Ok, there are valid complaints about Vista, but your post doesn't really include much substance.
1) Performance! The darn thing gobs up 600MB of RAM when it has nothing open, and even more when you open up applications. The bootup time is slow and the whole system feels very slow. This is unacceptable. This is bloated code to hell.
As other people have said, this is due to pre-caching files you're likely to need in the near future. Guess what: blank RAM is useless RAM! There's no reason for ANY OS to keep ANY byte of RAM blank when it could pre-load something in it you're statistically likely to need in the near future. If your OS leaves blank RAM blank, it's slower than it needs to be.
2) Lock-Ins Want to disable the stupid Windows indexing search thing? You can't! Want to uninstall all the stupid apps that are bundled in with Windows? You can't do that either.
You can disable the search indexing by adding your HD to the exclusion list. In any case, this is a feature the vast majority of people actually like-- guess what, OS X does it too, so do most Linux distributions.
3) The look I don't understand how Aero is supposed to be revolutionary. The interface is unbelievably distracting. The semi-transparent and blurry window borders look like a joke. Aswell, most programs will use that old-school rectangular look. It feels like I'd be running Wine.
1) This is all opinion. 2) Then turn it off and stop your whining. Vista includes the "Classic" Windows look, as well.
4) Lack of innovation What does it offer more than than XP? XP is perfectly stable, it's fast and it WORKS. The features that Microsoft is touting are simply pathetic. An integrated Anti-Virus (I have a brain and AVG for that) and some other applications in the system.
Shadow Copy is the main reason I upgraded. There are a million small fixes also that are pretty cool.
In addition to this, I have experienced many bugs since my installation of Vista. I know that drivers are to blame, but I would assume that the Bootcamp drivers are well made. Here's what I had so far:
I'm not going to respond to any complaints about Vista running on hardware made by a competitor with an BIOS emulation/driver set made by a competitor. Try Vista on an actual PC, then come back and let us know how much you hate it. (Since you obviously wouldn't change your mind.)
Nerd rage...I had never heard of it before, but I LOVE IT!;-) Consider it stolen;-)
Adam Carolla used this phrase pretty often to describe the nerds who get upset and rant, foamy-mouthed, because some bit part was cut out of the LoTR movies, or something equally stupid and pointless. As a recent example, Variety recently received a dose of nerd rage after accidentally writing that Spock's mom was vulcan and not human. No normal person gives half a crap.
They built the Live service using a subscription model to gain a recurring revenue stream from gamers. The services provided through a Live Gold subscription are available for free from other vendors, as pointed out earlier in this discussion thread.
Not all in the same place. There is a lot of advantage to the fact that all the services offered are integrated together, which is something you don't normally see on PC games. Wouldn't it be great if you could start up Battlefield: 2142 and see a notice that your buddies are all playing WOW? Right now that service doesn't exist for games other than Xbox Live (and in a more limited form on Steam.)
Besides, I think the fee does a lot of discourage griefers from trying to abuse the system. When you know it's at least $50 to re-establish an account, you're not going to try cheats as often.
In general, I assume that Microsoft is using its desktop OS monopoly as leverage with game developers to adopt its Live service.
Ok.
I also see Halo 2 (a DirectX 9 game) being Vista-only as an attempt to propagate their desktop OS monopoly into the next generation of desktop OSes.
Ok.
In the specific case of Gears of War, I think that because it is originally an XBox 360 game, they simply ported the Live support instead of implementing game server functionality and an in-game browser -- since laziness is one of the virtues of being a programmer, I do not aim my rage at EPIC or the company they partnered with to port GOW to the PC.
So it's ok that Epic did it the "wrong way" because the "wrong way" is lazier than doing it the right way? If that's really how you feel, ok, but it seems dumb to me.
I honestly have no idea how community mods for Gears of War will work on the PC through the Live service...but maybe I'll find out when I try Live Silver tonight on my PC.
I can't help you here. I only play Xbox 360 games, except WOW. (One of the few PC games that works without being hugely buggy, or installing shit all over my system, or opening up security holes, or disabling virtual CD software, or any other shit that PC games all do and PC gamers seem to tolerate for some reason.)
As far as I am concerned, every dollar that goes to Microsoft is a dollar used to try to kill Linux and the larger open-source movement.
I guess you save on wallpaper when your entire world is so black and white.
