Actually, when I worked at Alberson's headquarters, on Saturdays we would head up to the room where they kept all the screeners of movies that the various companies wanted us to buy (in order to rent out at our stores). There were a crap-load of them (technical term) and all new releases. We could easily have taken them home with us (I did a couple times, though I brought them back) and ripped them there. So no, Academy members *aren't* the only ones who get them.
That would be more interesting if Micron wasn't the only remaining U.S. memory maker*. So, by definition, anyone that Micron 'colludes' with and then rats out would be a foreign manufacturer. Sorry if that bursts any conspiracy bubbles...
Disclaimer: I am a Micron employee. And like most of the people around here that I talk to, if we *were* conspiring to raise prices, we did a piss-poor job of it. We just has our first profitable quarter in over two years, and even that was just barely. Maybe we should be taken to court for being the most incompetent cartel ever:-)
*Chip maker, that is. There are a few U.S. based module makers, but all they do is take chips and put them on boards. Kingston, Crucial, et. al. fall into this camp.
And I forgot to mention, that they have 12 copies of the Finding Nemo dvd and 5 of the vhs tape. Of course, you have to get in line, because its the hot new item. But I find that you only *rarely* absolutely *have* to watch something right away. Patience becomes you, when it comes to popular stuff. I find it's very similar to netflix that way.
In Boise, we have a conglemeration of various libraries that have joined together and basically share resources. There are about six of them from various towns in the Treasure Valley, and they have one big cataloging system, with web, telnet, dialup, and terminal (at the libraries themselves) access. Within the system, you can put any item on hold, and specify a pickup location. Within a day or so, if it's on the shelf, or as soon as it comes in if it was checked out, it will make its way to the pickup location, and they'll email you to tell you so. By pooling their resources, they are able to each take a portion of the available materials and keep at least a copy or two of almost everything (it doesn't scale linearly, as there is quite a bit of duplication, especially with brand-new 'hot' stuff, but it is still much, much, better than any stand-alone library can be). That includes new releases of DVDs and CDs, as well as obscure stuff, and old stuff, and etc...
For instance, they have all four seasons of Buffy that have been released to DVD, and Season 5 already on order. They have most of the Criterion Collection (and I was able to watch Ikiru, Seven Samurai, Time Bandits, and Letiat zhuravlit as Heaven intended, instead of on crappy vhs copies), the Watchmen, the Sandman collection, the first season of 24, a bunch of Groo collections, classic eighties movies that I had somehow missed (Say Anything, Weird Science), classic radio collections (Amos & Andy, Abbott & Costello, Fred Allen, Jack Benny, etc), a crapload of cds (Phish, Radiohead, Widespread Panic, David Bowie, The Polyphonic Spree, Coltrane, and much, much, more), Prarie Home Companion collections, every Bill Bryson book in audio form, read by the author (the *only* way to go), Spirited Away (shortly after it's release), Things my girlfriend and I have argued about, Ansel Adams collections, the BBC's Coupling: first season on DVD, Red Green, Trekkies, Cosmos on dvd, Black Adder, and more. If that list seems a little jumbled, well I was just cherry picking from the list of things that I've checked out this year (another feature of the telnet interface to their system). By keeping my hold queue filled, I constantly have things to watch/listen to/read, and it's all for 'free'! Also, I didn't note the books that I checkout, as they're pretty standard stuff, but I also read about 3-4 books a week, and they keep me supplied with them as well.
You'd be hard pressed to make me say anything bad about our library system, because it rocks with a rocking that is hard. If you've had experiences that are different than that, well, I can only tell you that it doesn't have to be that way.
I'm frustrated because my spambot hasn't been picking up nearly as many email addresses recently, as comparared to what it used to. Some people out there are really clever!:-( Could you please detail to me exactly how you try and keep me from harvesting your address? Oh, and putting into a testcase form would just be the icing on the cake!
