A whole brand tarnished on one product out of hundreds (if not thousands)?! You're harsh man!
Well, here's the thing. I spent most of the years of my career living in a university town with excellent booksellers. I now live in a comparatively tiny island community a long way from the nearest tech center and if I want tech books I can't just pop into a store that has them in stock and browse, I have to order them and have them shipped.
I've previously bought quite a few O'Reilly titles and while not every one of them was brilliant, they were reliably pretty decent; this one was affirmatively the worst, to the point where in the future when I want a tutorial or reference work on a new technology I won't just call up and order the O'Reilly book on the subject because I don't feel like I can rely on their quality and I don't need any more $40 door stops.
It doesn't mean I'll never order another O'Reilly tome, but it does mean that I felt let down enough to stop automatically trusting their quality by default.
I'll chime in as another who found a previous edition of this work to be flawed -- enough so to tarnish the O'Reilly brand for me. While it's possible the newest edition is better it sounds (from the review) more like an update than a re-write.
who for some unfathomable reason decided to call themselves "Acretive Solutions," or something. I mean, aside from the impossibility of being able to tell if it's "Acretive" or "Acrative" just by listening to it, what the hell is that supposed to mean?
Not to imply that it's a good name, but it sounds as though you're not aware that "accretive" is a genuine word with an established meaning (it's an adjectival form of "accretion".)
Just as it takes more than skillful special effects to make a great movie, it takes more than good graphics to make a great game. You'd think these points would be obvious but there are quite clearly game (and movie) makers out there who don't get them.
About six years ago I lived in an eastside suburb of Seattle and subscribed to Netflix. I cancelled after about four months because during that time four movies never reached me and I wound up paying Netflix for one of them (I probably could have avoided that if I'd made a stink, but as I figured it they'd already eaten the cost of several other movies.)
Around about that time a substantial check that I was expecting to receive disappeared in the mail, and I noticed that other items were disappearing in the mail, too. I called to cancel a magazine gift subscription a well-meaning relative had signed me up for and discovered that they'd been sending the magazine for six months, though I had only received one issue. Between the movies, the magazines, and the missing check it was clear that I had a problem with disappearing mail.
So I went down to the local post office and asked to speak with the local postmaster. I explained about the missing magazines, movies, and check, and told him that I suspected I was a victim of ongoing mail theft.
He assured me that he'd look into the situation and was turning to go back into the bowels of the post office when I interrupted. "You're lying," I said. He said something to the effect of "That's an awfully rude thing to say for no reason," but I knew he had no intention of seriously looking into my complaint and I told him why. During our entire conversation I hadn't mentioned my address and he never asked.
His body language led me to believe that he had a carrier on his staff (or possibly several) that he knew was stealing mail. I figured as soon as I told him I was losing mail he knew who the likely culprit was without even having to ask which route I was on but either couldn't or wouldn't stop them.
Shortly thereafter I moved to a small town in Alaska. The mail service here is reliable and the people at the post office are very nice. To the best of my knowledge none of my mail has ever gone missing here. I've talked to other people who have had mail problems and everything I've heard has lead me to believe that the reliability of your mail depends a great deal on the people working at the post office nearest you and in some places at the nearest big sorting center.
It's a shame, because if you live in a place where the service is good, the USPS is pretty nifty. You tend not to think of it because the mail is so ordinary, but the fact that I can drop a piece of paper in the box on the corner here on an island in southeast Alaska and for $0.42 someone will carry it to my family back in Michigan or even halfway around the world is really pretty remarkable.
Instead of uploading a paper to a printer, why not email it directly to your professor? If they feel the need to have a printed copy, let them print it.
Your suggestion has several major problems, particularly:
It either requires all of the students to convert their documents to a common interchange format or requires the professor to have a working copy of every application their students use to prepare their work.
It exposes the professor to unnecessary risk from virus-infected documents.
There are many other more surmountable objections (e.g. it depends on the reliability of an electronic submission process that has not been discussed but which is likely to be less than 100% reliable, etc.) but the first two are enough to kill it as far as I'm concerned.
