You probably wont find anything on google. While most case law in the US is available to the public, it is usually only available on the internet if you pay by the page.
In fact, yes if you walked in and observed them choking customers on their way out and you continued to go in and buy something, you would be consenting. In fact somebody just might file suit against you for knowingly participating!
It doesn't make it legal to do something illegal just because you consent to it, know about it, or others consent to it. Well, it makes it about 95% legal in a trivial case like receipt checking. Your rights are not an absolute thing. If rights were absolute, we wouldn't need a legal system.
When you walked in the door, did you observe other people getting their receipts checked? Upon entering, would a reasonable person assume this business checked your receipt on the way out? If yes, there goes almost your entire argument. You can argue about the legality of the search, but that you consented to it upon entering the business, and worse you actually purchased something too, will significantly weaken your case.
They can prevent you from entering, they can prevent you from leaving with their property, but they cannot prevent you from leaving with your property. Once you have paid, the item is your property, end of story. I doubt this is gonna fly in a court, sorry.
Or you could just not be a douche bag and get let the pimple faced receipt checker do his or her job. If it pisses you off that much, you could just stop shopping there. Being an asshole to a cop is a great way to get arrested.
I promise you right now, the only guy laughing is the receipt checker telling the story to his buddies.. "get this, some douche bag yuppie prick tried to walk past my line and when I told him I'll need to search his bag he started to yell at me. I totally called the cops on his sorry ass and he started to yell at cops too! But he got what was coming to him.. cops totally arrested his sorry ass... hahaha". Seriously, the only person who "won" was the receipt checker.
Wow! Never even thought about this. You could collude with an employee at Costco and cart out a new hi-def TV if they didn't have the receipt checker. In fact, Costco probably has it way worse because of the open nature of their stores makes it easier to not be noticed.
When should you [the merchant] ask a cardholder for an official government ID? Although Visa rules do not preclude merchants from asking for cardholder ID, merchants cannot make an ID a condition of acceptance. Therefore, merchants cannot refuse to complete a purchase transaction because a cardholder refuses to provide ID. Visa believes merchants should not ask for ID as part of their regular card acceptance procedures. Laws in several states also make it illegal for merchants to write a cardholder's personal information, such as an address or phone number, on a sales receipt. PDF from Visa, around page 29
I guess Visa doesn't explicitly disallow it, but every merchant account contract I've read says "thou shalt not check ID". Merchant accounts are a type of account that lets you accept credit cards. Unless you are really big fish, you never directly go through Visa or Mastercard. Instead you find company that offers a merchant account and they send you all the gear. You swipe a card, or do an internet transaction through their gateway. They route the funds into your regular checking account.
By the way in the document, before what I quoted, they have this interesting bit to say about "See ID":
Some customers write "See ID" or "Ask for ID" in the signature panel, thinking that this is a deterrent against fraud or forgery; that is, if their signature is not on the card, a fraudster will not be able to forge it. In reality, criminals don't take the time to practice signatures: they use cards as quickly as possible after a theft and prior to the accounts being blocked. They are actually counting on you not to look at the back of the card and compare signatures--they may even have access to counterfeit identification with a signature in their own handwriting. "See ID" or "Ask for ID" is not a valid substitute for a signature. The customer must sign the card in your presence, as stated above. (also on page 29, same document)
None of the laws in that link directly address a shopkeepers ability to search customers though. I suspect that unless you are a lawyer, you'll be hard pressed to find and kind of definitive proof that it is "legal". What I think you'll find is the legality of searching customers (i.e. Fry's) was upheld in court and is really case law. In other words, there is no law on the books that says "it is legal for businesses like Fry's to search people".
To play fake lawyer, it kind of makes sense because there are laws that say "thou shalt not be subjected to unwarranted searches" and in court it was found that the Fry's scenario did not apply to those laws.
The trick is to find court cases where the defendant tried to claim "your honor, they had no right to search me according to $LAW$ and therefore they cannot prosecute me" and the court said "sorry, they could search you because $LAW$ does not apply to your circumstance."
It isn't just lawsuits they worry about. It is the employee getting into a situation they aren't trained to handle. Some pimple faced 17 year old kid does not have the training to chase down a suspect and arrest him. The kid could easily provoke the suspect into say, shooting the kid or maybe even customers. The kid could maybe overstep his or her bounds and beat the shit out of the thief as well.