As an active, temple-going Mormon, and someone whose seen the original BG movie, I had to have the connections pointed out to me, and even then it was just surface stuff like calling the council at the beginning of the movie "The Quorum of the Twelve" (or something like that, it's been a year or so and my memory is hazy). It was more along the lines of insider jokes for fellow mormons to laugh at (the writers were mormon). Either way, it was *not* some sort of "expose" of the "secret Mormon dogma". There is nothing to sue over, or worry about...
Oh, and the people that had the temerity to base a work on the CoS were Cos members themselves. And the results *were* horrific, but only to the audience. Unless you *liked* "Battlefield Earth"?!?!?
Adding implicit rules in make is not difficult. It's in the man page (even Solaris' crappy man page for make describes it well enough, and the system default rules file has lots of examples).
Sorry, didn't mean to imply that it was difficult. My point was that having "built-in" support for a subset of languages in scons is no different than make. And I don't doubt that adding ObjC support to scons would be much harder...
What does this mean? Will SCons somehow only work with languages that SCons has built in support for?
Well, I haven't actually looked at scons, but in Make, there is only built-in support for a limited amount of languages. For instance, (maybe this has changed recently) with ObjC you have to define how to take care of.m file, as it doesn't know to compile them..c and.cc files it knows to use CC on, etc.
How does SCons compare to Apache's Ant?
Well, the fact that it isn't based on Java or XML gives it a good head start:-)
Unfortunetly, they don't have the download for the plugin allowing shn and flac available from their site. It is still at other places on the 'net, though. If you can't find it, email me, and I'll get you setup with a copy.
A much better solution would be for someone to step up and write a qt-decoder for flac (and shn, I guess, though I convert every shn I get to flac and give away the shns), allowing playback in iTunes. I tried to write a flac decoder for arts (KDE), but got lost in the almost complete lack of up2date documentation.
And all we're saying is that we will compete against any company that wants to get into the DRAM business. We have been, for 20 years. But we *can't* compete against governments, because while we don't have bottomless pockets, they do. Look into Hynix, and see how much debt that they've accumulated (over 8 billion dollars, last time I looked) and they readily admit that they don't have any hope of becoming profitable in the near or midterm-future. The only reason they can keep going is that the gov't keeps bailing them out (the absolute worst part is that a good portion of the money used to bail out Hynix is American!). And in the meantime, they're dumping their product below *their* cost, driving the price of *all* dram *artifically* low. If prices drop to $30 p/512MB as a result of Samsung shrinking their die and moving to bigger wafers (or whatever), then we had better figure out a way to lower our costs as well. We don't sue when our competitors innovate. If prices drop to $30 p/512MB as a result of the South Korean gov't paying for 50% of every die, then what should we do?
(this next part isn't directly to you, Zero)
I wonder what the reaction on/. would be if the Indian gov't was subsidizing software development houses, paying 50% of each devs salary, so that they could bid projects even lower than what they do now. Would the same people crying "Free trade or die!" come to/. and say "Yeah, I just lost my job and my company is shutting down, but that's okay because it's just the way capitalism works!" There has already been a lot of pissing and moaning about competing with India, and to have them reduce their costs by half again would seriously affect the equation. Now, you can't exactly put a tariff on labor, so the US couldn't respond the same way (I don't even know how you could, at all), but I can gauruntee the overall tone of the comments would be a far cry from what it is here...
As a stockholder of Micron, when a vested interest in seeing Micron able* to make a profit, I do.
As a resident and homeowner in the Treasure Valley (Boise and surrounding area for non-Idahoans) where 12,000 people are employed by Micron, I do.
As a resident of Idaho, where (supposedly) one out of every twenty people is employed by Micron, I do.
As a resident of the US, where Micron is the *only* remaining US company producing dram, I do.
As a guy who's done his econ. homework and realizes that there are two outcomes from the current situation: eventual failure of all but a couple dram companies and resultant (bi|mo)nopoly pricing *or* return to free competition and fair pricing, I do.
But go ahead and demand 512Mb sticks of PC2700 for $30. I mean, after all, why should *you* care?
