***That every bad decision that I thought was bad had a logical explanation behind it.***
No, that's a fair assessment I think. Microsoft doesn't make all that many bad decisions. But when they do screw something up, they screw things up big time. My short list of things Microsoft did wrong.
1. The Registry. They really should have known that a huge, undocumentable data base with sloppy security was going to cause untold mischief. If they had called me in 1993 and asked, I'd have told them pretty much what was going to happen. I'm far from the brightest guy around, so I think they really should have been able to figure it out for themselves.
2. Failing to anticipate the importance of the Internet for way too long.
3. Trying to build a desktop OS with a server architecture and maintain backward compatibility with old applications. What they ended up with was a stable desktop that is not a very satisfactory place for users and has horrible security problems. I think they would have done better to try to design a great single user OS with backward compatiblity. (And yes, Linux has the same architecture. Is has much the same problems although no one seems to want to think seriously about that)
4. Trying to protect their Intellectual Property at the expense of user convenience. Hardly anyone remembers, but two decades ago, Microsoft was the consumer's friend. They sold decent, if undistinguished, products at reasonable prices and didn't copy protect things. IMHO, they could have continued along that route, been just as rich as they are today, and been a hell of a lot more popular. To a significant extent, the OSS movement is fueled by folks who are really, really fed up with Microsoft. Microsoft could have avoided that I think.
***Y'know, a couple of decades ago I was running non-native applications on a 7Mhz system with 1MB RAM (my old A500). They were fast, but not quite as fast as native. I'm now using a system in the region of 500 times faster, in terms of raw CPU, and with 2,048 times more memory. And y'know what, non-native stuff is fast, but not quite as fast as native. Something about code expanding to fill the available CPU cycles, methinks.***
Or something...
My P166 with Windows 95 boots and runs applications faster than my wifes' 2.4 GHz XP machine. At least until we get into stuff that starts swapping because the P166 has only 64mb of memory. I get frustrated on the newer "faster" machines (we have several around here) because they are so unresponsive compared to the antique. I can't get over the feeling that we're doing something wrong here but I can't quite pin down what.
My gut feeling is that the issue is not native code vs interpreted. Maybe its something we might call the crud to useful code (C2UC) ratio. That is to say that interpreted code on a low C2UC machine will be more satisfactory than native code on a high C2UC box.
I expect from the hardware requirements that Vista will probably open new horizons in high C2UC and low user satisfaction.
Re:What makes you think Java won't rule the client
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The End of Native Code?
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· Score: 2, Informative
***What is it now, 2006, and Java came out around 1996?***
1990 actually. vs 1987 for PERL, 1990 for Python, 1995 for PHP, and 1995 for Ruby.
***And what can us consumers do about it? If we refuse it, we don't get updates.***
If you don't get Windows updates, what? Your toenails will fall off? Your children will become laughing stocks? Osama bin Laden will force the US, NATO and the UN to sign a surrender document on the Whitehouse steps?
Odds on bet. Sometime in the next decade, either:
1. Microsoft will release a bad update that will cripple tens of millions of PCs around the world. They actually did release an innocuous looking Windows 98 patch from Intel a few years ago. It broke IDE on a lot of PCs. Removing that update for those who got it turned out to be non-trivial. IMHO, that should be all the warning a sensible user needs about the risks blindly loading patches.
or
2. Some seventeen year old sociopath in Bucharest will figure out how to hijack Windows Update/WGA and will download truly nasty malware onto half a billion PCs before the mechanism is shut down.
or both.
IMO, the obvious benefits of running Windows Update are roughly balanced by the not so obvious risks in doing so. Microsoft has chosen to give you another reason not to use it. Why not take them at their word? Don't use it.
More important probably is whether WGA works to the honest user's benefit. That's a really important, and really difficult question. So much so that I'm not sure that anyone including Microsoft really knows. Personally, II think that a cautious user should probably avoid WGA, quit buying Microsoft products other than the OS, and start thinking about switching to Apple or Linux. But it's really not that big a deal unless you are paid to worry about the welfare of a bunch of PCs and a like number of users. Which, thank God, being retired, I no longer am.
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NT based Windows desktops are entirely too much like the Leaning Tower of Pisa with 13 additional stories tacked on.
It's Pointy Headed Bosses all the way down
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The Living Dilbert?
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· Score: 1
It's been a while, but I worked for several decades in the Military Industrial Complex and saw a lot of operations. Some general observations:
If you find the military frustrating, stay away from the federal civil service. I recall an AF Major looking out over a floor full of civil service IT types and muttering "I couldn't do that. It's a f**king demeaning job". I agreed with him 100%.
Many large companies are every bit as screwed up as the military and have many of the disadvantages of the military without the benefits. If you must work for a big company and aren't ambitious, try to get yourself transferred to a remote field office just as fast as you can. There is not a lot of job security with many large companies. Never has been amongst military contractors BTW.
Small operations are often better. They will probably underpay you and probably overwork you. But they are, on average, more fun. If it's not fun, and you have a choice, why do it?
On the other hand, many small companies are not very sound financially. They tend to drop like flies when the economy turns down. A recession is not a good time to be looking for a job.
New companies are, on average, less structured and more fun than older ones.
Be aware that many military trained IT types are not especially good at IT. You probably know that already. So do many employers. There are plenty of exceptions, so military IT experience shouldn't be the absolute kiss of death. But it won't help. A transferable security clearance OTOH...
If there is some aspect of IT that fascinates you, look for a job, even a lousy job in that area. If you just want a job, things on the outside may not be all that much better than the USAF.
100000A is going to require a pretty big cable. Even if the resistance is only.000001 Ohm per foot, that's still going to be I^2*R=4KW generated per foot, no? Maybe we can cook dinner and heat up the bath water while charging the car?
And isn't there going to be a pretty healthy magnetic field? Aren't flying small objects like screws, wrenches, screws, motorscooters and such likely to be a hazard at that filling station?
***The reason: the scarcity of Linux and open source documentation.***
Windows and Windows software are documented? When did that happen?