Receipt checkers are basically human security cameras. It is an act to make would be thief think twice about pocketing a stick of RAM. It isn't perfect, but I'm sure they've done the spreadsheet and can show that it cuts back on loss.
Seattle's bus system, Metro, has a similar policy for similar reasons. Bus drivers are not to pursue people who do not pay the bus fare. They are instructed to just give an evil eye, close the door, drive away, and let the cops deal with the aftermath.
I hear this all the time. My friends (while waiting in the receipt line, of course) always like to say "you know, this is illegal, we dont have to stand in this line". Yet in the entire thread that has spawned from your post, I have yet to see an actual URL to either case law, or a state/federal law that actually spells out the legality of bag checking. I can easily see a laywer arguing that the practice is simalar to checking bags on the way into a baseball game; as long as the customer knows they must consent to a search than the store or ballpark is doing nothing wrong.
This isn't to imply that they *should* be doing this, it is just to ask if it is actually legal for them to do so. Right or wrong is a whole different ball of wax. On the one hand, being treated like a criminal isn't a good thing, but on the other hand bringing fireworks into a baseball game is bad and so is walking out the front door of Fry's with a 1TB hard drive you didn't pay for. Does the businesses ability to prevent theft outweigh the cost of subjecting a customer to a shopping bag search? I don't know. Fry's sells a lot of very expensive things (unboxed ram & cpus) that are very easy to hide from cashiers. It isn't like a Target where most of the small stuff is inexpensive. If target had a bag check, that would be rather silly. Fry's, I dont know... It really doesn't bug me that much as long as I don't have to wait in a line.
But is it legal in all 50 United States? My gut says yes. If you want to bitch about something that *is* messed up, go bitch about cashiers checking who ask for photo ID when they take your credit card. Every merchant account contract I've signed or read explicitly prohibits this. You aren't even supposed to match signatures according to the contract.
Arg, to follow up to myself... if you said "I'll tell the FBI somebody hacked into my computer" rather than "cracked into my computer" and you still believe that hacker doesn't mean criminal, I'll tell you why that makes you uncomfortable and guilty. Internally your brain brain has to translate the word "cracker" into "hacker" before you talk to the person. When your brain isn't at 100% for whatever reason, it just might forgo that translation and leave your though process saying "hacker" to the FBI and feeling the emotions "person who likes to tinker around". Your mouth said "criminal" but your brain might have meant "geeky computer guy". And that is what is dangerous because it dulls your anger and clouds your thought process and if there was an agenda behind it, it was to make you think almost against your own will that computer crime is okay; information wants to be free, right?
I'm dead serious and I'm not trolling at all. And if we were in a bar, I'd sober up and look you right in the eyes when I said the stuff above. Hopefully I could convince you how wrong you are or you could just buy me drinks until I shut the fuck up or maybe come up with a reason why I'm wrong besides wikipedia links because dude, this ain't about tech it is about politics, linquistics and appeals to emotion. It is hard to discuss this on a website designed for maximum flameage.
The "media" had no agenda when they started to mainstream the word "hacker," it was just a nice sounding semi-watered down word already. The media was not sensationalizing the original term "hacker" it was redefining it to mean "the bad guy". Once the media brought the world of computer crime into the mainstream (I'm thinking of that lame hackers movie...*) the "war" on the word hacker was forever lost and it was time to move on. Be glad that the media was just finally catching on that people could do bad shit to computers regardless of the term. You should read some books written by sysadmins around that time (I have one but I can't find it on my bookself to get you the title). Sysadmins have had a very hard time getting government bodies to help them track down hackers. Nobody realized the damage these people could do, and half the reason very well could have been because of the watered down term "hacker" confusing things.
So please, I'm not trolling and quite frankly this stuff is better beer talk. I'll just leave saying that if you think I'm wrong, try going over scenarios in your head about people breaking into your computer shit. Listen to your though process and pay attention to your emotions while you label the person. Pretend you are thinking about going to the cops with it. What do you type? How does calling the perp a hacker make you feel? Does it make it feel like the person isn't doing anything wrong?
