I thought you were going to hit home at the end with the punch-line "oh wait, they've already done it with office XP" but you didn't. Doesn't Office XP do most of these things already. Excellent point though. People use MS because it's easy and it's what they know. Once that PITA factor rises above a certain threshold they're going to look for alternatives.
I don't like office. If I want to write something for myself I write it in plain text. If I want it to look pretty I write HTML. If I want to do a presentation I use HTML. If I want to calculate something I write a program to do it (I have never used Excel of my own volition, I have to use it sometimes because clients insist on "importing" csv files into Excel). If I want a database I'll use a real one, not a toy one. The only one I use on a daily basis is Outlook - because it's a company standard.
Oil prices often go down during the northern hemisphere summer due to a lowering in demand (because oil is used for heating). At least that is what I've been told. In Australia the energy consumption pattern is different. The balance has tipped to being greater in summer as people air-condition their homes to escape the heat and humidity. When it starts hitting 45 celsius with 100% humidity you'll do whatever you can. Anyway, I think the poster was referring to the electrical energy crisis.
I've never downloaded anything from Oracle Technet (I don't have UNLIMITED bandwidth), but it always looks like there is a lot of cool stuff up there to be downloaded. This (plus the fact that Larry Ellison is a nut-job) makes Oracle seem kind of cool.
My thoughts exactly. Although all the products achieve the same aim, they all do it in different ways, and all have their uses. VMWare is useful for testing lots of different windows configurations on one box, running windows and linux etc, but it is fundamentally different to WINE, which is useful if you want to run a single windows app without paying for a windows license, or without having to re-boot. Win2Net sound like some kind of proxy-in-a-browser or X-for-windows-in-a-browser thing, which is yet another sort of beast altogether (and probably not a bad solution in a number of cases - I remeber reading in a recent/. article by roblimo were public servants in some city in florida were using some sort of software like this to access MS-Excel via terminal-emulation). All three approaces are different, with pros and cons for each.
I'm a windows developer, and I'm still doing fine with my pentium II 300 (I did just upgrade to 256 meg of ram, just 'cause ram is so cheap right now). I have VS.NET installed, VS6, SQL Server 2K. I have the same stuff installed at work (PIII 1GHz) and I only ever notice a slight lag when starting up applications at home compared to work. I try and keep my machine as lean and mean as possible. Don't install crap you don't need or will never use, don't upgrade unless you have to, if you want to try something out install it by all means (but then get rid of it when you're finished having a look at it), Uninstall or disable any services you don't need (this helps security also). I think the games industry does a great job of pushing the boundaries of hardware. I'm sure if I tried to play any games on my PII 300 I'd be in for a pretty rude shock (except my favourite game is Nethack - I don't think that would tax my PII 300 too much). This means that when I upgrade next year or whenever I'll be able to get a kick-ass machine for not very much because my new machine will already be at the bottom end of the curve for playing games on.
I DID read the article, thanks very much, (although perhaps I did skip over the last part because I didn't remember reading anything about consulting the owner). I was quite convinced by the author's reasoning, but I was just questioning why (it seemed when I read it that) technical people were making a very major business decision with a lot of potential ramifications. Apart from this one paragraph mentioning the owner the rest of the article makes it sound as though the decision was made in a vaccum (i.e. one day the developers all had a meeting and decided to make a MAJOR change for our company). I'd still argue that a decision like "should we use visual basic or C++" is a business decision which should be made based on a number of things, including (but not limited to) technical considerations. Perhaps it is just my perception (or I'm smoking crack), but I think a number of things developers consider when chosing tools/languages/whatever are business considerations (Like productivity for example). From a purely technical perspective C++ is far superior to visual basic, but many developers might choose it for certain types of projects (where the limitations of VB aren't going to be tested) because they know (or think) they can be more productive in it. Having established that all programmers are also shrewd business-people at their core, now all we need to do is get sales/marketting to allow themselves to tap the innate technical knowledge they all posess and bring it to bear in their daily business dealings %{8^).
After making the change to Microsoft development tools why did you stick with Win32? Persumably new PCs that you buy can be installed with your favourite distro, and no doubt you will want to keep a few Windows boxen around for your legacy VB code etc. My other question is why did the developers make this decision? This seems to be more of a business decision to me, not a decision that developers should make. Developers should make technical decisions and business people should make business decisions. If can achieve you goals using VB or open source tools, then the question of which tool-set to use becomes a business one rather than a technical one. Which tools are most productive (so costs are lower)? Which tools are cheaper to purchase? (once again - so costs are lower - but this is less of an issue than tool productivity, since productive tools will usually pay for themselves quite easily). Which tools are more widely supported (to mitigate risk)? Where do our existing strengths lie? Don't get me wrong, I think open source tools can hold their own from a business perspective as well as a technical perspective, I just don't think business decisions should be made by technical people (unless they are also the business people). Developers always get pissed off when sales/marketting says "we can deliver X in 3 months". The business people are making a technical decision. Technical people making business decisions is no different. BTW if you're a VB shop moving to Open Source try Python and wxwindows (if you need a gui) and straight python (if you don't need a gui). You'll find the change very pleasant.
