Isn't that the catch 22 everyone faces? If I had money I could start a successful business, create awesome new software that would easily be marketable, pay for grad school so I could get a good job, etc. People act like young (and poor) people don't want to do things but really it's usually more a limitation of what we have to work for. Unfortunately just being bright and hard working won't get you far very quickly.
To me, it seems to be a major problem with our society. We don't take advantage of all our resources because there is no appropriate way to identify people that have great potential and put them to work doing something useful. Most of us geeks end up working on minor improvements to commercial products that won't really have any positive benefit to society because that's what we have to do to live. Most corporations don't have much vision and since the Cold War ended the government doesn't really seem to care much at all either. All the people that could be curing cancer are working as grunts.
Myself, I think I'll stick to letting everyone contribute. That way I can see all the expert views as well as all the interesting notes and crackpot additions that non-experts add. Since Wikipdia started limiting contributions I've found it a lot less useful and less enjoyable to use. If I wanted to read a smaller, more limited, more expert opinionated, source I would grab the encyclopedia off my shelf. What made Wikipedia great was it's huge amount of information with stuff you wouldn't find in the encyclopedia. It gave you one heck of a place to start with and then through your own research you could sort through the information provided to see what was from experts, what was interesting side material experts wouldn't tell you about, and what was just crap. Rather than censoring non-expert material it's better to highlight expert material while leaving everything available.
Sadly, most code, that isn't mine, that I've had to work with just mushed everything all together. It's one of my pet peeves about open source code as a lot of smaller projects are really badly written. Of course most closed source code I've worked on was just as bad. I swear that schools must crank out CS majors without teaching them to actually code things properly.
The worst is people who think of themselves as web programmers. There is often no separation of logic at all. Of course if you're going to cram PHP, HTML, CSS, Javascript, and SQL all into a single file anyway then why would you think about actually designing your code. I love when you see someone who whines their code is broken and you see a tangle like that. Usually they don't even know how to properly use functions or objects.
You can tweak your stylesheets to take care of the issue. I mostly insert logos and theme related graphics from stylesheets anyway and those have a default stylesheet that uses PNGs and a IE6 stylesheet that uses GIF versions of the same graphics. For other images on the site I use the IE specific filter progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader ( src = 'src', sizingMethod = 'scale' ) to make things work a bit nicer.
SVG would be awesome but working CSS and Javascript would be enough to make me happy. Being on par with Firefox, Safari, and Opera is all IE needs to get off my hate list. I'm so tired of having to bust my ass to make sure everything I want to do works in IE.
Of course we still have to support IE6 and IE7 for probably another ten years. IE6 still makes up 25% of the traffic my websites get and IE7 makes up another 50%.
It's less a recommendation for style guidelines than it is a reminder to not rely entirely on style guidelines. As always the nicest UI in the world won't help you if the underlying software sucks. To many programs are badly designed and tightly bound to their UI.
I'm not sure on following Apple's guidelines. Some of their stuff is great but some of it really sucks too. They have a hit and miss record with usability.
What I might suggest is to design so that the UI is loosely coupled so it can easily be switched out as needed. Better than trying to make one universal perfect interface is to create one simple interface with the ability to create alternates easily. Then if you need a console based or text-based interface (say for a blind employee) it's easy to do without confusing your existing users. If you need to make a more advanced interface for admins it's easy to do. There is no one interface to rule them all.
I want Vista to do the Duke talk for system events then. When you boot it should say 'Go get some.' Maybe when ever the stupid admin permissions box pops up it should make the sound we hear in Duke games when he takes a piss. I always feel like I'm getting pissed on when Vista keeps popping that stuff up over and over again for every minor thing.
Our company doesn't currently pay any outside people to support our open source usage but we'll consider doing so on a as-needed basis. The vast majority of problems are stuff that is familiar to anyone that is experienced at working with the specific software and within the open source community but if something was new and above our abilities we'd pay for support.
We are paying for support for a large proprietary ERP system. The software was expensive, requires expensive hardware (only runs on IBM), and support is quite expensive. The software is buggy, missing obvious features, and is poorly documented. The support is often poor and most questions can only get answered, if they can be answered at all, by talking to a manager-level person in the support department or even to someone from development. The entire experience is much worse than working with open source and does not leave me with any desire to use more proprietary software.
