Programming with.NET is like cooking in a McDonalds kitchen. It is full of amazing tools that automate absolutely everything. Just press the right button and follow the beeping lights, and you can churn out flawless 1.6 oz burgers faster than anybody else on the planet.
However, if you need to make a 1.7 oz burger, you simply can’t. There’s no button for it. The patties are pre-formed in the wrong size.
I programmed, with other people, an application that involved a server that provided custom service design, compilation, execution, and consumption (through the intranet), an ASP.Net site to manage those designed services, a WPF desktop application to manage the whole server, and an application for Windows Mobile that installed assemblies compiled on-the-fly from the server for offline consumption of services. He would be amazed to know that we didn't use a wizard at all.
There was reluctance from China and Russia on a no-fly zone, and they only needed to exercise their veto power to blast the initiative to hell. In the end, they abstained instead of voting for the proposal. Why are we keeping veto power, if it's only used for the personal benefits or views of a few countries that won a war 75 years ago?
So, instead, we have to build consensus with this five countries, decisions take time, and this indeed may be too late. A lot of rebels have died, and it will cost them some legitimacy if they indeed get their revolution.
Years pass, and I grow disenchanted of the United Nations. The veto power has impaired it since day 1, and everyone else is still taking that bullshit.
Art lies in the artistic act itself. Whatever tangible result produced by the artistic act is but its trace.
Disagree, art for me is anything, whether tangible or intangible, that's the result of a master's execution or work. But art is, perhaps, impossible to define.
It's not important if it's the last of eight traits. It's like that list of software product and process characteristics, like reliability, security, etc.: all of them are important and you would want them at their maximum, but when you prioritise you see which ones are relevant for real.
Common sense isn't as common as the name would imply, so the deletionists deleted it.
Even more, common sense isn't as sensible as the name would imply. After all, it's just a collection of random data, assumptions, analogies, past experiences, and educated guesses. No wonder we have problem modelating it in IA!
After those K-12 years, I ended up with clinical depression from the senseless beatings and abuse (although I got over it). It's normal to think that we live in an idiocracy when the TV is flooded with you-think-you-lose shows. They all promote the same stereotypes, they feed the same bullshit.
BUT, there's sweet hope. I remember, while I was in K-12, finding some solace in the knowledge that my intellect would drive me far, and indeed it did. When I was 22, my acquaintances from my home town told me most of my classmates are leeches sucking money from their parents, working for low wages, or being single parents. Turns out being geek was a huge investment, even at short term.
So, good news: I think this is the decade for geeks. Technology permeates everything, everywhere. Those with brains, those who master technology are really the ones in control. We ride the wave and the rest are mere sheep. Think about it for a second: rogue admins are capable of wreaking massive havoc, jaded hackers expose dirty secrets from the powers-that-be. Even basic encryption techniques protects you against ISPs that would happily collect your private conversations; basic things like Wireshark give you an edge over the drones that chat through an insecure protocol. Wikileaks can give you all the crap you want about the Gov., and technology made that possible. We are knowledge-mongers, and knowledge equals power. We are starting to see the effects of that power: we get to see Moot and Torvalds being invited to those parties organized for Time Magazine and the Oscars. The last Barbie model is a computer programmer and comes with a laptop that has written "BARBIE" in binary ASCII. Everyone is glorifying 8 bit arcade music. I don't buy the "geek is the new cool" slogan. I think geeks will never be cool by current standards, but now they will be, at least, tolerated. Otherwise, they could "power my computer on, enter my machine, and do whatever they want".
We argies paid the AFA a handsome amount of money, so the Gov. could transmit, through public television, all soccer matches for the upper leagues. I don't like that decision, because although I enjoy watching soccer, I wouldn't pay for it. I'm not even considering the fact that I don't own a TV nor I want to buy one.
BUT, I do recognise that soccer here is more than a sport, it's a cultural good (or should I say cult?;) ). So, the state may have an interest to broadcast the most popular games to the general public instead of limiting them to people who can pay good bucks to their cable , in the same way that it has an interest to keep museums opened and artists with food on their plates.
