I just happen to live in a very broadly multicultural area that also just happens to be fairly dense in high-tech and medium-tech businesses. I had a fellow from India explain some of this stuff to me. Up here people typically just obtain their citizenship and apply for work like everyone else, on equal terms. In the states where he had previously worked as well as many of his college mates, the attitude is to fly people over on a work visa, then the employers use that non-resident status as a cattle prod. He told me he was often afraid of being fired and exiled back to India for no valid reason, other than the company trying to pressure him into working longer hours. The work visa then becomes the slave driver's whip.
So the guy moved up north to the land of beavers, poutine and warm busty women. Sure, it took a little work to get the papers done but now he's a permanent citizen just like me, and he works the same job, gets the same pay, enjoys the same benefits and pays the same ridiculously high taxes as everyone else. We don't throw around many work visas because frankly, if you're going to work in Canada, you might as well live here too and keep the money recirculating (and re-taxing) in our system.
The fact that he's english and I'm french means it wouldn't bother me all that much. tee-hee! but the whole point of a public demonstration like that, whether it's throwing soggy french fries or cleaving someone's head off, is to express discontentment. I still think most public demonstrations are founded in ignorance and don't accomplish anything other than further dividing the world's population, but oh well. Humankind is its own worst enemy.
In the grand scheme of things, a million terrorists could chop a million heads every day, really it doesn't make a goddamned difference because it doesn't matter where you're from, who/what/where/why/how you worship or how much money you've got. We're all just a bunch of horny hungry curious animals running around trying to live a long happy life, and that much will never change. The threats of the few cannot turn the minds of the majority.
Well then why do most word processors offer precise positioning of any element, various text and object justification schemes, headers and footers, even left/right margin breakers and many other layout controls ? They exist only to create readable documents after all.. why couldn't HTML do the same ? If I can tell Wordperfect to render a text block 3 inches wide by 2 inches tall, rotated 30 degrees and place it dead center in the page while reflowing text around it etc etc etc.. why not HTML ?
I think the reason I'm so upset with HTML and CSS is that they're just hacks layered on top of more hacks and wrapped in the wedgeless hack that is SGML.
And since you ended that line with a question mark, the answer is YES! People often ask me why I don't have an anti-virus installed and I just answer "I'm the best anti-virus in the world". Why ? Because I just KNOW. I'm one of those wackos who can tell when something is a little off in my PC, because I am so naturally attentive to little details. I can tell when an application is lagging just a tiny bit as a result of the virus looking for infectable executables; I can sense when my firewall box is working hard because of a stray worm on one of our PC's.. most importantly I have yet to spot a virus that is 100% stealthy because they all damage applications to a certain extent due to their greed and carelessness.
But I think the #1 reason why I don't need an anti-virus is I just know better than to get software from "unofficial mirrors" or click on my long-estranged half-step-brother-twice-removed Prince Mobutu Sesa the 8th who simply wants to show me his financial reports in EXE format "in case I didn't have Nigeriasoft Excel installed". How thoughtful of him!
Just a few months ago I strayed from my "anti-antivirus" stance and installed Clamshell AV. I just run it when I feel the need to, it doesn't monitor my email, network connections, or every goddamned disk operation. It doesn't turn my fast workstation into a bogged down Amiga emulator, and it doesn't give me Defcon-5 full-screen warnings about a "possibly hazardous image file named Slashdot.jpg". In other words I don't need Homeland Security on my firewalled and smartly-operated PC.
Ahh good old americans vs canadians.. we canadians want to know how much fuel it takes to get to where we need to be. Americans want to know how far they'll go with X amount of gas, because they really have no clue where they're going, they just want to drive their flashy guzzlers right into an economic depression again.
