If you're offended by me listening to me listening to Mozart with my windows up and the system down, let me know and I'll see what I can do to be less irritating About a month or two after I moved into my condo, the old lady living below me called the cops on me for playing Dvorak's 9th too loud. She claimed I was dragging chains around and blowing whistles. She never complained when I was playing any other style of music.
If you use thunderbird, you can share the same inbox, address book, etc. across platforms. You can do the same thing with firefox for bookmarks and history. It's pretty easy to do and there's quite a few tutorials that are easy to find with a couple google searches. Just look for info on moving the "profile" directory.
I've got a triple monitor setup at work (2 17" LCDs and a 20" widescreen in the middle), but I had a 4 monitor setup for a while. I was only planning to go to 3 monitors, but the card I added supported two, so one of my coworkers scrounged up another 15" LCD. I found I really didn't use the 4th monitor much. It didn't hurt my productivity, I just rarely had any use for it. Usually it just had my music player or instant messenger list. I think the resolution across all four was something like 5000x1050.
For triple monitor, I typically have a text editor or file browser open on the left 17", the middle has my browser or the IDE for whatever language I'm working in, and the right 17" has email, IM, and music player. If I'm doing work in a remote desktop or a virtual machine I usually put that on which ever side monitor I'm not using at the moment.
So for the typical programmer, I'd say above 3 is overkill. I don't think it hurts productivity to have more, but the usefulness drops off after 3.
In 2001 I was able to get a cd duplicated for under $1 a disc for a run of only 500. Total cost for the project including packaging and licensing for the cover songs, which was about 1/4 of the budget, put the per disc cost at just under $2 a disc. If the music we'd recorded on there was better, we could have made a decent profit selling them at $5. It's not that hard to make a profit off cd sales if there's no record label taking a cut.
In regards to the grandparent's post, there are plenty of places to get DRM free music at a decent price. I get mine from emusic for an average of $3 per album. Just use the RIAARadar site before making a purchase so you can be assured your money is going towards the labels and artists who are not involved in the mafiAA tactics.
I'd put my money on it being written and delivered using Apollo. That's the new platform they are developing that merges Flash and HTML and runs in both the browser and on the desktop. They explain it better than I can on the adobe labs site (labs.adobe.com I think). I think that's on track for launching in about 6 months, and Photoshop would make a great killer app to push the platform to lots of computers.
Yeah, Twig rocks. I had to write a perl script about 2 years ago that parsed a 400mb xml file. I tried a bunch of libraries and ended up going with twig. It was by far the easiest way to parse a huge document like that.
You forgot one of the things flash is really good for: Video.
Right now, flash is by far the best way to deliver video on the web. It's got a way higher install base than any other video format, it runs on win, mac, and linux, and it allows for streaming content.
I know it's still fashionable to hate flash on slashdot, but public opinion seems to be changing. Check out the user comments on this BBC editorial describing why they are using wmv and real media instead of flash. For those too lazy to read the link, the reason is it would be too expensive in time and man hours to convert all their content to a new format.
I had a similar experience. My Dad started complaining about how he didn't like "the new google." I asked what he meant since google hasn't changed anything other than their logo on holidays. He explained that since you "click the little blue 'e'" and it says google, then that is google. I then explained that he should be clicking the orange firefox. I haven't heard any complaints since.
But that made me start thinking about how many people out there are going around saying "I hate the new msn interface." As a web developer I often forget how many people don't understand the difference between a web browser and a web page.
The point is that the javascript language and syntax can be used with other languages very well. Once example of this is JSFL, the implementation of Javascript to script the flash authoring environment. Same syntax as the familiar browser javascript, just built for automating flash authoring instead of controlling the browser.
Javascript was built as a way for developers to be able to control the user's browser. That inherently makes javascript on a webpage platform dependent on the browser. That's bad for web standards and developer sanity, but it's not because of a flaw in the language.