What limitations are you refering to? You'll have to be more specific. Maybe it doesn't have parametric polymorphism or multiple inheritance but it looks O.K. to me.
There is another program called BOA (also called the BOA Constructor). It's a gui builder and IDE for python (it's quite good) which can be found here. This BOA also looks cool. It seems to have all the basic requirements to be a productive web developer (db access, regex, encapsulating html object in special tags). I might give it a try.
If they hacked my account...
on
Hotmail Hacked
·
· Score: 2, Redundant
All they'd see is SPAM!
form Horny1673_@somemadeupdomain.com Free Britney Spears Hardcore!
from Blah684yi8s@anothercrapdomain.com Consolodate your debt now!
from gr33r5s@hotmail.com Attract Men and Women
And let's not forget...I send you this e-mail in order to have your advice. I have a hard enough time reading my e-mail. Good luck to all the crackers out there who want to read my e-mail. I even got spammed the other day by someone selling orthopedic in-soles for people with a "leg lenght discrepancy" now that is something I'm looking forward to more in the future, Niche Spam.
This isn't related to the "Handing Over Root Passwords to Consultants" ask slashdot a couple of items below is it? If not there may be a few good suggestions there.
I'd love to see replication in postgres. I too feel that none of the vendors have handled it particularly well (at least none I've seen). You need to design for it from day one, and hold it's hand all the way.
I hope most people who develop applications for windows would agree with me that "windows" is not a homogenous thing. For a start there's windows95/98/NT/ME/2000/CE. CE is obviously very different from the rest so I'll ignore it for the rest of the discussion. This leaves 95/98/NT/ME/2000. They are simply NOT homogenous. You cannot treat them as such. Something that works fine on 98 will not work on 95. NT increases the problem by having multiple service packs. Also, the presence/absence of large pieces of software will greatly affect the behaviour of the platform (especially IE). Even the ORDER that things are installed in can have an impact. (I'm sure some of us have gone mad trying to remember did we install x before or after we installed service pack n, and was that before or after we installed y, and if it was was it y professional or y enterprise, and if we did, did we select the foo option?). One commercial application I worked on had a bug in the installer(created by installshield) that on windows NT service pack 4 would completely fsck the user's computer to the point where it was un-bootable and needed to be re-formatted, but worked fine on every other combination of windows we tested. Windows is NOT a homogenous platform.
I think one of the great advantages of python is the wealth of material the monty python scripts bring to the table. Endless material for tutorial and how-to writers. Think of the novelty of reassembling the string "spam, eggs, spam, sausage, spam, spam, bacon, spam and spam" in a million different ways using all the different types of sequence objects. Ruby just can't compete with this type of idiom.
I saw OSX for the first time the other night at my brother's house. It seemed quite fast (on a relatively old iMac). It is also most certainly a UNIX. The command prompt is right there with all the commands I know and love (like 'man';^)). My brother also had an early MONO running on it. Very cool. The developers tools (which come on a seperate CD) look quite interesting. Nice GUI builder ala visual basic with object c behind (I think). Overall....I'm jealous!
I remember reading about another lineage of cells in a book. They were called TEHE cells (I think), and they were also removed form a cancer patient. If I remember rightly they were also very...how shall I put it...virrulent. Cell cultures that were kept in the same room as them were overtaken by them. They even corrupted some government tissue bank's "pristine" cell cultures. I searched google but couldn't find anything (except a lot of mis-spellings of "the" and "laughter - tehe - get it!"). The story of these cells and the HELA cells is very interesting. Is there anyone out there who can confirm this fading memory? I can't even remember what book I read it in.
I'm sure I've read this post (or very similar) before (especially the estimation of the number of *BSD users). I hope you're not re-cycling posts are you (althought why you would re-cycle such an obvious troll is beyond me)? If *BSD is dead what do you call this?