But seriously, if you're foaming at the mouth with anger at this whole thing, why'd you even buy Gears of War? I think EA produces crappy products (see: Battlefield: 2142 as mentioned above) and participates in monopolistic practices (like gaining exclusive sports licenses), so I do this insane, crazy thing: I don't buy EA games. AMAZING!
You're never going to change the world by buying from Microsoft while telling Microsoft they should change their business practices-- you bought the game! Demonstrably their business practices work just fine.
Just a few weeks ago I 'fixed' a computer that had an NTFS partition with 70% fragmentation. It took about 15 hours of defragmentation to get to 3%, and, suddenly, the computer started to work properly.
I can counter anecdotes with anecdotes if you want. I think I'll just skip though.
Also, clearing the PRAM on old Macs can help if it has been corrupted somehow (e.g. after suffering a power failure while changing some important system settings).
Yes, on very old Macs, for a very select few problems, in very rare circumstances. But you'll still meet dozens of Mac users who, whenever they have a problem with OS X, immediately go and clear the PRAM to "solve" it regardless of what the problem is. It doesn't hurt anything, but it also doesn't help anything: it's just a placebo cure. I think a lot of people treat defrag on Windows the same way.
I agree that it doesn't seem to do much of anything, the fact though remains if theres something that doesn't "need" that de-fragmenting why keep using the one that does?
If defragging doesn't "do much of anything", isn't that synonymous with saying it's not necessary? Which is entirely my point? Or am I missing something?
When I used to use Windows it didn't seem to do much, but then again, on older hard drives running at slower RPMs the difference could be large.
It *could* be. And it *could* be large on a Linux filesystem. Or monkeys *could* fly out of my ass. Until I see some evidence that it does make a large difference, I'm inclined to believe that defragmentation is simply un-necessary for NTFS partitions.
3. Non-Fragmenting filesystem, Seriously, when there is file systems on Linux that never have to be de-fragmented that have been there since at least 2000, why can't Windows in 2006 not have it?
I've never bothered to de-frag a NTFS filesystem, and I don't seem to be in any trouble. I think de-frag is just one of those "magic spells" that people that don't know much about computers believe can solve any ills. Like "clearing PRAM" on Macintoshes. It does nothing but placebo.
Ok a lot of your complaints are the general Slashdot/cranky old bastard complaints.
But no ClearType or Search Indexing? WTF, those are very very useful features. ClearType lets me actually read text on a monitor without gagging at his hideous it all is, and search indexing makes searching orders of magnitude faster at the cost of a few megabytes. Both are no-brainers.
There's nothing to it. Just save some of the drive space when you install (this is a problem with some "recovery CD's" that grab everything) and format it later. Then add a swap file to it and set the swap file on C:\ to 0 bytes. Reboot and it's set.
What's stopping you from doing it now? It sounds like you're complaining about a "missing" feature that's been available in Windows since Windows 95. Or am I mis-understanding something?
Did you know that, when your console RRODs, you will only be able to play your downloaded games when logged in to live? Nope, your wife/brother/roommate's account wont be able to play the game.
Their *account* won't, but you can have (almost 100% sure) multiple Live accounts on the same console. You can simply move your account to their console, re-download the games you've purchased, and play to your heart's content.
You can play Gears online for free with a Xbox Live Silver account. It doesn't have all the features that a Gold account works, but your post is still wrong.
In any case, this is just nerd rage. If you don't want to pay for Xbox Live Gold, then don't pay for it. It's not some huge crime against humanity, or some huge debasement of your human rights, it's simply a game matching service with a yearly fee.
Of course, your nerd rage isn't even aimed in the right direction. If you have a real problem with it, take it up with Epic... Xbox Live doesn't have anything against a game using their own non-Live matching service. (Final Fantasy 11 does it, for example.)
Fable was kind of a disappointment, but Psychonauts and Crimson Skies are both excellent games. I won't bother mentioning Halo, since I know, this being Slashdot, that everyone hates Halo.;)
Hm, well, I stand corrected then. They must have added a crapload of stuff to it since I used it last, because last time I used it it didn't do any of those things. (Except perhaps handling character sets; it was an English-only DB.)
Not really the kind of thing that one can prove with hard evidence, is it? Perhaps the number of studies that show that poorer people are generally happier people go part way.
Then maybe you should cite one, eh?
