I don't mean this as flaming the poster, as we're all guilty of it, but:
My shiny new Zaurus crashed
That's the reason software sucks. You bought it, right? Sharp got their money so to them their software is 100% on the mark. Could things be better? Oh hell yes! But they don't "need" to be better because the industry is making money off their shoddy software now. It's good enough for 90% of all purposes though so it's marketable.
I'm not surprised really -- can you name ONE single market that's widely adopted where people demand the utmost of quality all the time? I can't think of one single thing I purchase that's "high end" because not doing so would be insane.
Less than perfect cars? That's the norm, though they are getting better over time. The cost/benefit ratio though of buying an Audi vs. a Ford just doesn't justify that extra cost (assuming you agree that Audi makes nice quality cars -- I'm working for Germans so I'm biased and I drive a VW).
Lets drop the price way down: fast food. We don't really buy it because it's the best out there. It's cheap, it's quick, and it fills the job. You want a nice home-made Gyro made fast? It'll cost ya. Some will pay, most won't. It's a niche market.
Heck... beer is the same way, at least in the US and Canada. I'd say around 90% of "beer" drinkers in my area wouldn't know a good porter if it jumped down their throat. They could grab a 12 pack of good porter for 16 bucks or a 24 pack of rice water for 20... they go with rice water. Reason: value per dollar.
Is Cherry Coke the best damned cherry flavored cola in your town? I'd wager it isn't, as long as you live in a decent sized town. Yet, we still all buy it.
Business shoots for the lowest common demoniator. If you can't live with it, well, make yourself a business that caters to people that really want the best. Once your name picks up though you'll have to start mass-producing things at sub standard quality to make a really good profit margin -- unless you gouge your customers.
Do I dislike it? Yes... of course, especially when it comes to technology as that's 'my thing' and I know it can be done better. Somebody running up to me with a spiffy new Zaurus that crashes is like driving up to your mechanic buddy and beaming about the brand new Kia you just bought. "Hey -- it's got cool cup holders!". Oh brother.
I really shouldn't do this, but that sig has been bugging me for months now:
Arithmetic according to C: float x = 3.14159; float y = 1/2 * x; Value of y? zero.
This makes perfect sense. You specify integer artithmetic when you write an integer and don't cast the darned thing. Your 2nd statement is actually:
float y = (int)1/(int)2 * float(3.1.4159);
Now, we all know that division and multiplication are on equal levels regarding evaluation, so it's done left to right -- and 1/2 is = 0 when you don't care about decimals. And 0 * 3.14159 is 0.
C is portable assemtly. Bask in it's optimizations, but don't curse it for the same reason we all love it.
While you were being humorous, no it's not.223 inches big. It's bigger than that from ripping pieces of metal on the entrance with it. If you shoot something soft though, like an empty five gallon bucket you'll find that the hole is -smaller- than.223 though. The plastic sort of melts/bends around the bullet as it goes in. Looks more like a.17 bb hole than a.223 round.
Seriously guys,.223. It's great fun on metal targets that are mutli-layered. Ever hit a coffee can with one? Friggen amazing! It goes in one side blistering fast at 3,000+ fps and makes a little hole less than.25 inches big, then blows back out the other side over a half an inch. I don't have any slo-mo video of it but I attribute it to the bullet tearing that metal it bit off at a high rate and pushing it out the back end along with the tumble of the bullet after it gets offset from that first impact to make a much larger hole in the back. I can't imagine what would happen if you actually tried pushing it through something nearly solid.
Oh heck, get some incindiary ammo and blow right through the thing. I'd love to see what it does to that. A.223 incindiary round is supposed to blow through 3/8inch steel. Hmm... where's that old 6GB bigfoot drive at?
I just get a kick out of the teeny little entrance hole versus the gaping "exit wound" that it leaves.
"This book tells people to do things they shouldn't do."
Thanks, dude. LIKE WHAT?!
This will be the beginning of a long running tirade in this thread agains the entire premise of such a book, simply based upon it's title and the number of things I have read like it.
Now, to address your question. Things like:
A) Building a PHP application from the ground up with MySQL and tieing the two together like cousins in Kentucky in a stack of hay. The very THOUGHT that a book would come out with such a title just wreaks of being marketed to two-bit hackers out there. Now, if the book was targed toward "PHP databased development using MySQL" that'd be another matter. Giving good, industry -STANDARD- procedures of seperating your code from your DB is the only way to really make a decent book out of the subject. If there is -ONE single line of top-level PHP code that contains -ONE- MySQL specific line of code in it -- damn that book. That is -NOT- the way to write a web application, or any application.