I admit that my Windows experience is desktop, not server, but I have always found Windows and Windows software documentation to be fragmentary and entirely too often dead flat wrong. Linux documentation leaves a lot to be desired also, but my take is that it is more comprehensive, less inaccurate, and ultimately source is available if (well, OK, when...) the documentation is too awful.
***Why the US has to be different once again I haven't figured out.***
Gee, I dunno. Could it be because our politicians are venal and our citizenry spectacularly ill-informed? No? OK, I'll try to come up with another theory. How about we've been taken over by aliens? Incompetent aliens no less. No? OK then, how about American beer dissolves brain cells? Sorry, best I can do.
***And it always will be, regardless of the operating system. People want powerful information systems on their desk, yet most of them simply don't want to put in the effort to secure those systems (or even learn to do so).***
Not always I think. There's no obvious reason that security and usability can't coexist someday, it's just that no one knows how to align them.
The issue with Vista appears to be that Microsoft seems to have misguessed how to best to secure software using current technology. Maybe they can tweak it into something that folks can live with. Maybe they can't. If not, I imagine that (almost) everyone will turn User Access Controls off, and Microsoft will go off to try something different in the next major release. In the interim, they will claim that they have world class security and it's the user's fault for not using it.
It'd help if IT folks would get a grip on reality. Users are not very programmable. Users can't remember complex passwords, don't follow instructions consistently, and will not, with rare exceptions, deal properly with endless access permission screens. If we depend on stuff like that for security, then our systems are not going to be very secure. It's not the user's fault that systems are insecure any more than it is the fault of US taxpayers that no one can fill out any but the simplest income tax form correctly.
Pages 1-3: They have again improved (i.e. changed) the graphical interface with, are you ready for this? tranparent windows (I assume this is different from not displaying the window at all).
Pages 4-11 They've fixed IE so that it is secure, does what Firefox does, and prints properly (about damn time if true). People still use IE?
Pages 12-15 They've added GUI IPV6 support
Page 16 You can specify your language for voice input
Page 17 They've tinkered with the help system (again).
Pages 19-21 You will now have a choice of secure or usable. That's an exclusive or.
Pages 22-24 They have expanded Windows Update (an accident waiting to happen if you ask me)
Pages 25-29 They have tinkered some with Explorer. Some of the stuff sounds reasonable.
Page 29 They have done more work on device driver installation. This is probably a genuine improvement. But XP was pretty good.
Page 30 You can specify default browser, email, etc in one place
Page 31 There will be a new DirectX, but it's not ready yet.
Pages 32-39 All the old games are there and you can save and restore them. They've added chess, inkball.and purple place.(Yes, TH really devoted EIGHT pages to games)
It took five years for This ? I imagine that there is more, but I don't know what. I've probably trialized some genuine improvements. But on the whole, Vista seems pretty underwhelming, and in any case, my fondest hope is that I can stick with Windows 9 until either Linux really works well, or Microsoft rethinks its approach to OSes and delivers up somthing that does less and does it better.
***It would take an expert insider a lot of work to cause the kind of catastrophes the author is predicting here***
Maybe. Trouble is that if there are a gazillion potential vulnerabilies, odds are that a few will be easy to exploit. And there do seem to be a lot of possibilities. For example, how about we get into a railroad company's computers and bias the weight calculations a bit? The result might well be a series of spectacular crashes as trains come off long downgrades doing 100mph. Is Al Quedda capable of doing that if the vulnerabilities are there? Probably. Bin Laden himself is an engineer and I imagine that he is not the only Islamic fundamentalist with brains and technical training.
On the other hand, I don't think Al Quedda really cares that much about the US. If they did, we wouldn't have had to wait for Katrina to destroy the New Orleans levees. And the aquaducts bringing water to Los Angeles would be history. And... The Islamic fundamentalists appear to be interested in purifying Islam -- which is hard, not in bringing the US to its knees which probably is much easier. The point of 9/11 was not Death to the Infidels. It was that moslems are not powerless and can strike back at what they view as oppression. I think that moslems got that message even if the West's unguided missle leaders did not.
.
What makes me nervous is that the Bush adminstration is worried about this. God knows what that bunch of screwups will do to solve the problem. Something stupid and inappropriate almost for sure. Gee, a fire -- let's throw some gasoline on it -- seems to be GWB's style.
***But it's not the tape that needs the contract; well not actually a contract as such; it's just the SCSI bus that connects the tape drive and it may look like it but "SCSI is NOT magic. There are fundamental technical reasons why you have to sacrifice a virgin goat to your SCSI chain every now and then."***
A reasonable assumption, but no, in my case it was the drives. The heads quit reading and defied cleaning (I'm not a total stranger to cleaning helical heads. I kept a couple of VCRs going for a decade with cleaning tapes and an occasional manual cleaning).
You're right that SCSI is not magic. It's not engineering either as far as I can see. I really tried to take the technology seriously, but my experience was that SCSI problems usually defied rational analysis -- at least by me. Disconcertingly, what most often worked to solve them was experimenting with illegal terminator configurations until one worked. Occasionally tinkering with totally incomprehensible, poorly documented, SCSI BIOS settings helped also.
Will a goat fit through the tiny door of those tape drives? Never occurred to me to try.
I fought with tapes from 1961 until 2005, and frankly, I never had much but trouble with the damn things. OK for tying up packages (although it'd be easier if they weren't so slippery). Not so good for data transfer. They aren't even all that good for playing back music or video.
I do understand that some people use them successfully for data backup in large installations, but I'll be damned if I can see how. Maybe there is a blank, postage paid, contract with Satan included in the materials shipped with classy tape drives? And the software... I can deal with tar and cpio. No worse (or better) than most unix command line software. But BACKUP EXEC? Surely, it can't be as awful as it seems. There's some secret manual that they hid from me, right?
Anyway, for the subset of home and small business users who actually back up data, help has hopefully arrived or is on the way in the form of flash memory. And perhaps it'll scale in the future to enterprise backup applications. Maybe in 20 years IT folks will look at tape drives in computer museums with the same bemusement that the currently exhibit for punch card equiment.