VBScript Unleased in 24 hours for Dummies, Deluxe Edition
Just Kidding about that last one! As you can probably tell from my list I'm a programmer (so programming books are the type of books I can reccomend) No doubt hardware/networking people will have some awesome books in this area to reccomend. Ditto books on SQL and relational database design.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't like office. If I want to write something for myself I write it in plain text. If I want it to look pretty I write HTML. If I want to do a presentation I use HTML. If I want to calculate something I write a program to do it (I have never used Excel of my own volition, I have to use it sometimes because clients insist on "importing" csv files into Excel). If I want a database I'll use a real one, not a toy one. The only one I use on a daily basis is Outlook - because it's a company standard.
You think Perl is bad? Try the Brainfuck langauage. Here is some code for factoring large numbers written in brainfuck.
But if the part that the computer thought was defective turns out to be O.K. will it go on a murderous rampage?
sounds like a candidate for the Interface Hall Of Shame
Oil prices often go down during the northern hemisphere summer due to a lowering in demand (because oil is used for heating). At least that is what I've been told. In Australia the energy consumption pattern is different. The balance has tipped to being greater in summer as people air-condition their homes to escape the heat and humidity. When it starts hitting 45 celsius with 100% humidity you'll do whatever you can. Anyway, I think the poster was referring to the electrical energy crisis.
I've never downloaded anything from Oracle Technet (I don't have UNLIMITED bandwidth), but it always looks like there is a lot of cool stuff up there to be downloaded. This (plus the fact that Larry Ellison is a nut-job) makes Oracle seem kind of cool.
My thoughts exactly. Although all the products achieve the same aim, they all do it in different ways, and all have their uses. VMWare is useful for testing lots of different windows configurations on one box, running windows and linux etc, but it is fundamentally different to WINE, which is useful if you want to run a single windows app without paying for a windows license, or without having to re-boot. Win2Net sound like some kind of proxy-in-a-browser or X-for-windows-in-a-browser thing, which is yet another sort of beast altogether (and probably not a bad solution in a number of cases - I remeber reading in a recent /. article by roblimo were public servants in some city in florida were using some sort of software like this to access MS-Excel via terminal-emulation). All three approaces are different, with pros and cons for each.
Because Office for Mac and IE for Mac would disappear.
I'm a windows developer, and I'm still doing fine with my pentium II 300 (I did just upgrade to 256 meg of ram, just 'cause ram is so cheap right now). I have VS.NET installed, VS6, SQL Server 2K. I have the same stuff installed at work (PIII 1GHz) and I only ever notice a slight lag when starting up applications at home compared to work. I try and keep my machine as lean and mean as possible. Don't install crap you don't need or will never use, don't upgrade unless you have to, if you want to try something out install it by all means (but then get rid of it when you're finished having a look at it), Uninstall or disable any services you don't need (this helps security also). I think the games industry does a great job of pushing the boundaries of hardware. I'm sure if I tried to play any games on my PII 300 I'd be in for a pretty rude shock (except my favourite game is Nethack - I don't think that would tax my PII 300 too much). This means that when I upgrade next year or whenever I'll be able to get a kick-ass machine for not very much because my new machine will already be at the bottom end of the curve for playing games on.
I DID read the article, thanks very much, (although perhaps I did skip over the last part because I didn't remember reading anything about consulting the owner). I was quite convinced by the author's reasoning, but I was just questioning why (it seemed when I read it that) technical people were making a very major business decision with a lot of potential ramifications. Apart from this one paragraph mentioning the owner the rest of the article makes it sound as though the decision was made in a vaccum (i.e. one day the developers all had a meeting and decided to make a MAJOR change for our company). I'd still argue that a decision like "should we use visual basic or C++" is a business decision which should be made based on a number of things, including (but not limited to) technical considerations. Perhaps it is just my perception (or I'm smoking crack), but I think a number of things developers consider when chosing tools/languages/whatever are business considerations (Like productivity for example). From a purely technical perspective C++ is far superior to visual basic, but many developers might choose it for certain types of projects (where the limitations of VB aren't going to be tested) because they know (or think) they can be more productive in it. Having established that all programmers are also shrewd business-people at their core, now all we need to do is get sales/marketting to allow themselves to tap the innate technical knowledge they all posess and bring it to bear in their daily business dealings %{8^).
After making the change to Microsoft development tools why did you stick with Win32? Persumably new PCs that you buy can be installed with your favourite distro, and no doubt you will want to keep a few Windows boxen around for your legacy VB code etc. My other question is why did the developers make this decision? This seems to be more of a business decision to me, not a decision that developers should make. Developers should make technical decisions and business people should make business decisions. If can achieve you goals using VB or open source tools, then the question of which tool-set to use becomes a business one rather than a technical one. Which tools are most productive (so costs are lower)? Which tools are cheaper to purchase? (once again - so costs are lower - but this is less of an issue than tool productivity, since productive tools will usually pay for themselves quite easily). Which tools are more widely supported (to mitigate risk)? Where do our existing strengths lie? Don't get me wrong, I think open source tools can hold their own from a business perspective as well as a technical perspective, I just don't think business decisions should be made by technical people (unless they are also the business people). Developers always get pissed off when sales/marketting says "we can deliver X in 3 months". The business people are making a technical decision. Technical people making business decisions is no different. BTW if you're a VB shop moving to Open Source try Python and wxwindows (if you need a gui) and straight python (if you don't need a gui). You'll find the change very pleasant.