*not gaurunteed, just able. As Appleton is fond of saying, we'll compete with any company out there, but we can't compete against governments.
You're exactly right except for the fact that you're completly wrong! Simplot dumped the vast majority (if not all) of his Micron shares a few years ago.
You're right, I should apologize for the tone of both my emails (though I can't really for the gist of them). The fact that I'm dealing with an idiot at work with a remarkably similar attitude is not his problem. But that doesn't change the fact that he's still an idiot:-)
I believe what has made code so bloated these days, is people believing it's more important to produce more faster and fix it later than do it right the first time.
I don't believe that I said anything about shipping broken code. Maybe I did. Maybe you could point out where. Or is your point (again!), that if you didn't write it, it can't possibly be Right(tm)?
And in your example nobody has saved $3500 on your salary alone. Every 3rd party lib you add for the sole purpose of saving time at the moment costs you about 10% when it comes time debug... you run into weird problems and can't trace them down.. why? because someone else wrote the code and now your learning THEIR code.
That 10% figure still stinks from where you pulled it out of. And if you don't think that taking a month off of a twelve month project is a *serious* gain, then I don't believe you have ever had to ship a working product.
Your app is guaranteed to be slower as well, a library that is designed to be more universal has to make sacrifices to that end.
Let's take your logic to its conclusion (without exagerating anything you've said). Your first premise is that general purpose libs are bloated and prone to error. The solution is to write your own versions, and then (as you said in the last paragraph of your first comment), you don't have to keep reinventing the wheel as you go on to other projects. Can I take that to mean that you reuse that code that you have polished? Code reuse is a good thing, I think we both agree. So, you have a lib that does something. You wrote it for app A, and then reuse it in app B. Of course, when reusing it in app B, you discover something that worked well at first, but needs to be more flexible now. So you change it a bit, and now it works equally fine in apps A and B (because you need to maintain A, that's a given). Now along comes app C, you make more changes AND WHAT THE HELL IS DIFFERENT BETWEEN YOUR LIBRARY AND ONE THAT OTHER PEOPLE WROTE??!??!!?!? You just managed to (as you so aptly put it) reinvent the wheel, making a generalized lib that can be reused but has only been 1)tested by you 2)understood by you 3)given a design review by you. How, *exactly*, is this magically faster/better/strong than something that's had people spending time optimizing it, had people looking at it from completely different angles to expose design flaws, and testing it in one thousand and one different situations, exposing bugs?
I'll give you a hint: it isn't. And the *only* reason for someone to continually and habitually refuse to use other people's libs like you've described, is pure and utter arrogance.
A library that saves you 3hrs on a project that takes a year is not good. A library that saves you 3 days on the same project... not good. a week, still not good. A month... now we are starting to consider using the existing library.
While it's nice that you took the time to rant about how much better of a programmer that you are then everyone else (the whole "If I didn't code it, it's crap" attitude really shines through), I think your scale is a bit off.
Lets say a library saves you a week. Now, lets say that like more people you use at least 4 libraries. Now, you've saved a month. A *month*, at which point you say you'll start to "consider" using external libraries. Well, I'm underpaid, but lets say you hired me to do this. By shaving a month off, you've saved over $3500 in my salary alone. And that's assuming that I (or anyone) could fully implement, *debug*, and "finish", a given complicated lib in 1 week. Great! Now, I quit, because I'm underpaid, and my replacement comes in. Now, I write good, well documented stuff, but it's not industry standard. So my replacement can't just sit down and pick up where I left off, but has to learn how *I* decided to implement libfoo. But it turns out that he's a lot like you, and thus 'he didn't write it, so it's crap'. And then *he* spends a month throwing away my stuff, and redoing it all. And on, and on, and on. There's a *reason* that things like Boost and Roguewave and Qt and Gtk and glib exist. And until you figure that out, you're doomed to be 1/10th as productive as you could be. Or, assuming that (as you claim) you've polished your libs to perfection and the productivity is there, I pity whomever has to take over your code. No, actually, I just pity you.