Let's face it: on paper, consumers would be in control of the oil producers, because we have the money they so desperately love. In reality, nobody gives a damn and we just want to floor that pedal until flames shoot out the back of the muffler. Don't count on humankind growing a collective superbrain because the laws of chaos dictate exactly the opposite. It doesn't even matter how high the price shoots at the pump.. even if it goes to 10$ a gallon, the OPEC will just make greater profits because we won't stop driving to work, we won't stop heating our homes.. You would think between the 7 billion inhabitants of earth, we could all pitch in a toonie, buy out the whole goddamned desert and kick those tyrants out. Small pests, big problems.
Okay this post is completely pointless and will probably sound like an infomercial, but the staff got a sneak peek of these just weeks ago and I can tell you that we all wanted one of these babies, if only they'd deduct them off our payroll in instalments:)
It's such a weird beast due to its size, but from what I saw it is rather well designed with the handle and all. The wireless dockable keyboard and mouse are just so sexy. I'm not privy to any information beyond my tech support duties, but it's a safe guess that they had the newly-annexed Alienware folks involved in this project. Now I'm not a Dell fanboi in any way, they just give me money every two weeks which goes to the local OEM supplier in my neverending quest for more power, but if Dell made a Billco-approved XPS with 8-drive RAID-0 and quad-dualcore-opteron sweetness I just might kiss someone's ass for a staff discount:)
I hate the term "viral marketing" as it is used to represent interesting content as opposed to "forced-down-your-throat" ad propaganda. Many years ago Bell Canada got into this "viral marketing" stuff by hiring a comedian to do their TV ads in Quebec. Now I hate telecoms even more than I hate buzzwords, but the ads were hilarious and everyone either loved or hated them, but all knew of them. Many people even recorded or downloaded them.. some used them as an answering message or ring tone.. you'll be hard pressed to find a Quebecer that won't chuckle or even sing along if you say "Bonjour Toto". The ad campaign was an explosive success.
Cue to the crappier ads I've seen locally, one for a huge used car dealership "Mega Automobile". They hired some coked-out ditz to overpronunciate catch phrases from a cue card while frenetically bouncing her empty head on each syllable. Just as cheesy as the stereotypical used car salesmen that work there. At least they could have hired a coked-out bikini ditz instead.. hell just stick a picture of Kermit the Frog on the screen for 30 seconds, it would probably work better than the cookie-cutter no-budget bullshit they pulled.
LOL.. you're either pulling very hard for a joke, or majestically ignorant:) DNS records are written backwards as are regular domain names - you don't type "com.mianus.www" do you ? On second thought, maybe you do *rimshot*
What they're basically saying is that coffee greatly reduces your chances of getting cirrhosis. That's great, but what are the evils of drinking so much coffee ? Isn't caffeine bad for us ? I've been drinking tons of pop since I was a wee hacker kid, and to me caffeine withdrawal is no different from any other drug-induced malaise - i.e. headaches, soreness, confusion/distraction, homicidal tendencies.. Seems like we're trading one vice for another here.
Go ahead, embrace your mutually assured destruction with your hostile enemies while I sit peacefully in Canada with my poutine and rich tasty beer. I'd rather be taxed poor than shot dead.
The problem with all this hype about profits in SL is that the money has to come from somewhere.. wherever there is gain, there must be equal loss to balance the equation. For every SL hundredaire, there's got to be a dozen virtual street bums and crackwhores. It's even worse that you can use real money to purchase virtual goods, that directly ties SL's economy to real-world stresses and constraints.
I can't say I'm not curious, but I am extremely skeptical. SL was created first and foremost to produce profit for its owners; it is a product.
Work, money, time.. you need at least two. Either pay up for internal Windows Messenger, whose client is already on all your desktops, or develop your own simple IM server and client putting in your own sweat and blood.. or pay someone to develop a non-MS solution. You have to weigh the potential benefits of an IM solution. For most people, just keeping their email open and minimized is good enough. If they don't reply to you quickly enough, well that's not email's fault, they can ignore IM windows just as easily.