Language is an important tool. It is more powerful than weapons because it can literally alter the way you think. "Smart" governments and those with agendas they'd rather not be open about use language to manipulate peoples emotions and thoughts. See also, George Orwell.
Well, my last post was inflamitory for a reason; people that manipulate the English language piss me off to no end. "Ethical Hacker" = "Ethical Rapist". Period. In fact, by "ethical hacker" is a contraindication itself because nobody with any kind of ethics would use the word "hacker" for any other reason besides "criminal". Unethical people manipulate language.
Why am I being an ass? Because language is important. Every time you use hacker in a sentence and mean "smart guys having fun doing nerdy stuff with computers" instead of "asshole who fucks over peoples computer systems and causes hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage" you are promoting an agenda you probably don't agree with. Richard Stallman and that ESR dude are very good at manipulating language to further their agenda. Dont forget Stallman had a huge issue when MIT added passwords on their network. In his mind, everybody should be able to access any computer with full permission (after all, information wants to be free, right?). Very much like he tries to hijack "Free" to confuse people, he tried to hijack "Hacker" to make it sound like it is sometimes okay to break into other peoples property. If you realistically believe our computer systems can survive without any security, and you realistically belive that anybody should have access to any computer system, by all means continue pushing his cause by watering down the word "hacker.
Hacker = Criminal. Ethical Hacker is an oxymoron that minimizes the very real damage that hackers can cause when breaking into computer systems. When some fuckwad hacks into my computer system, I dont want the FBI agent thinking "did he mean 'some friendly hacker just trotted in humming and being all nice?" I want that FBI agent to hear that word and always thing "scum of the earth who fucks up computer systems". Hacking is not funny. There is no such thing as a friendly hacker. Hackers are evil and are scum of the earth. Hackers should be treated by our courts the same as any other criminal. Period.
Get your own word for people who like to mess with things... how about geek? The sooner we stop feeling guilty about associating hackers with criminals, the sooner our society can help us track down people that damange the systems we maintain.
Unethical hacker is really redundant, don't you think? All burglars are unethical, right? All rapists are unethical, right? Is there such a thing as a non-unethical hacker? That is like a non-unethical rapist, or an "ethical rapist", right?
If there is such a thing as an "ethical hacker" tell me how somebody can hack into a system and yet remain ethical? Do they wipe their proverbial feet before entering via some exploit in your PHP stack? Do they `nice` all their rootkits to run at a low priority? Do they gzip all their warez before XDCC'ing them to their buddies?
So, I dare ask you, how *can* you be an ethical hacker?
I'm confused too. Isn't "ethical hacker" the same as "ethical burglar" or "ethical rapist"? That doesn't make much sense.
Of course, in old-english the word "hacker" referred to old guys with grey beards doing crazy things on green-screen TTY's using LISP and M4. Bad guys were "crackers". Now days, we just use cracker for guys who break into vaults and of course crackhead white dudes. Hackers are what we use for criminals.
Sorry if I sound stupid, I should probably go bust out something in python... by dynamic you mean python is more like Perl:
my $var = "Could be a number, or a string, or a hashref"; or more like C# int var = 102; string astring = "My Happy String";
I'd think with the former perl like syntax the only way you could really parse the language in the editor and do good intellesense is to damn near compile the code in real time somehow. With C# and language like it, the editor only needs to look "skin deep" for the most part to determine the structure of variables and the language.
That said.. I'm no CS major, and alas I cannot write my own compiler. Not a superstar programmer here:-).
"Every OS" means BeOS, Amiga and Hurd, dude. Vista is a mainstream OS and if you are developing software or supporting those that use your software, you'd do well to force yourself to use it. Who knows, you might even like it. I forced myself to learn macs so I can write a desktop application and I've so far been fairly impressed.
Mainstream is:
Windows - Vista, XP, 2003 Server, 2000 Server Mac OSX A couple variants of linux - redhat, debian and suse Free/Open/NetBSD? What about home routers?
Is python dynamically typed? I've never got around to playing with it. If so, I'd be curious how VS2005 does it's intellesense magic with a dynamically typed language.