Emusic has an *excellent* selection of electronic music (ambient/"techno"/d&b/jungle/etc). They also have some other stuff by people you've never heard of, and probably never will. Does that mean that their music sucks? No, of course not. But it does mean that there will not be the mainstream "flocking to their doors" to buy their wares.
In riposte to your statement "the popular contender to iTunes seems to be eMusic", that simply isn't true. The contender vs. iTunes is kazaa and edonkey2k. The public will have to decide whether to get its pop music for free via a less-than-perfect distribution system (long queues, bad rips, madonna telling you to eff off) or pay for no queues, good rips, and the music you want. Not that iTunes is perfect either (several bugs in signing up if you already have an account, drm encumbered, relatively small selection). But I have faith that two of those three will clear up, and the third is livable, while the p2p side has had several years to get their act together and replicate napster at it's peak (which was unbeatable in all three areas), but they haven't come close.
All the previous is coming from someone who is a current eMusic member, and has bought stuff from iTunes. I will get much *more* music from eMusic, because when you get right down to it techno is almost all interchangeable so the more you have the better, and you don't have to be *overly* picky about choosing just 'the good stuff'. But when I want to get Coldplay's third album, or REMs next, or whatever, I'll probably use iTunes to do it.
I have no idea if any of this actually answers your root question, I'm just rambling at this point. Thanks for reading this far!
If, for instance, they were having problems and needed to fix something in the software first? So they ship the unit with functional hardware, and in an update in 'the next months', they have an update and make another ipod announcement. Doesn't sound too odd to me...
I'd just like to second the recommendation to checkout Umbrello. I used it to do the design on a project in Java last year, and was very pleased with it, and it's gotten better since then (now that they accepted my patch to fix a focus bug;-). It can output to java/c++/someotherstuff, and has a very nice ui.
I'd like to agree, I really would, but I believe (this is personal experience talking), that the reason pirated games aren't that popular is that almost all games nowadays are 1) networked, and 2) have some sort of copy protection built into the server so that you can't play networked without a legit (non-copied) key. I.e., by use of DRM, the game companies are able to (mostly) successfully fight theft of their product.
Which doesn't mean that the same model will work for the music industry, at all. You'll notice that with games, the online part is *part* of the experience. You have to go online to get the full (or any) enjoyment. With songs, some sort of 'net based authorization, checking to see if you have 'permission' to listen to track foo, will never work, as you don't have to be online to enjoy music (and often can't, i.e., in the car, jogging, etc).
Did you read the article? Or even skim it? One of her main problems was not that it doesn't work like Windows, but that the various installation routines and setup programs would either not work the way they were supposed to at all, or work sometimes and not others. I'm thinking specifically of her redhat 8.0 problems, where didn't see her soundcard at boot until she ran snconfig, then it saw it the next time, and offered to configure it for her (too late!); and the knopix random segfaulting and mouse cursor disappearing; and mandrake not seeing that it was connected to the 'net even when it was; and various cd burned programs not seeing her drives, or burning coasters; etc, etc, etc. You can't claim reliability as a plus to linux, unless it is actually stable and reliable!
Now, before you get your panties in a twist, I think you have to differentiate between the kernel and the gui. I will agree that on average, the Linux kernel is more stable than windows 9x, me, and 2k (I've never used XP, couldn't tell you). *However*, the Linux GUI is just as unstable and crappy as those listed. Now I personally take that as a challenge, and help out with various KDE projects, with bug reporting/fixing, and the like. But pretending that the general state of the GUI in linux is that of stable, reliable, user-friendly, and intuitive programs would be self-deluding.-
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Actually, when I worked at Alberson's headquarters, on Saturdays we would head up to the room where they kept all the screeners of movies that the various companies wanted us to buy (in order to rent out at our stores). There were a crap-load of them (technical term) and all new releases. We could easily have taken them home with us (I did a couple times, though I brought them back) and ripped them there. So no, Academy members *aren't* the only ones who get them.