Fuck me. As an amateur, serious photographer you're not the "average user", you're a prosumer or whatever they call us people who are easily parted from our money. I'm the same way with audio equipment. Not everyone uses a high end digital camera, cares about RAW images.. most people are happy with Kodak idiot-proof camera software that does everything automatically at moderate quality. Same thing with camcorders.. sure, MiniDV is big, and now HDV, but for the average person who just wants a computer for web surfing and email, it is much easier for them to get a set-top DVD deck they can simply plug their camcorder into and press "Record" like a VCR. Ten years ago I thought home entertainment CD burners were stupid, mostly because they needed "special" audio CD-R discs that cost more, but thinking outside of my own bubble, for non-geeks the concept of a CD or DVD burner that works exactly like a tape recorder is just fine. At least then you don't have to teach them how to use DVD Decrypter and DVDShrink and all that crap.
The hardware to put that in place is peanuts compared to what an actual wiretap costs, equipment, time, wages etc.
Re:Ex-Military IT staff described in a nutshell.
on
The Living Dilbert?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Having interviewed way too many prospective employees both in and out of IT, I can tell you right now that your "ex-military" woes have less to do with the military and more to do with poor staffing. Yes, military people are overconfident, that's just the kind of circle-jerk bullshit you have to develop in that kind of environment. What I think is happening at your workplace is your interviewers can't see past the strong attitude and get duped far too easily. The common "curve balls" used in interviews can easily backfire, that is a science in itself.
I learned early on that I'm a very charismatic candidate when it comes to job interviews. It doesn't matter what the job is, people either love me to death and think I'm the god of [insert business arc] or they think I'm the most arrogant, irreverent bastard they've ever met. It all boils down to bad hiring practices; an inexperienced or just plain bad interviewer will be easily deceived by someone who can talk the talk, if you can fake the jargon and make up for it with confidence and personality you can get any job. I've talked myself into jobs where the boss/manager thought I was going to be a phenomenon, yet a few weeks into it I knew it just wasn't meant to be, shocking the suits ghost-white with my resignation. It's kind of like poker, you could have a pair of deuces, but if your bluffing game is strong you will be in control.
The moral of this story is: if you have a bunch of ex-military applicants, learn to communicate effectively with them and find out what YOU want to know about the person, not what THEY want to tell you. This could be as simple as hiring a military staffing consultant to teach you how to talk to these people, or perhaps a psychologist to help you write a personality test like many of the top companies use.. you know, those stupid things that ask "If you found a ten dollar bill in front of a bank, would you return it?" kind of bullshit. Hey, they work!
Ok little interference here. I've been a web developer since early HTML and Netscape 2.0. I've been trying to come to grips with CSS for a few years now, but the bulk of the information available on CSS involves working around browser bugs. There is no consistent implementation of CSS anywhere, I don't care what you Opera zealots thing, it's still not right. CSS itself is lacking in many areas, most notably tables. Sure, the HTML table system is a pain in the butt, having to futz with ROWSPAN/COLSPAN and the link, but CSS can't even do that yet.
I still have to mix them both almost all the time, so I usually end up using CSS to describe fonts, colors and chrome, but decade-old HTML to describe the layout. My biggest peeve with CSS positioning is that of the few options available, half of them are unsupported, especially if they relate more to screen than print, such as when you're trying to present a web application.
Just try to put down a consistent status bar docked to the bottom of the browser, another across the top, and a task pane on the left; Outlook-style. The wealth of CSS trickery required to just make it work is horrible. Sure, getting the accessory panes up there is easy, it's getting the remainder of the window to flow naturally that's a disgusting hack. Your content pane ends up being the full size of the client area because those toolbars and status bars are "floating", so you have to set hard margins everywhere, but then you have to nest DIVs or else your scrolling will be fubarred. Really, how hard would it be for a browser that just rendered a bunch of rectangles, to figure out how much space is left for the remaining items ? Something like good old "frameset N,*" that flows automatically when resized.. trivial functionality yet it's not there thanks to some angry god-fearing designer.
I've got a couple dozen emus on my Xbox, with rom sets thanks to a hard drive upgrade. The hardest part is figuring out a button layout that's comfortable on the Xbox controller, once that's set up it's smooth sailing.