I'm actually thinking of choosing an open source ERP project and sponsoring having the features we need added to it. Even if it took several years to bring the open source system to par with our existing system I think it'd be the better forward track because we could then switch systems and have the features we need, that the current system doesn't offer, run on our choice of hardware, and have the great support offered by open source projects. If we made this switch we'd also want commercial support though as the system would be mission critical. We'd use in-house support, community support, and commercial support to cover all our bases.
Libertarians tend to favor big business though - a worse bunch than big government. I like to keep my personal freedoms and not hand them over to anyone.
They tend to bury their head in the sand and ignore issues until they come and bite them in the butt too. The whole thing that we should ignore terrorism and the growing power of certain foreign countries that pose a risk to world stability because they might not become an unignorable problem for a few more decades.
At least they aren't usually as retarded as certain others I know, mostly liberals, that think that if we're just nice to the bad guys that they'll clean up and go to Sunday school and be our friends. Some sort of hippy love trip. I'd love to see them getting mugged - some guy steals their wallet and punches them so they give the bad guy a hug and offer their watch. Yeah, that'll fix things.
Of course the alternative to those two groups of wusses is a bunch of wackos, the conservatives, that tend to think that personal rights aren't that important and that make things like the Patriot Act happen.
Am I the only person who feels we're fucked? Oh well - I'll probably vote for Romney or Obama and hope for the best. I'd rather vote for Satan than Hillary and don't think much of McCain either. Both of those smell of being politicians. Romney and Obama I may not agree with but I feel they are thinkers and have the best interest of the country at heart. I'd love to see Romney as President with Obama as VP, or vice versa.
Well - I don't like IE as a browser and only use it when I have to but I can tell from tests that IE7 does render more standards compliant pages than IE6 does so it's some improvement. Sadly, to many developers still won't use any features that IE6 can't handle so users rarely notice that IE sucks even when they happen to use a better browser on occassion.
IE7 still has major issues to deal with but it's a heck of a lot better than IE6. I'd love to see them wipe IE6 off every computer that hasn't specifically chosen to keep IE6 for some reason. (I keep it in a Win2000 virtual machine for testing IE6.) Death to IE6!
I can't say I liked or disliked the movie. It was interesting and sometimes cool. Often it was lame. It quickly gave me a headache thanks to the Blair Witch style filming (a camcorder with lots of running). It was sort of gritty with a lot of washed out colors and it was hard to see what was going on. The movie really didn't have a plot - like the Blair Witch Project it was mostly watching people run around and react to things. You didn't really have a chance to become emotionally attached to the characters so while the movie was sometimes frightening you didn't care much when even the major characters bought the farm. It was a bit depressing because you never got to see what happened and the movie basically ended on a low note. The special effects were okay, and not to distracting, but nothing great. I can't see very many people seeing this more than once or bothering to buy the DVD but it was worth seeing once. Good for people that don't like to think when watching a movie. I liked seeing it with some friends but I know my wife would have hated it.
While overall I as unimpressed by Cloverfield I do think that if War of the Worlds was done with something closer to this style it could be very compelling. It'd go well with the history of WotW. Given a chance to get attached to the characters and a little more plot, I think this style could make the movie feel very real. Maybe limit the use of this filming style to the part of the film where the shit is hitting the fan so you get more of a difference from the staging part of the film where everything is peachy - might help to reduce the headaches if limited too.
I'd say this movie is overhyped but doesn't suck total ass.
For the most part the Firefox UI is a pretty good balance of easy to use and powerful. From the description of these guys on their website I'm afraid they'll go nuts with trying to remove any flexibility.
Firefox's UI is good enough to only need the occasional minor improvement. I'd rather see them work on speed and stability. Opening one site that has buggy Javascript or Flash shouldn't take down the entire browser. Don't wank off on UI crap when there are still real problems with the underlying application.
This is not a broken window fallacy. In that case the money spent has limited value - in this case the money spent has unlimited value.