Just so you know...
That would be more interesting if Micron wasn't the only remaining U.S. memory maker*. So, by definition, anyone that Micron 'colludes' with and then rats out would be a foreign manufacturer. Sorry if that bursts any conspiracy bubbles...
:-)
Disclaimer: I am a Micron employee. And like most of the people around here that I talk to, if we *were* conspiring to raise prices, we did a piss-poor job of it. We just has our first profitable quarter in over two years, and even that was just barely. Maybe we should be taken to court for being the most incompetent cartel ever
*Chip maker, that is. There are a few U.S. based module makers, but all they do is take chips and put them on boards. Kingston, Crucial, et. al. fall into this camp.
And I forgot to mention, that they have 12 copies of the Finding Nemo dvd and 5 of the vhs tape. Of course, you have to get in line, because its the hot new item. But I find that you only *rarely* absolutely *have* to watch something right away. Patience becomes you, when it comes to popular stuff. I find it's very similar to netflix that way.
In Boise, we have a conglemeration of various libraries that have joined together and basically share resources. There are about six of them from various towns in the Treasure Valley, and they have one big cataloging system, with web, telnet, dialup, and terminal (at the libraries themselves) access. Within the system, you can put any item on hold, and specify a pickup location. Within a day or so, if it's on the shelf, or as soon as it comes in if it was checked out, it will make its way to the pickup location, and they'll email you to tell you so. By pooling their resources, they are able to each take a portion of the available materials and keep at least a copy or two of almost everything (it doesn't scale linearly, as there is quite a bit of duplication, especially with brand-new 'hot' stuff, but it is still much, much, better than any stand-alone library can be). That includes new releases of DVDs and CDs, as well as obscure stuff, and old stuff, and etc...
For instance, they have all four seasons of Buffy that have been released to DVD, and Season 5 already on order. They have most of the Criterion Collection (and I was able to watch Ikiru, Seven Samurai, Time Bandits, and Letiat zhuravlit as Heaven intended, instead of on crappy vhs copies), the Watchmen, the Sandman collection, the first season of 24, a bunch of Groo collections, classic eighties movies that I had somehow missed (Say Anything, Weird Science), classic radio collections (Amos & Andy, Abbott & Costello, Fred Allen, Jack Benny, etc), a crapload of cds (Phish, Radiohead, Widespread Panic, David Bowie, The Polyphonic Spree, Coltrane, and much, much, more), Prarie Home Companion collections, every Bill Bryson book in audio form, read by the author (the *only* way to go), Spirited Away (shortly after it's release), Things my girlfriend and I have argued about, Ansel Adams collections, the BBC's Coupling: first season on DVD, Red Green, Trekkies, Cosmos on dvd, Black Adder, and more. If that list seems a little jumbled, well I was just cherry picking from the list of things that I've checked out this year (another feature of the telnet interface to their system). By keeping my hold queue filled, I constantly have things to watch/listen to/read, and it's all for 'free'! Also, I didn't note the books that I checkout, as they're pretty standard stuff, but I also read about 3-4 books a week, and they keep me supplied with them as well.
You'd be hard pressed to make me say anything bad about our library system, because it rocks with a rocking that is hard. If you've had experiences that are different than that, well, I can only tell you that it doesn't have to be that way.
And no, I'm not accusing the OP of being a spammer. I just thought it was funny...
I'm frustrated because my spambot hasn't been picking up nearly as many email addresses recently, as comparared to what it used to. Some people out there are really clever! :-( Could you please detail to me exactly how you try and keep me from harvesting your address? Oh, and putting into a testcase form would just be the icing on the cake!
Sincerely,
Your Friendly Neighborhood Spammer
And thus my hopes for "Firefly taken up by SciFi" are dashed...
/. headline?!??!?
On the other hand, how stupid do you have to be to get you hopes up based on a
But it's $50 per bottle, and they are making $35 p/bottle post-raw materials and shipping. So, do the math again...
