I live in France, and I work into the IT field. I have the complete opposite feeling than the post above. The CNIL has always demonstrated a very deep understanding of technology. Even if it is a state agency, it has provided very sound analysis and opinions on the recent laws (HADOPI,...) that were demonstrating the stupidity of the proposed laws. The laws were adopted almost unchanged and all the analysis of the CNIL have been proven to be true.
The CNIL is not very powerful and can not go beyond its scope, but I have never been deceived by anything it has produced.
The main root of the CNIL is the history of France during the 2nd world war where some files were used against jews.
Wine works perfectly on my PC (photoshop,...). I have also stone age crappy windows applications that are isolated in a virtual machine in order to keep my computer clean.
Browser, email, media player, libre office suite are identical or superior on Linux.
I think that Linux is not desktop ready, but it seems I do not have the same understanding of "desktop" as you.
2 weeks ago, I booted a ubuntu live CD and my nvidia video card was not correctly handled, it was unusable.
When I do a copy/paste, I have to cope with a mixture of windows and X conventions (Ctrl+CXV or mouse middle clicks).
There is no uniformity in application look and feel.
Gnome has put a layer that hides very well how things works. I have never found why hibernation was not working on my PC.
For me, individual applications are better on Linux than Windows, but the whole desktop experience is still not there.
Different types of mind lead to different types of programmers, none of them being really superior.
I know some experiences developers who have problems with recursivity. I have already met some very fast developers who were producing very good and clean code but who had difficulties to understand the requirements and the explanations.
I really do not think that this is a question of intelligence. There are so many programming languages not only because of the different kind of problems to solve, but also because of the different kind of minds.
Programming requires logic and abstraction. This may be slightly more difficult for some people, but as said Chef Gusto, "anyone can cook".
bring a new hard drive with you. Your father should first change all his passwords.
You install Linux on the new drive (enable ssh for remote administration).
Mount the old windows drive as read only and leave the task of retrieving his data to your father.
Uranium is very bad. It can be used for awful weapons. In order to clean the planet from it in a very efficient way, I suggest to disintegrate it in nuclear plants.
Of course it will be only for ecologic purpose.
Sorry to contradict you. I am using ubuntu LTS and OpenOffice at home since years. I am using Word at work. OpenOffice crashes far more often than Word. I do not complain at all: OpenOffice has an excellent recovery of documents after crashing, I have never lost anything with OpenOffice. Word has also a recovery, but this does not work very well: it crashes again just after the recovery. I can not say for libre office, but OpenOffice crashes too often to deny it.
If google declares war to drug cartel and illicit network, it will become the enemy of many political groups and this will not increase the support from other political groups. Google is already a target of many criticism. With this movement, they either commit suicide or change radically the world.
In fact the core of the kernel has already been refactored many times and is of excellent quality. It represent only a very small percentage of the whole code. Most of the code is drivers. Many drivers are poorly written and may need to be rewritten, but developers are too busy coding the many missing drivers.
In fact there is no real problem in Linux code, just a recent increase in the number of developers.
No. I was using linux in 1992 on my 486dx33 with 16Mb. The high end was the 486dx2 66. 8Mb was the standard. I choosed to have more memory because the fastest machine were too expensive.
At that time, 8Mb was just enought to continue using X server while compiling the kernel. It was usual for people to have only 4 Mb. Minix was running on 8086 with 640ko.
Minix still exists. The purpose of Linus Torvalds was to learn assembly and in particular how intel cpu were supporting multitasking and memory protection.
Linus then criticize minix idea of message passing saying it was incompatible with an optimal usage of cpu performances. They are still fighting.
Salespeople have no time to lose. Teach them to program what is useful for them. VBA is shitty, but contains functions and most of the bases of programming.
Excell is very important for salespeople and they will more easily understand the aim of exercises.
The opposition between clock cycles and developer time is wrong. In C, developers are so involved in fighting against bugs that they can not search for smart algorithms. Many programs written in C get faster when rewritten in python.
