Funny, of all the web languages I've used, PHP is still my favorite. All these new ones are sugar-coated poop.
PHP is far FAR from perfect, but it is expressive enough that I can build upon it in a structured and dependable manner. It lets me get things done quickly and painlessly, which is all that matters at the end of the day.
You're leasing these out as servers ? Why would anyone want to pay those prices for an ultra-low capacity server ? What kind of clientele do you have ?
I know there are some ridiculously overpriced hosts out there and you're certainly not one of them, but I fail to see how buying cheap Apple machines can be more cost-effective than low-end PC hardware. I've built tons of micro-servers around Intel E2180 (2ghz dual) processors, with power consumption between 40 and 80 watts (peak), and they fit in a half-width 1U slab (outboard PSU). Cost ? About the same as your Apple TV, only it has 4 times the processing power and 2gb of Ram.
If the client's needs are less than what the dedicated box provides, that's what shared hosting is for... hell even a dozen VMs on a big rig would be a more cost-effective and power-wise approach than a beowulf cluster of Apple.
What Psystar is doing is not much different than the sketchy PC vendors that preinstall an upgrade copy of Windows. The main difference is Psystar most likely is not paying for the OS at all, since it is doubtful that Apple would allow it.
Part of the high price of a Mac is the OS. The $129 pricing of the standalone MacOS is really more of an upgrade price, since you need to own a Mac in the first place, and you can't get the hardware without the OS so normally you'd have already tithed.
The only thing Psystar is doing is using components that are known to work decently with the hacked OS, and then preloading the OS. It is legal in the USA ? Hell no. Does it make business sense ? Probably not.
Who is more likely to buy a Psystar hackintosh ? The power user who has the time and patience to dabble with hacks and unsupported software ? No. He/she is more likely to build their own hackintosh from scratch.
What about the non-techy users who just want a cheap Mac ? No, they wouldn't want a Psystar, because they need vendor support and they'd be better off with a true low-end Mac.
So what are we to do, as tech fiends ? I think we should ignore Psystar. They have already gotten far more attention that they deserve, for what amounts to little more than a trendy piracy scheme. The moment the hardware starts shipping, someone from Apple is going to get their hands on one and lawsuits will fly.
Who's to say the next Mac app you install isn't going to brick your Psystar ? All it needs to do is detect the unofficial hardware, blank out the BIOS EEPROM and call it a day. Hell, they could even replace the BIOS with a tiny script and image saying "The computer you are running is a fake Mac and is not licensed to run Mac OS. FOAD! - The Management"
The $10 is peanuts, yes, but the premise that users are paying to create content that would normally be an in-house responsibility... that's the nasty part.
If they gave away the full editor and not a 25% demo, they would have billions of diverse creatures ready at launch and most people would praise them for it, but having us pay AND do their job, that's just weird and sketchy.
MSFT has turned a single user OS and tacked on multi user support
Yep, that's responsible for a huge number of Windows' problems. So why the hell did they do it ?
At home, I'm the only user on my machine. The wife occasionally checks a web site or plays a video on my rig, but ultimately I have no need for multi-user configs as there is only one account. I can't remember the last time I had any profile other than Administrator on my own box.
Casual users will create separate profiles, but really all they're personalizing is individual preferences. They still run all the same apps. Should these people need to jump through hoops like the UAC, just for the privilege of having their own set of bookmarks ?
Today's exploits operate in plain sight: "Click here to install TalkingMonkeyP2PsexTorrentScannerTweak.exe". The UAC still can't prevent stupid people from being stupid. They click "Yes" on ActiveX prompts, they'll continue to click "Yes" on UAC prompts because whatever malware they're installing, they made a conscious decision to click in the first place. Uninformed, but conscious. Might as well do away with the UAC and let users jump headfirst into trouble, like they always have and always will.
You know what would be more useful and effective than the UAC ? A "safety tip of the day" widget that forces common users to sit through a 2-minute tutorial with an exam at the end. Don't let them surf that day until they pass the exam. Educate the users, beat them over the head with the wisdom we geeks take for granted. That will make a real difference!
