs. bad programming practices is perceptable. In fact, I have used timing a few thousand iterations of computationally intense algorithms in Java and then tweaking them as a way of optimizing algorithms, which were later ported to C. Experimenting with Java is usually faster, since it only recompiles the single class that changed.
Having taught Java as an introductory language, I feel qualified to state that it should be the first language anybody learns. Why? Because it's simple; it's easier to learn. And it doesn't teach you the bad habits that say BASIC would. It is more standardized across different platforms than C/C++, and just as good for OOP as C++. And of course, it's FREE for educational use. Java isn't a perfect language (frankly, the lack of unsigned primitive types bothers me) but it's the best language for beginners.
Why not? High-quality compilers are available, with source if desired, at zero cost.
Not every computer user, or even every computer user with which I would like to share code with, is a hacker. Let's face it, 95% of all computer owners probably aren't capable of successfully installing a compiler, compiling a non-trivial app, and installing the app. (Needless to say, these are mostly windows users.)
heard of POSIX?
The nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from. Yes, the fact that most OSes are now 99% POSIX compatible means that it takes only a day or two to port an app, rather than months. But that's still a day or two per machine, and requires that you own one of every machine. Myself, I've got 6 x86 boxen and nothing with any other kind of CPU. By the way, can we have a show of hands, how many people have actually ported to Windows' "POSIX compliant" API? How many people were slightly put off by their disclaimer "We implement POSIX, but none of the socket calls." Uh, that's really usefull...
Why bother? Suppose I come up with a neat program on my SparcStation, and I want to email to all my friends to show it off. Now, maybe recompiling from source isn't a problem for you and your small circle of friends, but truth be told, some of my friends and relatives (gasp!)DON'T EVEN HAVE A COMPILER INSTALLED ON THEIR COMPUTER!!! My only choice is to send them an executable. Again, maybe you have such a small circle of friends that you can keep track of what kind of computer each of them is running. But quite frankly, some of my relatives, when asked "do you have an x86, PowerPC, 68000, or Sparc chip in that there puppy" can only respond with "huh?!?"
Your arguments regarding optimization also apply to distributing files as Java byte code, but the simple fact is, for most applications, nobody gives a damn about optimization anymore anyway! Let's see, even if your favorite text editor were 100, or even 1000 times slower, would you be able to type faster than it can buffer input? I don't think so! For the few cases in which cycles are that critical, shouldn't the code be written in hand-optimized assembly and made available in system libraries anyway?
Your argument that straight binary translation is useless, and that you also need to re-create the entire run time environment is a good point. This, however, is an argument in favor of using Java (or som equivalent), and is an argument AGAINST distributing everything as source. Have you tried lately to write a non-trivial application where the same source compiles on both Linux and Windows lately? (It can be done, but it is EVEN LESS FUN THAN HERDING CATS!) Fact is, this whole discussion is fairly pointless because run-time environment compatibility is both much more important and much harder to acheive than mechanical tranlation of one machine's opcodes to another machine's opcodes.
As opposed to BASIC, which is an extremely stupid solution to the same problem?
I don't see how the problem that I'd like to send you dynamic content via email without requiring you to be running the same CPU as I am is caused by closed standards. On the contrary, it seems to be an inevitable side effect of competition in the processor market. Yes, it is an obvious solution: given that I can do on-demand translation to the Java Virtual Machine, how much harder is it to do on-demand translation to the instruction set of a real CPU?
Let's make a deal -- we'll use your anachronistic English spellings when refering to British place names, if you'll use our creative American spellings when refering to American place names, ok?
The Patriot
Everybody knows this was just a remake of "Braveheart" with "American colonies" substituted for "Scotland" and "sons" substituted for "wife". I assure you that, although it was quite an emotional stirring movie, even the most gullible Americans (and that's pretty darn gullible!) don't accept it as historical fact.
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking of .NET, would you trust Microsoft with your data?
Correction: they have stolen/borrowed/appropriated some really tight ideas... the only idea I know that was actually original to the boyz in Redmond was Bob... can anybody think of any others?