You want to focus on coding for untold reasons, but these reasons are important to give you advices. If you need to develop a standalone application, python is (by far) the easiest way. It is fast to learn, powerful.
If your need is to come back on developer market, you need to learn web development. If you have been a developer a long time ago, php and mysql will be a piece of cake, but you may have more difficulties with javascript/html5/css3. Learning jquery and bootstrap is the best way to web development. You should definitively avoid learning any framework: they become obsolete very very fast.
Learning how to use github will also be a good idea.
Remark: everything is free. If you have notions of unix, Linux is a very good environment for developers. But, if all you know is windows, you have many things more important than linux to learn first. Stick with windows.
when it makes a mistake. Why the bank could not cancel a transaction when it is a fraudulent transaction.
Transaction cancelling is not exceptional because bank employees are human. The only explanation of the fact that bank refuse to cancel fraudulent transaction is that they earn a lot with fraud.
Or maybe someone knows better than me. My main source is my wife that tells me about the huge mistakes she discovers and fixes.
For me the trigger was the migration to Vista. Vista was too bad. It was a good opportunity to move to ubuntu. I think (dream) that all the societies that are still on windows XP should study a migration to linux.
wine is for the mainstream. I have wrote many programs on windows that work perfectly well on Linux. Photoshop works fine. I have not tinkered at all, just click on the executable.
Windows installation is generally easy, but when problems occur, they are generally minor and difficult to solve, sometimes impossible to solve (because of closed source). Often, people live with them.
Linux installation is not very difficult, but when problems occur, they are generally major and must be solved by an experimented user. Once the computer is installed, you do not need to be a power user.
Slashdot Mirror
I live in France, and I work into the IT field. I have the complete opposite feeling than the post above. The CNIL has always demonstrated a very deep understanding of technology. Even if it is a state agency, it has provided very sound analysis and opinions on the recent laws (HADOPI, ...) that were demonstrating the stupidity of the proposed laws. The laws were adopted almost unchanged and all the analysis of the CNIL have been proven to be true.
The CNIL is not very powerful and can not go beyond its scope, but I have never been deceived by anything it has produced.
The main root of the CNIL is the history of France during the 2nd world war where some files were used against jews.
Wine works perfectly on my PC (photoshop, ...). I have also stone age crappy windows applications that are isolated in a virtual machine in order to keep my computer clean.
Browser, email, media player, libre office suite are identical or superior on Linux.
I think that Linux is not desktop ready, but it seems I do not have the same understanding of "desktop" as you.
2 weeks ago, I booted a ubuntu live CD and my nvidia video card was not correctly handled, it was unusable.
When I do a copy/paste, I have to cope with a mixture of windows and X conventions (Ctrl+CXV or mouse middle clicks).
There is no uniformity in application look and feel.
Gnome has put a layer that hides very well how things works. I have never found why hibernation was not working on my PC.
For me, individual applications are better on Linux than Windows, but the whole desktop experience is still not there.
SLS
slackware
redhat
mandrake
LFS
SUSE
Ubuntu
Debian
CentOS
Some short tries with knoopix, gentoo and gobolinux.
Different types of mind lead to different types of programmers, none of them being really superior.
I know some experiences developers who have problems with recursivity. I have already met some very fast developers who were producing very good and clean code but who had difficulties to understand the requirements and the explanations.
I really do not think that this is a question of intelligence. There are so many programming languages not only because of the different kind of problems to solve, but also because of the different kind of minds.
Programming requires logic and abstraction. This may be slightly more difficult for some people, but as said Chef Gusto, "anyone can cook".
I never click on a shortened URL. Maybe I am too old :-(
bring a new hard drive with you. Your father should first change all his passwords. You install Linux on the new drive (enable ssh for remote administration). Mount the old windows drive as read only and leave the task of retrieving his data to your father.
Uranium is very bad. It can be used for awful weapons. In order to clean the planet from it in a very efficient way, I suggest to disintegrate it in nuclear plants. Of course it will be only for ecologic purpose.
