Content management can indeed be a bear pit, but so can anything else. The problems you've had are familiar- mostly to users of Vignette. Frankly, it's a badly designed, bloated, buggy piece of shit. The only thing it ever had going for it was marketing dollars- someone decided they could be the Peoplesoft of content management, and they just about succeeded- except for the product, which sucks. You'd have better luck with just about anything else. Sorry you got sucked in. It happened to a lot of good folks.
Sorry, I missed the part about interchangeable lenses. In that case, your choices are more limited. Basically, there are three ways to go with this.
First, get a camera with a wide angle zoom. These are very few and far between. The only ones I can think of right now are the new Nikon 5000, and a Minolta model I can't remember. There's also the older Kodak DC4800, which is on sale right now at Ritz for $300. A great deal, but older cameras tend to have noisier images and slower overall operation. All these cameras will give you a lens equivalent to a 28mm for 35mm systems.
The second choice is a good zoom camera with a wide angle add-on lens. The better ones work pretty well, usually with a.5-.8 magnification factor. So you could get a pretty wide angle for your G2 or Olympus Camedia. Most of these are off-brand cheapies, so no guarantees on optical quality, but I'm sure the Canon or Olympus branded ones are OK.
Finally, there are the digital SLRs. These are expensive, and so are the lenses. All are excellent, though. The problem is that they usually have a 1.6x magnification factor because of their small sensors, so you'd need one of those super expensive superwides (14mm or 17mm) to get a good wide angle effect. The bodies themselves are around 2 grand, though you can probably get a year old D30 for a little over half that. The downside of an interchangeable lens SLR is that it's difficult to keep the sensor dust-free, and this shows up on your images. The all in one zoom cameras don't have this problem.
RAther than fret over memory card types or interchangeable lenses, figure out what your photographic objective is, and buy the best tool for the job.
My favorite camera review site is www.megapixel.net. They give a good practical overview without the long winded nebbishy blathering of the other camera sites.
Frankly, the kind of memory should be the last thing you consider. Memory prices have really come down, and even the proprietary stuff like Sony Memory Sticks are cheap these days.
But if you must, Olympus cameras all use Smartmedia. They can also be mounted just like any USB drive, so they don't need any special software. That way you can load your images into any computer with USB.
FWIW, the new Olympus 3020 would probably meet your needs really well.
BTW - Oracle just matched BEA System's price/performance record for the java application server benchmark. Oracle ran with an all Linux solution on HP Proliant hardware.
I thought Oracle's licensing doesn't allow you to publish the results of such tests... well, I'm sure they don't mind if Oracle comes out the winner...
...is Just Java by Peter Van der Linden. As an almost-middle-aged engineer, technical writer, and beginning programmer, I combed through every Java book I could find. Most of them either explained everything in terms of C++, which was useless for me, or they were too basic, or they were just badly written. Just Java is a really well written book by any measure. It's suitable for any level of programmer, and a great reference.
A lot of companies don't hire CS grads, because Math, Physics, and ME/EE grads have far better math, logic, and modeling skills, and are often smarter to begin with. Programming itself is a trade school level thing. What counts is what's behind the code. Get someone who understands that stuff, and you can teach him to implement it- but not vice-versa.
...these clueless students who enroll in other engineering disciplines tend to migrate over to CS since it's not as "balls-to-the-wall" difficult as say, EE or ME.
No, they migrate because the computer industry offers more money, is more interesting, and has more sex appeal (yes, really). In this day and age, it's where the action is.
As an ME who graduated in the mid 80s, and now tackling CS, I can vouch for the fact that to be a real computer scientist is much, much harder than to be another kind of engineer. The laws of physics and chemistry don't change, but everything in CS is a moving target. It's also way, way more abstract. And I don't think studying it in college is any easier. I'm sure ME students pull far fewer all nighters debugging their homework.
However, most of these students wouldn't have been good mechianical/electrical engineers either. What a CS degree gives them is a meal ticket. Even if they never become a good computer scientist, without an inkling of what an algorithm is, they can at least emerge from college with a trade-school level of ability as a programmer. And even that makes bank- a run of the mill programmer might make more than a senior engineer at an aerospace firm.
This seems great at first glance, but I can think of a few caveats. How long does the ban last? Companies continually reinvent themselves, and the marketplace itself changes completely every few years.
So while this sounds good when applied to Microsoft, what about telecommunications companies? Will the government have to shut off all their phones, because no one is clean enough to supply the service? How about aerospace and defense? Motor vehicles?
