Actually, generally speaking most people who develop problems with substance abuse tend to either be genetically predisposed to easily develop addiction problems ("addictive personality") or they have other underlying problems (this is also a large factor in why many drug addicts also have mental health problems (although many of the most rabid anti-drug advocates like to pretend that the drugs were the cause of the mental illness and not the other way around)).
Of course, your work in prisons may lead you down that path to some extent, but I would hate to think of the conclusions of a sociologist who was only ever allowed to study the prison population of the culture he was trying to understand.:-)
This sounds an awful lot like how people who spend all day working with drug addicts in rehab tend to have this image of all illegal drugs as horrible and talk about how the majority of drug users are broken worn-down people, they just see that all day and never see the girl smoking a joint at a party, or the friends who take some ecstacy at a rave and then go home to sleep it off, they just see the guy who smokes 5g of weed per day, the habitual coke-head and the heroin addict who's ruined his life and base their image of drug users on these people while not realising that the average drug user is a fairly normal person with a regular life...
(This was not meant to be in the defense of child molesters but rather as an example of a similar situation in which it is easy to get a warped view of reality based on a poorly chosen sample group)
It must be nice for the Europeans to reap the benefits and investment that Americans put into emerging technologies...
Oh, you must mean like the first partly automatic car phone systems, oh wait, those were Swedish...
Perhaps you meant the first fully automatic analog cell phone network? But that was in Japan so that couldn't be it...
How about digital 2G cell phones then? No, unfortunately that would only be true if Finland was part of the US (GSM network in Finland 1991).
But at least you can be proud of how you're still at the forefront of basic science research. Oh, sorry, I forgot you guys focusing increasingly on "immediately marketable areas" (as Alcatel-Lucent put it when they decided to cease basic research at Bell Labs last year).
Actually, no, I've mostly used more general computer websites and websites targeting people working with CG art and I haven't really been paying attention to the tablet PC world for over a year simply because I got tired of waiting for something decent to show up.
I guess I'll have to browse tabletpcreview now to see if there's anything there that fits my needs (although I wouldn't say no to an Apple tablet running OS X seeing as how I don't want to drag a Windows tablet into my home (which is currently 100% *nix with FreeBSD, Linux and OS X as the primary operating systems)).
Oh yes, I've looked around for a decent affordable tablet which is basically "a Cintiq with onboard computer" but most tablets I've found have either had an extremely bad monitor, horrible digitizer or they somehow charge Vaio/MBP prices for a very moderately powered tablet with a Graphire-era quality digitizer and an "ok" monitor.
I'm still hoping for Apple or someone else to come up with a good stylus-compatible tablet with a good monitor that doesn't have "early adopter pricing" throughout its lifecycle...
Well, the reason I'm using NAT is because I'm forced to do so (I do have an IPv6 tunnel and a/48 but they're only usable internally or when I'm in the rare place that actually has IPv6 connectivity).
As for my apps working it is true that they mostly do but most of the time you have to configure the apps a bit extra due to NAT plus the actual NAT setup to make sure that end-to-end connectivity works for the most important ports.
All they did was set up a NAT that (obviously) disallowed all incoming connections, this was enough to cause lots and lots of problems with all sorts of apps.
Also, as for your "but I use $FOO through NAT" comment, that's YOUR NAT, not your ISP's, I've been stuck behind an ISP NAT (crazy policy making on a university network meant some student apartments were behind a NAT, had lots of "fun" trying to get stuff working through that).
Creating a workaround for every higher level protocol out there is not a solution, it's a bunch of ugly hacks no matter how much you keep repeating "it works for me! not a problem! NANANANANABINGOBINGOBINGOICANTHEARYOU!"...
...but for the other 99% of the users, they'd be fine NATed.
Actually, there are a lot of users who would be at least annoyed (although their annoyance may very well end up being directed at someone other than their ISP). A few examples of things which really require end-to-end connectivity to work PROPERLY (emphasis to avoid "it can work if you jump through 2^2987 hoops and sacrifice a bucket of chicken blood to Cthulhu" comments) are p2p applications (duh!) and games (which are Big Business(tm) these days). That said, I fully expect ISPs to attempt passing blame to others and trying to paint an image of "teh intarwebz" as just another cable tv network and those (companies/developers) trying to use end-to-end capabilities as evil anarcho-commie-mooslim scum out to destroy america. But hey, it's alright because new routers cost money and these switches we bought in 2002 still work, no point in messing with the quarterly profits just to make sure our products actually work, right?