... and the auto makers would go out of business because it would not only cost more to manufacture (steel is easier to shape and cut), but your car would last longer. These days the engines last longer than the body, especially for us beavers up in Canada with our ridiculous weather shifts and the beloved road salt they pile on every winter.
If you want Apache to take over IIS, just wrap a nice idiot-proof gui around it, replacing the irritating.conf files, then charge a modest amount of money for it.. something like $199 or so for the software with pay-per-incident support, or $599 for the same thing with unlimited phone support. It doesn't matter whether a product is good or not, it's all about how you package it, how it appears to the untrained eye, because let's face it, a lot of the people with buying authority couldn't tell a web server from a powerpoint presentation, as long as the powerpoint has a picture of a globe on it.
How is this better than just having 256mb of extra ram ? Since we're talking notebooks, there's a battery backup so having a big r/w disk cache is not a problem, your data won't vanish during a brownout (america's national pastime).
Hell, I have 4 gb ram in my desktop and it's the best damn speed booster I've ever had. The OS caches everything and syncs whenever the PC is idle, letting me run my bursty, data-intensive processes at full speed without any concern for disk throughput.
I think the real reason why I'm suspicious is the volatile nature of hard drives. Why would I want a hybrid drive that needs replacing every few years, when the part that breaks down is the cheaper half of the device ? Seems like a way for the HD manufacturers to squeeze more profit out of their mediocre products.
Err because it's a good idea ? Just because you can afford to throw out a pizza after taking just one bite doesn't mean it's a good idea.
I'm all for high-performance low-power chips. For most uses, we don't need the super-multi-ghz light-flickering beasts anyway. Frig, my main PC needs a 600 watt power supply just to breathe. Give me an 8-cpu low-voltage rig and I'll be happy, not to mention saving a chunk on my hydro bill. Hell, I'd build servers around massively-parallel mobile CPUs if I could.. just give me a board for it! Less power = less heat = longer life. I'm sure the nearest small biz with a dozen servers wouldn't mind an extra ten grand a year just in power savings for using low-voltage chips.
You lost all credibility in my eyes with that last zinger about Delphi. Delphi six years ago was just another VB, yes. Delphi today is downright scary in its breadth and performance. I haven't written a Delphi app in over a year now but I still swear by it. C++ needs to be taken down a notch or two.. sure it works, as long as you buy all the utilities to fix it:P BoundsChecker, Lint, Purify.. one isn't enough, usually. It's like MS Windows - it works once you throw in Ad-Aware, Spybot, WinRar etc.
I guess I live in a world where time = money, thus a faster development cycle with Delphi means I can get paid and move on to the next project in record time.
In the web world, it's like PHP vs Java. PHP is the slender, rebellious RAD tool, while Java is the fat, tempermental, old-fogey weapon of choice for people with too much time and money (that means Money^2) to spend. I'm not saying to write every app in PHP, that would be painful, but keep that Java away from the web server! It used to be that we'd write the complex logic in whatever native language we preferred, then simply used Perl/PHP as the glue - the presentation layer. What's so wrong with that practice ? It milked a whole lot more performance out of old server than today's big iron seems to handle.
Slashdot Mirror
I just happen to live in a very broadly multicultural area that also just happens to be fairly dense in high-tech and medium-tech businesses. I had a fellow from India explain some of this stuff to me. Up here people typically just obtain their citizenship and apply for work like everyone else, on equal terms. In the states where he had previously worked as well as many of his college mates, the attitude is to fly people over on a work visa, then the employers use that non-resident status as a cattle prod. He told me he was often afraid of being fired and exiled back to India for no valid reason, other than the company trying to pressure him into working longer hours. The work visa then becomes the slave driver's whip.