Fun fact, though I dont have the MSDN link, from what I understand Visual Studio provides all kinds of hooks to get it to "understand" your language of choice. Besides the python thing, aint there a PHP one?
I think the keyword for VS and C++ is "getting there". For whatever reason, VS2005 likes to somehow corrupt some internal component that then disables intellesense in my c/c++ project. I cannot get it back until I delete it's cache file. I haven't tried VS2007 yet, but I only can dream they have improved intellesense (and improved XMLDoc for C++ projects).
As for a comparison to eclipse? I don't think they target the same market honestly. Eclipse really seems like the IDE of choice for open source languages and VS2005 is all about doing Windows apps with Microsoft's set of languages. I don't think Visual Studio could even do PHP, Perl or any other dynamically typed language without making it feel awkward. On the same token, I dont think eclipse could ever make you feel at home in a.NET language.
Way off track now... does eclipse have dialog editors like VS2005? Can I go into eclipse and start drawing a form? If so, sweet!
But it always feels slightly off. I think half my problem is just their website really stinks. There is no diffinitive "this is eclipse, click here to download". And by download, I mean "setup.exe". Right now it is more like "here is a bunch of random eclipse like stuff with random names and no sense".
Am I right to assume eclipse is kind of like the linux kernel, and you need to pick a "eclipse distribution" to get any kind of coherent package?
I knocked on genuine 100% cedar wood* the entire time I typed that message. My servers know too, you know.
* And yes, your mom helped. Just figured I'd add that to keep out any obvious your mom jokes that may or may not come my way after typing such an obvious attack vector.
Which is why I get so many calls to fix broken Windows boxes. Maybe because there are just more Windows users, eh? Wait until grandma Fux0z your little Ubuntu install with the latest Ubuntu.Blast4r.2000 bot because she apt-got some shitty kitten screen saver. Or were you guys not planning on some kind of RFC put out by the Free Software Foundation that bans all forms of shitty kitty screen savers? What about all the third party software that wasn't in the repository? What happens when every company tries to install their weird ass toolbars, printer drivers and other kinds of garbage? What then? Or is Richard Stallman working on that RFC too?
Trust me, when people hack unix boxes, they can dig themselves so deep into your OS you'll never know they are there. People will fuck their computer up no matter what the operating system is. Imagine what happens when our botnet friends can use a compiler on your machine and have access to all kinds of exciting scripting languages like bash & perl. The day a Linux system becomes mainstream, we'll see all kinds of new exciting exploits.
Impossible you say? All it takes is one foul apt-get of "Shitty Kitty Screen Saver" and a local root exploit.
Slashdot Mirror
heh... i win :-) interesting stuff.
You probably wont find anything on google. While most case law in the US is available to the public, it is usually only available on the internet if you pay by the page.
Bloody yanks and your chemical leaveners.
(cookies to whoever gets that reference)
Or you could just not be a douche bag and get let the pimple faced receipt checker do his or her job. If it pisses you off that much, you could just stop shopping there. Being an asshole to a cop is a great way to get arrested.
I promise you right now, the only guy laughing is the receipt checker telling the story to his buddies.. "get this, some douche bag yuppie prick tried to walk past my line and when I told him I'll need to search his bag he started to yell at me. I totally called the cops on his sorry ass and he started to yell at cops too! But he got what was coming to him.. cops totally arrested his sorry ass... hahaha". Seriously, the only person who "won" was the receipt checker.
Wow! Never even thought about this. You could collude with an employee at Costco and cart out a new hi-def TV if they didn't have the receipt checker. In fact, Costco probably has it way worse because of the open nature of their stores makes it easier to not be noticed.
If I had mod points, you'd be getting them all.
rules do not preclude merchants from asking for cardholder ID, merchants
cannot make an ID a condition of acceptance. Therefore, merchants cannot
refuse to complete a purchase transaction because a cardholder refuses to
provide ID. Visa believes merchants should not ask for ID as part of their regular
card acceptance procedures. Laws in several states also make it illegal for
merchants to write a cardholder's personal information, such as an address or
phone number, on a sales receipt. PDF from Visa, around page 29
I guess Visa doesn't explicitly disallow it, but every merchant account contract I've read says "thou shalt not check ID". Merchant accounts are a type of account that lets you accept credit cards. Unless you are really big fish, you never directly go through Visa or Mastercard. Instead you find company that offers a merchant account and they send you all the gear. You swipe a card, or do an internet transaction through their gateway. They route the funds into your regular checking account.