So, we come to this question: Is music just a form of entertainment, or also a cultural good? And, if it's the latter, why wouldn't we want to subsidise culture? Even people who pinky-promises that they NEVER hear music benefits from it, in the form of people interacting with them in a better mood, for example.
I've taken a bow and stood clean for a number of years. I know, it sounds like a drug, and in a sense it is. Everyone else does it, and if you don't they accuse you of being hypocritical (sounds stupid, but people usually act that way). It's possible, but social pressure is really intense.
The greatest problem I see in Argentina is that everything is dollarized: video games and music are really expensive. I couldn't care less, since I don't play games anymore, and I use Jamendo, Magnatune and Grooveshark for my sound fix. I see the motivation to use pirated software and music, though.
I owned legal copies of a few games back in the days, when they were at a reasonable price (20 bucks, maybe less if that title wasn't new). Nowadays, they can cost four or five times more. My brother, in an act of loyalty to Blizzard, spent a huge load of money to get a legal copy of Starcraft 2: it costed him over 250 (a waste of money if you ask me, the game wasn't that good anyway). That amount of money won't be spent again until the planets align. And the cost of life is raising...
Want to solve the problem? Have prices so low that would make you a bastard if you don't pay them. Let's say a cent per song, 10 cents at most: a CD would cost no more than 1 peso, and you'll be a maggot if you don't pay it. The best way would be to deploy this model through phone carriers (mobile phones are massively used here, even among the lowest class), and indeed they have done this... but prices are still too high and the whole process is too bothersome. Alternatively, you could involve the broadband carriers: they already charge the internet users! Make it simple and cheap, and your cash flow will INEVITABLY go up.
Now, I Read The Fine Report, and is laughable. Let's take a look at a few pearls...
Identify major distributors of pirate products in public markets and promote the revocation of licenses to those points of sale.
Piracy is systemic, the whole society does it and there's no major distributor. Taringa may count as a distributor, but what they do isn't illegal, so they are screwed from the start.
Commit, at the highest levels of the Argentine government, to develop and implement a coordinated anti-piracy campaign that addresses hard goods and online infringements as a matter of national priority.
If a politician established this priority, he would commit political suicide. It would mean that he is out of touch with reality: not because, as I said before, "everybody does it", but because burdening the justice system with something that only benefits foreign governments is strange to say the least.
Improve border enforcement, partnering with Paraguayan and Brazilian officials to establish a program to inspect goods in-transit for potential pirate product.
Here they are talking about the Triple Frontera. They are smoking crack if they think copyright should be a concern there. Drug and people trafficking are much more serious than copyright violations and Argentina is not doing a good job on those two issues. And now, we need to check if they carry a CD with pirated music?
Push for legislation that will establish clear ISP responsibility for illegal content over their networks and a program to address the issue that includes deterrent level sanctions.
They can't. The Supreme Court have already ruled that packets are equivalent to snail mails, and therefore should be subjected to the same privacy protections.
Support efforts to issue an executive decree that would require government legalization of current business software programs, within a balanced and neutral system to select technical solutions and improve procurement practices.
Hmm, interesting. There's a fellah one person away from the president in the federal government that took the lead on this matter, and has been pushing si
For those who don't have English as their mother tongue, "dying" refers to the use of a tincture, not to a destructive process for the cell. Inb4 people wondering what the hell are we talking about.
The BSA said this would "inadvertently reduce choice [and] hinder innovation", and even went so far as to claim open standards would lead to higher e-government costs, but open-source advocates say the policy reflects how much the European Interoperability Framework is weighted in favour of the proprietary software companies."
The BSA inadvertently choose the right letters for Bull Shit Association. Was it on purpose or just a coincidence? You decide!
If Bradley Manning really did obtain the documents and leak them to Assange, as the US government alleges, then he should be given the Peace Prize. If he's convicted. Until then, we'll just continue to torture him.
I miss my mod points... You are right Anonymous Coward, the recipient should have been Bradley M. and, optionally, WikiLeaks. It's not uncommon for the people being awarded the Nobel to be in prison.
On a second thought, the Nobel Peace Prize has lost a lot of credibility... you know, with Obama, Kissinger, and all... Perhaps the best thing to do is not to receive it.