The funny thing is I've been contemplating banning Gmail from my server and having an auto-reply to the tune of
"Gmail is full of spammers, and Google isn't doing anything about it. If you really want to contact me, please use an alternative mail provider."
Seriously, a huge portion of my spam, and IMHO the far worse bounce spam, comes from Gmail. Google never acts upon spam reports, nor can they be asked to crack down on splogs even when users are doing all the sleuthing work. If they want to continue printing money from the internets, they'd better start cleaning out their front lawn. Until that day comes, I say fuck em!
True, Delphi 2.0 was very decent at the time, as it was clean and efficient, but for me it's 4.0 that represented a leap forward as it introduced many language constructs that I learned to love (and abuse). Overloading, (fake) 64-bit ints, dynamic arrays and a bunch of tweaks to component development that embraced my cryptic, hoop-jumping style.
In the later years, I was developing apps with very little coding, I had built up a bunch of "smart" components that self-configured and played nice together, and IDE addons that did much of the heavy lifting. I did with Delphi what a lot of people are doing today with Eclipse, which is how I think software development should be. We're friggin' programmers, we write apps to make everyone else's job quick and easy, we should take the time to write apps that make our own jobs pleasant.
It's true, and I was impressed with Delphi for PHP. Admittedly, I've only tried it for a few minutes, but I was expecting an absolutely useless mockery of an IDE, instead I got the impression this thing could actually build a web app on short notice.
If I weren't drowning in CF filth, I might actually take Delphi/PHP for a spin one of these days.
Since they're talking graduate school, I think they're too young to be considering long term.
Yeah, so I'm a jerk / party animal, but I think those people who "try hard" and wind up marrying the first person they meet are absolutely pathetic / desperate. How about a man who worked the same job for 40 years, and ends up hanging himself in the shed because it took them that long to realize he wanted something else, now it's too late to start over.
I say fail, and fail miserably! Try everything until you can honestly sit down with a complete stranger and tell them precisely what you look for in a partner, with all the details and nuances. Analogy: fifteen years ago when I started dabbling with audio equipment, I was clueless. I couldn't tell the good from the bad, and I kept getting shafted by every dealer in the biz. After a few years of experimenting and much time & money spent, I considered myself a sound freak and was able to seek out the best gear for my tastes (and budget) with minimal effort and confusion, balancing my personal preferences with the inevitable compromises of the loudspeaker industry. Today, all I need is 5 seconds to "feel out" a product and immediately gauge if it will please me and fit with the rest of my setup.
I can tell you for a fact, the people I dated in my youth weren't anything like the later picks, and frankly if I had stayed with those early flings, well I'd have killed them all eventually! What those "bad" relationships did is help me figure out, through extensive trial and error, who I am and what I truly want. The tricky thing is that most people, including myself, can't figure out what they want, so we have to identify and eliminate what we don't want and take it from there. It's far easier to hate someone over one little peeve, than to see the dozen great things about them. That's human nature.
So what if they're both math geeks ? Y'know what ? I'm a math geek too, does that mean I should be dating the same ? See above paragraph involving murder. Sure, I like my women to have a mental pulse, and it sure drives me foolish when the wife messes up basic arithmetic, but it's not like I want to discuss polynomials in bed for the rest of my pre-homicide life.
Sometimes, the function of law-enforcement is just to suck more money out of our pockets without having to undergo the public scrutiny of an official budget. The asshats that "check your license" for a burnt headlight aren't reducing crime or improving safety, they're just looking for excuses to stick you with a random fine so the mayor can pay off the stripper who's blackmailing him.
Don't believe me ? Come live in Ottawa for a few months, I'll introduce you to said ex-mayor and stripper.
If cops were truly interested in controlling crime, they wouldn't be driving around with radar guns. Stop one speeder, and 200 more will zoom by while the cop's taking his sweet time writing up a ticket. It's a drop in the bucket and it still doesn't stop people from being killed every day in the stupidest of motoring accidents.
IMHO, the job of law enforcement should be to print off this list, go visit these "terrorists" one by one and pop them.
Oh, they don't want to do it ? Why not ? Because they're afraid of false positives ? Proof that the system is worthless.
