That does not mean it's the only tool for the job. FOSS is not perfect, just like commercial software isn't always the best solution. Like in most areas, the cost of software licenses is minuscule compared to salaries, facilities, materials, etc; software is a tool regardless of whether money is charged for it or not.
I'd rather have cancer cured than agendas furthered.
It's not necessary to pretend you're five different people to make a point. Only a retarded child would think that's some sort of requirement to have your opinions be heard.
And while I didn't say he was trolling, I'd have to disagree. What value do you see in the "M$ Windoze" crap he posts? I even bothered to go through TFA and it doesn't even mention what those servers are running. They could be Solaris or midrange boxes for all we know. But hey, twitter already decided "M$ Windoze" is to blame.
I'm not joined to the hip with Microsoft, and I don't work for them as he conveniently claims over and over again. I manage a data center with just about every conceivable type of hardware and software mankind has produced in the past 35 years, including two mainframes. I'm typing this from an IBM T43 laptop running openSuSE 10. I use their products when it makes sense, and I use something else when it doesn't. But things like that just piss me off to no end, regardless of the target. Free software does not benefit when people like twitter spray their inane bullshit all over the internet for the world to ponder.
It's amazing that you keep replying to yourself and thinking no one has figured out that you have ten different accounts. That is amazing.
Why don't you just say what you have to say with a single post and stop trying to insult everyone's intelligence? For an account with a grand total of 48 posts, a distressing number seem to dedicated to the cult of twitter.
No, of course you're not. You're just some dude that created a Slashdot account three weeks ago with a grand total of 60 comments, most of which are spent shilling twitter's posts and those of his other nine accounts.
Ah, twitter. I think I get this. People are modding you up because they think this is posted by Otter, a long-time Slashdot user with a low UIN. You created this name troll specifically because of that, didn't you?
And of course they don't know that the rest of the time you just shill and complain about the moderation on your other accounts.
I hadn't realized that until now. You're modded down on sight when you post as yourself, because of your trolling. But this one account gets modded up consistently, as does this one, which was also created as a name troll of westlake.
You really have no shame at all twitter. It's nice of you to reply to me using the name troll account you created specificially to target me, just like the ones you've created for anyone on Slashdot who disagrees with you, like westlake, Otter and Mactrope.
Why do you insist on misleading everyone into thinking there is a conversation between multiple people taking place? You've done this "reply to the goatse troll with all my sockpuppets" thing before, and it didn't work out too well then either.
My offtopic moderation is well deserved. Your "insightful" one is not.
Anyone moderating in this thread should be aware that "Mactrope" and "westbake" (who replied to this post) are the same person as twitter. Other sockpuppet accounts (which I assume will show up on this thread soon) include "inTheLoo", "gnutoo", "Odder", "Erris" and "willeyhill".
twitter uses multiple accounts to create the illusion that there is a discussion going on and try to get modded up (most of his accounts have negative karma). He calls it a dreadfully easy game, but doesn't always work.
I hope I can go back over your posting history and see that you commented on how positive it was that they posted record profits last quarter. In the name of fairness, you know. And that would probably lend some relevance to your inclusion of that here, as opposed to making people think that you're doing nothing more than that obnoxious out-of-context bullet point evangelism you seem to enjoy so much.
Use of real standards.
I hope you're not referring to ODF, considering Microsoft have the defacto standard in the office suite platform. That doesn't excuse what they did with OOXML, of course (though it does explain a lot, considering IBM's involvement). What other standards? HTML? CSS? IE7 and 8 are steps in the right direction for them, I think. I'd love to see them support SVG though. They have a lot to do in this area, but they're getting better. It won't happen overnight.
Elimination of all DRM.
You are quick on the draw to complain that the hardware makers are to blame whenever someone mentions a piece of hardware doesn't work with Linux, but you're apparently incapable of making the connection between the media producers and DRM. Why don't you write a few strongly-worded letters to Universal and News Corp. asking them to stop being so paranoid and greedy, and then Microsoft or Apple won't have to add DRM to their operating systems. Unless you want to explain to your cousin Joe Bob why the DVD he bought at Wal-Mart doesn't work on his new computer. I can assure you he won't care a bit about the "DRM is evil" spiel.