By the way in the document, before what I quoted, they have this interesting bit to say about "See ID": Some customers write "See ID" or "Ask for ID" in the signature panel, thinking
that this is a deterrent against fraud or forgery; that is, if their signature is not
on the card, a fraudster will not be able to forge it. In reality, criminals don't take
the time to practice signatures: they use cards as quickly as possible after a
theft and prior to the accounts being blocked. They are actually counting on you
not to look at the back of the card and compare signatures--they may even have
access to counterfeit identification with a signature in their own handwriting.
"See ID" or "Ask for ID" is not a valid substitute for a signature. The customer
must sign the card in your presence, as stated above. (also on page 29, same document)
None of the laws in that link directly address a shopkeepers ability to search customers though. I suspect that unless you are a lawyer, you'll be hard pressed to find and kind of definitive proof that it is "legal". What I think you'll find is the legality of searching customers (i.e. Fry's) was upheld in court and is really case law. In other words, there is no law on the books that says "it is legal for businesses like Fry's to search people".
To play fake lawyer, it kind of makes sense because there are laws that say "thou shalt not be subjected to unwarranted searches" and in court it was found that the Fry's scenario did not apply to those laws.
The trick is to find court cases where the defendant tried to claim "your honor, they had no right to search me according to $LAW$ and therefore they cannot prosecute me" and the court said "sorry, they could search you because $LAW$ does not apply to your circumstance."
It isn't just lawsuits they worry about. It is the employee getting into a situation they aren't trained to handle. Some pimple faced 17 year old kid does not have the training to chase down a suspect and arrest him. The kid could easily provoke the suspect into say, shooting the kid or maybe even customers. The kid could maybe overstep his or her bounds and beat the shit out of the thief as well.
Receipt checkers are basically human security cameras. It is an act to make would be thief think twice about pocketing a stick of RAM. It isn't perfect, but I'm sure they've done the spreadsheet and can show that it cuts back on loss.
Seattle's bus system, Metro, has a similar policy for similar reasons. Bus drivers are not to pursue people who do not pay the bus fare. They are instructed to just give an evil eye, close the door, drive away, and let the cops deal with the aftermath.
I hear this all the time. My friends (while waiting in the receipt line, of course) always like to say "you know, this is illegal, we dont have to stand in this line". Yet in the entire thread that has spawned from your post, I have yet to see an actual URL to either case law, or a state/federal law that actually spells out the legality of bag checking. I can easily see a laywer arguing that the practice is simalar to checking bags on the way into a baseball game; as long as the customer knows they must consent to a search than the store or ballpark is doing nothing wrong.
This isn't to imply that they *should* be doing this, it is just to ask if it is actually legal for them to do so. Right or wrong is a whole different ball of wax. On the one hand, being treated like a criminal isn't a good thing, but on the other hand bringing fireworks into a baseball game is bad and so is walking out the front door of Fry's with a 1TB hard drive you didn't pay for. Does the businesses ability to prevent theft outweigh the cost of subjecting a customer to a shopping bag search? I don't know. Fry's sells a lot of very expensive things (unboxed ram & cpus) that are very easy to hide from cashiers. It isn't like a Target where most of the small stuff is inexpensive. If target had a bag check, that would be rather silly. Fry's, I dont know... It really doesn't bug me that much as long as I don't have to wait in a line.
But is it legal in all 50 United States? My gut says yes. If you want to bitch about something that *is* messed up, go bitch about cashiers checking who ask for photo ID when they take your credit card. Every merchant account contract I've signed or read explicitly prohibits this. You aren't even supposed to match signatures according to the contract.
Arg, to follow up to myself... if you said "I'll tell the FBI somebody hacked into my computer" rather than "cracked into my computer" and you still believe that hacker doesn't mean criminal, I'll tell you why that makes you uncomfortable and guilty. Internally your brain brain has to translate the word "cracker" into "hacker" before you talk to the person. When your brain isn't at 100% for whatever reason, it just might forgo that translation and leave your though process saying "hacker" to the FBI and feeling the emotions "person who likes to tinker around". Your mouth said "criminal" but your brain might have meant "geeky computer guy". And that is what is dangerous because it dulls your anger and clouds your thought process and if there was an agenda behind it, it was to make you think almost against your own will that computer crime is okay; information wants to be free, right?