So the guy moved up north to the land of beavers, poutine and warm busty women. Sure, it took a little work to get the papers done but now he's a permanent citizen just like me, and he works the same job, gets the same pay, enjoys the same benefits and pays the same ridiculously high taxes as everyone else. We don't throw around many work visas because frankly, if you're going to work in Canada, you might as well live here too and keep the money recirculating (and re-taxing) in our system.
<? bighair() { ?>
Shot through the code,
and you're too lame.
You give PHP
a bad name.
<? } ?>
The fact that he's english and I'm french means it wouldn't bother me all that much. tee-hee! but the whole point of a public demonstration like that, whether it's throwing soggy french fries or cleaving someone's head off, is to express discontentment. I still think most public demonstrations are founded in ignorance and don't accomplish anything other than further dividing the world's population, but oh well. Humankind is its own worst enemy.
In the grand scheme of things, a million terrorists could chop a million heads every day, really it doesn't make a goddamned difference because it doesn't matter where you're from, who/what/where/why/how you worship or how much money you've got. We're all just a bunch of horny hungry curious animals running around trying to live a long happy life, and that much will never change. The threats of the few cannot turn the minds of the majority.
Well then why do most word processors offer precise positioning of any element, various text and object justification schemes, headers and footers, even left/right margin breakers and many other layout controls ? They exist only to create readable documents after all.. why couldn't HTML do the same ? If I can tell Wordperfect to render a text block 3 inches wide by 2 inches tall, rotated 30 degrees and place it dead center in the page while reflowing text around it etc etc etc.. why not HTML ?
I think the reason I'm so upset with HTML and CSS is that they're just hacks layered on top of more hacks and wrapped in the wedgeless hack that is SGML.
Holistic computer repair... I like it.
And since you ended that line with a question mark, the answer is YES! People often ask me why I don't have an anti-virus installed and I just answer "I'm the best anti-virus in the world". Why ? Because I just KNOW. I'm one of those wackos who can tell when something is a little off in my PC, because I am so naturally attentive to little details. I can tell when an application is lagging just a tiny bit as a result of the virus looking for infectable executables; I can sense when my firewall box is working hard because of a stray worm on one of our PC's.. most importantly I have yet to spot a virus that is 100% stealthy because they all damage applications to a certain extent due to their greed and carelessness.
But I think the #1 reason why I don't need an anti-virus is I just know better than to get software from "unofficial mirrors" or click on my long-estranged half-step-brother-twice-removed Prince Mobutu Sesa the 8th who simply wants to show me his financial reports in EXE format "in case I didn't have Nigeriasoft Excel installed". How thoughtful of him!
Just a few months ago I strayed from my "anti-antivirus" stance and installed Clamshell AV. I just run it when I feel the need to, it doesn't monitor my email, network connections, or every goddamned disk operation. It doesn't turn my fast workstation into a bogged down Amiga emulator, and it doesn't give me Defcon-5 full-screen warnings about a "possibly hazardous image file named Slashdot.jpg". In other words I don't need Homeland Security on my firewalled and smartly-operated PC.
Ahh good old americans vs canadians.. we canadians want to know how much fuel it takes to get to where we need to be. Americans want to know how far they'll go with X amount of gas, because they really have no clue where they're going, they just want to drive their flashy guzzlers right into an economic depression again.
Let's face it: on paper, consumers would be in control of the oil producers, because we have the money they so desperately love. In reality, nobody gives a damn and we just want to floor that pedal until flames shoot out the back of the muffler. Don't count on humankind growing a collective superbrain because the laws of chaos dictate exactly the opposite. It doesn't even matter how high the price shoots at the pump.. even if it goes to 10$ a gallon, the OPEC will just make greater profits because we won't stop driving to work, we won't stop heating our homes.. You would think between the 7 billion inhabitants of earth, we could all pitch in a toonie, buy out the whole goddamned desert and kick those tyrants out. Small pests, big problems.