I found the apps in Google Market quite lacking: they are either free and really lame, or very expensive compared to the price of an SMS or phone call.
To this, I'll add that I have to pay big cash in order to keep a Motoblur account and receive updates from Motorola for my Cliq XT aka bug-laden piece of sh*t. Let's say the alarm clock: it has some nasty bugs that are too expensive to fix with an update, and tech support offers to reflash everything and lose all of my data. All I want is a simple alarm clock with no fancy features, but it's so damn expensive/annoying in the end I may use a third party app store.
Luckily, I can write my own alarm clock for Android. Others may choose to risk it with the app store from China...
To be honest, I've never heard of a firmware update coming from Motorola. All I hear is excuses. My L6 and Quench (aka Cliq xt) never got their update, so I'm basically a sitting duck for malware in Android. The L6 was trusty, but the Quench is full of bugs I'll never get fixed. I'm just waiting for Cyanogen Mod to add support to the MIB501 to erase the crap out of that phone.
My uni had that schizo policy: you had to pay "voluntary" contribution tickets. When, on the students' system, you read "This year, you are required to pay 8 voluntary contribution tickets", hilarity ensued. To be honest, if you didn't have that money, you could pay less, or nothing at all, but they could have chosen a better name. One that didn't blatantly lied would have been cool.
Slashdot Mirror
Welcome to Slashdot 1984, where the past is rewritten as you please. :P
Agreed.
.NET is a dandy language.
WTF? .Net is an infrastructure, not a language.
Programming with .NET is like cooking in a McDonalds kitchen. It is full of amazing tools that automate absolutely everything. Just press the right button and follow the beeping lights, and you can churn out flawless 1.6 oz burgers faster than anybody else on the planet.
However, if you need to make a 1.7 oz burger, you simply can’t. There’s no button for it. The patties are pre-formed in the wrong size.
I programmed, with other people, an application that involved a server that provided custom service design, compilation, execution, and consumption (through the intranet), an ASP.Net site to manage those designed services, a WPF desktop application to manage the whole server, and an application for Windows Mobile that installed assemblies compiled on-the-fly from the server for offline consumption of services. He would be amazed to know that we didn't use a wizard at all.
Astrosurfing is something that needs to be fought back against.
Why?! Astrosurfing sounds awesome!
100% of the times I published first, and after that I submitted the patent. I know a lot of colleagues that do the same thing.
Sorry, no stereotypes here to bash, or insightful comments about it. You can believe them if you want to, but reality begs to differ.
IBM doesn't publish. They patent.
Wrong. I work for IBM and when I publish, I put my affiliation as everyone else (IBM Arg.). But sure, I also patent.
There was reluctance from China and Russia on a no-fly zone, and they only needed to exercise their veto power to blast the initiative to hell. In the end, they abstained instead of voting for the proposal. Why are we keeping veto power, if it's only used for the personal benefits or views of a few countries that won a war 75 years ago?
So, instead, we have to build consensus with this five countries, decisions take time, and this indeed may be too late. A lot of rebels have died, and it will cost them some legitimacy if they indeed get their revolution.
Years pass, and I grow disenchanted of the United Nations. The veto power has impaired it since day 1, and everyone else is still taking that bullshit.
we have to go deeper.
That's what she said.
Art lies in the artistic act itself. Whatever tangible result produced by the artistic act is but its trace.
Disagree, art for me is anything, whether tangible or intangible, that's the result of a master's execution or work. But art is, perhaps, impossible to define.
It's not important if it's the last of eight traits. It's like that list of software product and process characteristics, like reliability, security, etc.: all of them are important and you would want them at their maximum, but when you prioritise you see which ones are relevant for real.
Common sense isn't as common as the name would imply, so the deletionists deleted it.
Even more, common sense isn't as sensible as the name would imply. After all, it's just a collection of random data, assumptions, analogies, past experiences, and educated guesses. No wonder we have problem modelating it in IA!
Before Julia Stiles was a student with no future due to her marriage ambitions, she was a hacker. I'll say that's the best hacker depiction of all. :P
You have strayed far from your pure-capitalism bridge, troll. Please, do continue.