It's quite simple: if Lex Luthor can't spend his dirty money in the USA, he'll drive up to Canada, get things done, then come back to the states to be a terrorists again. Not only does it NOT solve the crime problem, it actually diverts money away from the local economy.
Go FTC! keep it up, and in 20 years you can all become Canada's 11th province and get in on the lower taxes and subsidized health care, like every other modern civilized nation in the world.
You're seriously overestimating the skill, diligence and most importantly: availability of security consultants.
Code reviews ? Don't make me laugh. Security experts excel at policy writing. They are fear mongers. The people who can actually look at code with an emphasis on security, they are few and far-between. A few of them are plain old kernel hackers, the rest are black hats, because that's where the big bucks are.
Computer security isn't something that's easily done long-term, because it's an even faster moving target than the underlying hardware and software. New exploits spring up every few seconds, and old ones are slow to be patched. It's a business where you go all-out for a few years, then get out before you turn into a paranoid schizo.
Simple: People care about not having the ATM (containing their money) robbed or compromised. People care about money.
People don't care about a voting machine, firstly because they know it's all a fraud anyway, and secondly because people don't care about voting.
Voting is not money. It ends up costing them tons of money and grief over four years, but since we can't compare candidates in purely objective points, there's no way to accurately present that cost to the mindless commoner. They whine about taxes, they whine about healthcare, they even whine about the candidate's ethnic background, but the one thing they don't do is act.
People don't whine when they get short-changed at the drive-thru, they YELL and complain and attack. People used to react just as violently to political issues, a long long time ago. If they still did today, we might have a little more fairness in this theatre they call Democracy.
I can make an EEG monitor that IS a baseball cap. By carefully measuring the angle of the visor relative to the wearer's head, as well as a few environmental factors such as precipitation, temperature and altitude, I can identify half-bred imbeciles with shocking accuracy.
I can also tell with 100% certainty that a person wearing a ballcap will make a mistake. That mistake is asking me to fix their computer.
I agree with you on Coldfusion, simply because I'm forced to work with it on a daily basis. As a longtime "real" programmer, CF is an insult to my skill and experience, but sadly I need to eat.
Delphi though, slow down! Everyone keeps repeating how Pascal is a teaching language, yet it was my official language for many years. Back in the 90's I was developing commercial games with little more than Borland Pascal 7 and Turbo Assembler. I did the speedy bits in assembler, and the logic in Pascal. My development time was extremely short and my code was very reliable and reusable.
When Delphi happened, well honestly the first few versions stank, but I remember writing all sorts of apps in Delphi 4 (yes, even DirectX games). Delphi today has turned into a schizophrenic marketing clusterfuck thanks to Borland/Inprise/Codegear/TrendyNameOfTheMomentInc, but I think Delphi as language is just right for a large number of situations.
It's right in the sweet spot between useless VB and painful C, plus it compiles crazy fast and performs very respectably, given how easy it is to develop. In fact, its qualities closely resemble those of C#, only Delphi did it over 12 years ago. It's no coincidence, Microsoft hired the creator of Turbo Pascal, Anders Hejlsberg, to create C#, J++ and many key architectural features of.NET. If Borland hadn't gone mental in the mid-90s,.NET would not exist today, instead we'd have Borland's equivalent and people would be praising Delphi, just as they praise C# in today's reality. It would probably run a helluva lot faster too!
That rebel ISP would gain a lot of support from everyone who's sick and tired of the financial tyranny.
There isn't much fun in being a monopoly if nobody can afford your services. I can tell you for a fact I won't ever stoop down to paying a receiving ISP for the privilege of routing my packets to their clients. I pay my onramp, they pay theirs. That's how it's always been, and there's no good reason to reverse it, just a cornucopia of criminally bad reasons.
Greed has already crippled many nations beyond repair. If it cripples the internet even further, then the only cure will be a full reboot of the entire concept.
Well I do, because I usually do a dozen of these each day on various sites. The web is my workplace, and I've got better things to do than pander to underachieving security weenies.
The CAPTCHA was a great idea back in the day, but now it is obsolete, like everything else in the tech world. Let it die with some dignity.