I STILL have the same parallel port ZIP drive that I bought in 1992 to archive data when the 105mb hard drive in my 386SX16 filled up. And I still use it every weekend to back up a copy of my critical data for offsite (car trunk) storage. Other than wearing out a couple of disks, sufficiently that there weren't enough good sectors left to save 98mb of data it has performed flawlessly.
I realize that not everyone was that lucky, and maybe including ZIP in the list is reasonable. But in point of fact, I never encountered a ZIP drive that didn't work. I sort of think that what kept people from using ZIP was the relatively high cost of the media, not the occasional spectacular device failures.
Now if we want to talk about crappy data storage hardware, let's bring up the subject of CD drives. I have four CDRW drives on the household computers and not one of them can be relied on to write more than a couple of hundred MB without an error. OK, CDR/CDRW have lousy S/N ratios because evey vendor uses their own proprietary recording layer formulation in order to avoid paying royalties (just another benefit of Intellectual Property laws). You'd think that commercial pressed CDs would read reliably. Not so -- not even on a PC that's only a year old or on a USB CD drive borrowed from my wife's sewing machine. In fact, when I have to load data from a CD, I often end up roaming around the house looking for a drive that will read it, copy all the files to disk and move them to the target machine via the household network. Back when I used to work with a lot of machines, we'd occasionally get a batch of machines with OK CD or CDRW drives. But most of the drives we got failed within a year or three and had to be replaced with other drives that failed within a year or three.
CD is a teriffic medium for music where an occasional error is tolerable. For data, it sucks. With the possible exception of magnetic tape, CD has to be the most troublesome and least reliable data storage medium since paper tape.
And maybe we should add PC magnetic tape to the list of really bad technology products. I can't tell you how many magnetic tapes I have found to be unreadable after the unfortunate owner's hard drive had crashed or been eaten by a virus. And that's not just Travan and similar junk. The last computer I had to deal with that used tape was a Netware server that ate three drives in three years under warranty. These drives listed for about $1000 each. Another, much cheaper, drive purchased after the warranty ran out lasted 18 months. It was on its fifth drive when it was retired. By then, I was buying used low end drives for relatively reasonable prices. Worked every bit as well as the classy drives (i.e. dismally)
After drive number four I stuffed a drive caddy into a junker (486SX33), installed Linux and backed up the system every night to a hard drive as well as to tape (on days when we had a functioning tape drive). The network backup was much easier to run. Infinitely easier to recover data from.... and comperable in cost if one doesn't need many levels of backup.
Are you daft, man? Have you not seen the throngs of cold, hungry, computer users out there begging for yet another incompatible digital format in addition the 17,619 picture, audio, text, word processing, spreadsheet, etc formats already in use? Sometimes it's hard to get out the door through the mobs of the underformatted unfortunates clogging the streets and crying toward Redmond to be saved from the curse of software that will actually work properly with material imported from someone else's computer.
This may not be the silliest idea since the Edsel, but it is close.
***"I tried to install on a laptop, and it didn't work."
Am I the only one who's sitting here and wondering, "What was this guy thinking?!" ***
I think maybe we (all of us, not just you) have lost track of what Alpha and Beta mean. Your observation is absolutely correct... for Alpha Test software -- which might -- on a good day -- work on vanilla hardware.
Beta Test is supposed to mean something like 'We think it's about ready to ship and want users to tell us what's wrong with it that we don't know about.' OK, so the software was 'near Beta', not Beta. Still, I think it should have done better than it did even on a laptop.
Before someone accuses me of not knowing what Alpha and Beta mean, Let me demonstrate that I'm not alone in my ignorance. Here's a link to the Wikipedia article on Software_Testing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_testing.
***To sum it up, his first laptop didn't have updated Vista drivers,...***
Actually, he had drivers that would apparently have worked after a fashion. He got them to work sort of on a clean install, But the initial install process ate his drivers (and all his applications I assume) -- and took four(!!!) hours to do so.
If nothing else, we seem to have one data point here. The Vista beta apparently will not run cleanly with XP drivers. Worth knowing I think.
Now 'splain to me again. If I have a deep and solid emotional attachment to my spare cash and data, why would I spend money for Windows Vista? It surely will consume some of the first, may eat the second, and doesn't seem to offer me one single feature that I care about.
Your point, I'm sure, is that there are things schools in developing countries need a lot more than computers. I agree with you actually, and I wouldn't limit that to developing countries.
But the first few computers in a school really will have a positive effect. Probably a $100 laptop or three will make it easier for teachers to create and print teaching materials, and will help with grading, and attendance and bizarre mandatory paperwork which I suspect is not a phenomenon unique to the developed world. There will be some other beneficial uses.
The idea of giving every kid in any K-12 school -- developed country or not -- a computer, strikes me as being somewhere between wierd and demented. But a few cheap computers in each of a million or so schools that now don't have enough of them will probably do some good.
***I don't see why this is a big deal. Average desktop users should not have admin rights -- no? ***
Well, maybe not. Every geek in the universe thinks that no one should have admin privileges... except them. And it's very likely impossible to secure a machine where the user has admin privileges. On the other hand, it's not all that easy to make a program run properly when run by a non-admin user. Especially if it is a legacy application.
Users tend to want their software to work, and it tends to work a LOT better if the user runs as admin. Especially on Windows, but even on Linux it's sometimes non-trivial to get software to work right for a non-admin user. It doesn't help that Microsoft has, in the past, encouraged practices that turn out to be somewhat at odds with good user security. For example they advised developers to use their humongous, questionably designed, poorly documented Registry for application data. You want to make bets on how much software that uses the Registry for its own data storage will run right for a non-admin user with just a default install?
I don't have the slightest idea how to straighten this mess out. But my bet is that just taking admin away from Microsoft (and enterprise, (and home)) users isn't going to fix things in any realistic fashion. At least not without untold pain, aggravation, and everyone yelling at everyone else about their total idiocy.