Feel ya, bro.
After those K-12 years, I ended up with clinical depression from the senseless beatings and abuse (although I got over it). It's normal to think that we live in an idiocracy when the TV is flooded with you-think-you-lose shows. They all promote the same stereotypes, they feed the same bullshit.
BUT, there's sweet hope. I remember, while I was in K-12, finding some solace in the knowledge that my intellect would drive me far, and indeed it did. When I was 22, my acquaintances from my home town told me most of my classmates are leeches sucking money from their parents, working for low wages, or being single parents. Turns out being geek was a huge investment, even at short term.
So, good news: I think this is the decade for geeks. Technology permeates everything, everywhere. Those with brains, those who master technology are really the ones in control. We ride the wave and the rest are mere sheep. Think about it for a second: rogue admins are capable of wreaking massive havoc, jaded hackers expose dirty secrets from the powers-that-be. Even basic encryption techniques protects you against ISPs that would happily collect your private conversations; basic things like Wireshark give you an edge over the drones that chat through an insecure protocol. Wikileaks can give you all the crap you want about the Gov., and technology made that possible. We are knowledge-mongers, and knowledge equals power. We are starting to see the effects of that power: we get to see Moot and Torvalds being invited to those parties organized for Time Magazine and the Oscars. The last Barbie model is a computer programmer and comes with a laptop that has written "BARBIE" in binary ASCII. Everyone is glorifying 8 bit arcade music. I don't buy the "geek is the new cool" slogan. I think geeks will never be cool by current standards, but now they will be, at least, tolerated. Otherwise, they could "power my computer on, enter my machine, and do whatever they want".
Of course, I may be just delusional. ;)
You forgot your smiley. If you still don't understand, check out my sig.
I agree.
We argies paid the AFA a handsome amount of money, so the Gov. could transmit, through public television, all soccer matches for the upper leagues. I don't like that decision, because although I enjoy watching soccer, I wouldn't pay for it. I'm not even considering the fact that I don't own a TV nor I want to buy one.
BUT, I do recognise that soccer here is more than a sport, it's a cultural good (or should I say cult? ;) ). So, the state may have an interest to broadcast the most popular games to the general public instead of limiting them to people who can pay good bucks to their cable , in the same way that it has an interest to keep museums opened and artists with food on their plates.
So, we come to this question: Is music just a form of entertainment, or also a cultural good? And, if it's the latter, why wouldn't we want to subsidise culture? Even people who pinky-promises that they NEVER hear music benefits from it, in the form of people interacting with them in a better mood, for example.
A few years ago, I was a T.A. and I thought it was sexual slavery, figuratively speaking. I guess it's literal now...
Mod parent up 'Informative'.
I've taken a bow and stood clean for a number of years. I know, it sounds like a drug, and in a sense it is. Everyone else does it, and if you don't they accuse you of being hypocritical (sounds stupid, but people usually act that way). It's possible, but social pressure is really intense.
The greatest problem I see in Argentina is that everything is dollarized: video games and music are really expensive. I couldn't care less, since I don't play games anymore, and I use Jamendo, Magnatune and Grooveshark for my sound fix. I see the motivation to use pirated software and music, though.
I owned legal copies of a few games back in the days, when they were at a reasonable price (20 bucks, maybe less if that title wasn't new). Nowadays, they can cost four or five times more. My brother, in an act of loyalty to Blizzard, spent a huge load of money to get a legal copy of Starcraft 2: it costed him over 250 (a waste of money if you ask me, the game wasn't that good anyway). That amount of money won't be spent again until the planets align. And the cost of life is raising...
Want to solve the problem? Have prices so low that would make you a bastard if you don't pay them. Let's say a cent per song, 10 cents at most: a CD would cost no more than 1 peso, and you'll be a maggot if you don't pay it. The best way would be to deploy this model through phone carriers (mobile phones are massively used here, even among the lowest class), and indeed they have done this... but prices are still too high and the whole process is too bothersome. Alternatively, you could involve the broadband carriers: they already charge the internet users! Make it simple and cheap, and your cash flow will INEVITABLY go up.