It may strike you as meaningless, but then GDP is a measure of how well a group plays a game invented by humans which no longer has much basis in the physical world. For me happiness is more important than that shit.
GDP has no basis in the physical world? You're saying the amount of wealth a nation generates is nothing but a numbers game? So you the number of luxury cars in nations with a high GDP is the exact same as the number of luxury cars in Haiti?
Again, get educated and stop buying the propaganda. Emancipate yourself from mental slavery.
How about you help to educate me by citing a study, a single peer-reviewed study that re-inforces your viewpoint? You know, instead of Bob Marley lyrics.
Don't forget Lotus Notes/Domino. Which also is terrible, and also nothing integrates with it.
IBM has to build their own tool for syncing with Palms because Palm refuses to do it. Hah! Too bad IBM's tool hardly works, even that simple feature they botched. (To be fair, most of the botched is the Palm rejecting Lotus Note stupidity-- I'd actually expect a Palm to puke if you fed it a meeting that ended *before* it began, but Lotus Notes will happily let you create one!)
phpmyadmin is what you need. Seriously, it's ever bit as good as enterprise manager and query analyzer.
Does it show the execution path of the query so I can optimize it? Can I use it to generate a printable schema of the database tables? Will it help me do a export of a database (including schema) into a new database on the same, or a different, server without touching any SQL? If so, does it then let me schedule that to run at 3:00 AM every third Tuesday? Does it handle all kinds of collations/character sets?
Sorry. PHPMyAdmin is an OK tool, but it's not nearly as good as Enterprise Manager/Query Analyzer or SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). PHPMyAdmin doesn't even copy result grids cleanly into spreadsheets, at least not last time I used it.
Enterprise manager doers a better job of building queries, sure.
Does Enterprise Manager even build queries? I've never used that feature, if it has it. I used Query Analyzer for building queries, and now I use SSMS for that task.
(But seriously, if you're using a gui to build your queries then there's no hope for you as a database developer.)
Ah! The old Open Source canard when faced with something Open Source doesn't do well: "you don't really need to do that." This is the slightly more extreme version, "you're too stupid to do it the right way."
How is using a GUI tool to run ad-hoc queries on a database any different from using an IDE for software development? What's so wrong with me wanting to type "select * from jobsite" and paste the results into Excel? (How would you even do something like that using only CLI tools? Export to CSV I suppose, then import that into Excel...).
For the record I don't use the GUI query builder, I type in my queries in plain text. And in the process I benefit from GUI features like syntax highlighting and auto-complete.
enter/edit data... phpmyadmin is seriously very nice and quite practical to use for day-to-day software development.
PHPMyAdmin does a crappy job of entering data, if you're just doing data entry. SSMS isn't tremendous at it, either*, but it's orders of magnitude faster.
I use it for my software development on my local machines, and as an added bonus, I'm not crippled when I'm working on a remote machine behind a firewall.
That's one advantage of a web-based product, given. I just set up a VPN and use Remote Desktop now.
* Attention Microsoft: Shift-Space IS NOT A KEYBOARD SHORTCUT! If I'm entering data and I happen to hold down the shift key while typing a space, JUST TYPE A SPACE like every other program ever written! Resolving that one problem would make data entry on SSMS about ten times faster. End rant.
One of the things I've always felt is most lacking for Open Source databases is good client-side GUI tools to do ad-hoc queries, look at the database structure, assist in copying/importing/exporting data, etc. Microsoft has a pretty good tool in this area with either the SQL Enterprise Manager/Query Analyzer combo or SQL Server Management Studio.
MySQL on the other hand has a poorly-implemented, not-well-supported equivalent to Query Analyzer called MySQL Query Browser: http://www.mysql.com/products/tools/query-browser/ It's slow, crashes often (especially when called upon to list large datasets), and has tons and tons of usability flaws (the most glaring being the impossibility to select/copy the dataset to any other applications, and the failure to support standard keyboard shortcuts like Control/Command-A to Select All.)
It seems to me that MySQL Query Browser is treated, at best, as a second-class citizen in the MySQL world. Is that the case? If so, is it simply due to a lack of qualified developers for it, or is it part of a larger strategy to keep more resources working on the back-end?
In my opinion, MySQL could benefit greatly from having some really great (or at least passable!) client-side tools.
They have invested in their intrinsic growth to be strong enough to go up against the likes of Microsoft and squash them like a bug.