As to the fallacy itself I can't entirely agree with it. It's not as simple a problem as it appears. Often people will not circulate money as quickly as could be desired. Often the money will be spent in such a way that it is circulated through only a small part of society. Perhaps by circulating the money among tradesmen (a lower segment of society) before it migrates to the business man (a higher segment of society) it'll have a chance to better distribute resources. Just as it is bad for the economy if resources don't move it's also bad if they move only among a small segment of society. So causing this extra stirring may still be beneficial.
The pull back on funding for basic scientific research and exploration is hurting us now and in the future. Only doing research that you know is useful leaves out a lot of room to discover new things. Money in itself is worthless - just some counters to manage resources. Scientific discoveries keep our lifestyle improving and enables us to keep making more discoveries. That is what has real value.
Likewise other basic resources such as materials and a quality workforce have real value. Materials may be just fine if left where they are but the workforce has to be nurtured. You have to keep people educated and working enough to keep their skills and pay their bills. The stirring effect of keeping resources moving among the lower classes is important for keeping the workforce at peak condition. And of course the fact that the workforce is us - what benefits the workforce benefits the majority of society so even if it doesn't produce more resources but only allows distributes to us the resources we need to live quality lives then it's still a benefit. What other benefit is important besides maintaining and creating resources and improving the average quality of life?
How can exploring space not have a positive value? Access to endless mineral resources alone is bound to be enough to pay back every cent we put into it. It's the same as when they were deciding to explore the America's - sure it may be expensive and hard up front but the payback is huge.
I don't mind watermarks - I'll easily admit that I'll share just about any kind of data I gt my hands on. I'm the kind of guy that scanned my text books so I could share them online. DRM on the other hand kept me from buying.
I wonder what it'd do to their watermarks if I did my own steganography to hide my own data in the music. I have over 100GB (and growing) of music files so it'd seem an easy place to hide pretty big chunks of data.
I keep old, but not dead, drives around for when I need extra swap space on a computer. Stick in an old io card and stick a couple old drives in and you have some swap space that won't wear out or slow down your main drives.
As a software developer I feel there should be no copyright. I rarely pay for software mostly because the vast majority of proprietary software is overpriced, buggy, and poorly supported. It isn't worth the amount asked but in some cases you still need it due to proprietary file formats that are treated as industry pseudo-standards. In the end, like any industry, it comes down to product quality, return on investment, and customer service. I wonder how long it takes a company using legally purchased copies of Vista, Office, and Adobe Creative Suite to earn back the cost of that software with what their employees are using the software for. In my experience it'd take most employees a pretty long time using that software for it to pay for itself. The output just isn't that valuable.
Most companies need to learn about free alternatives. That way they can avoid these vultures while still having the functionality they need. I think the BSA's enforcement can only help open source grow so I wish them well in their efforts. As for me, I just won't use proprietary crapware whenever a workable alternative exists.
In that case try something like PHP followed by Python. Java is still beyond most of the nitwits I've seen it taught to. Maybe the real problem is that they encourage everyone that has ever looked at online porn or played a video game to go into computer science.
Of course you really shouldn't write in C anyway unless you are doing something tight. We also get a lot of dorks that feel the need to write everything in C. Naw don't write a quicky shell script - crank out the C and write 3000 lines of garbage to replace those 3 lines of shell code.
Really though, I'd suggest teaching PHP, shell scripting (Bash), Perl, Python, Lisp, Prolog, SQL, Javascript, Java, C, and C++ to all computer science students. Those are the languages I find most useful in real life and I really do use all of them (and more). I don't use Lisp and Prolog very often but when I do they are lifesavers - and I think it's good to force people to try thinking about problems in different ways. I rarely use assembly any more but if you're going to teach C it doesn't hurt to at least touch on coding in assembly.
I agree that it's pretty silly to have an operating systems concepts class for students that have never coded in C and assembly. Might as well teach pigeons to swim.
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Isn't that the catch 22 everyone faces? If I had money I could start a successful business, create awesome new software that would easily be marketable, pay for grad school so I could get a good job, etc. People act like young (and poor) people don't want to do things but really it's usually more a limitation of what we have to work for. Unfortunately just being bright and hard working won't get you far very quickly.