To be honest I'd have to say that anyone working in IT (or even developing networked applications these days) should be able to put together some decent inclusive firewall rules without too much trouble,it's fine if you have to look up the syntax of your particular config file format but it definitely shouldn't be black magic, this isn't 1994 anymore.
Then there's the other date-mangling tactic, setting the date weeks or months in the past, I'm guessing they're doing this to make recepients think that the spam is some old legit mail they forgot about, it's annoying when one of those slip through though...
Regardless of what you may think of software bloat there is still the issue of a system like that being ancient, as jon3k pointed out it wasn't just "a few years ago" that such a system was high end.
Also, even for web development a system like that would be horrible, first you have half a dozen different browsers (possibly with some for of "javascript debugger" like firebug) which alone would eat up cycles and RAM like crazy, on top of that you most likely have an IDE or at least a few gVim sessions open, throw in Photoshop on top of that and that machine will be crawling along, and don't even dream of running any virtual machines on it.
Having old hardware does not encourage developers to write more efficient code, it angers them and makes them disgruntled.
I'm all for test environments being constrained in terms of hardware if that's what a real-world production environment would look like, but to tell devs they need to use 17" CRT monitors running at 1024x768@72Hz attached to 1 GHz PIII systems with 512 MiB of RAM will not make them more productive (I've had worse systems thrown at me as "developer workstations" in the last two years, good luck running your IDE + debugger + test environment on that).
If you consider Counter Strike to hasve"insane running speed" then I would suggest you not try playing Quake (or any other FPS for that matter, one of the things in CS that annoy me the most and which make it feel "unplayable" is that you always run so damn slow).
In the broadest sense, it is the absence of belief in the existence of deities.
Above quote from Wikipedia.
The man who is unacquainted with theism is an atheist because he does not believe in a god. This category would also include the child with the conceptual capacity to grasp the issues involved, but who is still unaware of those issues. The fact that this child does not believe in god qualifies him as an atheist.
-- George H. Smith
An atheist is not someone who is anti-god, merely someone who does not believe in a god, no matter how much you'd love to believe that "a" = "anti-".
Classic/. attitude. I know how to write VB better than the folks documenting it, therefore the language is a complete waste of time.
I never said that, please don't pretend that I said things that I didn't.
That "fairly quirky syntax" is pretty easy to use, once you actually LEARN it. I honestly think C++ has a screwy syntax, but I still code with it.
If you improve your reading comprehension and learn to interpret what you read based on the context in which it is meant to be read then maybe you'll understand that what I meant was that for a beginner it would probably make more sense to start out with a language with a more C-like syntax since it will most likely help the transition to other languages.
Maybe it never occurred to you that the overall code quality in the VB community (read: VB forums) is due to a large beginner user base?
I never commented on the reason for the low quality of a lot of the VB code but yes, one reason that is likely to contribute is that many VB programmers are fairly inexperienced with programming in general.
The MSDN documentation, on the other hand, is perfectly fine. I know, I've seen it.
I didn't comment on the quality of the MSDN code so I hope you're not implying that I did.
I think your stated lack of experience explains your lack of satisfaction with the documentation.
No, my dissatisfaction with the non-MS documentation on the net comes from the low quality of the code, it's a lot harder to understand exactly what the code does if it's all mangled up, does unnecessary things because the author never bothered checking if they were needed and is written in an incomprehensible way.
I don't think a 10-year old would ever understand "grep" or "awk", for example...
I'd have to disagree, while I wasn't a *nix user at age ten I was at that age coding SV-BASIC and Z80 asm as well as having little trouble editing autoexec.bat and config.sys on various custom boot floppies for different games (No sound card required? No need to waste memory on that then!) and I'm pretty sure I'm not unique in having picked up such things at that age.
If the kid is actually motivated to learn it then he/she will.
I'd actually say that VB or VB.NET would be a horrible first language, very little code I've seen come from developers who started with VB or VB.NET has been well-written and I think this is partly because of the language and partially because within the "VB community" there is less focus on the quality of code.