They hardly compete with Microsoft now. Or, to be more specific, they compete with bits of Microsoft. But what they don't compete with:
1) Windows 2) Most of Office, except Office Live and Sharepoint 3) Microsoft Games (Including Microsoft's Zone.com or whatever they call it now, and including Massive which does in-game ad serving.) 4) Hardware 5) Servers (although arguably they prove that you can run successful businesses on only open source technology, that's still not competing.)
What they do compete with:
1) Hotmail 2) Most Live services; Live Search, Live Maps, Live Local, etc.
What they half-compete with:
1) MSN/MSNBC - they compete with the advertising half, but not the content generation part 2) Office (the Office Live/Sharepoint bit)
I'm sure I'm missing a lot of points; Microsoft is huge and Google's not tiny either. But the point is, right now, there's not a ton of damage Google can do to Microsoft.
Google are (is?) supporting Mozilla because Google gets money for selling ads in their search results, and Mozilla uses Google as the default search engine. My guess is that Google is paying Mozilla less than half of what they're making from the deal.
Ok, I don't know what "NetBeans" is, and therefore my post is flamebait. I apologize to whoever moderated that post as flamebait for trying to imbue it with a teeny bit of humor, and I hope that the surgery to remove the stick from your ass proceeds with no complications.
If an employee is leaving for Amazon.com or another second-tier employer which doesn't make Microsoft so paranoid, they'll probably serve out the traditional two weeks of unproductive wrapping up.
That's a pretty damned big "probably." If Microsoft does let those people serve out two weeks, then this article is actually making a point. If not, then this article is worthess trash. Does the author bother to find out which it is? Nope! Wild speculation all-around!
For all we know this is standard practice in all of Microsoft. Or, for that matter, there was just one manager not following the standard practices. Crap journalism.
The thing that people forget is that Microsoft is big. Really, really big. You're right that the botched Vista release has probably reduced the cachet of the Windows division... but Microsoft Games right now is super-hot and kicking ass. Microsoft Office has just finished redesigning almost the entire UI of Office in their new release, and it's been received pretty well. (No matter how it was received, though, the pure risk involved in doing that deserves taking note!) Microsoft Hardware has always been pretty good at putting out good products, and Live.com right now has the best image search on the web and is rapidly advancing on Google in nearly all areas.
But even then you can drill down. I said I was impressed that the Office division completely re-designed their UI-- then again, look at Office Live. They're putting out a product that virtually nobody wants, and selling it in a crummy way. And I'm sure you could go down another level and find a group within Office Live that's really kicking ass if you did the research.
Point is, Microsoft has 70,000 employees in the Redmond/Seattle area alone. They're freakin' huge. If you read an article saying IBM printer sales were down, you wouldn't assume that iSeries midrange computers are going to tank also. Remember the same applies to Microsoft.
If you were working at Microsoft Games, you wouldn't think your job sucked based on how Windows was received.
I seem to remember admitting that large Java apps are often slow and buggy in the first line of my post. Did you even read it?
I did, but apparently I didn't understand it correctly. I thought that you were citing that list of apps as good examples, not just a list of "big Java UI apps I use even though they suck," which is apparently what it was. Sorry.
Also, generalizing that Java in it's entirety is slow and bloated just because a few Java GUI apps suck as is a pretty dumb thing to do.
Yeah. So is generalizing that all VisualBasic apps are terrible based only on a few examples. Or that all PHP apps have huge gaping security holes based only on a few examples. And yet people do that all the time, at least on this site.
But of course the point is that Sun is a decent sized corporation which (apparently) a marketing department. The whole point of a marketing department is to give the people who might buy the product a good impression of the product. That's not happening with Java.
If "NetBeans" is supposed to be an example of a great app in Java, they're doing a terrible job. I've never heard of "NetBeans" nor do I even know what it's for. (Some kind of web-based coffee recipe storage database?)
The Java apps I know are Azureus, Lotus Notes, OpenOffice.org, Limewire, all of which are slow and bloated and most of which have weird alien UIs that don't match the host OS at all.
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Ok, there are valid complaints about Vista, but your post doesn't really include much substance.
1) Performance!
The darn thing gobs up 600MB of RAM when it has nothing open, and even more when you open up applications. The bootup time is slow and the whole system feels very slow. This is unacceptable. This is bloated code to hell.