Uh, isn't that because you have to actually be charging money before you can "work the beancounters"?
Could there possibly be a flaw somewhere in the logic that "there is no such thing as bad publicity"?
Personally, I do refuse to buy products from companies with annoying ads, but I'm probably in the minority.
The heck with that, make 'em program a KIM 1 (like I had to) instead! The KIM was was basically a 6502, hex keypad, and LCD. That's it. Smarter students used the Apple ][ assembler to translate assembly into hex, then punched the hex into memory via the keypad...
You forgot 4) Don't put your real email address in your /. user profile. Those old postings are archived forever, and easily accessable by any web spider...
This just seems like one more indication of Microsoft's self-destructive behaviour. They appear to be betting the company on the .NET initiative, but as I see it, the success of .NET depends on other companies trusting Microsoft to take care of thier data, and trusting Microsoft to NOT use the fact that they control the servers that the data is stored on for Microsoft's competitive advantage. Now, given Microsoft's past history, and given the fact that the Microsoft octopus is expanding into so many different areas that potentially EVERY high-technology company will become a direct competitor with Microsoft in some field, ask your self: "Do I trust Microsoft with my data?" Then ask yourself how many successful companies are going to answer "yes" to that question. My suspicion is that any company naive and gullible enough to fall for the .NET/XP trojan horse hook, line, and sinker probably is too poorly managed to stay in business for long anyway. Prediction: .NET early adopters will experience a phenomenon simular to the .com fiasco, e.g. 80% will be out of business within 2 years. Sell any MSFT stock you still own now...
When given ultimatums, I always choose the opposite of what the person issuing the ultimatums wants me to do. I guess I WON'T be renewing my MSDN membership! Yes, it appears to me that MICROS~1 is shooting themselves in both feet with their current initiatives, but only time will tell...
Thomas Jefferson died broke and deeply in debt. I guess he made some really poor choices, didn't he?
Yes, the current situation, with the same company allowed to control both phone lines and cable lines in the same region sucks. But (provided anyone can get spectrum) wireless would open it up to competition again.
I've asked the phone company, and they say it will cost me $10,000 to run another cable to my house. You sure you want this to come out of your tax dollars? Wouldn't it make a lot more sense to just let me buy a $500 wireless box and hang it on the side of my house? They've the technology to do this for years, and I'm line of sight to virtually all of Beaverton, OR. But no phone company will sell me this service! Wouldn't providing a kick in the pants to existing communications monopolies to provide wireless make a lot more sense then running a fiber to every house in the country?
Truth be known, I'd pay big bucks to drive on a private highway, if it didn't have the arbitrary and capricious speed limits I'm subjected to on the public ones. Which brings up a point: do you really want to have the cyber equivalent of getting pulled over for speeding on the information superhighway? That which the government funds, it controls. If a censored, limited, highly taxed internet is what you want, you're welcome to it. I sorta prefer the current anarchic situation myself.
Your criticism is complete bullshit. What about removing your head from you arse before hitting that submit button next time, eh?
You come across as both an immature and arrogant zealot, and a wienie to boot!
The most competent programmers spend their time coding, not making ill-conceived flames whose only purpose is to demonstrate the author's ignorance. Again, if you'll read the original comment, I made it crystal clear I was speaking from my own personal experience. Your mileage may differ. Yes, a lot of times the best choice is open source, a lot of the time it isn't.
Anyone who true beleives the original posting stated or implied that "all good engineers develop with open source products" should stop smoking crack for a few days, then re-read the original comment. You, my dear friend, are obviously a severely deluded, funny little troll!
If you haven't diligently reviewed the source and then compiled it yourself, _any_ software could contain trojans... even say, software coming out of a certain monolithic company in Redmond. In the Open Source community we rely on many eyes examining the code to detect malicious insertions, but even this isn't foolproof. In general, it's good idea to assume that any code that hasn't been running for several months _may_ contain back doors. The assumption is that if the software is running on enough machines, within a few months to a year _somebody_ should have detected the problem, although there are no guarantees. In this case, running a new update of the SETI code DOES represent a security risk.