I've long maintained that learning how to ask questions properly is a big part of getting a useful response.
Apropos of which, positing a question that is highly location-specific in a global forum and then not specifying one's location is an excellent way to get no useful responses whatsoever.
It'd be nice to think that that was true, but based on the number of totally f'ed up McAfee and Norton situations I've seen, it's not even close to safe to conclude that for-pay anti-virus products are reliably more trouble-free than ones that don't cost money for home use.
I've read through the whole thread so far and haven't seen any mention of the tremendous power available using the grouping operators '\(' and '\)' in regular expression search and replace. You can do some really amazing line transformations using these in the match part of the substitute and the \1, \2, etc. patterns in the replace.
Let's say you've got a text table of comma separated weather data, for example:
75,Sunny,5mph,SW 65,PartCloudy,10mph,W
and you want to switch the field order so the second field comes first after the replace. Very easy when you know that grouping the match expressions in \( and \) allows you to re-use them in the substitute pattern (\1 is the first grouped match expression, \2 is the second, etc..)
:%s/\([0-9]*\),\([A-Za-z]*\),\(.*\)/\2,\1,\3/
will switch the sample text above to:
Sunny,75,5mph,SW PartCloudy,65,10mph,W
OK, that's a really simple example and could easily have been accomplished by piping the block to awk (for example) but trust me, once you start finding places to use this powerful feature of regex search and replace you'll wonder how you ever lived without it.
Secondly, how exactly do the "latest music files" get into this monitored folder? If you manually dragged them there, then you might as well have just manually dragged them onto the itunes window. If they arrived there through any other means, that just further underscores that its an advanced feature.
Perhaps you downloaded them from a non-iTunes music service? eMusic, for example, will be happy to sell you MP3s unencumbered by DRM on a monthly subscription plan. Amazon will sell tunes to you one at a time or by the album. Myriad other services exist which will do likewise.
That iTunes requires extra effort (drag and drop or manual import) to use tunes obtained from these services isn't all that surprising, but it is an example of Apple using its market domination in the MP3-player market to reinforce its music store business, That, in turn, by locking purchases with a DRM scheme that's incompatible with other manufacturers' personal audio players reinforces Apple's MP3-player hardware-market dominance -- it's a classic example of a monopolist or near-monopolist using their market position to give an advantage to their own products and services. Does it really surprise you to find out that the typical Slashdot reader doesn't approve of that kind of business practice?
Its few faults and many strengths actually. The biggest advantage it has over other players is that it works with =all= ipods/iphones seamlessly.
Again with the vendor lock-in.. It works great with Apple products (and only Apple products.) As far as I'm concerned, that's their prerogative -- they write the software, they can write it how they want. Some number of us, however, will choose to use some other app. In the long run if that leads to the development of an application that large number of people find to be better than iTunes, everybody (except, perhaps, the monopolists) wins.
they also said the constitution isn't a suicide pact
They never said that, nor does it make any sense to believe that the men who pledged "our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor," to the revolution in the Declaration of Independence would, by the time the Constitution was adopted, have concluded "you know, this freedom stuff's OK, but it's not worth dying for.."
The "not a suicide pact" meme is pretty close to the antithesis of the spirit that moved the founders of this country, and like the previous commenter I consider it a detestable sentiment.
That would actually be a neat trick. Photoshop a few pictures of you along with high-ranking government officials.
For bonus irony points, put your head on top of Saddam Hussein's body in that famous picture of him shaking hands with Donald Rumsfeld. (Although, Rumsfeld is technically no longer a high-ranking government official.)
I have absolutely no idea what this story is about. Might as well be in Farsi. How many nerd points do I loose? Anyone want to fill me in for the benefit of anybody else in my shoes?
Strong Bad is a character featured on the popular animation web site homestarrunner.com.
The write-up concerns a downloadable game written for the Nintendo Wii gaming console that uses Strong Bad and other characters developed by homestarrunner.
That pattern can be explained in a single word: gerrymandering.