So to answer the question in the title, yes, it should get more respect. I think the respect will come in time once more applications start using javascript for non-web usage instead of proprietary languages.
Well people don't have to buy software from Adobe to create flash files. The SWF format is open and there are lots of applications that can create SWF files. OpenOffice has an export to flash option, php has the MING library for generating dynamic files, and there's lots of 3rd party programs, like swish, that are sort of "flash lite." Then if you start looking around on the osflash site (osflash.org, I think) you'll find lots more open source flash stuff including compilers, IDEs, and lots of debugging tools.
I think the main reason companies are protective of the file reader programs is that they want to maintain the integrity of the format. They don't want someone coming out with a buggy or insecure player that makes people hate the format. Of course when they put out a buggy player then there's not much point.
In Montgomery County in 1998 they were still using punch card ballots. The reason they never went with the optical electronic voting system was that they couldn't get accurate results in thier tests. I worked for the Board of elections in '98 and I've got friends who still work there. I wasn't a part of the tests and I don't have details on the results, but I know there was a lot of research being done to find the best electronic voting system.
And FWIW, at that time most of the people working at the Montgomery County BOE were democrats. They liked having me there since I'm a republican and many of the jobs they do require one democrat and one republican. Typical government work where it's required by law that two people do the job of one person.
I worked for the montgomery county board of elections about 8 years ago. Back then we had traditional paper ballots. People here might know them by thier other name: punch cards. That's right, the old ballots were just punch cards read by a room full of 30 year old mainframes. Every 2 years they had to bring in highly paid specialists to dust off the machines and get them running again. It was secure, but slow and inaccurate. No encryption, but there was a paper trail. It's now a whole lot quicker to count and recount votes, but it's also a lot easier to hack a voting computer than to make a punch card virus.
So I guess what I'm trying to say is that the voting system has never been perfect. It's been computerized for over 30 years, they've just been made more visible.
And cut the warehouse workers a little slack. They work 12+ hour days, 6 or 7 days a week, for a month leading up to an election. I heard from an old friend who still works there (that might change soon) and he's working a 24 shift today. It's a ton of work getting all the materials sorted and organized so that every polling place gets exactly what they need.
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If you use thunderbird, you can share the same inbox, address book, etc. across platforms. You can do the same thing with firefox for bookmarks and history. It's pretty easy to do and there's quite a few tutorials that are easy to find with a couple google searches. Just look for info on moving the "profile" directory.
I've got a triple monitor setup at work (2 17" LCDs and a 20" widescreen in the middle), but I had a 4 monitor setup for a while. I was only planning to go to 3 monitors, but the card I added supported two, so one of my coworkers scrounged up another 15" LCD. I found I really didn't use the 4th monitor much. It didn't hurt my productivity, I just rarely had any use for it. Usually it just had my music player or instant messenger list. I think the resolution across all four was something like 5000x1050.
For triple monitor, I typically have a text editor or file browser open on the left 17", the middle has my browser or the IDE for whatever language I'm working in, and the right 17" has email, IM, and music player. If I'm doing work in a remote desktop or a virtual machine I usually put that on which ever side monitor I'm not using at the moment.
So for the typical programmer, I'd say above 3 is overkill. I don't think it hurts productivity to have more, but the usefulness drops off after 3.
In 2001 I was able to get a cd duplicated for under $1 a disc for a run of only 500. Total cost for the project including packaging and licensing for the cover songs, which was about 1/4 of the budget, put the per disc cost at just under $2 a disc. If the music we'd recorded on there was better, we could have made a decent profit selling them at $5. It's not that hard to make a profit off cd sales if there's no record label taking a cut.
In regards to the grandparent's post, there are plenty of places to get DRM free music at a decent price. I get mine from emusic for an average of $3 per album. Just use the RIAARadar site before making a purchase so you can be assured your money is going towards the labels and artists who are not involved in the mafiAA tactics.