***but... but... oh, god, I hate environmentalists... but it doesn't PRODUCE any ionizing radiation, aside from gamma stuff that's shielded anyway!***
But it does produce a bunch of neutrons that convert non-radioactive materials to particle emiting isotopes. It's not that big a deal I think, but fusion reactors are going to generate some radioactive waste. If (OK, when) a fusion reactor manages to blow up there may well be some radioactive contamination of the neighborhood. The party line here is that at any given time, there won't be much fuel in the reactor core so the explosion can not be all that devestating. It'd be interesting to see a comparison of radioactive contamination from say one thermonuclear accident a decade to the steady release of minute amounts of radioactives from coal and petroleum. I'd bet that fusion wins out on that score.
Anyway, the tree huggers are (slowly) coming to comprehend that nuclear and thermonuclear power are probably LESS polluting than fossil fuels. It'll be a few decades before they figure out that the world economy really can not be run on the methane emitted from fermenting dandelion greens, but eventually they will come around. Who knows, in a couple of decades, you and your environmentalist neighbors may yet find true love.
***I just don't get the idea of a text editor that relies heavily on the mouse. Keyboard shortcuts seem like a much better idea, since your hands are already on the keyboard when you type. Plus, I find it difficult to quickly click on text with the mouse, since it consists of a bunch of tiny little rows and letters.***
You're probably dead on -- at least for yourself and a bunch of other users like yourself.
My own operating style tends to use the clipboard a lot, and even on Windows where the clipboard is pretty reliable, I end up swearing a lot at some otherwise sterling applications (Firefox comes to mind) where the marked text often doesn't match the mouse clicks without several retries or resorting to marking with the shift key and arrows keys after several failed attempts to get the mouse to do this simple job right. It doesn't help that some applications overload the mouse selection and will try to execute the text or move it if they decide that is what was wanted. Other applications will decide to scroll the screen in response to mouse motions while trying to mark text. The results are kind of entertaining -- when this is happening to someone else.
I have a perfectly good Linux installation that I hardly ever use because the IBM CUA keyboard conventions for cutting, pasting, and copying to the clipboard are erratic. Sometimes they work. Sometimes they don't. The mouse conventions work (in KDE anyway) except for the problems in not marking the right stuff, but they require me to mark, drop down a menu, and select an option. That's really tedious.
Who needs all that? A mouse centric editor might be fine if the infrastructure to support it were rock solid. But even after a couple of decades of GUI it's not. No one seems to be in much of a hurry to do the uninteresting and probably quite extensive work required to fix it.
***And they also weren't. Are you trying to be sarcastic?***
Good guess.
***Why not? Compared to every other military unit mentioned in this thread, these guys are losers. And seeing as you put quotes around the street gangs, are you trying to hint that you have a better definition?
They won't be running Iraq, because these people aren't even FROM Iraq. They're paid mercenaries that blow shit up at random to frighten people.***
Since you seem to be sincere, if misguided, I'll try to refrain from sarcasm and summon up a little patience. Unfortunately, I sort of ran out of that some decades ago -- I think it was about the time Henry Kissenger won a Nobel Peace prize.
The point of my sarcasm was that diminishing unconventional military forces with silly and inaccurate descriptions has a long history. Suprisingly often, those who are so deprecated turn out in the long run to be the winners.
So let's take a look at those 'street gangs' of yours:
First and foremost, there are the Peshmerga. They consist of 100,000 or so Kurdish "para"-militaries. I doubt that you intended to include them as "street gangs", but the basic differences between them and say the Badr Corps, is that they have been around longer and are our long-term allies. They are in fact being somewhat subsidized by a foreign power -- the US. Something that you might remember is that unlikely as it may seem today, in two years we may well be supporting some other faction and fighting the Peshmerga.
There is the Badr Corps. This bunch of beauties is the military arm of the shiite Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Their leadership purportedly trained in Iran. Incredible as it seems, these guys are the core of the proud new Iraqi security forces and are therefore our allies (this week anyway).
And we have the Mahdi Army. These are the Shiite paramilitaries 10000 or more loyal to Muqtada al Sadr. They engaged in the first real shooting fest between US troops and the militias in 2004 when the US (probably inadvisably) attempted to arrest al Sadr. As far as I know, they have no major foreign affiliations but they have promised to defend Iran if the US invades. They are not fans of the US.
There are the Baathist militias. These are Sunni (and, for all I know Christian as well, the Baath party is secular, not purely islamic). It is generally believed they are the core remnants of Saddam Hussein's military. These guys are thought to have substantial arms caches. Anyway, they control the three Western Provinces as well as parts of Baghdad ---more or less -- except where and when they don't. These are the guys who fought US troops for a week in Fallujah before they faded away. Somebody, maybe them entertains themselves regularly by lobbing mortar shells at US troops in the Fallujah area.
And there are the Jihadiis. These are Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi's islamic fundamentalists -- the local arm of Al Quedda. They are said to be less than popular with the other factions in Iraq, but that's probably irrelevant because their work in Iraq is probably done. Their goal was to destabilize the place and replace secular Islam with fundamentalist Islam. Preferably Sunni fundamentalist Islam -- which isn't going to happen in most of the country. But my guess is that a fragmented country with a some Salafist areas is, from their viewpoint, a win compared to the centrally controlled secular country that Saddam Hussein was running.
And, of course, there are Turkmen militias, Christian militias, Tribal militias, neighborhood militias, and actual street gangs.
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As far as I know, most of the mercenaries in Iraq are hired by the US. I suppose in any place as chaotic as Iraq there must be some islamic mercenaries, but I doubt they are a major force. I think that the guys you were thinking of who blow things (including themselves) up are mostly religious fanatics, not mercenaries.
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So, who is going to end up controlling Iraq? Who the hell
Don't blame me. If it had been my call, we'd be spending money on science, not bizarre experiments in imperialism. (Wrong century for that). The bad news is that you can expect a lot more of this in the out years when the results of the current administration's fiscal whackiness come home to roost. I suppose there could be all sorts of reasons for delaying/cutting SOFIA and that some of them might be valid. But on the surface it looks like a worthy project.