To me, it seems to be a major problem with our society. We don't take advantage of all our resources because there is no appropriate way to identify people that have great potential and put them to work doing something useful. Most of us geeks end up working on minor improvements to commercial products that won't really have any positive benefit to society because that's what we have to do to live. Most corporations don't have much vision and since the Cold War ended the government doesn't really seem to care much at all either. All the people that could be curing cancer are working as grunts.
Building Secure Microsoft ASP.NET Applications ?
Myself, I think I'll stick to letting everyone contribute. That way I can see all the expert views as well as all the interesting notes and crackpot additions that non-experts add. Since Wikipdia started limiting contributions I've found it a lot less useful and less enjoyable to use. If I wanted to read a smaller, more limited, more expert opinionated, source I would grab the encyclopedia off my shelf. What made Wikipedia great was it's huge amount of information with stuff you wouldn't find in the encyclopedia. It gave you one heck of a place to start with and then through your own research you could sort through the information provided to see what was from experts, what was interesting side material experts wouldn't tell you about, and what was just crap. Rather than censoring non-expert material it's better to highlight expert material while leaving everything available.
Sadly, most code, that isn't mine, that I've had to work with just mushed everything all together. It's one of my pet peeves about open source code as a lot of smaller projects are really badly written. Of course most closed source code I've worked on was just as bad. I swear that schools must crank out CS majors without teaching them to actually code things properly.
The worst is people who think of themselves as web programmers. There is often no separation of logic at all. Of course if you're going to cram PHP, HTML, CSS, Javascript, and SQL all into a single file anyway then why would you think about actually designing your code. I love when you see someone who whines their code is broken and you see a tangle like that. Usually they don't even know how to properly use functions or objects.
You can tweak your stylesheets to take care of the issue. I mostly insert logos and theme related graphics from stylesheets anyway and those have a default stylesheet that uses PNGs and a IE6 stylesheet that uses GIF versions of the same graphics. For other images on the site I use the IE specific filter progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader ( src = 'src', sizingMethod = 'scale' ) to make things work a bit nicer.
SVG would be awesome but working CSS and Javascript would be enough to make me happy. Being on par with Firefox, Safari, and Opera is all IE needs to get off my hate list. I'm so tired of having to bust my ass to make sure everything I want to do works in IE.
Of course we still have to support IE6 and IE7 for probably another ten years. IE6 still makes up 25% of the traffic my websites get and IE7 makes up another 50%.
I just compare the registered location of the user's IP to my list of caches and serve up the one closest. Seems far easier than special URL's to me.
It's less a recommendation for style guidelines than it is a reminder to not rely entirely on style guidelines. As always the nicest UI in the world won't help you if the underlying software sucks. To many programs are badly designed and tightly bound to their UI.
I'm not sure on following Apple's guidelines. Some of their stuff is great but some of it really sucks too. They have a hit and miss record with usability.
What I might suggest is to design so that the UI is loosely coupled so it can easily be switched out as needed. Better than trying to make one universal perfect interface is to create one simple interface with the ability to create alternates easily. Then if you need a console based or text-based interface (say for a blind employee) it's easy to do without confusing your existing users. If you need to make a more advanced interface for admins it's easy to do. There is no one interface to rule them all.
I want Vista to do the Duke talk for system events then. When you boot it should say 'Go get some.' Maybe when ever the stupid admin permissions box pops up it should make the sound we hear in Duke games when he takes a piss. I always feel like I'm getting pissed on when Vista keeps popping that stuff up over and over again for every minor thing.
That's how I feel about Photoshop. It's a bit of crap IMO. Is much harder to use and is harder to apply scripting with.
Our company doesn't currently pay any outside people to support our open source usage but we'll consider doing so on a as-needed basis. The vast majority of problems are stuff that is familiar to anyone that is experienced at working with the specific software and within the open source community but if something was new and above our abilities we'd pay for support.
We are paying for support for a large proprietary ERP system. The software was expensive, requires expensive hardware (only runs on IBM), and support is quite expensive. The software is buggy, missing obvious features, and is poorly documented. The support is often poor and most questions can only get answered, if they can be answered at all, by talking to a manager-level person in the support department or even to someone from development. The entire experience is much worse than working with open source and does not leave me with any desire to use more proprietary software.