As an active, temple-going Mormon, and someone whose seen the original BG movie, I had to have the connections pointed out to me, and even then it was just surface stuff like calling the council at the beginning of the movie "The Quorum of the Twelve" (or something like that, it's been a year or so and my memory is hazy). It was more along the lines of insider jokes for fellow mormons to laugh at (the writers were mormon). Either way, it was *not* some sort of "expose" of the "secret Mormon dogma". There is nothing to sue over, or worry about...
Oh, and the people that had the temerity to base a work on the CoS were Cos members themselves. And the results *were* horrific, but only to the audience. Unless you *liked* "Battlefield Earth"?!?!?
Adding implicit rules in make is not difficult. It's in the man page (even Solaris' crappy man page for make describes it well enough, and the system default rules file has lots of examples).
Sorry, didn't mean to imply that it was difficult. My point was that having "built-in" support for a subset of languages in scons is no different than make. And I don't doubt that adding ObjC support to scons would be much harder...
What does this mean? Will SCons somehow only work with languages that SCons has built in support for?
.m file, as it doesn't know to compile them. .c and .cc files it knows to use CC on, etc.
:-)
Well, I haven't actually looked at scons, but in Make, there is only built-in support for a limited amount of languages. For instance, (maybe this has changed recently) with ObjC you have to define how to take care of
How does SCons compare to Apache's Ant?
Well, the fact that it isn't based on Java or XML gives it a good head start
Here's hoping....
Unfortunetly, they don't have the download for the plugin allowing shn and flac available from their site. It is still at other places on the 'net, though. If you can't find it, email me, and I'll get you setup with a copy.
A much better solution would be for someone to step up and write a qt-decoder for flac (and shn, I guess, though I convert every shn I get to flac and give away the shns), allowing playback in iTunes. I tried to write a flac decoder for arts (KDE), but got lost in the almost complete lack of up2date documentation.
And all we're saying is that we will compete against any company that wants to get into the DRAM business. We have been, for 20 years. But we *can't* compete against governments, because while we don't have bottomless pockets, they do. Look into Hynix, and see how much debt that they've accumulated (over 8 billion dollars, last time I looked) and they readily admit that they don't have any hope of becoming profitable in the near or midterm-future. The only reason they can keep going is that the gov't keeps bailing them out (the absolute worst part is that a good portion of the money used to bail out Hynix is American!). And in the meantime, they're dumping their product below *their* cost, driving the price of *all* dram *artifically* low. If prices drop to $30 p/512MB as a result of Samsung shrinking their die and moving to bigger wafers (or whatever), then we had better figure out a way to lower our costs as well. We don't sue when our competitors innovate. If prices drop to $30 p/512MB as a result of the South Korean gov't paying for 50% of every die, then what should we do?
/. would be if the Indian gov't was subsidizing software development houses, paying 50% of each devs salary, so that they could bid projects even lower than what they do now. Would the same people crying "Free trade or die!" come to /. and say "Yeah, I just lost my job and my company is shutting down, but that's okay because it's just the way capitalism works!" There has already been a lot of pissing and moaning about competing with India, and to have them reduce their costs by half again would seriously affect the equation. Now, you can't exactly put a tariff on labor, so the US couldn't respond the same way (I don't even know how you could, at all), but I can gauruntee the overall tone of the comments would be a far cry from what it is here...
(this next part isn't directly to you, Zero)
I wonder what the reaction on
As an employee of Micron, I do.
As a stockholder of Micron, when a vested interest in seeing Micron able* to make a profit, I do.
As a resident and homeowner in the Treasure Valley (Boise and surrounding area for non-Idahoans) where 12,000 people are employed by Micron, I do.
As a resident of Idaho, where (supposedly) one out of every twenty people is employed by Micron, I do.
As a resident of the US, where Micron is the *only* remaining US company producing dram, I do.