I don't even have to read the book, or the review. There will be a top-level line of MySQL code in their PHP right smack dab into the presentation layer. If I'm wrong, hey, appologies to the author, but you picked a damn stupid title if you were going to actually present a real programming design/implementation book.
Until you have your car modified so that the exhaust feeds into the cabin, you're a fucking liar and you know it.
In highly concentrated forms sure car exhaust is horrid to human beings. The CO itself can strangle your lungs so you can't get any O2 after a while. Many things that aren't too bad for you in small amounts are deadly in high amounts.
Take a hydrogen fuel-cell care. They emit pure water. Right after you retrofit yours to dump all the H20 into the cabin I'll start sucking on my CO exhaust:).
People don't generally write one-off small apps they intend to run hundreds of times a day in java. That's not what it's designed to do.
This is one thing that bugs me about the language. The smallest program will have to load up a rather large JVM. I'm waiting for the day when there's a constantly running JVM on your machine and represents one system process. A java app is started then with a java 'bootloader' of some sort that ties your new process into the JVM, or perhaps instructs the original process to suck the new byte-code into an ultra-protected type thread in the same processes making Java more of a mini-OS inside your OS. For server apps isn't not such a big deal, but for Desktop applications it could really lead to quicker adoption. Load the JVM at boot time (or 2 or 3 if your system needs different versions) then just load the bytecode into the existing JVM for each application. Distribute with a little 'task manager' type application for inspecting/killing processes and Sun might have something pretty nifty.
I think I'm finding out the same thing you are. I started getting hit with RSI symptoms about two years ago, and I ignored it. After about 6 months of it I finaly got a split keyboard thing (MS Natural) and that seemed to really help out a lot. After a while though, like another 6 months, I started to hurt again, so I switched back to a regular keyboard for a while and things went away. I'm just rotating environments now. Sometimes I use my laptop keyboard and LCD screen, sometimes I jack it into the monitor and use the fullsize MS Natural keyboard. I switch positions during the day posture wise. That's the only thing that really works, IMHO.
select * from items where name like 'PO%'
order by number_of_requests_last_week
Nah, it's more complicated than that. I was asked to do something similiar to this around 2000 when the patent was filed. We scrapped it from the project though.
Basically you record every search term in your database, then you query them out when you present the search page (or from a cache, as this data won't really change that much). You get back a list of the most common search terms, then proceed to build up JavaScript that you can send back to the browser. If you start making round-trips to the DB every time somebody types in a letter, well, you just shot yourself in the foot.
Why did we scrap it? Makes the search page load slower. Just not cool. I suppose if you want to only auto-complete out of a hundred items it's feasible, especially with broaband today, but to really make it useful I'd imagine you'd need at least a match for every reasonable 3 letter combination. So, lets do a little fuzzy math:
To start with we'll assume 26 possible first letters. For every letter after that it's safe to say that only around 18 letters would make sense after that (or be common), and for the 3rd letter you've probably got another 18 letters. Odds of a word starting with qzz that's a common search term? Null. Things like ao, po, and at you see alot. qx, tx, rz, etc you don't see ofen, if ever. At any rate, 26*18*18 = 8,424. Now, assume 10 bytes per word, and the overhead of actually putting this into a JavaScript array type structure and I'd imagine your'e going to blow past 100k of data to get a comprhensive auto-complete feature out of the deal. Back in 2000 plenty of users were on 56k or less connections. They still are today. Would you really want to piss your customers off in that era with 20+ seconds of extra download time just to get to your search -entry- page? I sure wouldn't. That's why you don't see these even if the idea is rather simple.
When everybody's on broadband, perhaps showing your users the 8,000 most searched for terms would be feasible, but not now, at least not in my mind.
I can safely predict most people here will not give it credit because of it's links to Monopolysoft.
This is probably true, and I'm as much as an anti-MS guy as you can get really, but I have my reasons for not liking VB. I did a few projects with it in the past year (ASP/VBScript with VB COM components, MTS, etc), so I speak from experience.