I'm actually thinking of choosing an open source ERP project and sponsoring having the features we need added to it. Even if it took several years to bring the open source system to par with our existing system I think it'd be the better forward track because we could then switch systems and have the features we need, that the current system doesn't offer, run on our choice of hardware, and have the great support offered by open source projects. If we made this switch we'd also want commercial support though as the system would be mission critical. We'd use in-house support, community support, and commercial support to cover all our bases.
Gay people are just a bunch of fags anyway. :p
Libertarians tend to favor big business though - a worse bunch than big government. I like to keep my personal freedoms and not hand them over to anyone.
They tend to bury their head in the sand and ignore issues until they come and bite them in the butt too. The whole thing that we should ignore terrorism and the growing power of certain foreign countries that pose a risk to world stability because they might not become an unignorable problem for a few more decades.
At least they aren't usually as retarded as certain others I know, mostly liberals, that think that if we're just nice to the bad guys that they'll clean up and go to Sunday school and be our friends. Some sort of hippy love trip. I'd love to see them getting mugged - some guy steals their wallet and punches them so they give the bad guy a hug and offer their watch. Yeah, that'll fix things.
Of course the alternative to those two groups of wusses is a bunch of wackos, the conservatives, that tend to think that personal rights aren't that important and that make things like the Patriot Act happen.
Am I the only person who feels we're fucked? Oh well - I'll probably vote for Romney or Obama and hope for the best. I'd rather vote for Satan than Hillary and don't think much of McCain either. Both of those smell of being politicians. Romney and Obama I may not agree with but I feel they are thinkers and have the best interest of the country at heart. I'd love to see Romney as President with Obama as VP, or vice versa.
Well - I don't like IE as a browser and only use it when I have to but I can tell from tests that IE7 does render more standards compliant pages than IE6 does so it's some improvement. Sadly, to many developers still won't use any features that IE6 can't handle so users rarely notice that IE sucks even when they happen to use a better browser on occassion.
IE7 still has major issues to deal with but it's a heck of a lot better than IE6. I'd love to see them wipe IE6 off every computer that hasn't specifically chosen to keep IE6 for some reason. (I keep it in a Win2000 virtual machine for testing IE6.) Death to IE6!
I can't say I liked or disliked the movie. It was interesting and sometimes cool. Often it was lame. It quickly gave me a headache thanks to the Blair Witch style filming (a camcorder with lots of running). It was sort of gritty with a lot of washed out colors and it was hard to see what was going on. The movie really didn't have a plot - like the Blair Witch Project it was mostly watching people run around and react to things. You didn't really have a chance to become emotionally attached to the characters so while the movie was sometimes frightening you didn't care much when even the major characters bought the farm. It was a bit depressing because you never got to see what happened and the movie basically ended on a low note. The special effects were okay, and not to distracting, but nothing great. I can't see very many people seeing this more than once or bothering to buy the DVD but it was worth seeing once. Good for people that don't like to think when watching a movie. I liked seeing it with some friends but I know my wife would have hated it.
While overall I as unimpressed by Cloverfield I do think that if War of the Worlds was done with something closer to this style it could be very compelling. It'd go well with the history of WotW. Given a chance to get attached to the characters and a little more plot, I think this style could make the movie feel very real. Maybe limit the use of this filming style to the part of the film where the shit is hitting the fan so you get more of a difference from the staging part of the film where everything is peachy - might help to reduce the headaches if limited too.
I'd say this movie is overhyped but doesn't suck total ass.
For the most part the Firefox UI is a pretty good balance of easy to use and powerful. From the description of these guys on their website I'm afraid they'll go nuts with trying to remove any flexibility.
Firefox's UI is good enough to only need the occasional minor improvement. I'd rather see them work on speed and stability. Opening one site that has buggy Javascript or Flash shouldn't take down the entire browser. Don't wank off on UI crap when there are still real problems with the underlying application.
Even if binaries are available a lot of people will pay just to get the program on a cd with some documentation and basic support.