Even this uber-annoying system can be defeated using today's tech: forward the image to another user, and copy their answer. That's what a lot of scripts actually do... they post the image somewhere and wait for a human to fill it out.
What ? Why'd ya think there were so many similar-looking CAPTCHAs in the first place ? It's a big money business.
We bash Microsoft every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Sundays we bash Apple, and Wednesday is OSS-recognition day. Mondays and Fridays we just beat off to SuicideGirls while Zonk posts a bunch of dupes.
Agreed. My initial reaction was shock and frustration, but it quickly subsided once I got the hang of the Ribbon. Now I like it, and 2007 has brought a few tweaks and improvements to common tasks like charting and sorting, that make me life much easier.
More importantly, most new users find 2007 very friendly and quick to learn. It's us veterans that are afraid of change. It's far from perfect, but for a dramatic shift in UI design, they got it pretty good for a first iteration. The next version will hopefully address the power-user woes and make it even better for everyone.
Worst case, if there's something you absolutely hate about the new version, install both 2003 and 2007 on the same machine and switch where needed until you figure out a new workflow.
Actually, I'd love for that to happen just so all the whiners could see how much of their new Dell or HP is subsidized by the shovelware.
Maybe then, they'd shut up and format their system upon receipt like a good customer should. They might also give independent builders like myself, just a little more respect.
If I had the option of getting paid to install crapware, I'd offer it to my clients and pass along the savings with a smile, or maybe I'd use it as punishment for the few jackasses that try to haggle me on the cheapest piece of shit system I begrudgingly sell.
Here's a hint: when you get Windows preinstalled on a big-name computer, the cost of that license is under $40. Microsoft isn't in it for the money, they're in it for market share. With some suppliers, the cost is even lower. Microsoft would rather lose money on Windows, than lose a seat to Linux/Apple, because that "free" OS will generate sales for big ticket items such as Office, Visual Studio and maybe a few games. That's why they fought to get it on the Asus EEE.
Slashdot Mirror
Funny, of all the web languages I've used, PHP is still my favorite. All these new ones are sugar-coated poop.
PHP is far FAR from perfect, but it is expressive enough that I can build upon it in a structured and dependable manner. It lets me get things done quickly and painlessly, which is all that matters at the end of the day.
Sweet Jesus, let's get gay-married!
This deserves a "+5000, Awesomer than StrongBad"
Wait a minute...
You're leasing these out as servers ? Why would anyone want to pay those prices for an ultra-low capacity server ? What kind of clientele do you have ?
I know there are some ridiculously overpriced hosts out there and you're certainly not one of them, but I fail to see how buying cheap Apple machines can be more cost-effective than low-end PC hardware. I've built tons of micro-servers around Intel E2180 (2ghz dual) processors, with power consumption between 40 and 80 watts (peak), and they fit in a half-width 1U slab (outboard PSU). Cost ? About the same as your Apple TV, only it has 4 times the processing power and 2gb of Ram.
If the client's needs are less than what the dedicated box provides, that's what shared hosting is for... hell even a dozen VMs on a big rig would be a more cost-effective and power-wise approach than a beowulf cluster of Apple.
What Psystar is doing is not much different than the sketchy PC vendors that preinstall an upgrade copy of Windows. The main difference is Psystar most likely is not paying for the OS at all, since it is doubtful that Apple would allow it.
Part of the high price of a Mac is the OS. The $129 pricing of the standalone MacOS is really more of an upgrade price, since you need to own a Mac in the first place, and you can't get the hardware without the OS so normally you'd have already tithed.
The only thing Psystar is doing is using components that are known to work decently with the hacked OS, and then preloading the OS. It is legal in the USA ? Hell no. Does it make business sense ? Probably not.
Who is more likely to buy a Psystar hackintosh ? The power user who has the time and patience to dabble with hacks and unsupported software ? No. He/she is more likely to build their own hackintosh from scratch.
What about the non-techy users who just want a cheap Mac ? No, they wouldn't want a Psystar, because they need vendor support and they'd be better off with a true low-end Mac.
So what are we to do, as tech fiends ? I think we should ignore Psystar. They have already gotten far more attention that they deserve, for what amounts to little more than a trendy piracy scheme. The moment the hardware starts shipping, someone from Apple is going to get their hands on one and lawsuits will fly.