I went into it thinking it would suck, but I quickly found it being okay for gettings things done. "Hey, maybe these guys are onto something I think...". Then the project gets more complex and I realize why I like langauges that are far more strict regarding what you can and cannot do.
Lack of short circuiting conditionals really started to eat me up. Mostly because every other language I used (except BASIC) would short-circuit conditionals. All too often I would find myself writing complex loops using short-circuits and then realize later on I had totally blown the algorithm. I wasn't the only one either. I saw experienced VB guys do stuff like: If (objRS IsNotNull AND objRS.RecordCount > 0) Then.... Not much fun when that blows up.
Some consistency would be nice. I think Pascal is the only other language I've ever used that would let you declare a function in two different ways. One for returning data and one that didn't. The seperation of Sub and Function is a friggen mess. It's even worse when you realize later on you need to return a boolean out of your Sub and suddenly you have to track down everybody that called it and change the method of which you call it.... even the ones that could care less about it's true/false return. What's wrong with the return type void?
No macros or a precompiler. VB didnt' clean up unused objects very well for itself and one point in time, if I recall correctly, which made developers (at least at where I was) make sure they always set objects to Nothing before a failed function would return. That's find and dandy, but I hated repeating the same awkward (due to lack of short-circuiting conditionals) cleanup code in function after function that were nearly identical. Think nearly identical functions with a bit of business logic in them passing data off to a data layer for the real DB access. Each function had maybe 3-4 lines of individual code, sometimes up to 20 though. Every function though was at least 30 lines long, with the same drivel repeated over and over again. How much better it would have been to write:
If (ErrorState = True) Then
CLEANUPCOMMONOBJECTS End If
If I had good exception and a good GC I wouldn't have even needed this though.
That damned VARIANT type needed for COM. Okay, this is common amonst all COM enabled apps when going across boundaries, but it really stunk if you asked me.
Little bugs. If you return a 'decimal' datatype from an ADODB.RecordSet and called IsNumeric() on it would you expect a true or false? Assuming the value in question wasn't Nothing, you'd assume it's true, right? Bzzzzzz!. IsNumeric(CStr(val)) would return true though. All because IsNumeric didn't understand all the possible variant datatypes that you could toss into it. Minor oversight, but it turned up a pretty decent and noticable bug in my code once. Err, wait, that was VBScript, anybody know if that happens in Real VB?
It's a short list, but it's been a while since I coded in it.
I'd suggest, if you would like to do it in a batch file but cannot, that you do in VBScript instead. Just hack it up in a.vbs files and you're ready to go. No development environment needed but a good text editor and web browser to hit MSDN. A self-contained.exe that may need the VB runtime distributed with it is a bit overkill IMHO. Think of it as the Perl for Win32, when you dont' want to install Perl.
Just my two cents. I hate VBScript for most things, but for this, I'll glady use it.
Anybody else see that miscaptioned picture? They had a picture of the girl from Lizzy McGuire with a caption referencing a "Brian" that was supposed to be on the left. At first glance I thought the (left) was to make sure nobody confused the real life person with the small cartoon character to the right. It made me chuckle.
I don't think he needs a lecture. We all know the reasons why they slowly added new directories.
And they are all asinine.
I think you've also missed the point. I'll grant that a typical desktop doesn't need this seperation but there really are good reasons why this exists. I'll reiterate the obvious stuff:/bin,/etc,/sbin,/dev, and/lib basically all have to be on the / partition. If they're not there then the system doesn't have enough to properly boot. This is your core OS.
Things in/usr and/home don't need to be on the same parition. I know, I know, you're thinking "hard disks are big enough to mash them together now" and this is true -- but what about when you dont' even want them on the same computer? Think NFS mounted partitions so apps can be maintained across a number of machines with only one real working copy. That's a good strong reason to never break this whole/bin/ and/usr/bin idea. Now,/usr/local/bin and/usr/bin are confusing, but they have a purpose. The OS vendor's software should be in/usr/bin and the 3rd party apps should be in the/usr/local area, though there was this whole '/opt' thing for 3rd party apps that just never really caught on. I still see some sysadmins though create/apps and/misc partitions that do exactly what/opt is supposed to do. Oracle will try and install to/opt last time I checked. Big apps that don't really share much with other ones really do belong in/opt -- and Mozilla is probably one of them.