I'm dead serious and I'm not trolling at all. And if we were in a bar, I'd sober up and look you right in the eyes when I said the stuff above. Hopefully I could convince you how wrong you are or you could just buy me drinks until I shut the fuck up or maybe come up with a reason why I'm wrong besides wikipedia links because dude, this ain't about tech it is about politics, linquistics and appeals to emotion. It is hard to discuss this on a website designed for maximum flameage.
The "media" had no agenda when they started to mainstream the word "hacker," it was just a nice sounding semi-watered down word already. The media was not sensationalizing the original term "hacker" it was redefining it to mean "the bad guy". Once the media brought the world of computer crime into the mainstream (I'm thinking of that lame hackers movie...*) the "war" on the word hacker was forever lost and it was time to move on. Be glad that the media was just finally catching on that people could do bad shit to computers regardless of the term. You should read some books written by sysadmins around that time (I have one but I can't find it on my bookself to get you the title). Sysadmins have had a very hard time getting government bodies to help them track down hackers. Nobody realized the damage these people could do, and half the reason very well could have been because of the watered down term "hacker" confusing things.
So please, I'm not trolling and quite frankly this stuff is better beer talk. I'll just leave saying that if you think I'm wrong, try going over scenarios in your head about people breaking into your computer shit. Listen to your though process and pay attention to your emotions while you label the person. Pretend you are thinking about going to the cops with it. What do you type? How does calling the perp a hacker make you feel? Does it make it feel like the person isn't doing anything wrong?
Language is an important tool. It is more powerful than weapons because it can literally alter the way you think. "Smart" governments and those with agendas they'd rather not be open about use language to manipulate peoples emotions and thoughts. See also, George Orwell.
Well, my last post was inflamitory for a reason; people that manipulate the English language piss me off to no end. "Ethical Hacker" = "Ethical Rapist". Period. In fact, by "ethical hacker" is a contraindication itself because nobody with any kind of ethics would use the word "hacker" for any other reason besides "criminal". Unethical people manipulate language.
Why am I being an ass? Because language is important. Every time you use hacker in a sentence and mean "smart guys having fun doing nerdy stuff with computers" instead of "asshole who fucks over peoples computer systems and causes hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage" you are promoting an agenda you probably don't agree with. Richard Stallman and that ESR dude are very good at manipulating language to further their agenda. Dont forget Stallman had a huge issue when MIT added passwords on their network. In his mind, everybody should be able to access any computer with full permission (after all, information wants to be free, right?). Very much like he tries to hijack "Free" to confuse people, he tried to hijack "Hacker" to make it sound like it is sometimes okay to break into other peoples property. If you realistically believe our computer systems can survive without any security, and you realistically belive that anybody should have access to any computer system, by all means continue pushing his cause by watering down the word "hacker.
Hacker = Criminal. Ethical Hacker is an oxymoron that minimizes the very real damage that hackers can cause when breaking into computer systems. When some fuckwad hacks into my computer system, I dont want the FBI agent thinking "did he mean 'some friendly hacker just trotted in humming and being all nice?" I want that FBI agent to hear that word and always thing "scum of the earth who fucks up computer systems". Hacking is not funny. There is no such thing as a friendly hacker. Hackers are evil and are scum of the earth. Hackers should be treated by our courts the same as any other criminal. Period.
Get your own word for people who like to mess with things... how about geek? The sooner we stop feeling guilty about associating hackers with criminals, the sooner our society can help us track down people that damange the systems we maintain.
Unethical hacker is really redundant, don't you think? All burglars are unethical, right? All rapists are unethical, right? Is there such a thing as a non-unethical hacker? That is like a non-unethical rapist, or an "ethical rapist", right?
If there is such a thing as an "ethical hacker" tell me how somebody can hack into a system and yet remain ethical? Do they wipe their proverbial feet before entering via some exploit in your PHP stack? Do they `nice` all their rootkits to run at a low priority? Do they gzip all their warez before XDCC'ing them to their buddies?