Hint: Stevens is a senator, serving the entire state of Alaska. For that matter, our lone congressional representative here in Alaska is also elected by the entire state, as the population of the state is not large enough to qualify for more than one congressional district. Gerrymandering explains nothing about Alaska's federal office-holders.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, here's the thing. I spent most of the years of my career living in a university town with excellent booksellers. I now live in a comparatively tiny island community a long way from the nearest tech center and if I want tech books I can't just pop into a store that has them in stock and browse, I have to order them and have them shipped.
I've previously bought quite a few O'Reilly titles and while not every one of them was brilliant, they were reliably pretty decent; this one was affirmatively the worst, to the point where in the future when I want a tutorial or reference work on a new technology I won't just call up and order the O'Reilly book on the subject because I don't feel like I can rely on their quality and I don't need any more $40 door stops.
It doesn't mean I'll never order another O'Reilly tome, but it does mean that I felt let down enough to stop automatically trusting their quality by default.
I'll chime in as another who found a previous edition of this work to be flawed -- enough so to tarnish the O'Reilly brand for me. While it's possible the newest edition is better it sounds (from the review) more like an update than a re-write.
Quoted in the write-up:
Nobody's talking about "throwing" anybody who isn't ready, just about making it an option for students who are. Options are good, no?
Not to imply that it's a good name, but it sounds as though you're not aware that "accretive" is a genuine word with an established meaning (it's an adjectival form of "accretion".)
If there really is a secret force out there influencing events to preserve civilization I'm counting on them to prevent this.
Apparently they don't even teach Pig Latin correctly anymore. Eeshshay!
Just as it takes more than skillful special effects to make a great movie, it takes more than good graphics to make a great game. You'd think these points would be obvious but there are quite clearly game (and movie) makers out there who don't get them.
About six years ago I lived in an eastside suburb of Seattle and subscribed to Netflix. I cancelled after about four months because during that time four movies never reached me and I wound up paying Netflix for one of them (I probably could have avoided that if I'd made a stink, but as I figured it they'd already eaten the cost of several other movies.)
Around about that time a substantial check that I was expecting to receive disappeared in the mail, and I noticed that other items were disappearing in the mail, too. I called to cancel a magazine gift subscription a well-meaning relative had signed me up for and discovered that they'd been sending the magazine for six months, though I had only received one issue. Between the movies, the magazines, and the missing check it was clear that I had a problem with disappearing mail.
So I went down to the local post office and asked to speak with the local postmaster. I explained about the missing magazines, movies, and check, and told him that I suspected I was a victim of ongoing mail theft.
He assured me that he'd look into the situation and was turning to go back into the bowels of the post office when I interrupted. "You're lying," I said. He said something to the effect of "That's an awfully rude thing to say for no reason," but I knew he had no intention of seriously looking into my complaint and I told him why. During our entire conversation I hadn't mentioned my address and he never asked.
His body language led me to believe that he had a carrier on his staff (or possibly several) that he knew was stealing mail. I figured as soon as I told him I was losing mail he knew who the likely culprit was without even having to ask which route I was on but either couldn't or wouldn't stop them.
Shortly thereafter I moved to a small town in Alaska. The mail service here is reliable and the people at the post office are very nice. To the best of my knowledge none of my mail has ever gone missing here. I've talked to other people who have had mail problems and everything I've heard has lead me to believe that the reliability of your mail depends a great deal on the people working at the post office nearest you and in some places at the nearest big sorting center.
It's a shame, because if you live in a place where the service is good, the USPS is pretty nifty. You tend not to think of it because the mail is so ordinary, but the fact that I can drop a piece of paper in the box on the corner here on an island in southeast Alaska and for $0.42 someone will carry it to my family back in Michigan or even halfway around the world is really pretty remarkable.
Your suggestion has several major problems, particularly:
There are many other more surmountable objections (e.g. it depends on the reliability of an electronic submission process that has not been discussed but which is likely to be less than 100% reliable, etc.) but the first two are enough to kill it as far as I'm concerned.
I've long maintained that learning how to ask questions properly is a big part of getting a useful response.