It's a flexible system, and I'd like to see it stick around. Most systems don't need this level of complexity but there's really nothing wrong with it if you're using a proper package manager.
I still don't know why XFree86 gets it's own area though. I'd like to see it live right along with the rest of the system personally.
There's another reason why I like this setup too -- it keeps my 'PATH' environment variable rather simple. If you look at my Windows systems it's just a friggen horrid long string becaue of how software likes to install itself there... basically the same idea as/opt. As a result of this I put all my one-off.exe files in c:\winnt and treat it like a/usr/bin/ directory.
I notice that you mention/usr/local/X11/bin and/usr/local/java/bin being moronic, and that your login script has to spend some time trying to locate them properly. How in the world would creating something like/Programs/X11/bin and/Programs/java/bin really help things? Sure, '/usr/local' isn't intuitive at first, but now that you know it's purpose it makes sense, doesn't it? Perhaps we go with:
/System Programs/ /OS Programs/ /3rd Party Programs/ ... and then each application would place itself under one of those top level folders and then create their own/bin and/lib and/doc directories? I fail to see how such a solution would get around you not liking/usr/local/X11/bin. If they had just stuck it in/usr/local/bin the system would be much easier to use... and that's all users want to do -- use the system. When they pop a new application on they don't want to muck with LD_LIBRARY_PATH and their PATH variable to get their shell (or desktop environment) to play nicely with their new app. Sure, it makes removal a piece of cake, but it makes actually -finding- things to run so much harder on the system, and making su
I think you forgot that the older programmer is far less likely to produce bugs. Sure, the young new hot shot pumped code out that can sell, but what's the suport cost of a shitty product vs that of a product produced by an experienced person?
Personally, in my current job, I'd much rather be handling software pumped out by some older guys that knew what the heck was going on. I see too many bugs to think that a new hot shot programmer can actually do the job the Right Way.... Mind you, I say this as I myself am a "young hot shot" -- 23 years old and a college drop out. I know I'm a "young'in" and I revel in the knowledge that I am sometimes fortunate to glean from real senior programmers. Unfortunately I don't get to work with them that often, probably for reasons that this whole thread was started.
Not picking on your post in particular, but it just struck a chord with me.
Sure, as IT workers we have to rationalize our decisions, but sometimes we're asked to rationalize things that are just so far out there that we don't know where to begin. I think the movie "Tommy Boy" put it best, and I can't beleive I actually brought this into the thread:
paraphrased: "I could take a shit in a box and guarantee it if you wanted."
If OSS isn't popular because it doesn't have the 24x7 support built into it, show them how good their commercial support really is. Tell them to shutdown the local helpdesk and just call the vendor everytime something goes wrong. They'll balk -- for good reason. Nobody in their right mind would actually RELY on vendor support for 24x7 support. It's there when you need it, and even then it rarely helps at all.
Now, with OSS you pay for support because that's all they get paid for. You can keep the software and not give them a dime if the support sucks. Take Bea (decent product)... if their support doesn't live up to what you want, what are you going to do? Switch vendors? Sure, you could, but you get this "cozy" feeling because you still got software that you paid for and it works most of the time even if support isn't great.
On the other hand if you deployed everything on JBoss and the support just wasn't what you're paying for (which I doubt) you'd just drop the support and keep the software.
The original poster chose a really poor example there: finding a list of bound ports. Sure that TCPView thing will do it, but you can do it in Windows with the built in utilities.
If I want to do it in a Linux environment I run:
netstat -n
If I want to do it in a Windows environment I run:
netstat -n... You can usually tell which Windows utils were inspired by *nix equivalents. They usually use the - notation instead of / before command line options.
I didn't look at the parent, but everything you wrote -can- be solved with a Unix-like script for deploying software. Apt-get comes to mind there. At any rate... my real point:
And -you're OS- will refuse to update a file if the system has it open for 'read' access. This negates the possibility of upgrading software while the user is actually using the system. I know it sounds foreign, but I see no darned good reason as to why I can't have a.dll file open while an application removes the old one and drops in a new one.
It's because of that -shit- that I had to turn off our company-wide software push system. The only safe time to patch the box was after I logged in and couldn't fire up any applications. Newsflash: When I log in I have work to do.
Although I am for an outright ban or much stricter controls on guns in the US, even I will make this distinction clear.