I'd put my money on it being written and delivered using Apollo. That's the new platform they are developing that merges Flash and HTML and runs in both the browser and on the desktop. They explain it better than I can on the adobe labs site (labs.adobe.com I think). I think that's on track for launching in about 6 months, and Photoshop would make a great killer app to push the platform to lots of computers.
Yeah, Twig rocks. I had to write a perl script about 2 years ago that parsed a 400mb xml file. I tried a bunch of libraries and ended up going with twig. It was by far the easiest way to parse a huge document like that.
You forgot one of the things flash is really good for: Video.
Right now, flash is by far the best way to deliver video on the web. It's got a way higher install base than any other video format, it runs on win, mac, and linux, and it allows for streaming content.
I know it's still fashionable to hate flash on slashdot, but public opinion seems to be changing. Check out the user comments on this BBC editorial describing why they are using wmv and real media instead of flash. For those too lazy to read the link, the reason is it would be too expensive in time and man hours to convert all their content to a new format.
I had a similar experience. My Dad started complaining about how he didn't like "the new google." I asked what he meant since google hasn't changed anything other than their logo on holidays. He explained that since you "click the little blue 'e'" and it says google, then that is google. I then explained that he should be clicking the orange firefox. I haven't heard any complaints since.
But that made me start thinking about how many people out there are going around saying "I hate the new msn interface." As a web developer I often forget how many people don't understand the difference between a web browser and a web page.
The point is that the javascript language and syntax can be used with other languages very well. Once example of this is JSFL, the implementation of Javascript to script the flash authoring environment. Same syntax as the familiar browser javascript, just built for automating flash authoring instead of controlling the browser.
Javascript was built as a way for developers to be able to control the user's browser. That inherently makes javascript on a webpage platform dependent on the browser. That's bad for web standards and developer sanity, but it's not because of a flaw in the language.
So to answer the question in the title, yes, it should get more respect. I think the respect will come in time once more applications start using javascript for non-web usage instead of proprietary languages.
Well people don't have to buy software from Adobe to create flash files. The SWF format is open and there are lots of applications that can create SWF files. OpenOffice has an export to flash option, php has the MING library for generating dynamic files, and there's lots of 3rd party programs, like swish, that are sort of "flash lite." Then if you start looking around on the osflash site (osflash.org, I think) you'll find lots more open source flash stuff including compilers, IDEs, and lots of debugging tools.
I think the main reason companies are protective of the file reader programs is that they want to maintain the integrity of the format. They don't want someone coming out with a buggy or insecure player that makes people hate the format. Of course when they put out a buggy player then there's not much point.
In Montgomery County in 1998 they were still using punch card ballots. The reason they never went with the optical electronic voting system was that they couldn't get accurate results in thier tests. I worked for the Board of elections in '98 and I've got friends who still work there. I wasn't a part of the tests and I don't have details on the results, but I know there was a lot of research being done to find the best electronic voting system.
And FWIW, at that time most of the people working at the Montgomery County BOE were democrats. They liked having me there since I'm a republican and many of the jobs they do require one democrat and one republican. Typical government work where it's required by law that two people do the job of one person.
I worked for the montgomery county board of elections about 8 years ago. Back then we had traditional paper ballots. People here might know them by thier other name: punch cards. That's right, the old ballots were just punch cards read by a room full of 30 year old mainframes. Every 2 years they had to bring in highly paid specialists to dust off the machines and get them running again. It was secure, but slow and inaccurate. No encryption, but there was a paper trail. It's now a whole lot quicker to count and recount votes, but it's also a lot easier to hack a voting computer than to make a punch card virus.
So I guess what I'm trying to say is that the voting system has never been perfect. It's been computerized for over 30 years, they've just been made more visible.
And cut the warehouse workers a little slack. They work 12+ hour days, 6 or 7 days a week, for a month leading up to an election. I heard from an old friend who still works there (that might change soon) and he's working a 24 shift today. It's a ton of work getting all the materials sorted and organized so that every polling place gets exactly what they need.