To elaborate, the language has fairly quirky syntax compared to many other languages, some may not like it but I think it's better to start out with a language that has a slightly more C-like syntax, that way it's easier to move to lower-level languages like C or other high-level languages since a lot of books and other resources on various languages compares language concepts in comparison to C.
Secondly, the code quality in the VB community tends to be a lot lower, whenever I need to work on legacy VB/VB.NET apps I find myself checking MSDN and googling for "best practice" examples and even though I'm not particularly experienced with VB I can tell a very high percentage of example code is poorly written (for VBScript there's always the classic "include-o-mania" which has certain similarities to what could often be seen with PHP3 code, if(condition) { include("somefile.php"); }).
/Mikael
Re:a game that tells the truth about religion
on
Religion in Video Games
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Atheism is not faith in the absence of a God, it is absence of faith in a God.
Grab a sketchbook, lean back in the nearest couch and try drawing something, are you using the sketchbook at an angle or do you simply position it so that it is facing you?
I take it you've never used a notebook or a sketchbook then (you know, the kinds that are made of paper)? Or, god forbid, a Wacom Cintiq (Here's a hint, most cintiq users don't mount it flat on a table or standing up at a right angle to the floor).
Oh, both #3 and #4 exist it's just that most members of group #3 either aren't very active (since they're normally working for beer and weed money, not tuition) or they end up transforming into a member of one of the other groups and most members of group #4 don't exactly strip in your regular strip joint in the bad part of town, they can most likely be found in places where you have to pay $50 for a drink and just checking your jacket at the door ends up costing more than what most people are prepared to spend on beer in one night...
Well, checking Google Analytics for one of our websites at work has consistently shown IE6 at "just cranks and a handful of corporate users" levels for a long time now (less than 10%, down to about 5% last month or so). You'll never get rid of it completely, there are still a few nutjobs running Mac OS 9 + IE5 out there, unfortunately a lot of these people will complain loudly when things don't work for them (even though there is no chance whatsoever of most websites supporting their ancient setup).
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, generally speaking most people who develop problems with substance abuse tend to either be genetically predisposed to easily develop addiction problems ("addictive personality") or they have other underlying problems (this is also a large factor in why many drug addicts also have mental health problems (although many of the most rabid anti-drug advocates like to pretend that the drugs were the cause of the mental illness and not the other way around)).
/Mikael
Of course, your work in prisons may lead you down that path to some extent, but I would hate to think of the conclusions of a sociologist who was only ever allowed to study the prison population of the culture he was trying to understand. :-)
This sounds an awful lot like how people who spend all day working with drug addicts in rehab tend to have this image of all illegal drugs as horrible and talk about how the majority of drug users are broken worn-down people, they just see that all day and never see the girl smoking a joint at a party, or the friends who take some ecstacy at a rave and then go home to sleep it off, they just see the guy who smokes 5g of weed per day, the habitual coke-head and the heroin addict who's ruined his life and base their image of drug users on these people while not realising that the average drug user is a fairly normal person with a regular life...
(This was not meant to be in the defense of child molesters but rather as an example of a similar situation in which it is easy to get a warped view of reality based on a poorly chosen sample group)
/Mikael
It must be nice for the Europeans to reap the benefits and investment that Americans put into emerging technologies...
Oh, you must mean like the first partly automatic car phone systems, oh wait, those were Swedish...
Perhaps you meant the first fully automatic analog cell phone network? But that was in Japan so that couldn't be it...
How about digital 2G cell phones then? No, unfortunately that would only be true if Finland was part of the US (GSM network in Finland 1991).
But at least you can be proud of how you're still at the forefront of basic science research. Oh, sorry, I forgot you guys focusing increasingly on "immediately marketable areas" (as Alcatel-Lucent put it when they decided to cease basic research at Bell Labs last year).
Also, nice troll but a bit too transparent.
/Mikael
Actually, no, I've mostly used more general computer websites and websites targeting people working with CG art and I haven't really been paying attention to the tablet PC world for over a year simply because I got tired of waiting for something decent to show up.
I guess I'll have to browse tabletpcreview now to see if there's anything there that fits my needs (although I wouldn't say no to an Apple tablet running OS X seeing as how I don't want to drag a Windows tablet into my home (which is currently 100% *nix with FreeBSD, Linux and OS X as the primary operating systems)).