Fine by me, so long as you don't want freedom of speach, soliers living with you by government mandate, police not needing a warrant to search your belongings, trial by jury, a speedy trial, and limited federal government powers.
The Bill of Rights is already eroding, please don't promote getting rid of even more.
You can kill people with a gun, but I haven't seen any lawsuit against S&W for creating a tool that can be used to commit a crime.
Err... what? You don't keep your eye on these things then. I find it ironic that you use S&W (Smith and Wesson) as the prime example here. During the Clinton Administration the feds actually pressured gun makers to build in "safety" devices into firearms, or be held liable for misuse. S&W caved. S&W saw a huge slump in sales when 2nd ammendment supporters boycotted their firearms. Heck, I knew people that got rid of taking ANYTHING labled S&W out into public to prevent accidentally advertising for them.
Thankfully this Congress put a stop to that and dropped a bomb that keeps gun manufactuers from being sued when their products are used in crimes. Before this lawsuits were fairly common against gun manufactuers when their products were used in crimes. It's bullshit, but it's true. Hopefully that's all over though.
Footnote: S&W sold out finally to an American ownership which canned all the deals made with the Clinton-era government. Sales went back up and you'll find people quite happy in the NRA with their reversal of opinion.
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That's the reason software sucks. You bought it, right? Sharp got their money so to them their software is 100% on the mark. Could things be better? Oh hell yes! But they don't "need" to be better because the industry is making money off their shoddy software now. It's good enough for 90% of all purposes though so it's marketable.
I'm not surprised really -- can you name ONE single market that's widely adopted where people demand the utmost of quality all the time? I can't think of one single thing I purchase that's "high end" because not doing so would be insane.
Less than perfect cars? That's the norm, though they are getting better over time. The cost/benefit ratio though of buying an Audi vs. a Ford just doesn't justify that extra cost (assuming you agree that Audi makes nice quality cars -- I'm working for Germans so I'm biased and I drive a VW).
Lets drop the price way down: fast food. We don't really buy it because it's the best out there. It's cheap, it's quick, and it fills the job. You want a nice home-made Gyro made fast? It'll cost ya. Some will pay, most won't. It's a niche market.
Heck... beer is the same way, at least in the US and Canada. I'd say around 90% of "beer" drinkers in my area wouldn't know a good porter if it jumped down their throat. They could grab a 12 pack of good porter for 16 bucks or a 24 pack of rice water for 20... they go with rice water. Reason: value per dollar.
Is Cherry Coke the best damned cherry flavored cola in your town? I'd wager it isn't, as long as you live in a decent sized town. Yet, we still all buy it.
Business shoots for the lowest common demoniator. If you can't live with it, well, make yourself a business that caters to people that really want the best. Once your name picks up though you'll have to start mass-producing things at sub standard quality to make a really good profit margin -- unless you gouge your customers.
Do I dislike it? Yes... of course, especially when it comes to technology as that's 'my thing' and I know it can be done better. Somebody running up to me with a spiffy new Zaurus that crashes is like driving up to your mechanic buddy and beaming about the brand new Kia you just bought. "Hey -- it's got cool cup holders!". Oh brother.
This makes perfect sense. You specify integer artithmetic when you write an integer and don't cast the darned thing. Your 2nd statement is actually:
float y = (int)1/(int)2 * float(3.1.4159);
Now, we all know that division and multiplication are on equal levels regarding evaluation, so it's done left to right -- and 1/2 is = 0 when you don't care about decimals. And 0 * 3.14159 is 0.
C is portable assemtly. Bask in it's optimizations, but don't curse it for the same reason we all love it.
While you were being humorous, no it's not .223 inches big. It's bigger than that from ripping pieces of metal on the entrance with it. If you shoot something soft though, like an empty five gallon bucket you'll find that the hole is -smaller- than .223 though. The plastic sort of melts/bends around the bullet as it goes in. Looks more like a .17 bb hole than a .223 round.
Seriously guys, .223. It's great fun on metal targets that are mutli-layered. Ever hit a coffee can with one? Friggen amazing! It goes in one side blistering fast at 3,000+ fps and makes a little hole less than .25 inches big, then blows back out the other side over a half an inch. I don't have any slo-mo video of it but I attribute it to the bullet tearing that metal it bit off at a high rate and pushing it out the back end along with the tumble of the bullet after it gets offset from that first impact to make a much larger hole in the back. I can't imagine what would happen if you actually tried pushing it through something nearly solid.