Now, I Read The Fine Report, and is laughable. Let's take a look at a few pearls...
Identify major distributors of pirate products in public markets and promote the revocation of licenses to those points of sale.
Piracy is systemic, the whole society does it and there's no major distributor. Taringa may count as a distributor, but what they do isn't illegal, so they are screwed from the start.
Commit, at the highest levels of the Argentine government, to develop and implement a coordinated anti-piracy campaign that addresses hard goods and online infringements as a matter of national priority.
If a politician established this priority, he would commit political suicide. It would mean that he is out of touch with reality: not because, as I said before, "everybody does it", but because burdening the justice system with something that only benefits foreign governments is strange to say the least.
Improve border enforcement, partnering with Paraguayan and Brazilian officials to establish a program to inspect goods in-transit for potential pirate product.
Here they are talking about the Triple Frontera. They are smoking crack if they think copyright should be a concern there. Drug and people trafficking are much more serious than copyright violations and Argentina is not doing a good job on those two issues. And now, we need to check if they carry a CD with pirated music?
Push for legislation that will establish clear ISP responsibility for illegal content over their networks and a program to address the issue that includes deterrent level sanctions.
They can't. The Supreme Court have already ruled that packets are equivalent to snail mails, and therefore should be subjected to the same privacy protections.
Support efforts to issue an executive decree that would require government legalization of current business software programs, within a balanced and neutral system to select technical solutions and improve procurement practices.
Hmm, interesting. There's a fellah one person away from the president in the federal government that took the lead on this matter, and has been pushing si
Alright, alright! I know the dye/die joke was lame, but taking it seriously only hurts my feelings.
For those who don't have English as their mother tongue, "dying" refers to the use of a tincture, not to a destructive process for the cell. Inb4 people wondering what the hell are we talking about.
The BSA said this would "inadvertently reduce choice [and] hinder innovation", and even went so far as to claim open standards would lead to higher e-government costs, but open-source advocates say the policy reflects how much the European Interoperability Framework is weighted in favour of the proprietary software companies."
The BSA inadvertently choose the right letters for Bull Shit Association. Was it on purpose or just a coincidence? You decide!
If Bradley Manning really did obtain the documents and leak them to Assange, as the US government alleges, then he should be given the Peace Prize. If he's convicted. Until then, we'll just continue to torture him.
I miss my mod points... You are right Anonymous Coward, the recipient should have been Bradley M. and, optionally, WikiLeaks. It's not uncommon for the people being awarded the Nobel to be in prison.
On a second thought, the Nobel Peace Prize has lost a lot of credibility... you know, with Obama, Kissinger, and all... Perhaps the best thing to do is not to receive it.
I found the apps in Google Market quite lacking: they are either free and really lame, or very expensive compared to the price of an SMS or phone call.
To this, I'll add that I have to pay big cash in order to keep a Motoblur account and receive updates from Motorola for my Cliq XT aka bug-laden piece of sh*t. Let's say the alarm clock: it has some nasty bugs that are too expensive to fix with an update, and tech support offers to reflash everything and lose all of my data. All I want is a simple alarm clock with no fancy features, but it's so damn expensive/annoying in the end I may use a third party app store.
Luckily, I can write my own alarm clock for Android. Others may choose to risk it with the app store from China...
Motorola has been quite bad about promising updates and not delivering.
Au contraire, they are quite good at promising updates and not delivering. They do it all the time.
To be honest, I've never heard of a firmware update coming from Motorola. All I hear is excuses. My L6 and Quench (aka Cliq xt) never got their update, so I'm basically a sitting duck for malware in Android. The L6 was trusty, but the Quench is full of bugs I'll never get fixed. I'm just waiting for Cyanogen Mod to add support to the MIB501 to erase the crap out of that phone.
My uni had that schizo policy: you had to pay "voluntary" contribution tickets. When, on the students' system, you read "This year, you are required to pay 8 voluntary contribution tickets", hilarity ensued. To be honest, if you didn't have that money, you could pay less, or nothing at all, but they could have chosen a better name. One that didn't blatantly lied would have been cool.