But then you're just being intentionally obtuse in the name of the cause, aren't you?
Liberation of their source code.
If this is your measure of their success, I expect they will continue to fail. Release of source code is an altruistic (or practical/commercial if accompanied by the expectation of community involvement) gesture, not a moral imperative.
His articles look reasonable, but you can never tell with that guy.
Well then twitter, why don't you analyze his articles and come to your own conclusion, instead of spraying ad hominems on him just because he doesn't hate Microsoft as much as you obviously do.
I see you forgot to switch sockpuppets before replying to yourself.
Maybe we could organize a code bounty and have someone write you a Firefox extension that makes this easy. A combination HTML highlighter (so that you know you already posted in a thread) and account changer. It could be called SockpuppetSlashFox. Or SlashPuppetFox. Or TwitterSlashPuppetFoxSwitcher. Or just pathetic.
Then you could continue to promote free software in your very special way.
I don't agree with your point about Excel/VBA, but regardless of that, and if you're actually interested in replying to his ad hominems, you deserve to know that "Mactrope" and "westbake" (who replied to you below) are the same person. He also posted on this same article twice with another account.
You already posted (twice) with one of your other accounts. Why don't you try sticking to just one per article? That way people will tend to give you more credibility, if that's at all possible.
And to stay on topic, I'd say that it's a little extreme to drop people into C without warning. Sure, they're going to need it to some extent eventually, but it shouldn't be so hard. Programming in science should be a tool, not what the scientists do.
I'd recommend a procedural interpreted language like Python or Perl. It will be useful beyond research and there are bindings for those two to most scientific and math libraries. No need for C.
Scientific problems, sure. It's not designed for that any more than GNUCash is. But let's not generalize, twitter. It's actually one of Microsoft's better products.
For complex charting and plotting I really like GNUPlot.
In more ways than one, PHP and MySQL are the Visual Basic and Access of the open source world.
They're not very good (or weren't for a long time), they feel cobbled together at best. But they work. They're fast, have a low learning curve, they're accessible and essentially cheap and/or free. They're easy to deploy and shove into production fresh off the prototype phase.
They have large numbers of people who use them as their primary tools. A large percentage of these people are not exactly what you'd call professional developers (I am not a developer, but I've worked closely with them throughout my career), yet they get "the thing" done somehow, and those systems tend to stay up there driving business for a long time.
It's just funny that the very phenomenon that for years and years the platform and language purists argued was one of the Really Bad things about Windows is actually now coming to Linux in a big way. What those elitists never realized is that most developers just want to get the business of business done, cash a paycheck and go home to their families. They don't care that there are 19 different ways of escaping a string in the runtime library. No one cares about that, as long as the platform continues to deliver, even if it just sort of limps around.
All those thousands and thousands of clueless VB/Access/VBA developers don't suddenly become little Donald Knuths because they're looking at a KDE desktop and using Emacs to code curly braces in PHP.
In the context of.NET, C++ is usually called Managed C++, OR "MC++". That describes applications written in C++ that use compiler extensions to leverage the.NET CLR and runtime.
Microsoft does have a "normal" C++ compiler obviously. But it's a little weird because normally if you write an MFC application, it's still C++. An MC++ app is also C++, but MFC is a code framework that does not technically require any special compiler considerations to be used, while MC++ does introduce keywords, modifiers and attributes that are not part of the C++ language itself.
So technically (I think) you could write an MFC app and compile it with the GCC suite. Not so with MC++.
Neither Gates nor Ballmer said that. They said it was a milestone. Even the submission title is directly contradicts what's in the lead-in.
But this is twitter, so what would you expect? Deliberately misrepresent what the whole article is about, spray a few clever dollar signs, and more karma for the sockpuppets. He calls it a "dreadfully easy game".