As other people have said, this is due to pre-caching files you're likely to need in the near future. Guess what: blank RAM is useless RAM! There's no reason for ANY OS to keep ANY byte of RAM blank when it could pre-load something in it you're statistically likely to need in the near future. If your OS leaves blank RAM blank, it's slower than it needs to be.
2) Lock-Ins
Want to disable the stupid Windows indexing search thing? You can't! Want to uninstall all the stupid apps that are bundled in with Windows? You can't do that either.
You can disable the search indexing by adding your HD to the exclusion list. In any case, this is a feature the vast majority of people actually like-- guess what, OS X does it too, so do most Linux distributions.
3) The look
I don't understand how Aero is supposed to be revolutionary. The interface is unbelievably distracting. The semi-transparent and blurry window borders look like a joke. Aswell, most programs will use that old-school rectangular look. It feels like I'd be running Wine.
1) This is all opinion.
2) Then turn it off and stop your whining. Vista includes the "Classic" Windows look, as well.
4) Lack of innovation
What does it offer more than than XP? XP is perfectly stable, it's fast and it WORKS. The features that Microsoft is touting are simply pathetic. An integrated Anti-Virus (I have a brain and AVG for that) and some other applications in the system.
Shadow Copy is the main reason I upgraded. There are a million small fixes also that are pretty cool.
In addition to this, I have experienced many bugs since my installation of Vista. I know that drivers are to blame, but I would assume that the Bootcamp drivers are well made. Here's what I had so far:
I'm not going to respond to any complaints about Vista running on hardware made by a competitor with an BIOS emulation/driver set made by a competitor. Try Vista on an actual PC, then come back and let us know how much you hate it. (Since you obviously wouldn't change your mind.)
Nerd rage...I had never heard of it before, but I LOVE IT! ;-) Consider it stolen ;-)
Adam Carolla used this phrase pretty often to describe the nerds who get upset and rant, foamy-mouthed, because some bit part was cut out of the LoTR movies, or something equally stupid and pointless. As a recent example, Variety recently received a dose of nerd rage after accidentally writing that Spock's mom was vulcan and not human. No normal person gives half a crap.
They built the Live service using a subscription model to gain a recurring revenue stream from gamers. The services provided through a Live Gold subscription are available for free from other vendors, as pointed out earlier in this discussion thread.
Not all in the same place. There is a lot of advantage to the fact that all the services offered are integrated together, which is something you don't normally see on PC games. Wouldn't it be great if you could start up Battlefield: 2142 and see a notice that your buddies are all playing WOW? Right now that service doesn't exist for games other than Xbox Live (and in a more limited form on Steam.)
Besides, I think the fee does a lot of discourage griefers from trying to abuse the system. When you know it's at least $50 to re-establish an account, you're not going to try cheats as often.
In general, I assume that Microsoft is using its desktop OS monopoly as leverage with game developers to adopt its Live service.
Ok.
I also see Halo 2 (a DirectX 9 game) being Vista-only as an attempt to propagate their desktop OS monopoly into the next generation of desktop OSes.
Ok.
In the specific case of Gears of War, I think that because it is originally an XBox 360 game, they simply ported the Live support instead of implementing game server functionality and an in-game browser -- since laziness is one of the virtues of being a programmer, I do not aim my rage at EPIC or the company they partnered with to port GOW to the PC.
So it's ok that Epic did it the "wrong way" because the "wrong way" is lazier than doing it the right way? If that's really how you feel, ok, but it seems dumb to me.
I honestly have no idea how community mods for Gears of War will work on the PC through the Live service...but maybe I'll find out when I try Live Silver tonight on my PC.
I can't help you here. I only play Xbox 360 games, except WOW. (One of the few PC games that works without being hugely buggy, or installing shit all over my system, or opening up security holes, or disabling virtual CD software, or any other shit that PC games all do and PC gamers seem to tolerate for some reason.)
As far as I am concerned, every dollar that goes to Microsoft is a dollar used to try to kill Linux and the larger open-source movement.
I guess you save on wallpaper when your entire world is so black and white.
But seriously, if you're foaming at the mouth with anger at this whole thing, why'd you even buy Gears of War? I think EA produces crappy products (see: Battlefield: 2142 as mentioned above) and participates in monopolistic practices (like gaining exclusive sports licenses), so I do this insane, crazy thing: I don't buy EA games. AMAZING!