My personal experience is that for the same programmer writing network software using Linux was at least TWICE as productive as using M$ development tools, although more that 5 times as productive is a bit suprising. I think what we have here is more due to the most competent programmers choosing to work with open source, and the least competent, most gullible ones choosing to work with Windows.
One thing that may be worth it because you can actually _feel_ the difference is subwoofers. These should preferably shake the entire house when "Alzo Spake Zarathustra" is played at high volume (for those of you that don't recognize the name: you have heard the music, it's usually refered to as "2001").
Master of Business Administration
Actually, Java is not that slow, and there is nothing to stop you from compiling Java to machine code, in which case it should run as fast as C++. However, in an educational environment, it is good that you're code run slow enough so that the effects of good vs. bad programming practices is perceptable. In fact, I have used timing a few thousand iterations of computationally intense algorithms in Java and then tweaking them as a way of optimizing algorithms, which were later ported to C. Experimenting with Java is usually faster, since it only recompiles the single class that changed.
Having taught Java as an introductory language, I feel qualified to state that it should be the first language anybody learns. Why? Because it's simple; it's easier to learn. And it doesn't teach you the bad habits that say BASIC would. It is more standardized across different platforms than C/C++, and just as good for OOP as C++. And of course, it's FREE for educational use. Java isn't a perfect language (frankly, the lack of unsigned primitive types bothers me) but it's the best language for beginners.
Not every computer user, or even every computer user with which I would like to share code with, is a hacker. Let's face it, 95% of all computer owners probably aren't capable of successfully installing a compiler, compiling a non-trivial app, and installing the app. (Needless to say, these are mostly windows users.)
heard of POSIX?
The nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from. Yes, the fact that most OSes are now 99% POSIX compatible means that it takes only a day or two to port an app, rather than months. But that's still a day or two per machine, and requires that you own one of every machine. Myself, I've got 6 x86 boxen and nothing with any other kind of CPU. By the way, can we have a show of hands, how many people have actually ported to Windows' "POSIX compliant" API? How many people were slightly put off by their disclaimer "We implement POSIX, but none of the socket calls." Uh, that's really usefull...
Your arguments regarding optimization also apply to distributing files as Java byte code, but the simple fact is, for most applications, nobody gives a damn about optimization anymore anyway! Let's see, even if your favorite text editor were 100, or even 1000 times slower, would you be able to type faster than it can buffer input? I don't think so! For the few cases in which cycles are that critical, shouldn't the code be written in hand-optimized assembly and made available in system libraries anyway?
Your argument that straight binary translation is useless, and that you also need to re-create the entire run time environment is a good point. This, however, is an argument in favor of using Java (or som equivalent), and is an argument AGAINST distributing everything as source. Have you tried lately to write a non-trivial application where the same source compiles on both Linux and Windows lately? (It can be done, but it is EVEN LESS FUN THAN HERDING CATS!) Fact is, this whole discussion is fairly pointless because run-time environment compatibility is both much more important and much harder to acheive than mechanical tranlation of one machine's opcodes to another machine's opcodes.
I don't see how the problem that I'd like to send you dynamic content via email without requiring you to be running the same CPU as I am is caused by closed standards. On the contrary, it seems to be an inevitable side effect of competition in the processor market. Yes, it is an obvious solution: given that I can do on-demand translation to the Java Virtual Machine, how much harder is it to do on-demand translation to the instruction set of a real CPU?
Uh, that's "Pearl Harbor", silly Englishman... ;-)
Let's make a deal -- we'll use your anachronistic English spellings when refering to British place names, if you'll use our creative American spellings when refering to American place names, ok?
The Patriot
Everybody knows this was just a remake of "Braveheart" with "American colonies" substituted for "Scotland" and "sons" substituted for "wife". I assure you that, although it was quite an emotional stirring movie, even the most gullible Americans (and that's pretty darn gullible!) don't accept it as historical fact.
No sir, I do NOT want a GyroPoint...
This means you MUST use their special drivers, which, er, aren't available for any operating system not controlled by Mr. Gates, are they?