No, they're not. That's why PayPal can get away with the shit they do. It's a common misconception that most people fall into, that because PayPal handles money, they must be a bank and subject to the same set of regulations you trust to put the stops on your bank if they get fresh with your money (including insurance. PayPal is not FDIC insured if you use their "high yield" holding option).
The problem here is that the transactions involved banks. The fact that PayPal was the conduit is irrelevant in this case, I think.
You absolutely have to tip your hat at this guy. I'm not sure if I feel bad for the financial institutions "bilked" by him (I'm sure they'll recover the money from insurance) or their CEOs that make millions while the stocks underperform, but I feel bad for him. After all he's just playing the system they set up to begin with.
It's obvious he knew exactly what he was doing, and he knew it was wrong. But you have to acknowledge the inventiveness and sheer perseverance.
twitter, have you thought about maybe using the sig on all your accounts to alert people to the fact that you reply to yourself? If you insist on playing this "dreadfully easy" game, at the very least you could do it with some honesty.
You don't think that anyone who is curious will figure out that all "westbake" has ever done is post comments agreeing with twitter and all your other accounts?
Slashdot Mirror
I'd rather have cancer cured than agendas furthered.
And while I didn't say he was trolling, I'd have to disagree. What value do you see in the "M$ Windoze" crap he posts? I even bothered to go through TFA and it doesn't even mention what those servers are running. They could be Solaris or midrange boxes for all we know. But hey, twitter already decided "M$ Windoze" is to blame.
I'm not joined to the hip with Microsoft, and I don't work for them as he conveniently claims over and over again. I manage a data center with just about every conceivable type of hardware and software mankind has produced in the past 35 years, including two mainframes. I'm typing this from an IBM T43 laptop running openSuSE 10. I use their products when it makes sense, and I use something else when it doesn't. But things like that just piss me off to no end, regardless of the target. Free software does not benefit when people like twitter spray their inane bullshit all over the internet for the world to ponder.
(I'll take my offtopic mod now, as usual...)
Why don't you just say what you have to say with a single post and stop trying to insult everyone's intelligence? For an account with a grand total of 48 posts, a distressing number seem to dedicated to the cult of twitter.
No, of course not. Just a concerned bystander.
No, of course you're not. You're just some dude that created a Slashdot account three weeks ago with a grand total of 60 comments, most of which are spent shilling twitter's posts and those of his other nine accounts.
It's just all a big misunderstanding.
And of course they don't know that the rest of the time you just shill and complain about the moderation on your other accounts.
I hadn't realized that until now. You're modded down on sight when you post as yourself, because of your trolling. But this one account gets modded up consistently, as does this one, which was also created as a name troll of westlake.
Why do you insist on misleading everyone into thinking there is a conversation between multiple people taking place? You've done this "reply to the goatse troll with all my sockpuppets" thing before, and it didn't work out too well then either.
My offtopic moderation is well deserved. Your "insightful" one is not.
twitter uses multiple accounts to create the illusion that there is a discussion going on and try to get modded up (most of his accounts have negative karma). He calls it a dreadfully easy game, but doesn't always work.
Sorry for the offtopic post.
I hope I can go back over your posting history and see that you commented on how positive it was that they posted record profits last quarter. In the name of fairness, you know. And that would probably lend some relevance to your inclusion of that here, as opposed to making people think that you're doing nothing more than that obnoxious out-of-context bullet point evangelism you seem to enjoy so much.
Use of real standards.
I hope you're not referring to ODF, considering Microsoft have the defacto standard in the office suite platform. That doesn't excuse what they did with OOXML, of course (though it does explain a lot, considering IBM's involvement). What other standards? HTML? CSS? IE7 and 8 are steps in the right direction for them, I think. I'd love to see them support SVG though. They have a lot to do in this area, but they're getting better. It won't happen overnight.
Elimination of all DRM.