You're never going to change the world by buying from Microsoft while telling Microsoft they should change their business practices-- you bought the game! Demonstrably their business practices work just fine.
Just a few weeks ago I 'fixed' a computer that had an NTFS partition with 70% fragmentation. It took about 15 hours of defragmentation to get to 3%, and, suddenly, the computer started to work properly.
I can counter anecdotes with anecdotes if you want. I think I'll just skip though.
Also, clearing the PRAM on old Macs can help if it has been corrupted somehow (e.g. after suffering a power failure while changing some important system settings).
Yes, on very old Macs, for a very select few problems, in very rare circumstances. But you'll still meet dozens of Mac users who, whenever they have a problem with OS X, immediately go and clear the PRAM to "solve" it regardless of what the problem is. It doesn't hurt anything, but it also doesn't help anything: it's just a placebo cure. I think a lot of people treat defrag on Windows the same way.
I agree that it doesn't seem to do much of anything, the fact though remains if theres something that doesn't "need" that de-fragmenting why keep using the one that does?
If defragging doesn't "do much of anything", isn't that synonymous with saying it's not necessary? Which is entirely my point? Or am I missing something?
When I used to use Windows it didn't seem to do much, but then again, on older hard drives running at slower RPMs the difference could be large.
It *could* be. And it *could* be large on a Linux filesystem. Or monkeys *could* fly out of my ass. Until I see some evidence that it does make a large difference, I'm inclined to believe that defragmentation is simply un-necessary for NTFS partitions.
3. Non-Fragmenting filesystem, Seriously, when there is file systems on Linux that never have to be de-fragmented that have been there since at least 2000, why can't Windows in 2006 not have it?
I've never bothered to de-frag a NTFS filesystem, and I don't seem to be in any trouble. I think de-frag is just one of those "magic spells" that people that don't know much about computers believe can solve any ills. Like "clearing PRAM" on Macintoshes. It does nothing but placebo.
Ok a lot of your complaints are the general Slashdot/cranky old bastard complaints.
But no ClearType or Search Indexing? WTF, those are very very useful features. ClearType lets me actually read text on a monitor without gagging at his hideous it all is, and search indexing makes searching orders of magnitude faster at the cost of a few megabytes. Both are no-brainers.
There's nothing to it. Just save some of the drive space when you install (this is a problem with some "recovery CD's" that grab everything) and format it later. Then add a swap file to it and set the swap file on C:\ to 0 bytes. Reboot and it's set.
What's stopping you from doing it now? It sounds like you're complaining about a "missing" feature that's been available in Windows since Windows 95. Or am I mis-understanding something?
Did you know that, when your console RRODs, you will only be able to play your downloaded games when logged in to live? Nope, your wife/brother/roommate's account wont be able to play the game.
Their *account* won't, but you can have (almost 100% sure) multiple Live accounts on the same console. You can simply move your account to their console, re-download the games you've purchased, and play to your heart's content.
You can play Gears online for free with a Xbox Live Silver account. It doesn't have all the features that a Gold account works, but your post is still wrong.
In any case, this is just nerd rage. If you don't want to pay for Xbox Live Gold, then don't pay for it. It's not some huge crime against humanity, or some huge debasement of your human rights, it's simply a game matching service with a yearly fee.
Of course, your nerd rage isn't even aimed in the right direction. If you have a real problem with it, take it up with Epic... Xbox Live doesn't have anything against a game using their own non-Live matching service. (Final Fantasy 11 does it, for example.)
Fable was kind of a disappointment, but Psychonauts and Crimson Skies are both excellent games. I won't bother mentioning Halo, since I know, this being Slashdot, that everyone hates Halo. ;)
Hm, well, I stand corrected then. They must have added a crapload of stuff to it since I used it last, because last time I used it it didn't do any of those things. (Except perhaps handling character sets; it was an English-only DB.)
Not really the kind of thing that one can prove with hard evidence, is it? Perhaps the number of studies that show that poorer people are generally happier people go part way.
Then maybe you should cite one, eh?
It may strike you as meaningless, but then GDP is a measure of how well a group plays a game invented by humans which no longer has much basis in the physical world. For me happiness is more important than that shit.
GDP has no basis in the physical world? You're saying the amount of wealth a nation generates is nothing but a numbers game? So you the number of luxury cars in nations with a high GDP is the exact same as the number of luxury cars in Haiti?