Sudoku is very efficiently solved using DLX (dancing links). It solves thousands of sudoku per second whatever the level of difficulty.
Sorry to contradict you. I am using ubuntu LTS and OpenOffice at home since years. I am using Word at work. OpenOffice crashes far more often than Word. I do not complain at all: OpenOffice has an excellent recovery of documents after crashing, I have never lost anything with OpenOffice. Word has also a recovery, but this does not work very well: it crashes again just after the recovery. I can not say for libre office, but OpenOffice crashes too often to deny it.
If google declares war to drug cartel and illicit network, it will become the enemy of many political groups and this will not increase the support from other political groups. Google is already a target of many criticism. With this movement, they either commit suicide or change radically the world.
In fact the core of the kernel has already been refactored many times and is of excellent quality. It represent only a very small percentage of the whole code. Most of the code is drivers. Many drivers are poorly written and may need to be rewritten, but developers are too busy coding the many missing drivers.
In fact there is no real problem in Linux code, just a recent increase in the number of developers.
No. I was using linux in 1992 on my 486dx33 with 16Mb. The high end was the 486dx2 66. 8Mb was the standard. I choosed to have more memory because the fastest machine were too expensive.
At that time, 8Mb was just enought to continue using X server while compiling the kernel. It was usual for people to have only 4 Mb. Minix was running on 8086 with 640ko.
Minix still exists. The purpose of Linus Torvalds was to learn assembly and in particular how intel cpu were supporting multitasking and memory protection. Linus then criticize minix idea of message passing saying it was incompatible with an optimal usage of cpu performances. They are still fighting.
most criminals are stupid. Not stupid criminals are generally white collar criminals (or president in France).
Salespeople have no time to lose. Teach them to program what is useful for them. VBA is shitty, but contains functions and most of the bases of programming.
Excell is very important for salespeople and they will more easily understand the aim of exercises.
The opposition between clock cycles and developer time is wrong. In C, developers are so involved in fighting against bugs that they can not search for smart algorithms. Many programs written in C get faster when rewritten in python.
This post is under appreciated: the BSA is primarily an association of gangsters having often illegal practices.
Or learn Perl. Perl can do easily the same things as bash, find, grep, awk, sed, ...
Avoiding to learn all the intricacy of all these tools was one of the main purposes of Perl.
You want to focus on coding for untold reasons, but these reasons are important to give you advices.
If you need to develop a standalone application, python is (by far) the easiest way. It is fast to learn, powerful.
If your need is to come back on developer market, you need to learn web development. If you have been a developer a long time ago, php and mysql will be a piece of cake, but you may have more difficulties with javascript/html5/css3. Learning jquery and bootstrap is the best way to web development. You should definitively avoid learning any framework: they become obsolete very very fast.
Learning how to use github will also be a good idea.
Remark: everything is free. If you have notions of unix, Linux is a very good environment for developers. But, if all you know is windows, you have many things more important than linux to learn first. Stick with windows.
when it makes a mistake. Why the bank could not cancel a transaction when it is a fraudulent transaction. Transaction cancelling is not exceptional because bank employees are human. The only explanation of the fact that bank refuse to cancel fraudulent transaction is that they earn a lot with fraud. Or maybe someone knows better than me. My main source is my wife that tells me about the huge mistakes she discovers and fixes.
For me the trigger was the migration to Vista. Vista was too bad. It was a good opportunity to move to ubuntu. I think (dream) that all the societies that are still on windows XP should study a migration to linux.
setup ssh and www.nomachine.com. Fix issues remotely.
Take the money (at least for the rare cases where you have to be physically present).
wine is for the mainstream. I have wrote many programs on windows that work perfectly well on Linux. Photoshop works fine. I have not tinkered at all, just click on the executable.
Windows installation is generally easy, but when problems occur, they are generally minor and difficult to solve, sometimes impossible to solve (because of closed source). Often, people live with them.
Linux installation is not very difficult, but when problems occur, they are generally major and must be solved by an experimented user. Once the computer is installed, you do not need to be a power user.