You are quick on the draw to complain that the hardware makers are to blame whenever someone mentions a piece of hardware doesn't work with Linux, but you're apparently incapable of making the connection between the media producers and DRM. Why don't you write a few strongly-worded letters to Universal and News Corp. asking them to stop being so paranoid and greedy, and then Microsoft or Apple won't have to add DRM to their operating systems. Unless you want to explain to your cousin Joe Bob why the DVD he bought at Wal-Mart doesn't work on his new computer. I can assure you he won't care a bit about the "DRM is evil" spiel.
But then you're just being intentionally obtuse in the name of the cause, aren't you?
Liberation of their source code.
If this is your measure of their success, I expect they will continue to fail. Release of source code is an altruistic (or practical/commercial if accompanied by the expectation of community involvement) gesture, not a moral imperative.
Well then twitter, why don't you analyze his articles and come to your own conclusion, instead of spraying ad hominems on him just because he doesn't hate Microsoft as much as you obviously do.
Maybe we could organize a code bounty and have someone write you a Firefox extension that makes this easy. A combination HTML highlighter (so that you know you already posted in a thread) and account changer. It could be called SockpuppetSlashFox. Or SlashPuppetFox. Or TwitterSlashPuppetFoxSwitcher. Or just pathetic.
Then you could continue to promote free software in your very special way.
(I'll take my offtopic mod now)
Which is why I said you don't use Excel for these types of applications.
And to stay on topic, I'd say that it's a little extreme to drop people into C without warning. Sure, they're going to need it to some extent eventually, but it shouldn't be so hard. Programming in science should be a tool, not what the scientists do.
I'd recommend a procedural interpreted language like Python or Perl. It will be useful beyond research and there are bindings for those two to most scientific and math libraries. No need for C.
Scientific problems, sure. It's not designed for that any more than GNUCash is. But let's not generalize, twitter. It's actually one of Microsoft's better products.
For complex charting and plotting I really like GNUPlot.
They're not very good (or weren't for a long time), they feel cobbled together at best. But they work. They're fast, have a low learning curve, they're accessible and essentially cheap and/or free. They're easy to deploy and shove into production fresh off the prototype phase.
They have large numbers of people who use them as their primary tools. A large percentage of these people are not exactly what you'd call professional developers (I am not a developer, but I've worked closely with them throughout my career), yet they get "the thing" done somehow, and those systems tend to stay up there driving business for a long time.
It's just funny that the very phenomenon that for years and years the platform and language purists argued was one of the Really Bad things about Windows is actually now coming to Linux in a big way. What those elitists never realized is that most developers just want to get the business of business done, cash a paycheck and go home to their families. They don't care that there are 19 different ways of escaping a string in the runtime library. No one cares about that, as long as the platform continues to deliver, even if it just sort of limps around.
All those thousands and thousands of clueless VB/Access/VBA developers don't suddenly become little Donald Knuths because they're looking at a KDE desktop and using Emacs to code curly braces in PHP.
Microsoft does have a "normal" C++ compiler obviously. But it's a little weird because normally if you write an MFC application, it's still C++. An MC++ app is also C++, but MFC is a code framework that does not technically require any special compiler considerations to be used, while MC++ does introduce keywords, modifiers and attributes that are not part of the C++ language itself.
So technically (I think) you could write an MFC app and compile it with the GCC suite. Not so with MC++.
Apparently though they get away with anything they want here in the US.
Thanks for the link.
Neither Gates nor Ballmer said that. They said it was a milestone. Even the submission title is directly contradicts what's in the lead-in.
But this is twitter, so what would you expect? Deliberately misrepresent what the whole article is about, spray a few clever dollar signs, and more karma for the sockpuppets. He calls it a "dreadfully easy game".
John Titor! I just *knew* I'd run into you on Slashdot. Eventually.
The problem here is that the transactions involved banks. The fact that PayPal was the conduit is irrelevant in this case, I think.
It's obvious he knew exactly what he was doing, and he knew it was wrong. But you have to acknowledge the inventiveness and sheer perseverance.
You don't think that anyone who is curious will figure out that all "westbake" has ever done is post comments agreeing with twitter and all your other accounts?
Hypocrisy indeed.
You don't need to pretend you're 10 different people to do that.