Again, get educated and stop buying the propaganda. Emancipate yourself from mental slavery.
How about you help to educate me by citing a study, a single peer-reviewed study that re-inforces your viewpoint? You know, instead of Bob Marley lyrics.
Don't forget Lotus Notes/Domino. Which also is terrible, and also nothing integrates with it.
IBM has to build their own tool for syncing with Palms because Palm refuses to do it. Hah! Too bad IBM's tool hardly works, even that simple feature they botched. (To be fair, most of the botched is the Palm rejecting Lotus Note stupidity-- I'd actually expect a Palm to puke if you fed it a meeting that ended *before* it began, but Lotus Notes will happily let you create one!)
phpmyadmin is what you need. Seriously, it's ever bit as good as enterprise manager and query analyzer.
Does it show the execution path of the query so I can optimize it? Can I use it to generate a printable schema of the database tables? Will it help me do a export of a database (including schema) into a new database on the same, or a different, server without touching any SQL? If so, does it then let me schedule that to run at 3:00 AM every third Tuesday? Does it handle all kinds of collations/character sets?
Sorry. PHPMyAdmin is an OK tool, but it's not nearly as good as Enterprise Manager/Query Analyzer or SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). PHPMyAdmin doesn't even copy result grids cleanly into spreadsheets, at least not last time I used it.
Enterprise manager doers a better job of building queries, sure.
Does Enterprise Manager even build queries? I've never used that feature, if it has it. I used Query Analyzer for building queries, and now I use SSMS for that task.
(But seriously, if you're using a gui to build your queries then there's no hope for you as a database developer.)
Ah! The old Open Source canard when faced with something Open Source doesn't do well: "you don't really need to do that." This is the slightly more extreme version, "you're too stupid to do it the right way."
How is using a GUI tool to run ad-hoc queries on a database any different from using an IDE for software development? What's so wrong with me wanting to type "select * from jobsite" and paste the results into Excel? (How would you even do something like that using only CLI tools? Export to CSV I suppose, then import that into Excel...).
For the record I don't use the GUI query builder, I type in my queries in plain text. And in the process I benefit from GUI features like syntax highlighting and auto-complete.
enter/edit data... phpmyadmin is seriously very nice and quite practical to use for day-to-day software development.
PHPMyAdmin does a crappy job of entering data, if you're just doing data entry. SSMS isn't tremendous at it, either*, but it's orders of magnitude faster.
I use it for my software development on my local machines, and as an added bonus, I'm not crippled when I'm working on a remote machine behind a firewall.
That's one advantage of a web-based product, given. I just set up a VPN and use Remote Desktop now.
* Attention Microsoft: Shift-Space IS NOT A KEYBOARD SHORTCUT! If I'm entering data and I happen to hold down the shift key while typing a space, JUST TYPE A SPACE like every other program ever written! Resolving that one problem would make data entry on SSMS about ten times faster. End rant.
One of the things I've always felt is most lacking for Open Source databases is good client-side GUI tools to do ad-hoc queries, look at the database structure, assist in copying/importing/exporting data, etc. Microsoft has a pretty good tool in this area with either the SQL Enterprise Manager/Query Analyzer combo or SQL Server Management Studio.
MySQL on the other hand has a poorly-implemented, not-well-supported equivalent to Query Analyzer called MySQL Query Browser: http://www.mysql.com/products/tools/query-browser/ It's slow, crashes often (especially when called upon to list large datasets), and has tons and tons of usability flaws (the most glaring being the impossibility to select/copy the dataset to any other applications, and the failure to support standard keyboard shortcuts like Control/Command-A to Select All.)
It seems to me that MySQL Query Browser is treated, at best, as a second-class citizen in the MySQL world. Is that the case? If so, is it simply due to a lack of qualified developers for it, or is it part of a larger strategy to keep more resources working on the back-end?
In my opinion, MySQL could benefit greatly from having some really great (or at least passable!) client-side tools.
There are three questions that any politician attacking social networking sites, should have to answer, in order to be specific about what they want.
It might be a good idea, to let somebody, else proofread your essay before publishing, it on a site with thousands, of readers.
They have invested in their intrinsic growth to be strong enough to go up against the likes of Microsoft and squash them like a bug.