Apropos of which, positing a question that is highly location-specific in a global forum and then not specifying one's location is an excellent way to get no useful responses whatsoever.
What you suggest about the current trend in Hollywood is undeniably true.
Still, wouldn't it be nice "to boldly go where [none] has gone before"?
It'd be nice to think that that was true, but based on the number of totally f'ed up McAfee and Norton situations I've seen, it's not even close to safe to conclude that for-pay anti-virus products are reliably more trouble-free than ones that don't cost money for home use.
I've read through the whole thread so far and haven't seen any mention of the tremendous power available using the grouping operators '\(' and '\)' in regular expression search and replace. You can do some really amazing line transformations using these in the match part of the substitute and the \1, \2, etc. patterns in the replace.
Let's say you've got a text table of comma separated weather data, for example:
75,Sunny,5mph,SW
65,PartCloudy,10mph,W
and you want to switch the field order so the second field comes first after the replace. Very easy when you know that grouping the match expressions in \( and \) allows you to re-use them in the substitute pattern (\1 is the first grouped match expression, \2 is the second, etc..)
:%s/\([0-9]*\),\([A-Za-z]*\),\(.*\)/\2,\1,\3/
will switch the sample text above to:
Sunny,75,5mph,SW
PartCloudy,65,10mph,W
OK, that's a really simple example and could easily have been accomplished by piping the block to awk (for example) but trust me, once you start finding places to use this powerful feature of regex search and replace you'll wonder how you ever lived without it.
Perhaps you downloaded them from a non-iTunes music service? eMusic, for example, will be happy to sell you MP3s unencumbered by DRM on a monthly subscription plan. Amazon will sell tunes to you one at a time or by the album. Myriad other services exist which will do likewise.
That iTunes requires extra effort (drag and drop or manual import) to use tunes obtained from these services isn't all that surprising, but it is an example of Apple using its market domination in the MP3-player market to reinforce its music store business, That, in turn, by locking purchases with a DRM scheme that's incompatible with other manufacturers' personal audio players reinforces Apple's MP3-player hardware-market dominance -- it's a classic example of a monopolist or near-monopolist using their market position to give an advantage to their own products and services. Does it really surprise you to find out that the typical Slashdot reader doesn't approve of that kind of business practice?
Again with the vendor lock-in.. It works great with Apple products (and only Apple products.) As far as I'm concerned, that's their prerogative -- they write the software, they can write it how they want. Some number of us, however, will choose to use some other app. In the long run if that leads to the development of an application that large number of people find to be better than iTunes, everybody (except, perhaps, the monopolists) wins.
Try doing it in your own home for better results..
They never said that, nor does it make any sense to believe that the men who pledged "our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor," to the revolution in the Declaration of Independence would, by the time the Constitution was adopted, have concluded "you know, this freedom stuff's OK, but it's not worth dying for.."
The "not a suicide pact" meme is pretty close to the antithesis of the spirit that moved the founders of this country, and like the previous commenter I consider it a detestable sentiment.
But in a sense you must be the target market for this product. 'Cause here you are reverse-engineering the book review..
Effective against the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal. Against other threats, not so much..
For bonus irony points, put your head on top of Saddam Hussein's body in that famous picture of him shaking hands with Donald Rumsfeld. (Although, Rumsfeld is technically no longer a high-ranking government official.)
Meesah sorry to hear that.
If it's "less discrete" does that mean they're doing it continuously?
Strong Bad is a character featured on the popular animation web site homestarrunner.com.
The write-up concerns a downloadable game written for the Nintendo Wii gaming console that uses Strong Bad and other characters developed by homestarrunner.
He's up for re-election this year. Senatorial terms are six years, thus he hasn't stood for election since 2002.
Hint: Stevens is a senator, serving the entire state of Alaska. For that matter, our lone congressional representative here in Alaska is also elected by the entire state, as the population of the state is not large enough to qualify for more than one congressional district. Gerrymandering explains nothing about Alaska's federal office-holders.
Actually, it doesn't go anywhere, because contrary to widespread misconceptions on the project it was never actually built.