***and fucked the German partners.***
Dumb bastards. That'll teach those sauerkraut slurping ninnies to try to talk us out of sailing into Iraq with guns blazing.
***Why not just cut the ISS?***
Because that would require some leadership and sound decision making? If I recall correctly, Michael Griffin is not a fan of the ISS. Having a NASA head who will actually say publically that the space shuttle and ISS were mistakes is surely a step in an unfamiliar direction that looks like the right direction to me. But it'll take more than one guy to turn our space program around.
A semester isn't a lot of time, and you need to develop teaching materials which will probably take a lot longer than you think it will. Moreover, you are going to find that your classes don't move at the pace that you as a student would think they should move. They are going to move at the pace of the slowest fairly dull student you decide to target and pull along.
Unless they have used them in the past, vi and emacs are not going to be intuitive for many of your students. There is a subset of humanity that thinks that vi is about the most aggravating purported text editor ever deployed. (Yes, there really are folks that would choose ed if ed and vi were the only two choices.) Emacs is more capable, but not more intuitive. Doesn't matter if the folks who dislike these editors are right or wrong. What matters is that you may need to work some of your students through enough of their problems with the text editor to get work done. That means that to some extent you would be teaching a course in vi or emacs, not a course in Python or Java. Is that really what you want to sign up for?
So you should go with an IDE? I don't know about that. The only Python IDE I have tried is IDLE and it runs so oddly under Windows that I quit using it after a couple of hours of struggling. (It acts like it saves files, but I'll be damned if I can figure out where it is putting them. Not where it says it is). I assume that it runs better under Unix, but I'm not sure that better is good enough. In any case, it certainly didn't make my life easier.
So it seems to me like you might want use whatever editor will cause you and the students the least grief. If you can teach the entire course with four line programs input from the console, maybe that's what you should do. If you need an editor, maybe you need to look for one that is as intuitive as possible -- joe, pico, mc from a Linux console. nedit or something similar if your students have a GUI available. Notepad if you are on Windows.
Maybe show them an IDE in the last class session just so they know that IDEs exist for Java and Python.
Just my thoughts. Not an expert and have just enough teaching experience to think that you have signed up for about as much job as any sane person would want to undertake.
***How? At this point they're just street gangs with explosives, funded by neighboring countries.***
... The American revolutionists were just a rabble with a few stolen muskets. And the Vietminh were just a bunch rice farmers with a handful of small arms. I would not dismiss those 'street gangs' my friend. On the whole, it seems likely that when the dust settles, the street gangs will be running Iraq, and America's wingnuts will be blaming everyone but themselves for this fiasco.
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No, that's a fair assessment I think. Microsoft doesn't make all that many bad decisions. But when they do screw something up, they screw things up big time. My short list of things Microsoft did wrong.
1. The Registry. They really should have known that a huge, undocumentable data base with sloppy security was going to cause untold mischief. If they had called me in 1993 and asked, I'd have told them pretty much what was going to happen. I'm far from the brightest guy around, so I think they really should have been able to figure it out for themselves.
2. Failing to anticipate the importance of the Internet for way too long.
3. Trying to build a desktop OS with a server architecture and maintain backward compatibility with old applications. What they ended up with was a stable desktop that is not a very satisfactory place for users and has horrible security problems. I think they would have done better to try to design a great single user OS with backward compatiblity. (And yes, Linux has the same architecture. Is has much the same problems although no one seems to want to think seriously about that)
4. Trying to protect their Intellectual Property at the expense of user convenience. Hardly anyone remembers, but two decades ago, Microsoft was the consumer's friend. They sold decent, if undistinguished, products at reasonable prices and didn't copy protect things. IMHO, they could have continued along that route, been just as rich as they are today, and been a hell of a lot more popular. To a significant extent, the OSS movement is fueled by folks who are really, really fed up with Microsoft. Microsoft could have avoided that I think.
Or something ...
My P166 with Windows 95 boots and runs applications faster than my wifes' 2.4 GHz XP machine. At least until we get into stuff that starts swapping because the P166 has only 64mb of memory. I get frustrated on the newer "faster" machines (we have several around here) because they are so unresponsive compared to the antique. I can't get over the feeling that we're doing something wrong here but I can't quite pin down what.
My gut feeling is that the issue is not native code vs interpreted. Maybe its something we might call the crud to useful code (C2UC) ratio. That is to say that interpreted code on a low C2UC machine will be more satisfactory than native code on a high C2UC box.
I expect from the hardware requirements that Vista will probably open new horizons in high C2UC and low user satisfaction.
1990 actually. vs 1987 for PERL, 1990 for Python, 1995 for PHP, and 1995 for Ruby.
If you don't get Windows updates, what? Your toenails will fall off? Your children will become laughing stocks? Osama bin Laden will force the US, NATO and the UN to sign a surrender document on the Whitehouse steps?
Odds on bet. Sometime in the next decade, either:
1. Microsoft will release a bad update that will cripple tens of millions of PCs around the world. They actually did release an innocuous looking Windows 98 patch from Intel a few years ago. It broke IDE on a lot of PCs. Removing that update for those who got it turned out to be non-trivial. IMHO, that should be all the warning a sensible user needs about the risks blindly loading patches.
or
2. Some seventeen year old sociopath in Bucharest will figure out how to hijack Windows Update/WGA and will download truly nasty malware onto half a billion PCs before the mechanism is shut down.
or both.
IMO, the obvious benefits of running Windows Update are roughly balanced by the not so obvious risks in doing so. Microsoft has chosen to give you another reason not to use it. Why not take them at their word? Don't use it.
More important probably is whether WGA works to the honest user's benefit. That's a really important, and really difficult question. So much so that I'm not sure that anyone including Microsoft really knows. Personally, II think that a cautious user should probably avoid WGA, quit buying Microsoft products other than the OS, and start thinking about switching to Apple or Linux. But it's really not that big a deal unless you are paid to worry about the welfare of a bunch of PCs and a like number of users. Which, thank God, being retired, I no longer am.