They hardly compete with Microsoft now. Or, to be more specific, they compete with bits of Microsoft. But what they don't compete with:
1) Windows
2) Most of Office, except Office Live and Sharepoint
3) Microsoft Games (Including Microsoft's Zone.com or whatever they call it now, and including Massive which does in-game ad serving.)
4) Hardware
5) Servers (although arguably they prove that you can run successful businesses on only open source technology, that's still not competing.)
What they do compete with:
1) Hotmail
2) Most Live services; Live Search, Live Maps, Live Local, etc.
What they half-compete with:
1) MSN/MSNBC - they compete with the advertising half, but not the content generation part
2) Office (the Office Live/Sharepoint bit)
I'm sure I'm missing a lot of points; Microsoft is huge and Google's not tiny either. But the point is, right now, there's not a ton of damage Google can do to Microsoft.
Google are (is?) supporting Mozilla because Google gets money for selling ads in their search results, and Mozilla uses Google as the default search engine. My guess is that Google is paying Mozilla less than half of what they're making from the deal.
Ok, I don't know what "NetBeans" is, and therefore my post is flamebait. I apologize to whoever moderated that post as flamebait for trying to imbue it with a teeny bit of humor, and I hope that the surgery to remove the stick from your ass proceeds with no complications.
You think naive end-users think Microsoft Windows and Xbox 360 is the same product? Seriously?
And for the record naive end-users don't even know what Exchange or IIS is. And, for that matter, I don't even know what "CE" is.
Then read the next sentence I typed after that one.
Christ, people on Slashdot just read until they get to an "anger point" then immediately reply with their rants I don't care about.
If an employee is leaving for Amazon.com or another second-tier employer which doesn't make Microsoft so paranoid, they'll probably serve out the traditional two weeks of unproductive wrapping up.
That's a pretty damned big "probably." If Microsoft does let those people serve out two weeks, then this article is actually making a point. If not, then this article is worthess trash. Does the author bother to find out which it is? Nope! Wild speculation all-around!
For all we know this is standard practice in all of Microsoft. Or, for that matter, there was just one manager not following the standard practices. Crap journalism.
The thing that people forget is that Microsoft is big. Really, really big. You're right that the botched Vista release has probably reduced the cachet of the Windows division... but Microsoft Games right now is super-hot and kicking ass. Microsoft Office has just finished redesigning almost the entire UI of Office in their new release, and it's been received pretty well. (No matter how it was received, though, the pure risk involved in doing that deserves taking note!) Microsoft Hardware has always been pretty good at putting out good products, and Live.com right now has the best image search on the web and is rapidly advancing on Google in nearly all areas.
But even then you can drill down. I said I was impressed that the Office division completely re-designed their UI-- then again, look at Office Live. They're putting out a product that virtually nobody wants, and selling it in a crummy way. And I'm sure you could go down another level and find a group within Office Live that's really kicking ass if you did the research.
Point is, Microsoft has 70,000 employees in the Redmond/Seattle area alone. They're freakin' huge. If you read an article saying IBM printer sales were down, you wouldn't assume that iSeries midrange computers are going to tank also. Remember the same applies to Microsoft.
If you were working at Microsoft Games, you wouldn't think your job sucked based on how Windows was received.
I seem to remember admitting that large Java apps are often slow and buggy in the first line of my post. Did you even read it?
I did, but apparently I didn't understand it correctly. I thought that you were citing that list of apps as good examples, not just a list of "big Java UI apps I use even though they suck," which is apparently what it was. Sorry.
Also, generalizing that Java in it's entirety is slow and bloated just because a few Java GUI apps suck as is a pretty dumb thing to do.
Yeah. So is generalizing that all VisualBasic apps are terrible based only on a few examples. Or that all PHP apps have huge gaping security holes based only on a few examples. And yet people do that all the time, at least on this site.
But of course the point is that Sun is a decent sized corporation which (apparently) a marketing department. The whole point of a marketing department is to give the people who might buy the product a good impression of the product. That's not happening with Java.
If "NetBeans" is supposed to be an example of a great app in Java, they're doing a terrible job. I've never heard of "NetBeans" nor do I even know what it's for. (Some kind of web-based coffee recipe storage database?)
The Java apps I know are Azureus, Lotus Notes, OpenOffice.org, Limewire, all of which are slow and bloated and most of which have weird alien UIs that don't match the host OS at all.