.223 incindiary round is supposed to blow through 3/8inch steel. Hmm... where's that old 6GB bigfoot drive at?
Oh heck, get some incindiary ammo and blow right through the thing. I'd love to see what it does to that. A
I just get a kick out of the teeny little entrance hole versus the gaping "exit wound" that it leaves.
This will be the beginning of a long running tirade in this thread agains the entire premise of such a book, simply based upon it's title and the number of things I have read like it.
Now, to address your question. Things like:
A) Building a PHP application from the ground up with MySQL and tieing the two together like cousins in Kentucky in a stack of hay. The very THOUGHT that a book would come out with such a title just wreaks of being marketed to two-bit hackers out there. Now, if the book was targed toward "PHP databased development using MySQL" that'd be another matter. Giving good, industry -STANDARD- procedures of seperating your code from your DB is the only way to really make a decent book out of the subject. If there is -ONE single line of top-level PHP code that contains -ONE- MySQL specific line of code in it -- damn that book. That is -NOT- the way to write a web application, or any application.
I don't even have to read the book, or the review. There will be a top-level line of MySQL code in their PHP right smack dab into the presentation layer. If I'm wrong, hey, appologies to the author, but you picked a damn stupid title if you were going to actually present a real programming design/implementation book.
In highly concentrated forms sure car exhaust is horrid to human beings. The CO itself can strangle your lungs so you can't get any O2 after a while. Many things that aren't too bad for you in small amounts are deadly in high amounts.
Take a hydrogen fuel-cell care. They emit pure water. Right after you retrofit yours to dump all the H20 into the cabin I'll start sucking on my CO exhaust
Water kills. Don't let anybody fool you.
This is one thing that bugs me about the language. The smallest program will have to load up a rather large JVM. I'm waiting for the day when there's a constantly running JVM on your machine and represents one system process. A java app is started then with a java 'bootloader' of some sort that ties your new process into the JVM, or perhaps instructs the original process to suck the new byte-code into an ultra-protected type thread in the same processes making Java more of a mini-OS inside your OS. For server apps isn't not such a big deal, but for Desktop applications it could really lead to quicker adoption. Load the JVM at boot time (or 2 or 3 if your system needs different versions) then just load the bytecode into the existing JVM for each application. Distribute with a little 'task manager' type application for inspecting/killing processes and Sun might have something pretty nifty.
I think I'm finding out the same thing you are. I started getting hit with RSI symptoms about two years ago, and I ignored it. After about 6 months of it I finaly got a split keyboard thing (MS Natural) and that seemed to really help out a lot. After a while though, like another 6 months, I started to hurt again, so I switched back to a regular keyboard for a while and things went away. I'm just rotating environments now. Sometimes I use my laptop keyboard and LCD screen, sometimes I jack it into the monitor and use the fullsize MS Natural keyboard. I switch positions during the day posture wise. That's the only thing that really works, IMHO.
Nah, it's more complicated than that. I was asked to do something similiar to this around 2000 when the patent was filed. We scrapped it from the project though.
Basically you record every search term in your database, then you query them out when you present the search page (or from a cache, as this data won't really change that much). You get back a list of the most common search terms, then proceed to build up JavaScript that you can send back to the browser. If you start making round-trips to the DB every time somebody types in a letter, well, you just shot yourself in the foot.
Why did we scrap it? Makes the search page load slower. Just not cool. I suppose if you want to only auto-complete out of a hundred items it's feasible, especially with broaband today, but to really make it useful I'd imagine you'd need at least a match for every reasonable 3 letter combination. So, lets do a little fuzzy math:
To start with we'll assume 26 possible first letters. For every letter after that it's safe to say that only around 18 letters would make sense after that (or be common), and for the 3rd letter you've probably got another 18 letters. Odds of a word starting with qzz that's a common search term? Null. Things like ao, po, and at you see alot. qx, tx, rz, etc you don't see ofen, if ever. At any rate, 26*18*18 = 8,424. Now, assume 10 bytes per word, and the overhead of actually putting this into a JavaScript array type structure and I'd imagine your'e going to blow past 100k of data to get a comprhensive auto-complete feature out of the deal. Back in 2000 plenty of users were on 56k or less connections. They still are today. Would you really want to piss your customers off in that era with 20+ seconds of extra download time just to get to your search -entry- page? I sure wouldn't. That's why you don't see these even if the idea is rather simple.