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NT based Windows desktops are entirely too much like the Leaning Tower of Pisa with 13 additional stories tacked on.
On the other hand, many small companies are not very sound financially. They tend to drop like flies when the economy turns down. A recession is not a good time to be looking for a job.
And isn't there going to be a pretty healthy magnetic field? Aren't flying small objects like screws, wrenches, screws, motorscooters and such likely to be a hazard at that filling station?
Windows and Windows software are documented? When did that happen?
I admit that my Windows experience is desktop, not server, but I have always found Windows and Windows software documentation to be fragmentary and entirely too often dead flat wrong. Linux documentation leaves a lot to be desired also, but my take is that it is more comprehensive, less inaccurate, and ultimately source is available if (well, OK, when...) the documentation is too awful.
Gee, I dunno. Could it be because our politicians are venal and our citizenry spectacularly ill-informed? No? OK, I'll try to come up with another theory. How about we've been taken over by aliens? Incompetent aliens no less. No? OK then, how about American beer dissolves brain cells? Sorry, best I can do.
Not always I think. There's no obvious reason that security and usability can't coexist someday, it's just that no one knows how to align them.
The issue with Vista appears to be that Microsoft seems to have misguessed how to best to secure software using current technology. Maybe they can tweak it into something that folks can live with. Maybe they can't. If not, I imagine that (almost) everyone will turn User Access Controls off, and Microsoft will go off to try something different in the next major release. In the interim, they will claim that they have world class security and it's the user's fault for not using it.
It'd help if IT folks would get a grip on reality. Users are not very programmable. Users can't remember complex passwords, don't follow instructions consistently, and will not, with rare exceptions, deal properly with endless access permission screens. If we depend on stuff like that for security, then our systems are not going to be very secure. It's not the user's fault that systems are insecure any more than it is the fault of US taxpayers that no one can fill out any but the simplest income tax form correctly.
It took five years for This ? I imagine that there is more, but I don't know what. I've probably trialized some genuine improvements. But on the whole, Vista seems pretty underwhelming, and in any case, my fondest hope is that I can stick with Windows 9 until either Linux really works well, or Microsoft rethinks its approach to OSes and delivers up somthing that does less and does it better.
Maybe. Trouble is that if there are a gazillion potential vulnerabilies, odds are that a few will be easy to exploit. And there do seem to be a lot of possibilities. For example, how about we get into a railroad company's computers and bias the weight calculations a bit? The result might well be a series of spectacular crashes as trains come off long downgrades doing 100mph. Is Al Quedda capable of doing that if the vulnerabilities are there? Probably. Bin Laden himself is an engineer and I imagine that he is not the only Islamic fundamentalist with brains and technical training.
On the other hand, I don't think Al Quedda really cares that much about the US. If they did, we wouldn't have had to wait for Katrina to destroy the New Orleans levees. And the aquaducts bringing water to Los Angeles would be history. And ... The Islamic fundamentalists appear to be interested in purifying Islam -- which is hard, not in bringing the US to its knees which probably is much easier. The point of 9/11 was not Death to the Infidels. It was that moslems are not powerless and can strike back at what they view as oppression. I think that moslems got that message even if the West's unguided missle leaders did not.
.
What makes me nervous is that the Bush adminstration is worried about this. God knows what that bunch of screwups will do to solve the problem. Something stupid and inappropriate almost for sure. Gee, a fire -- let's throw some gasoline on it -- seems to be GWB's style.
A reasonable assumption, but no, in my case it was the drives. The heads quit reading and defied cleaning (I'm not a total stranger to cleaning helical heads. I kept a couple of VCRs going for a decade with cleaning tapes and an occasional manual cleaning).
You're right that SCSI is not magic. It's not engineering either as far as I can see. I really tried to take the technology seriously, but my experience was that SCSI problems usually defied rational analysis -- at least by me. Disconcertingly, what most often worked to solve them was experimenting with illegal terminator configurations until one worked. Occasionally tinkering with totally incomprehensible, poorly documented, SCSI BIOS settings helped also.
Will a goat fit through the tiny door of those tape drives? Never occurred to me to try.
I do understand that some people use them successfully for data backup in large installations, but I'll be damned if I can see how. Maybe there is a blank, postage paid, contract with Satan included in the materials shipped with classy tape drives? And the software ... I can deal with tar and cpio. No worse (or better) than most unix command line software. But BACKUP EXEC? Surely, it can't be as awful as it seems. There's some secret manual that they hid from me, right?
Anyway, for the subset of home and small business users who actually back up data, help has hopefully arrived or is on the way in the form of flash memory. And perhaps it'll scale in the future to enterprise backup applications. Maybe in 20 years IT folks will look at tape drives in computer museums with the same bemusement that the currently exhibit for punch card equiment.
I realize that not everyone was that lucky, and maybe including ZIP in the list is reasonable. But in point of fact, I never encountered a ZIP drive that didn't work. I sort of think that what kept people from using ZIP was the relatively high cost of the media, not the occasional spectacular device failures.
Now if we want to talk about crappy data storage hardware, let's bring up the subject of CD drives. I have four CDRW drives on the household computers and not one of them can be relied on to write more than a couple of hundred MB without an error. OK, CDR/CDRW have lousy S/N ratios because evey vendor uses their own proprietary recording layer formulation in order to avoid paying royalties (just another benefit of Intellectual Property laws). You'd think that commercial pressed CDs would read reliably. Not so -- not even on a PC that's only a year old or on a USB CD drive borrowed from my wife's sewing machine. In fact, when I have to load data from a CD, I often end up roaming around the house looking for a drive that will read it, copy all the files to disk and move them to the target machine via the household network. Back when I used to work with a lot of machines, we'd occasionally get a batch of machines with OK CD or CDRW drives. But most of the drives we got failed within a year or three and had to be replaced with other drives that failed within a year or three.