Who's to say the next Mac app you install isn't going to brick your Psystar ? All it needs to do is detect the unofficial hardware, blank out the BIOS EEPROM and call it a day. Hell, they could even replace the BIOS with a tiny script and image saying "The computer you are running is a fake Mac and is not licensed to run Mac OS. FOAD! - The Management"
The $10 is peanuts, yes, but the premise that users are paying to create content that would normally be an in-house responsibility... that's the nasty part.
If they gave away the full editor and not a 25% demo, they would have billions of diverse creatures ready at launch and most people would praise them for it, but having us pay AND do their job, that's just weird and sketchy.
MSFT has turned a single user OS and tacked on multi user support
Yep, that's responsible for a huge number of Windows' problems. So why the hell did they do it ?
At home, I'm the only user on my machine. The wife occasionally checks a web site or plays a video on my rig, but ultimately I have no need for multi-user configs as there is only one account. I can't remember the last time I had any profile other than Administrator on my own box.
Casual users will create separate profiles, but really all they're personalizing is individual preferences. They still run all the same apps. Should these people need to jump through hoops like the UAC, just for the privilege of having their own set of bookmarks ?
Today's exploits operate in plain sight: "Click here to install TalkingMonkeyP2PsexTorrentScannerTweak.exe". The UAC still can't prevent stupid people from being stupid. They click "Yes" on ActiveX prompts, they'll continue to click "Yes" on UAC prompts because whatever malware they're installing, they made a conscious decision to click in the first place. Uninformed, but conscious. Might as well do away with the UAC and let users jump headfirst into trouble, like they always have and always will.
You know what would be more useful and effective than the UAC ? A "safety tip of the day" widget that forces common users to sit through a 2-minute tutorial with an exam at the end. Don't let them surf that day until they pass the exam. Educate the users, beat them over the head with the wisdom we geeks take for granted. That will make a real difference!
Seriously, a huge portion of my spam, and IMHO the far worse bounce spam, comes from Gmail. Google never acts upon spam reports, nor can they be asked to crack down on splogs even when users are doing all the sleuthing work. If they want to continue printing money from the internets, they'd better start cleaning out their front lawn. Until that day comes, I say fuck em!
True, Delphi 2.0 was very decent at the time, as it was clean and efficient, but for me it's 4.0 that represented a leap forward as it introduced many language constructs that I learned to love (and abuse). Overloading, (fake) 64-bit ints, dynamic arrays and a bunch of tweaks to component development that embraced my cryptic, hoop-jumping style.
In the later years, I was developing apps with very little coding, I had built up a bunch of "smart" components that self-configured and played nice together, and IDE addons that did much of the heavy lifting. I did with Delphi what a lot of people are doing today with Eclipse, which is how I think software development should be. We're friggin' programmers, we write apps to make everyone else's job quick and easy, we should take the time to write apps that make our own jobs pleasant.
It's true, and I was impressed with Delphi for PHP. Admittedly, I've only tried it for a few minutes, but I was expecting an absolutely useless mockery of an IDE, instead I got the impression this thing could actually build a web app on short notice.
If I weren't drowning in CF filth, I might actually take Delphi/PHP for a spin one of these days.
Since they're talking graduate school, I think they're too young to be considering long term.
Yeah, so I'm a jerk / party animal, but I think those people who "try hard" and wind up marrying the first person they meet are absolutely pathetic / desperate. How about a man who worked the same job for 40 years, and ends up hanging himself in the shed because it took them that long to realize he wanted something else, now it's too late to start over.
I say fail, and fail miserably! Try everything until you can honestly sit down with a complete stranger and tell them precisely what you look for in a partner, with all the details and nuances. Analogy: fifteen years ago when I started dabbling with audio equipment, I was clueless. I couldn't tell the good from the bad, and I kept getting shafted by every dealer in the biz. After a few years of experimenting and much time & money spent, I considered myself a sound freak and was able to seek out the best gear for my tastes (and budget) with minimal effort and confusion, balancing my personal preferences with the inevitable compromises of the loudspeaker industry. Today, all I need is 5 seconds to "feel out" a product and immediately gauge if it will please me and fit with the rest of my setup.