When everybody's on broadband, perhaps showing your users the 8,000 most searched for terms would be feasible, but not now, at least not in my mind.
This is probably true, and I'm as much as an anti-MS guy as you can get really, but I have my reasons for not liking VB. I did a few projects with it in the past year (ASP/VBScript with VB COM components, MTS, etc), so I speak from experience.
I went into it thinking it would suck, but I quickly found it being okay for gettings things done. "Hey, maybe these guys are onto something I think...". Then the project gets more complex and I realize why I like langauges that are far more strict regarding what you can and cannot do.
If (ErrorState = True) Then
CLEANUPCOMMONOBJECTS
End If
If I had good exception and a good GC I wouldn't have even needed this though.
It's a short list, but it's been a while since I coded in it.
I'd suggest, if you would like to do it in a batch file but cannot, that you do in VBScript instead. Just hack it up in a .vbs files and you're ready to go. No development environment needed but a good text editor and web browser to hit MSDN. A self-contained .exe that may need the VB runtime distributed with it is a bit overkill IMHO. Think of it as the Perl for Win32, when you dont' want to install Perl.
Just my two cents. I hate VBScript for most things, but for this, I'll glady use it.
Hmnm.... given the number of other users seeing missing lines with a Gecko browser I'd have to assume their HTML was really jacked up.
Anybody else see that miscaptioned picture? They had a picture of the girl from Lizzy McGuire with a caption referencing a "Brian" that was supposed to be on the left. At first glance I thought the (left) was to make sure nobody confused the real life person with the small cartoon character to the right. It made me chuckle.
Screenshot of it here
I think you've also missed the point. I'll grant that a typical desktop doesn't need this seperation but there really are good reasons why this exists. I'll reiterate the obvious stuff: /bin, /etc, /sbin, /dev, and /lib basically all have to be on the / partition. If they're not there then the system doesn't have enough to properly boot. This is your core OS.
/usr and /home don't need to be on the same parition. I know, I know, you're thinking "hard disks are big enough to mash them together now" and this is true -- but what about when you dont' even want them on the same computer? Think NFS mounted partitions so apps can be maintained across a number of machines with only one real working copy. That's a good strong reason to never break this whole /bin/ and /usr/bin idea. Now, /usr/local/bin and /usr/bin are confusing, but they have a purpose. The OS vendor's software should be in /usr/bin and the 3rd party apps should be in the /usr/local area, though there was this whole '/opt' thing for 3rd party apps that just never really caught on. I still see some sysadmins though create /apps and /misc partitions that do exactly what /opt is supposed to do. Oracle will try and install to /opt last time I checked. Big apps that don't really share much with other ones really do belong in /opt -- and Mozilla is probably one of them.
/opt. As a result of this I put all my one-off .exe files in c:\winnt and treat it like a /usr/bin/ directory.
/usr/local/X11/bin and /usr/local/java/bin being moronic, and that your login script has to spend some time trying to locate them properly. How in the world would creating something like /Programs/X11/bin and /Programs/java/bin really help things? Sure, '/usr/local' isn't intuitive at first, but now that you know it's purpose it makes sense, doesn't it? Perhaps we go with:
/System Programs/
/OS Programs/
/3rd Party Programs/
... and then each application would place itself under one of those top level folders and then create their own /bin and /lib and /doc directories? I fail to see how such a solution would get around you not liking /usr/local/X11/bin. If they had just stuck it in /usr/local/bin the system would be much easier to use... and that's all users want to do -- use the system. When they pop a new application on they don't want to muck with LD_LIBRARY_PATH and their PATH variable to get their shell (or desktop environment) to play nicely with their new app. Sure, it makes removal a piece of cake, but it makes actually -finding- things to run so much harder on the system, and making su
Things in
It's a flexible system, and I'd like to see it stick around. Most systems don't need this level of complexity but there's really nothing wrong with it if you're using a proper package manager.
I still don't know why XFree86 gets it's own area though. I'd like to see it live right along with the rest of the system personally.
There's another reason why I like this setup too -- it keeps my 'PATH' environment variable rather simple. If you look at my Windows systems it's just a friggen horrid long string becaue of how software likes to install itself there... basically the same idea as
I notice that you mention
Hmm.. maybe Ross Perot is up for another go at it?