CD is a teriffic medium for music where an occasional error is tolerable. For data, it sucks. With the possible exception of magnetic tape, CD has to be the most troublesome and least reliable data storage medium since paper tape.
And maybe we should add PC magnetic tape to the list of really bad technology products. I can't tell you how many magnetic tapes I have found to be unreadable after the unfortunate owner's hard drive had crashed or been eaten by a virus. And that's not just Travan and similar junk. The last computer I had to deal with that used tape was a Netware server that ate three drives in three years under warranty. These drives listed for about $1000 each. Another, much cheaper, drive purchased after the warranty ran out lasted 18 months. It was on its fifth drive when it was retired. By then, I was buying used low end drives for relatively reasonable prices. Worked every bit as well as the classy drives (i.e. dismally)
After drive number four I stuffed a drive caddy into a junker (486SX33), installed Linux and backed up the system every night to a hard drive as well as to tape (on days when we had a functioning tape drive). The network backup was much easier to run. Infinitely easier to recover data from. ... and comperable in cost if one doesn't need many levels of backup.
Are you daft, man? Have you not seen the throngs of cold, hungry, computer users out there begging for yet another incompatible digital format in addition the 17,619 picture, audio, text, word processing, spreadsheet, etc formats already in use? Sometimes it's hard to get out the door through the mobs of the underformatted unfortunates clogging the streets and crying toward Redmond to be saved from the curse of software that will actually work properly with material imported from someone else's computer.
This may not be the silliest idea since the Edsel, but it is close.
Am I the only one who's sitting here and wondering, "What was this guy thinking?!" ***
I think maybe we (all of us, not just you) have lost track of what Alpha and Beta mean. Your observation is absolutely correct ... for Alpha Test software -- which might -- on a good day -- work on vanilla hardware.
Beta Test is supposed to mean something like 'We think it's about ready to ship and want users to tell us what's wrong with it that we don't know about.' OK, so the software was 'near Beta', not Beta. Still, I think it should have done better than it did even on a laptop.
Before someone accuses me of not knowing what Alpha and Beta mean, Let me demonstrate that I'm not alone in my ignorance. Here's a link to the Wikipedia article on Software_Testing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_testing.
Actually, he had drivers that would apparently have worked after a fashion. He got them to work sort of on a clean install, But the initial install process ate his drivers (and all his applications I assume) -- and took four(!!!) hours to do so.
If nothing else, we seem to have one data point here. The Vista beta apparently will not run cleanly with XP drivers. Worth knowing I think.
Now 'splain to me again. If I have a deep and solid emotional attachment to my spare cash and data, why would I spend money for Windows Vista? It surely will consume some of the first, may eat the second, and doesn't seem to offer me one single feature that I care about.
But the first few computers in a school really will have a positive effect. Probably a $100 laptop or three will make it easier for teachers to create and print teaching materials, and will help with grading, and attendance and bizarre mandatory paperwork which I suspect is not a phenomenon unique to the developed world. There will be some other beneficial uses.
The idea of giving every kid in any K-12 school -- developed country or not -- a computer, strikes me as being somewhere between wierd and demented. But a few cheap computers in each of a million or so schools that now don't have enough of them will probably do some good.
Well, maybe not. Every geek in the universe thinks that no one should have admin privileges ... except them. And it's very likely impossible to secure a machine where the user has admin privileges. On the other hand, it's not all that easy to make a program run properly when run by a non-admin user. Especially if it is a legacy application.
Users tend to want their software to work, and it tends to work a LOT better if the user runs as admin. Especially on Windows, but even on Linux it's sometimes non-trivial to get software to work right for a non-admin user. It doesn't help that Microsoft has, in the past, encouraged practices that turn out to be somewhat at odds with good user security. For example they advised developers to use their humongous, questionably designed, poorly documented Registry for application data. You want to make bets on how much software that uses the Registry for its own data storage will run right for a non-admin user with just a default install?
I don't have the slightest idea how to straighten this mess out. But my bet is that just taking admin away from Microsoft (and enterprise, (and home)) users isn't going to fix things in any realistic fashion. At least not without untold pain, aggravation, and everyone yelling at everyone else about their total idiocy.
But it does produce a bunch of neutrons that convert non-radioactive materials to particle emiting isotopes. It's not that big a deal I think, but fusion reactors are going to generate some radioactive waste. If (OK, when) a fusion reactor manages to blow up there may well be some radioactive contamination of the neighborhood. The party line here is that at any given time, there won't be much fuel in the reactor core so the explosion can not be all that devestating. It'd be interesting to see a comparison of radioactive contamination from say one thermonuclear accident a decade to the steady release of minute amounts of radioactives from coal and petroleum. I'd bet that fusion wins out on that score.
Anyway, the tree huggers are (slowly) coming to comprehend that nuclear and thermonuclear power are probably LESS polluting than fossil fuels. It'll be a few decades before they figure out that the world economy really can not be run on the methane emitted from fermenting dandelion greens, but eventually they will come around. Who knows, in a couple of decades, you and your environmentalist neighbors may yet find true love.
You're probably dead on -- at least for yourself and a bunch of other users like yourself.
My own operating style tends to use the clipboard a lot, and even on Windows where the clipboard is pretty reliable, I end up swearing a lot at some otherwise sterling applications (Firefox comes to mind) where the marked text often doesn't match the mouse clicks without several retries or resorting to marking with the shift key and arrows keys after several failed attempts to get the mouse to do this simple job right. It doesn't help that some applications overload the mouse selection and will try to execute the text or move it if they decide that is what was wanted. Other applications will decide to scroll the screen in response to mouse motions while trying to mark text. The results are kind of entertaining -- when this is happening to someone else.
I have a perfectly good Linux installation that I hardly ever use because the IBM CUA keyboard conventions for cutting, pasting, and copying to the clipboard are erratic. Sometimes they work. Sometimes they don't. The mouse conventions work (in KDE anyway) except for the problems in not marking the right stuff, but they require me to mark, drop down a menu, and select an option. That's really tedious.