I can tell you for a fact, the people I dated in my youth weren't anything like the later picks, and frankly if I had stayed with those early flings, well I'd have killed them all eventually! What those "bad" relationships did is help me figure out, through extensive trial and error, who I am and what I truly want. The tricky thing is that most people, including myself, can't figure out what they want, so we have to identify and eliminate what we don't want and take it from there. It's far easier to hate someone over one little peeve, than to see the dozen great things about them. That's human nature.
So what if they're both math geeks ? Y'know what ? I'm a math geek too, does that mean I should be dating the same ? See above paragraph involving murder. Sure, I like my women to have a mental pulse, and it sure drives me foolish when the wife messes up basic arithmetic, but it's not like I want to discuss polynomials in bed for the rest of my pre-homicide life.
GTA V: Bush vs the World.
Sometimes, the function of law-enforcement is just to suck more money out of our pockets without having to undergo the public scrutiny of an official budget. The asshats that "check your license" for a burnt headlight aren't reducing crime or improving safety, they're just looking for excuses to stick you with a random fine so the mayor can pay off the stripper who's blackmailing him.
Don't believe me ? Come live in Ottawa for a few months, I'll introduce you to said ex-mayor and stripper.
If cops were truly interested in controlling crime, they wouldn't be driving around with radar guns. Stop one speeder, and 200 more will zoom by while the cop's taking his sweet time writing up a ticket. It's a drop in the bucket and it still doesn't stop people from being killed every day in the stupidest of motoring accidents.
IMHO, the job of law enforcement should be to print off this list, go visit these "terrorists" one by one and pop them.
Oh, they don't want to do it ? Why not ? Because they're afraid of false positives ? Proof that the system is worthless.
It's quite simple: if Lex Luthor can't spend his dirty money in the USA, he'll drive up to Canada, get things done, then come back to the states to be a terrorists again. Not only does it NOT solve the crime problem, it actually diverts money away from the local economy.
Go FTC! keep it up, and in 20 years you can all become Canada's 11th province and get in on the lower taxes and subsidized health care, like every other modern civilized nation in the world.
You're seriously overestimating the skill, diligence and most importantly: availability of security consultants.
Code reviews ? Don't make me laugh. Security experts excel at policy writing. They are fear mongers. The people who can actually look at code with an emphasis on security, they are few and far-between. A few of them are plain old kernel hackers, the rest are black hats, because that's where the big bucks are.
Computer security isn't something that's easily done long-term, because it's an even faster moving target than the underlying hardware and software. New exploits spring up every few seconds, and old ones are slow to be patched. It's a business where you go all-out for a few years, then get out before you turn into a paranoid schizo.
Those who can, do; those who can't, contract.
Simple: People care about not having the ATM (containing their money) robbed or compromised. People care about money.
People don't care about a voting machine, firstly because they know it's all a fraud anyway, and secondly because people don't care about voting.
Voting is not money. It ends up costing them tons of money and grief over four years, but since we can't compare candidates in purely objective points, there's no way to accurately present that cost to the mindless commoner. They whine about taxes, they whine about healthcare, they even whine about the candidate's ethnic background, but the one thing they don't do is act.
People don't whine when they get short-changed at the drive-thru, they YELL and complain and attack. People used to react just as violently to political issues, a long long time ago. If they still did today, we might have a little more fairness in this theatre they call Democracy.
It looks like they've even outsourced moderation. It's been a fluke all week.
I can make an EEG monitor that IS a baseball cap. By carefully measuring the angle of the visor relative to the wearer's head, as well as a few environmental factors such as precipitation, temperature and altitude, I can identify half-bred imbeciles with shocking accuracy.
I can also tell with 100% certainty that a person wearing a ballcap will make a mistake. That mistake is asking me to fix their computer.
How about a machine that does the job correctly FOR ME, instead of a machine that tells me I'm wrong ?
I thought that's what the wife was for!
<cfif coldfusion LTE garbage><cfthrow type="chair"></cfif>
I agree with you on Coldfusion, simply because I'm forced to work with it on a daily basis. As a longtime "real" programmer, CF is an insult to my skill and experience, but sadly I need to eat.