The need to punish bad behavior must be balanced with the taxpayers' getting value for their dollar. There are good (and free!) alternatives to Microsoft software, but not everything else.
What happened to the big scare about electromagnetic radiation? Remember the stories about people getting cancer from living underneath power lines? Rememeber people getting their houses checked with gauss meters? These folks are sure to come out of the woodwork if maglev trains are ever built.
I doubt the target audience for these machines is shelling out $$$ for Office. I'm sure they'd love to have a cheap computer that will run a "borrowed" copy, though.
Now we have a steady supply of pre-assembled, Linux-compatible computers for $299. Who can complain about that? If these machines run Lindows, they'll run our favorite Linux distribution too. How well, I don't know, but at least drivers exist for all the hardware.
The investment banking and consulting analogy probably isn't a good one. In these cases, other companies really want your contacts. What's seen as "recruiting" is actually more like a merger or an acquisition.
Other times, recruitment is nothing but a crippling strike designed to strip a competitor of its key people. In this case, you have to be careful. Once they've achieved their goal, you may be out on the street.
One of the big problems with Windows is that there's no standard home directory. Microsoft apps save everything to My_Documents, other apps to wherever they feel like. Even worse, sometimes it's really hard to find where an app has saved its files becuase the directories are cryptically named. Then you have the problem of people moving their data to places that make more sense, and other people moving them to somewhere else entirely.
More than once I've had to rescue a small business who moved their Quickbooks data into My_Documents, then their accountant worked on it and saved it back to the original location. Anyone who's worked with Quickbooks knows what a mess this is- you can't just merge the two files. It's back to square one- sometimes with weeks' worth of data!
If Microsoft and Windows developers would just standardize one one home directory, it would make everyone's lives a lot easier.
This app is written in Java but uses a native widget toolkit to speed up the GUI.
AFAIK, Eclipse uses IBM's own SWT toolkit, which is basically an alternative to Swing. It's a little more Windows-like than Swing, and indeed it's supposedly faster. But it's all Java.
However, I'm sure part of the reason for Eclipse and SWT is to lure people into programming Java "the IBM way," so IBM can sell them SWT tools, training, and code in the future. In fact, IBM and Sun had a little spat about this awhile back, as reported in Slashdot. I'm not sure about the licensing of SWT, but I think it's similar to the rest of Java.
The reason these engineering packages moved to Windows from Unix in the first place is that it was so much cheaper. The advantage of NT was that you could run these apps on cheap, commodity hardware, and a relatively cheap OS. The alternatives back then were commercial, proprietary Unix on expensive workstations from SGI, DEC, HP, or whoever. NT boxes cost less than half as much, and could be run by the average office's "computer whiz" (or at least that was the perception).
Since then, Linux has taken over, with the ability to run on the same cheap hardware. But now it doesn't matter as much- the savings are in the hundreds, rather than thousands, or tens of thousands per year, per seat. Compared to the cost of these apps and the salaries of the people using them, that's a drop in the bucket. Windows may not be cheap or good compared to Linux, but in the overall scheme of things it's cheap enough, and good enough.
These days you can look at things like books in the frame of total cost of ownership. Now that easy resale is possible, you can figure in the likely resale price and figure your TCO. There are a lot of things I can afford to buy new and forget about, but looking at it this way is kind of fun. I do it for everything from books to computer equipment to camera equipment to bike parts to blue jeans. Yup, even blue jeans- used 501s have a great resale value, and very low TCO!
...actually, I don't believe that, but I see where it comes from.
Australians have always been been politically apathetic, and apathetic in general. They're not civic minded people to begin with, plus anyone with ambition is quickly pulled down. Australians whine about everything, but no one wants to get involved. "Not me, not my job, mate." So they turn to government to solve all their problems, everything from keeping wages up and food prices down, to people driving too fast, to keeping the kids off drugs. Well, with that comes a price... and they're really paying it now.
They're paying *for* it too. Something like 1 in 6 Australians is directly on a government payroll. Unemployment is high, and gaming the system of government handouts is a national sport. Half the country is working to support the whole other half. This is not good.
Slashdot Mirror
Content management can indeed be a bear pit, but so can anything else. The problems you've had are familiar- mostly to users of Vignette. Frankly, it's a badly designed, bloated, buggy piece of shit. The only thing it ever had going for it was marketing dollars- someone decided they could be the Peoplesoft of content management, and they just about succeeded- except for the product, which sucks. You'd have better luck with just about anything else. Sorry you got sucked in. It happened to a lot of good folks.