Who needs all that? A mouse centric editor might be fine if the infrastructure to support it were rock solid. But even after a couple of decades of GUI it's not. No one seems to be in much of a hurry to do the uninteresting and probably quite extensive work required to fix it.
Good guess.
***Why not? Compared to every other military unit mentioned in this thread, these guys are losers. And seeing as you put quotes around the street gangs, are you trying to hint that you have a better definition?
They won't be running Iraq, because these people aren't even FROM Iraq. They're paid mercenaries that blow shit up at random to frighten people.***
Since you seem to be sincere, if misguided, I'll try to refrain from sarcasm and summon up a little patience. Unfortunately, I sort of ran out of that some decades ago -- I think it was about the time Henry Kissenger won a Nobel Peace prize.
The point of my sarcasm was that diminishing unconventional military forces with silly and inaccurate descriptions has a long history. Suprisingly often, those who are so deprecated turn out in the long run to be the winners.
So let's take a look at those 'street gangs' of yours:
First and foremost, there are the Peshmerga. They consist of 100,000 or so Kurdish "para"-militaries. I doubt that you intended to include them as "street gangs", but the basic differences between them and say the Badr Corps, is that they have been around longer and are our long-term allies. They are in fact being somewhat subsidized by a foreign power -- the US. Something that you might remember is that unlikely as it may seem today, in two years we may well be supporting some other faction and fighting the Peshmerga.
There is the Badr Corps. This bunch of beauties is the military arm of the shiite Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Their leadership purportedly trained in Iran. Incredible as it seems, these guys are the core of the proud new Iraqi security forces and are therefore our allies (this week anyway).
And we have the Mahdi Army. These are the Shiite paramilitaries 10000 or more loyal to Muqtada al Sadr. They engaged in the first real shooting fest between US troops and the militias in 2004 when the US (probably inadvisably) attempted to arrest al Sadr. As far as I know, they have no major foreign affiliations but they have promised to defend Iran if the US invades. They are not fans of the US.
There are the Baathist militias. These are Sunni (and, for all I know Christian as well, the Baath party is secular, not purely islamic). It is generally believed they are the core remnants of Saddam Hussein's military. These guys are thought to have substantial arms caches. Anyway, they control the three Western Provinces as well as parts of Baghdad ---more or less -- except where and when they don't. These are the guys who fought US troops for a week in Fallujah before they faded away. Somebody, maybe them entertains themselves regularly by lobbing mortar shells at US troops in the Fallujah area.
And there are the Jihadiis. These are Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's islamic fundamentalists -- the local arm of Al Quedda. They are said to be less than popular with the other factions in Iraq, but that's probably irrelevant because their work in Iraq is probably done. Their goal was to destabilize the place and replace secular Islam with fundamentalist Islam. Preferably Sunni fundamentalist Islam -- which isn't going to happen in most of the country. But my guess is that a fragmented country with a some Salafist areas is, from their viewpoint, a win compared to the centrally controlled secular country that Saddam Hussein was running.
And, of course, there are Turkmen militias, Christian militias, Tribal militias, neighborhood militias, and actual street gangs.
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As far as I know, most of the mercenaries in Iraq are hired by the US. I suppose in any place as chaotic as Iraq there must be some islamic mercenaries, but I doubt they are a major force. I think that the guys you were thinking of who blow things (including themselves) up are mostly religious fanatics, not mercenaries.
=== So, who is going to end up controlling Iraq? Who the hell
Don't blame me. If it had been my call, we'd be spending money on science, not bizarre experiments in imperialism. (Wrong century for that). The bad news is that you can expect a lot more of this in the out years when the results of the current administration's fiscal whackiness come home to roost. I suppose there could be all sorts of reasons for delaying/cutting SOFIA and that some of them might be valid. But on the surface it looks like a worthy project.
***and fucked the German partners.***
Dumb bastards. That'll teach those sauerkraut slurping ninnies to try to talk us out of sailing into Iraq with guns blazing.
***Why not just cut the ISS?***
Because that would require some leadership and sound decision making? If I recall correctly, Michael Griffin is not a fan of the ISS. Having a NASA head who will actually say publically that the space shuttle and ISS were mistakes is surely a step in an unfamiliar direction that looks like the right direction to me. But it'll take more than one guy to turn our space program around.
Unless they have used them in the past, vi and emacs are not going to be intuitive for many of your students. There is a subset of humanity that thinks that vi is about the most aggravating purported text editor ever deployed. (Yes, there really are folks that would choose ed if ed and vi were the only two choices.) Emacs is more capable, but not more intuitive. Doesn't matter if the folks who dislike these editors are right or wrong. What matters is that you may need to work some of your students through enough of their problems with the text editor to get work done. That means that to some extent you would be teaching a course in vi or emacs, not a course in Python or Java. Is that really what you want to sign up for?
So you should go with an IDE? I don't know about that. The only Python IDE I have tried is IDLE and it runs so oddly under Windows that I quit using it after a couple of hours of struggling. (It acts like it saves files, but I'll be damned if I can figure out where it is putting them. Not where it says it is). I assume that it runs better under Unix, but I'm not sure that better is good enough. In any case, it certainly didn't make my life easier.
So it seems to me like you might want use whatever editor will cause you and the students the least grief. If you can teach the entire course with four line programs input from the console, maybe that's what you should do. If you need an editor, maybe you need to look for one that is as intuitive as possible -- joe, pico, mc from a Linux console. nedit or something similar if your students have a GUI available. Notepad if you are on Windows.
Maybe show them an IDE in the last class session just so they know that IDEs exist for Java and Python.
Just my thoughts. Not an expert and have just enough teaching experience to think that you have signed up for about as much job as any sane person would want to undertake.
... The American revolutionists were just a rabble with a few stolen muskets. And the Vietminh were just a bunch rice farmers with a handful of small arms. I would not dismiss those 'street gangs' my friend. On the whole, it seems likely that when the dust settles, the street gangs will be running Iraq, and America's wingnuts will be blaming everyone but themselves for this fiasco.