So, I dare ask you, how *can* you be an ethical hacker?
I'm confused too. Isn't "ethical hacker" the same as "ethical burglar" or "ethical rapist"? That doesn't make much sense.
Of course, in old-english the word "hacker" referred to old guys with grey beards doing crazy things on green-screen TTY's using LISP and M4. Bad guys were "crackers". Now days, we just use cracker for guys who break into vaults and of course crackhead white dudes. Hackers are what we use for criminals.
So yes, I'm just as confused as you.
Sorry if I sound stupid, I should probably go bust out something in python... by dynamic you mean python is more like Perl:
:-).
my $var = "Could be a number, or a string, or a hashref";
or more like C#
int var = 102;
string astring = "My Happy String";
I'd think with the former perl like syntax the only way you could really parse the language in the editor and do good intellesense is to damn near compile the code in real time somehow. With C# and language like it, the editor only needs to look "skin deep" for the most part to determine the structure of variables and the language.
That said.. I'm no CS major, and alas I cannot write my own compiler. Not a superstar programmer here
Sweet.. I didn't know there was so many languages (like php).
You should tell your marketing dudes they need to make this website more prominent on the MSDN site. I had no idea this site even existed!
"Every OS" means BeOS, Amiga and Hurd, dude. Vista is a mainstream OS and if you are developing software or supporting those that use your software, you'd do well to force yourself to use it. Who knows, you might even like it. I forced myself to learn macs so I can write a desktop application and I've so far been fairly impressed.
Mainstream is:
Windows - Vista, XP, 2003 Server, 2000 Server
Mac OSX
A couple variants of linux - redhat, debian and suse
Free/Open/NetBSD?
What about home routers?
Is python dynamically typed? I've never got around to playing with it. If so, I'd be curious how VS2005 does it's intellesense magic with a dynamically typed language.
Fun fact, though I dont have the MSDN link, from what I understand Visual Studio provides all kinds of hooks to get it to "understand" your language of choice. Besides the python thing, aint there a PHP one?
I think the keyword for VS and C++ is "getting there". For whatever reason, VS2005 likes to somehow corrupt some internal component that then disables intellesense in my c/c++ project. I cannot get it back until I delete it's cache file. I haven't tried VS2007 yet, but I only can dream they have improved intellesense (and improved XMLDoc for C++ projects).
.NET language.
As for a comparison to eclipse? I don't think they target the same market honestly. Eclipse really seems like the IDE of choice for open source languages and VS2005 is all about doing Windows apps with Microsoft's set of languages. I don't think Visual Studio could even do PHP, Perl or any other dynamically typed language without making it feel awkward. On the same token, I dont think eclipse could ever make you feel at home in a
Way off track now... does eclipse have dialog editors like VS2005? Can I go into eclipse and start drawing a form? If so, sweet!
Awesome! Thanks to both you and your sibling for the tip.
:-)
I'm trying to do perl right now. I've been spoiled rotten with Visual Studio (C# / C++ work) and want the same kinds of goodies for my perl stuff
But it always feels slightly off. I think half my problem is just their website really stinks. There is no diffinitive "this is eclipse, click here to download". And by download, I mean "setup.exe". Right now it is more like "here is a bunch of random eclipse like stuff with random names and no sense".
Am I right to assume eclipse is kind of like the linux kernel, and you need to pick a "eclipse distribution" to get any kind of coherent package?
I knocked on genuine 100% cedar wood* the entire time I typed that message. My servers know too, you know.
* And yes, your mom helped. Just figured I'd add that to keep out any obvious your mom jokes that may or may not come my way after typing such an obvious attack vector.
Trust me, when people hack unix boxes, they can dig themselves so deep into your OS you'll never know they are there. People will fuck their computer up no matter what the operating system is. Imagine what happens when our botnet friends can use a compiler on your machine and have access to all kinds of exciting scripting languages like bash & perl. The day a Linux system becomes mainstream, we'll see all kinds of new exciting exploits.
Impossible you say? All it takes is one foul apt-get of "Shitty Kitty Screen Saver" and a local root exploit.