I'm an aD/OpenACS guy myself.
Sorry, I missed the part about interchangeable lenses. In that case, your choices are more limited. Basically, there are three ways to go with this.
.5-.8 magnification factor. So you could get a pretty wide angle for your G2 or Olympus Camedia. Most of these are off-brand cheapies, so no guarantees on optical quality, but I'm sure the Canon or Olympus branded ones are OK.
First, get a camera with a wide angle zoom. These are very few and far between. The only ones I can think of right now are the new Nikon 5000, and a Minolta model I can't remember. There's also the older Kodak DC4800, which is on sale right now at Ritz for $300. A great deal, but older cameras tend to have noisier images and slower overall operation. All these cameras will give you a lens equivalent to a 28mm for 35mm systems.
The second choice is a good zoom camera with a wide angle add-on lens. The better ones work pretty well, usually with a
Finally, there are the digital SLRs. These are expensive, and so are the lenses. All are excellent, though. The problem is that they usually have a 1.6x magnification factor because of their small sensors, so you'd need one of those super expensive superwides (14mm or 17mm) to get a good wide angle effect. The bodies themselves are around 2 grand, though you can probably get a year old D30 for a little over half that. The downside of an interchangeable lens SLR is that it's difficult to keep the sensor dust-free, and this shows up on your images. The all in one zoom cameras don't have this problem.
RAther than fret over memory card types or interchangeable lenses, figure out what your photographic objective is, and buy the best tool for the job.
My favorite camera review site is www.megapixel.net. They give a good practical overview without the long winded nebbishy blathering of the other camera sites.
Frankly, the kind of memory should be the last thing you consider. Memory prices have really come down, and even the proprietary stuff like Sony Memory Sticks are cheap these days.
But if you must, Olympus cameras all use Smartmedia. They can also be mounted just like any USB drive, so they don't need any special software. That way you can load your images into any computer with USB.
FWIW, the new Olympus 3020 would probably meet your needs really well.
I thought Oracle's licensing doesn't allow you to publish the results of such tests... well, I'm sure they don't mind if Oracle comes out the winner...
Uhm takin' this thang back ta Wal-Mart. Sheeit!
...is Just Java by Peter Van der Linden. As an almost-middle-aged engineer, technical writer, and beginning programmer, I combed through every Java book I could find. Most of them either explained everything in terms of C++, which was useless for me, or they were too basic, or they were just badly written. Just Java is a really well written book by any measure. It's suitable for any level of programmer, and a great reference.
A lot of companies don't hire CS grads, because Math, Physics, and ME/EE grads have far better math, logic, and modeling skills, and are often smarter to begin with. Programming itself is a trade school level thing. What counts is what's behind the code. Get someone who understands that stuff, and you can teach him to implement it- but not vice-versa.
...these clueless students who enroll in other engineering disciplines tend to migrate over to CS since it's not as "balls-to-the-wall" difficult as say, EE or ME.
No, they migrate because the computer industry offers more money, is more interesting, and has more sex appeal (yes, really). In this day and age, it's where the action is.
As an ME who graduated in the mid 80s, and now tackling CS, I can vouch for the fact that to be a real computer scientist is much, much harder than to be another kind of engineer. The laws of physics and chemistry don't change, but everything in CS is a moving target. It's also way, way more abstract. And I don't think studying it in college is any easier. I'm sure ME students pull far fewer all nighters debugging their homework.
However, most of these students wouldn't have been good mechianical/electrical engineers either. What a CS degree gives them is a meal ticket. Even if they never become a good computer scientist, without an inkling of what an algorithm is, they can at least emerge from college with a trade-school level of ability as a programmer. And even that makes bank- a run of the mill programmer might make more than a senior engineer at an aerospace firm.
This seems great at first glance, but I can think of a few caveats. How long does the ban last? Companies continually reinvent themselves, and the marketplace itself changes completely every few years.
So while this sounds good when applied to Microsoft, what about telecommunications companies? Will the government have to shut off all their phones, because no one is clean enough to supply the service? How about aerospace and defense? Motor vehicles?
The need to punish bad behavior must be balanced with the taxpayers' getting value for their dollar. There are good (and free!) alternatives to Microsoft software, but not everything else.