This is not a broken window fallacy. In that case the money spent has limited value - in this case the money spent has unlimited value.
As to the fallacy itself I can't entirely agree with it. It's not as simple a problem as it appears. Often people will not circulate money as quickly as could be desired. Often the money will be spent in such a way that it is circulated through only a small part of society. Perhaps by circulating the money among tradesmen (a lower segment of society) before it migrates to the business man (a higher segment of society) it'll have a chance to better distribute resources. Just as it is bad for the economy if resources don't move it's also bad if they move only among a small segment of society. So causing this extra stirring may still be beneficial.
The pull back on funding for basic scientific research and exploration is hurting us now and in the future. Only doing research that you know is useful leaves out a lot of room to discover new things. Money in itself is worthless - just some counters to manage resources. Scientific discoveries keep our lifestyle improving and enables us to keep making more discoveries. That is what has real value.
Likewise other basic resources such as materials and a quality workforce have real value. Materials may be just fine if left where they are but the workforce has to be nurtured. You have to keep people educated and working enough to keep their skills and pay their bills. The stirring effect of keeping resources moving among the lower classes is important for keeping the workforce at peak condition. And of course the fact that the workforce is us - what benefits the workforce benefits the majority of society so even if it doesn't produce more resources but only allows distributes to us the resources we need to live quality lives then it's still a benefit. What other benefit is important besides maintaining and creating resources and improving the average quality of life?
How can exploring space not have a positive value? Access to endless mineral resources alone is bound to be enough to pay back every cent we put into it. It's the same as when they were deciding to explore the America's - sure it may be expensive and hard up front but the payback is huge.
I don't mind watermarks - I'll easily admit that I'll share just about any kind of data I gt my hands on. I'm the kind of guy that scanned my text books so I could share them online. DRM on the other hand kept me from buying.
I wonder what it'd do to their watermarks if I did my own steganography to hide my own data in the music. I have over 100GB (and growing) of music files so it'd seem an easy place to hide pretty big chunks of data.
I keep old, but not dead, drives around for when I need extra swap space on a computer. Stick in an old io card and stick a couple old drives in and you have some swap space that won't wear out or slow down your main drives.
I'd vote for them if I was Swedish. To bad there is nobody worth voting for in our (US) upcoming Presidential election.
As a software developer I feel there should be no copyright. I rarely pay for software mostly because the vast majority of proprietary software is overpriced, buggy, and poorly supported. It isn't worth the amount asked but in some cases you still need it due to proprietary file formats that are treated as industry pseudo-standards. In the end, like any industry, it comes down to product quality, return on investment, and customer service. I wonder how long it takes a company using legally purchased copies of Vista, Office, and Adobe Creative Suite to earn back the cost of that software with what their employees are using the software for. In my experience it'd take most employees a pretty long time using that software for it to pay for itself. The output just isn't that valuable.
Most companies need to learn about free alternatives. That way they can avoid these vultures while still having the functionality they need. I think the BSA's enforcement can only help open source grow so I wish them well in their efforts. As for me, I just won't use proprietary crapware whenever a workable alternative exists.
In that case try something like PHP followed by Python. Java is still beyond most of the nitwits I've seen it taught to. Maybe the real problem is that they encourage everyone that has ever looked at online porn or played a video game to go into computer science.
Of course you really shouldn't write in C anyway unless you are doing something tight. We also get a lot of dorks that feel the need to write everything in C. Naw don't write a quicky shell script - crank out the C and write 3000 lines of garbage to replace those 3 lines of shell code.
Really though, I'd suggest teaching PHP, shell scripting (Bash), Perl, Python, Lisp, Prolog, SQL, Javascript, Java, C, and C++ to all computer science students. Those are the languages I find most useful in real life and I really do use all of them (and more). I don't use Lisp and Prolog very often but when I do they are lifesavers - and I think it's good to force people to try thinking about problems in different ways. I rarely use assembly any more but if you're going to teach C it doesn't hurt to at least touch on coding in assembly.
I agree that it's pretty silly to have an operating systems concepts class for students that have never coded in C and assembly. Might as well teach pigeons to swim.