I've read this post before. It wasn't interesting then, it isn't interesting now. Give it a rest.
What limitations are you refering to? You'll have to be more specific. Maybe it doesn't have parametric polymorphism or multiple inheritance but it looks O.K. to me.
I guess it's to cut down on the www.goatse.cx crap
There is another program called BOA (also called the BOA Constructor). It's a gui builder and IDE for python (it's quite good) which can be found here. This BOA also looks cool. It seems to have all the basic requirements to be a productive web developer (db access, regex, encapsulating html object in special tags). I might give it a try.
And let's not forget...I send you this e-mail in order to have your advice. I have a hard enough time reading my e-mail. Good luck to all the crackers out there who want to read my e-mail. I even got spammed the other day by someone selling orthopedic in-soles for people with a "leg lenght discrepancy" now that is something I'm looking forward to more in the future, Niche Spam.
This isn't related to the "Handing Over Root Passwords to Consultants" ask slashdot a couple of items below is it? If not there may be a few good suggestions there.
I'd love to see replication in postgres. I too feel that none of the vendors have handled it particularly well (at least none I've seen). You need to design for it from day one, and hold it's hand all the way.
I hope most people who develop applications for windows would agree with me that "windows" is not a homogenous thing. For a start there's windows95/98/NT/ME/2000/CE. CE is obviously very different from the rest so I'll ignore it for the rest of the discussion. This leaves 95/98/NT/ME/2000. They are simply NOT homogenous. You cannot treat them as such. Something that works fine on 98 will not work on 95. NT increases the problem by having multiple service packs. Also, the presence/absence of large pieces of software will greatly affect the behaviour of the platform (especially IE). Even the ORDER that things are installed in can have an impact. (I'm sure some of us have gone mad trying to remember did we install x before or after we installed service pack n, and was that before or after we installed y, and if it was was it y professional or y enterprise, and if we did, did we select the foo option?). One commercial application I worked on had a bug in the installer(created by installshield) that on windows NT service pack 4 would completely fsck the user's computer to the point where it was un-bootable and needed to be re-formatted, but worked fine on every other combination of windows we tested. Windows is NOT a homogenous platform.
I think one of the great advantages of python is the wealth of material the monty python scripts bring to the table. Endless material for tutorial and how-to writers. Think of the novelty of reassembling the string "spam, eggs, spam, sausage, spam, spam, bacon, spam and spam" in a million different ways using all the different types of sequence objects. Ruby just can't compete with this type of idiom.
I assume it will be available as a MS-Word doc. After all, he just loves those True-Type Fonts!
I saw OSX for the first time the other night at my brother's house. It seemed quite fast (on a relatively old iMac). It is also most certainly a UNIX. The command prompt is right there with all the commands I know and love (like 'man' ;^)). My brother also had an early MONO running on it. Very cool. The developers tools (which come on a seperate CD) look quite interesting. Nice GUI builder ala visual basic with object c behind (I think). Overall....I'm jealous!
I remember reading about another lineage of cells in a book. They were called TEHE cells (I think), and they were also removed form a cancer patient. If I remember rightly they were also very...how shall I put it...virrulent. Cell cultures that were kept in the same room as them were overtaken by them. They even corrupted some government tissue bank's "pristine" cell cultures. I searched google but couldn't find anything (except a lot of mis-spellings of "the" and "laughter - tehe - get it!"). The story of these cells and the HELA cells is very interesting. Is there anyone out there who can confirm this fading memory? I can't even remember what book I read it in.
I'm sure I've read this post (or very similar) before (especially the estimation of the number of *BSD users). I hope you're not re-cycling posts are you (althought why you would re-cycle such an obvious troll is beyond me)? If *BSD is dead what do you call this?
- The Pragmatic Programmer
- The Practice of Programming
- The C Programming Language
- Code Complete
- Rapid Development
- VBScript Unleased in 24 hours for Dummies, Deluxe Edition
Just Kidding about that last one! As you can probably tell from my list I'm a programmer (so programming books are the type of books I can reccomend) No doubt hardware/networking people will have some awesome books in this area to reccomend. Ditto books on SQL and relational database design.