/Mikael
Oh yes, I've looked around for a decent affordable tablet which is basically "a Cintiq with onboard computer" but most tablets I've found have either had an extremely bad monitor, horrible digitizer or they somehow charge Vaio/MBP prices for a very moderately powered tablet with a Graphire-era quality digitizer and an "ok" monitor.
I'm still hoping for Apple or someone else to come up with a good stylus-compatible tablet with a good monitor that doesn't have "early adopter pricing" throughout its lifecycle...
/Mikael
Well, the reason I'm using NAT is because I'm forced to do so (I do have an IPv6 tunnel and a /48 but they're only usable internally or when I'm in the rare place that actually has IPv6 connectivity).
As for my apps working it is true that they mostly do but most of the time you have to configure the apps a bit extra due to NAT plus the actual NAT setup to make sure that end-to-end connectivity works for the most important ports.
/Mikael
All they did was set up a NAT that (obviously) disallowed all incoming connections, this was enough to cause lots and lots of problems with all sorts of apps.
/Mikael
Also, as for your "but I use $FOO through NAT" comment, that's YOUR NAT, not your ISP's, I've been stuck behind an ISP NAT (crazy policy making on a university network meant some student apartments were behind a NAT, had lots of "fun" trying to get stuff working through that).
/Mikael
Creating a workaround for every higher level protocol out there is not a solution, it's a bunch of ugly hacks no matter how much you keep repeating "it works for me! not a problem! NANANANANABINGOBINGOBINGOICANTHEARYOU!"...
/Mikael
...but for the other 99% of the users, they'd be fine NATed.
Actually, there are a lot of users who would be at least annoyed (although their annoyance may very well end up being directed at someone other than their ISP). A few examples of things which really require end-to-end connectivity to work PROPERLY (emphasis to avoid "it can work if you jump through 2^2987 hoops and sacrifice a bucket of chicken blood to Cthulhu" comments) are p2p applications (duh!) and games (which are Big Business(tm) these days). That said, I fully expect ISPs to attempt passing blame to others and trying to paint an image of "teh intarwebz" as just another cable tv network and those (companies/developers) trying to use end-to-end capabilities as evil anarcho-commie-mooslim scum out to destroy america. But hey, it's alright because new routers cost money and these switches we bought in 2002 still work, no point in messing with the quarterly profits just to make sure our products actually work, right?
/Mikael
To be honest I'd have to say that anyone working in IT (or even developing networked applications these days) should be able to put together some decent inclusive firewall rules without too much trouble ,it's fine if you have to look up the syntax of your particular config file format but it definitely shouldn't be black magic, this isn't 1994 anymore.
/Mikael
Then there's the other date-mangling tactic, setting the date weeks or months in the past, I'm guessing they're doing this to make recepients think that the spam is some old legit mail they forgot about, it's annoying when one of those slip through though...
/Mikael
Regardless of what you may think of software bloat there is still the issue of a system like that being ancient, as jon3k pointed out it wasn't just "a few years ago" that such a system was high end.
Also, even for web development a system like that would be horrible, first you have half a dozen different browsers (possibly with some for of "javascript debugger" like firebug) which alone would eat up cycles and RAM like crazy, on top of that you most likely have an IDE or at least a few gVim sessions open, throw in Photoshop on top of that and that machine will be crawling along, and don't even dream of running any virtual machines on it.
/Mikael
Having old hardware does not encourage developers to write more efficient code, it angers them and makes them disgruntled.
I'm all for test environments being constrained in terms of hardware if that's what a real-world production environment would look like, but to tell devs they need to use 17" CRT monitors running at 1024x768@72Hz attached to 1 GHz PIII systems with 512 MiB of RAM will not make them more productive (I've had worse systems thrown at me as "developer workstations" in the last two years, good luck running your IDE + debugger + test environment on that).
/Mikael
If you consider Counter Strike to hasve"insane running speed" then I would suggest you not try playing Quake (or any other FPS for that matter, one of the things in CS that annoy me the most and which make it feel "unplayable" is that you always run so damn slow).
/Mikael
In the broadest sense, it is the absence of belief in the existence of deities.
Above quote from Wikipedia.
The man who is unacquainted with theism is an atheist because he does not believe in a god. This category would also include the child with the conceptual capacity to grasp the issues involved, but who is still unaware of those issues. The fact that this child does not believe in god qualifies him as an atheist.