.NET. If Borland hadn't gone mental in the mid-90s, .NET would not exist today, instead we'd have Borland's equivalent and people would be praising Delphi, just as they praise C# in today's reality. It would probably run a helluva lot faster too!
Delphi though, slow down! Everyone keeps repeating how Pascal is a teaching language, yet it was my official language for many years. Back in the 90's I was developing commercial games with little more than Borland Pascal 7 and Turbo Assembler. I did the speedy bits in assembler, and the logic in Pascal. My development time was extremely short and my code was very reliable and reusable.
When Delphi happened, well honestly the first few versions stank, but I remember writing all sorts of apps in Delphi 4 (yes, even DirectX games). Delphi today has turned into a schizophrenic marketing clusterfuck thanks to Borland/Inprise/Codegear/TrendyNameOfTheMomentInc, but I think Delphi as language is just right for a large number of situations.
It's right in the sweet spot between useless VB and painful C, plus it compiles crazy fast and performs very respectably, given how easy it is to develop. In fact, its qualities closely resemble those of C#, only Delphi did it over 12 years ago. It's no coincidence, Microsoft hired the creator of Turbo Pascal, Anders Hejlsberg, to create C#, J++ and many key architectural features of
That rebel ISP would gain a lot of support from everyone who's sick and tired of the financial tyranny.
There isn't much fun in being a monopoly if nobody can afford your services. I can tell you for a fact I won't ever stoop down to paying a receiving ISP for the privilege of routing my packets to their clients. I pay my onramp, they pay theirs. That's how it's always been, and there's no good reason to reverse it, just a cornucopia of criminally bad reasons.
Greed has already crippled many nations beyond repair. If it cripples the internet even further, then the only cure will be a full reboot of the entire concept.
Well I do, because I usually do a dozen of these each day on various sites. The web is my workplace, and I've got better things to do than pander to underachieving security weenies.
The CAPTCHA was a great idea back in the day, but now it is obsolete, like everything else in the tech world. Let it die with some dignity.
Even this uber-annoying system can be defeated using today's tech: forward the image to another user, and copy their answer. That's what a lot of scripts actually do... they post the image somewhere and wait for a human to fill it out.
What ? Why'd ya think there were so many similar-looking CAPTCHAs in the first place ? It's a big money business.
Sure, except the CPK won't make you their bitch.
Yet.
You must be new here.
We bash Microsoft every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Sundays we bash Apple, and Wednesday is OSS-recognition day. Mondays and Fridays we just beat off to SuicideGirls while Zonk posts a bunch of dupes.
Agreed. My initial reaction was shock and frustration, but it quickly subsided once I got the hang of the Ribbon. Now I like it, and 2007 has brought a few tweaks and improvements to common tasks like charting and sorting, that make me life much easier.
More importantly, most new users find 2007 very friendly and quick to learn. It's us veterans that are afraid of change. It's far from perfect, but for a dramatic shift in UI design, they got it pretty good for a first iteration. The next version will hopefully address the power-user woes and make it even better for everyone.
Worst case, if there's something you absolutely hate about the new version, install both 2003 and 2007 on the same machine and switch where needed until you figure out a new workflow.
Actually, I'd love for that to happen just so all the whiners could see how much of their new Dell or HP is subsidized by the shovelware.
Maybe then, they'd shut up and format their system upon receipt like a good customer should. They might also give independent builders like myself, just a little more respect.
If I had the option of getting paid to install crapware, I'd offer it to my clients and pass along the savings with a smile, or maybe I'd use it as punishment for the few jackasses that try to haggle me on the cheapest piece of shit system I begrudgingly sell.
Here's a hint: when you get Windows preinstalled on a big-name computer, the cost of that license is under $40. Microsoft isn't in it for the money, they're in it for market share. With some suppliers, the cost is even lower. Microsoft would rather lose money on Windows, than lose a seat to Linux/Apple, because that "free" OS will generate sales for big ticket items such as Office, Visual Studio and maybe a few games. That's why they fought to get it on the Asus EEE.