What happened to the big scare about electromagnetic radiation? Remember the stories about people getting cancer from living underneath power lines? Rememeber people getting their houses checked with gauss meters? These folks are sure to come out of the woodwork if maglev trains are ever built.
I wonder how long it will take for Microsoft to start using code that foils Wine...
I doubt the target audience for these machines is shelling out $$$ for Office. I'm sure they'd love to have a cheap computer that will run a "borrowed" copy, though.
Now we have a steady supply of pre-assembled, Linux-compatible computers for $299. Who can complain about that? If these machines run Lindows, they'll run our favorite Linux distribution too. How well, I don't know, but at least drivers exist for all the hardware.
The investment banking and consulting analogy probably isn't a good one. In these cases, other companies really want your contacts. What's seen as "recruiting" is actually more like a merger or an acquisition.
Other times, recruitment is nothing but a crippling strike designed to strip a competitor of its key people. In this case, you have to be careful. Once they've achieved their goal, you may be out on the street.
One of the big problems with Windows is that there's no standard home directory. Microsoft apps save everything to My_Documents, other apps to wherever they feel like. Even worse, sometimes it's really hard to find where an app has saved its files becuase the directories are cryptically named. Then you have the problem of people moving their data to places that make more sense, and other people moving them to somewhere else entirely.
More than once I've had to rescue a small business who moved their Quickbooks data into My_Documents, then their accountant worked on it and saved it back to the original location. Anyone who's worked with Quickbooks knows what a mess this is- you can't just merge the two files. It's back to square one- sometimes with weeks' worth of data!
If Microsoft and Windows developers would just standardize one one home directory, it would make everyone's lives a lot easier.
AFAIK, Eclipse uses IBM's own SWT toolkit, which is basically an alternative to Swing. It's a little more Windows-like than Swing, and indeed it's supposedly faster. But it's all Java.
However, I'm sure part of the reason for Eclipse and SWT is to lure people into programming Java "the IBM way," so IBM can sell them SWT tools, training, and code in the future. In fact, IBM and Sun had a little spat about this awhile back, as reported in Slashdot. I'm not sure about the licensing of SWT, but I think it's similar to the rest of Java.
The reason these engineering packages moved to Windows from Unix in the first place is that it was so much cheaper. The advantage of NT was that you could run these apps on cheap, commodity hardware, and a relatively cheap OS. The alternatives back then were commercial, proprietary Unix on expensive workstations from SGI, DEC, HP, or whoever. NT boxes cost less than half as much, and could be run by the average office's "computer whiz" (or at least that was the perception).
Since then, Linux has taken over, with the ability to run on the same cheap hardware. But now it doesn't matter as much- the savings are in the hundreds, rather than thousands, or tens of thousands per year, per seat. Compared to the cost of these apps and the salaries of the people using them, that's a drop in the bucket. Windows may not be cheap or good compared to Linux, but in the overall scheme of things it's cheap enough, and good enough.
These days you can look at things like books in the frame of total cost of ownership. Now that easy resale is possible, you can figure in the likely resale price and figure your TCO. There are a lot of things I can afford to buy new and forget about, but looking at it this way is kind of fun. I do it for everything from books to computer equipment to camera equipment to bike parts to blue jeans. Yup, even blue jeans- used 501s have a great resale value, and very low TCO!
I'm not xenophobic! I'm just sick of all these bloody wogs!
What happened to all the good australians such as hollywoods mel gibson, or crocodile dundee?
They all left. Make note of that.
I'm no gun lover, but attitudes like yours are why I left Australia. Everything is always someone else's job.
...actually, I don't believe that, but I see where it comes from.
Australians have always been been politically apathetic, and apathetic in general. They're not civic minded people to begin with, plus anyone with ambition is quickly pulled down. Australians whine about everything, but no one wants to get involved. "Not me, not my job, mate." So they turn to government to solve all their problems, everything from keeping wages up and food prices down, to people driving too fast, to keeping the kids off drugs. Well, with that comes a price... and they're really paying it now.
They're paying *for* it too. Something like 1 in 6 Australians is directly on a government payroll. Unemployment is high, and gaming the system of government handouts is a national sport. Half the country is working to support the whole other half. This is not good.
No bigger than a credit card. Fits in your wallet. 'nuff said.
In general, they're the best business men in the world.
If only that were true. Did you even read the article?
One of these articles says the average family income is $54,400, while another says $42,000. Which is it?