I hear Ted Nugent is going to run for Governor of Michigan in 2006. That'll be a hoot. He's got my vote.
I think you forgot that the older programmer is far less likely to produce bugs. Sure, the young new hot shot pumped code out that can sell, but what's the suport cost of a shitty product vs that of a product produced by an experienced person?
... Mind you, I say this as I myself am a "young hot shot" -- 23 years old and a college drop out. I know I'm a "young'in" and I revel in the knowledge that I am sometimes fortunate to glean from real senior programmers. Unfortunately I don't get to work with them that often, probably for reasons that this whole thread was started.
Personally, in my current job, I'd much rather be handling software pumped out by some older guys that knew what the heck was going on. I see too many bugs to think that a new hot shot programmer can actually do the job the Right Way.
Violent overkill? Never met an NRA member, eh?
Excuse me while I fondle my AR-15.
Not picking on your post in particular, but it just struck a chord with me.
Sure, as IT workers we have to rationalize our decisions, but sometimes we're asked to rationalize things that are just so far out there that we don't know where to begin. I think the movie "Tommy Boy" put it best, and I can't beleive I actually brought this into the thread:
paraphrased: "I could take a shit in a box and guarantee it if you wanted."
If OSS isn't popular because it doesn't have the 24x7 support built into it, show them how good their commercial support really is. Tell them to shutdown the local helpdesk and just call the vendor everytime something goes wrong. They'll balk -- for good reason. Nobody in their right mind would actually RELY on vendor support for 24x7 support. It's there when you need it, and even then it rarely helps at all.
Now, with OSS you pay for support because that's all they get paid for. You can keep the software and not give them a dime if the support sucks. Take Bea (decent product)... if their support doesn't live up to what you want, what are you going to do? Switch vendors? Sure, you could, but you get this "cozy" feeling because you still got software that you paid for and it works most of the time even if support isn't great.
On the other hand if you deployed everything on JBoss and the support just wasn't what you're paying for (which I doubt) you'd just drop the support and keep the software.
I really just don't get it.
The original poster chose a really poor example there: finding a list of bound ports. Sure that TCPView thing will do it, but you can do it in Windows with the built in utilities.
... You can usually tell which Windows utils were inspired by *nix equivalents. They usually use the - notation instead of / before command line options.
If I want to do it in a Linux environment I run:
netstat -n
If I want to do it in a Windows environment I run:
netstat -n
I didn't look at the parent, but everything you wrote -can- be solved with a Unix-like script for deploying software. Apt-get comes to mind there. At any rate... my real point:
.dll file open while an application removes the old one and drops in a new one.
And -you're OS- will refuse to update a file if the system has it open for 'read' access. This negates the possibility of upgrading software while the user is actually using the system. I know it sounds foreign, but I see no darned good reason as to why I can't have a
It's because of that -shit- that I had to turn off our company-wide software push system. The only safe time to patch the box was after I logged in and couldn't fire up any applications. Newsflash: When I log in I have work to do.
He's reformed alright -- got beat down and died in prison. Probably not babysitting anytime soon.
Fine by me, so long as you don't want freedom of speach, soliers living with you by government mandate, police not needing a warrant to search your belongings, trial by jury, a speedy trial, and limited federal government powers.
The Bill of Rights is already eroding, please don't promote getting rid of even more.
Err... what? You don't keep your eye on these things then. I find it ironic that you use S&W (Smith and Wesson) as the prime example here. During the Clinton Administration the feds actually pressured gun makers to build in "safety" devices into firearms, or be held liable for misuse. S&W caved. S&W saw a huge slump in sales when 2nd ammendment supporters boycotted their firearms. Heck, I knew people that got rid of taking ANYTHING labled S&W out into public to prevent accidentally advertising for them.
Thankfully this Congress put a stop to that and dropped a bomb that keeps gun manufactuers from being sued when their products are used in crimes. Before this lawsuits were fairly common against gun manufactuers when their products were used in crimes. It's bullshit, but it's true. Hopefully that's all over though.
Footnote:
S&W sold out finally to an American ownership which canned all the deals made with the Clinton-era government. Sales went back up and you'll find people quite happy in the NRA with their reversal of opinion.
I can't beleive a post with the term "poopy-heads" just got modded up to 5: Insightful.