As a guy who's done his econ. homework and realizes that there are two outcomes from the current situation: eventual failure of all but a couple dram companies and resultant (bi|mo)nopoly pricing *or* return to free competition and fair pricing, I do.
But go ahead and demand 512Mb sticks of PC2700 for $30. I mean, after all, why should *you* care?
*not gaurunteed, just able. As Appleton is fond of saying, we'll compete with any company out there, but we can't compete against governments.
You're exactly right except for the fact that you're completly wrong! Simplot dumped the vast majority (if not all) of his Micron shares a few years ago.
IOW, try again.
You're right, I should apologize for the tone of both my emails (though I can't really for the gist of them). The fact that I'm dealing with an idiot at work with a remarkably similar attitude is not his problem. But that doesn't change the fact that he's still an idiot :-)
I believe what has made code so bloated these days, is people believing it's more important to produce more faster and fix it later than do it right the first time.
I don't believe that I said anything about shipping broken code. Maybe I did. Maybe you could point out where. Or is your point (again!), that if you didn't write it, it can't possibly be Right(tm)?
And in your example nobody has saved $3500 on your salary alone. Every 3rd party lib you add for the sole purpose of saving time at the moment costs you about 10% when it comes time debug... you run into weird problems and can't trace them down.. why? because someone else wrote the code and now your learning THEIR code.
That 10% figure still stinks from where you pulled it out of. And if you don't think that taking a month off of a twelve month project is a *serious* gain, then I don't believe you have ever had to ship a working product.
Your app is guaranteed to be slower as well, a library that is designed to be more universal has to make sacrifices to that end.
Let's take your logic to its conclusion (without exagerating anything you've said). Your first premise is that general purpose libs are bloated and prone to error. The solution is to write your own versions, and then (as you said in the last paragraph of your first comment), you don't have to keep reinventing the wheel as you go on to other projects. Can I take that to mean that you reuse that code that you have polished? Code reuse is a good thing, I think we both agree. So, you have a lib that does something. You wrote it for app A, and then reuse it in app B. Of course, when reusing it in app B, you discover something that worked well at first, but needs to be more flexible now. So you change it a bit, and now it works equally fine in apps A and B (because you need to maintain A, that's a given). Now along comes app C, you make more changes AND WHAT THE HELL IS DIFFERENT BETWEEN YOUR LIBRARY AND ONE THAT OTHER PEOPLE WROTE??!??!!?!? You just managed to (as you so aptly put it) reinvent the wheel, making a generalized lib that can be reused but has only been 1)tested by you 2)understood by you 3)given a design review by you. How, *exactly*, is this magically faster/better/strong than something that's had people spending time optimizing it, had people looking at it from completely different angles to expose design flaws, and testing it in one thousand and one different situations, exposing bugs?
I'll give you a hint: it isn't. And the *only* reason for someone to continually and habitually refuse to use other people's libs like you've described, is pure and utter arrogance.
I'm going to bed...
While it's nice that you took the time to rant about how much better of a programmer that you are then everyone else (the whole "If I didn't code it, it's crap" attitude really shines through), I think your scale is a bit off.
Lets say a library saves you a week. Now, lets say that like more people you use at least 4 libraries. Now, you've saved a month. A *month*, at which point you say you'll start to "consider" using external libraries. Well, I'm underpaid, but lets say you hired me to do this. By shaving a month off, you've saved over $3500 in my salary alone. And that's assuming that I (or anyone) could fully implement, *debug*, and "finish", a given complicated lib in 1 week. Great! Now, I quit, because I'm underpaid, and my replacement comes in. Now, I write good, well documented stuff, but it's not industry standard. So my replacement can't just sit down and pick up where I left off, but has to learn how *I* decided to implement libfoo. But it turns out that he's a lot like you, and thus 'he didn't write it, so it's crap'. And then *he* spends a month throwing away my stuff, and redoing it all. And on, and on, and on. There's a *reason* that things like Boost and Roguewave and Qt and Gtk and glib exist. And until you figure that out, you're doomed to be 1/10th as productive as you could be. Or, assuming that (as you claim) you've polished your libs to perfection and the productivity is there, I pity whomever has to take over your code. No, actually, I just pity you.