-- George H. Smith
An atheist is not someone who is anti-god, merely someone who does not believe in a god, no matter how much you'd love to believe that "a" = "anti-".
/Mikael
Classic /. attitude. I know how to write VB better than the folks documenting it, therefore the language is a complete waste of time.
I never said that, please don't pretend that I said things that I didn't.
That "fairly quirky syntax" is pretty easy to use, once you actually LEARN it. I honestly think C++ has a screwy syntax, but I still code with it.
If you improve your reading comprehension and learn to interpret what you read based on the context in which it is meant to be read then maybe you'll understand that what I meant was that for a beginner it would probably make more sense to start out with a language with a more C-like syntax since it will most likely help the transition to other languages.
Maybe it never occurred to you that the overall code quality in the VB community (read: VB forums) is due to a large beginner user base?
I never commented on the reason for the low quality of a lot of the VB code but yes, one reason that is likely to contribute is that many VB programmers are fairly inexperienced with programming in general.
The MSDN documentation, on the other hand, is perfectly fine. I know, I've seen it.
I didn't comment on the quality of the MSDN code so I hope you're not implying that I did.
I think your stated lack of experience explains your lack of satisfaction with the documentation.
No, my dissatisfaction with the non-MS documentation on the net comes from the low quality of the code, it's a lot harder to understand exactly what the code does if it's all mangled up, does unnecessary things because the author never bothered checking if they were needed and is written in an incomprehensible way.
/Mikael
I don't think a 10-year old would ever understand "grep" or "awk", for example...
I'd have to disagree, while I wasn't a *nix user at age ten I was at that age coding SV-BASIC and Z80 asm as well as having little trouble editing autoexec.bat and config.sys on various custom boot floppies for different games (No sound card required? No need to waste memory on that then!) and I'm pretty sure I'm not unique in having picked up such things at that age.
If the kid is actually motivated to learn it then he/she will.
/Mikael
I'd actually say that VB or VB.NET would be a horrible first language, very little code I've seen come from developers who started with VB or VB.NET has been well-written and I think this is partly because of the language and partially because within the "VB community" there is less focus on the quality of code.
To elaborate, the language has fairly quirky syntax compared to many other languages, some may not like it but I think it's better to start out with a language that has a slightly more C-like syntax, that way it's easier to move to lower-level languages like C or other high-level languages since a lot of books and other resources on various languages compares language concepts in comparison to C.
Secondly, the code quality in the VB community tends to be a lot lower, whenever I need to work on legacy VB/VB.NET apps I find myself checking MSDN and googling for "best practice" examples and even though I'm not particularly experienced with VB I can tell a very high percentage of example code is poorly written (for VBScript there's always the classic "include-o-mania" which has certain similarities to what could often be seen with PHP3 code, if(condition) { include("somefile.php"); }).
/Mikael
Atheism is not faith in the absence of a God, it is absence of faith in a God.
/Mikael
You're not trying very hard, are you?
Grab a sketchbook, lean back in the nearest couch and try drawing something, are you using the sketchbook at an angle or do you simply position it so that it is facing you?
/Mikael
I take it you've never used a notebook or a sketchbook then (you know, the kinds that are made of paper)? Or, god forbid, a Wacom Cintiq (Here's a hint, most cintiq users don't mount it flat on a table or standing up at a right angle to the floor).
/Mikael
Oh, both #3 and #4 exist it's just that most members of group #3 either aren't very active (since they're normally working for beer and weed money, not tuition) or they end up transforming into a member of one of the other groups and most members of group #4 don't exactly strip in your regular strip joint in the bad part of town, they can most likely be found in places where you have to pay $50 for a drink and just checking your jacket at the door ends up costing more than what most people are prepared to spend on beer in one night...
/Mikael
Still at it, eh? Also, how do you set your preferences as an AC? Because it couldn't be that you're just clicking "post anonymously" could it?
/Mikael
Well, checking Google Analytics for one of our websites at work has consistently shown IE6 at "just cranks and a handful of corporate users" levels for a long time now (less than 10%, down to about 5% last month or so). You'll never get rid of it completely, there are still a few nutjobs running Mac OS 9 + IE5 out there, unfortunately a lot of these people will complain loudly when things don't work for them (even though there is no chance whatsoever of most websites supporting their ancient setup).
/Mikael