Emusic has an *excellent* selection of electronic music (ambient/"techno"/d&b/jungle/etc). They also have some other stuff by people you've never heard of, and probably never will. Does that mean that their music sucks? No, of course not. But it does mean that there will not be the mainstream "flocking to their doors" to buy their wares.
In riposte to your statement "the popular contender to iTunes seems to be eMusic", that simply isn't true. The contender vs. iTunes is kazaa and edonkey2k. The public will have to decide whether to get its pop music for free via a less-than-perfect distribution system (long queues, bad rips, madonna telling you to eff off) or pay for no queues, good rips, and the music you want. Not that iTunes is perfect either (several bugs in signing up if you already have an account, drm encumbered, relatively small selection). But I have faith that two of those three will clear up, and the third is livable, while the p2p side has had several years to get their act together and replicate napster at it's peak (which was unbeatable in all three areas), but they haven't come close.
All the previous is coming from someone who is a current eMusic member, and has bought stuff from iTunes. I will get much *more* music from eMusic, because when you get right down to it techno is almost all interchangeable so the more you have the better, and you don't have to be *overly* picky about choosing just 'the good stuff'. But when I want to get Coldplay's third album, or REMs next, or whatever, I'll probably use iTunes to do it.
I have no idea if any of this actually answers your root question, I'm just rambling at this point. Thanks for reading this far!
If, for instance, they were having problems and needed to fix something in the software first? So they ship the unit with functional hardware, and in an update in 'the next months', they have an update and make another ipod announcement. Doesn't sound too odd to me...
I'd just like to second the recommendation to checkout Umbrello. I used it to do the design on a project in Java last year, and was very pleased with it, and it's gotten better since then (now that they accepted my patch to fix a focus bug ;-). It can output to java/c++/someotherstuff, and has a very nice ui.
I'd like to agree, I really would, but I believe (this is personal experience talking), that the reason pirated games aren't that popular is that almost all games nowadays are 1) networked, and 2) have some sort of copy protection built into the server so that you can't play networked without a legit (non-copied) key. I.e., by use of DRM, the game companies are able to (mostly) successfully fight theft of their product.
.02.
Which doesn't mean that the same model will work for the music industry, at all. You'll notice that with games, the online part is *part* of the experience. You have to go online to get the full (or any) enjoyment. With songs, some sort of 'net based authorization, checking to see if you have 'permission' to listen to track foo, will never work, as you don't have to be online to enjoy music (and often can't, i.e., in the car, jogging, etc).
Anyways, my
Did you read the article? Or even skim it? One of her main problems was not that it doesn't work like Windows, but that the various installation routines and setup programs would either not work the way they were supposed to at all, or work sometimes and not others. I'm thinking specifically of her redhat 8.0 problems, where didn't see her soundcard at boot until she ran snconfig, then it saw it the next time, and offered to configure it for her (too late!); and the knopix random segfaulting and mouse cursor disappearing; and mandrake not seeing that it was connected to the 'net even when it was; and various cd burned programs not seeing her drives, or burning coasters; etc, etc, etc. You can't claim reliability as a plus to linux, unless it is actually stable and reliable!
Now, before you get your panties in a twist, I think you have to differentiate between the kernel and the gui. I will agree that on average, the Linux kernel is more stable than windows 9x, me, and 2k (I've never used XP, couldn't tell you). *However*, the Linux GUI is just as unstable and crappy as those listed. Now I personally take that as a challenge, and help out with various KDE projects, with bug reporting/fixing, and the like. But pretending that the general state of the GUI in linux is that of stable, reliable, user-friendly, and intuitive programs would be self-deluding.-
This to reverse it's trend. Company that makes no profits == company that doesn't buy me and my office mate brand-new (or even used) macs. :-)