Okay this post is completely pointless and will probably sound like an infomercial, but the staff got a sneak peek of these just weeks ago and I can tell you that we all wanted one of these babies, if only they'd deduct them off our payroll in instalments :)
:)
It's such a weird beast due to its size, but from what I saw it is rather well designed with the handle and all. The wireless dockable keyboard and mouse are just so sexy. I'm not privy to any information beyond my tech support duties, but it's a safe guess that they had the newly-annexed Alienware folks involved in this project. Now I'm not a Dell fanboi in any way, they just give me money every two weeks which goes to the local OEM supplier in my neverending quest for more power, but if Dell made a Billco-approved XPS with 8-drive RAID-0 and quad-dualcore-opteron sweetness I just might kiss someone's ass for a staff discount
It should be pretty obvious based on common sense
For future reference, the proper term is "trivial".
I hate the term "viral marketing" as it is used to represent interesting content as opposed to "forced-down-your-throat" ad propaganda. Many years ago Bell Canada got into this "viral marketing" stuff by hiring a comedian to do their TV ads in Quebec. Now I hate telecoms even more than I hate buzzwords, but the ads were hilarious and everyone either loved or hated them, but all knew of them. Many people even recorded or downloaded them.. some used them as an answering message or ring tone.. you'll be hard pressed to find a Quebecer that won't chuckle or even sing along if you say "Bonjour Toto". The ad campaign was an explosive success.
Cue to the crappier ads I've seen locally, one for a huge used car dealership "Mega Automobile". They hired some coked-out ditz to overpronunciate catch phrases from a cue card while frenetically bouncing her empty head on each syllable. Just as cheesy as the stereotypical used car salesmen that work there. At least they could have hired a coked-out bikini ditz instead.. hell just stick a picture of Kermit the Frog on the screen for 30 seconds, it would probably work better than the cookie-cutter no-budget bullshit they pulled.
LOL.. you're either pulling very hard for a joke, or majestically ignorant :) DNS records are written backwards as are regular domain names - you don't type "com.mianus.www" do you ? On second thought, maybe you do *rimshot*
What they're basically saying is that coffee greatly reduces your chances of getting cirrhosis. That's great, but what are the evils of drinking so much coffee ? Isn't caffeine bad for us ? I've been drinking tons of pop since I was a wee hacker kid, and to me caffeine withdrawal is no different from any other drug-induced malaise - i.e. headaches, soreness, confusion/distraction, homicidal tendencies.. Seems like we're trading one vice for another here.
Go ahead, embrace your mutually assured destruction with your hostile enemies while I sit peacefully in Canada with my poutine and rich tasty beer. I'd rather be taxed poor than shot dead.
The problem with all this hype about profits in SL is that the money has to come from somewhere.. wherever there is gain, there must be equal loss to balance the equation. For every SL hundredaire, there's got to be a dozen virtual street bums and crackwhores. It's even worse that you can use real money to purchase virtual goods, that directly ties SL's economy to real-world stresses and constraints.
I can't say I'm not curious, but I am extremely skeptical. SL was created first and foremost to produce profit for its owners; it is a product.
Work, money, time.. you need at least two. Either pay up for internal Windows Messenger, whose client is already on all your desktops, or develop your own simple IM server and client putting in your own sweat and blood.. or pay someone to develop a non-MS solution. You have to weigh the potential benefits of an IM solution. For most people, just keeping their email open and minimized is good enough. If they don't reply to you quickly enough, well that's not email's fault, they can ignore IM windows just as easily.
Fuck me. As an amateur, serious photographer you're not the "average user", you're a prosumer or whatever they call us people who are easily parted from our money. I'm the same way with audio equipment. Not everyone uses a high end digital camera, cares about RAW images.. most people are happy with Kodak idiot-proof camera software that does everything automatically at moderate quality. Same thing with camcorders.. sure, MiniDV is big, and now HDV, but for the average person who just wants a computer for web surfing and email, it is much easier for them to get a set-top DVD deck they can simply plug their camcorder into and press "Record" like a VCR. Ten years ago I thought home entertainment CD burners were stupid, mostly because they needed "special" audio CD-R discs that cost more, but thinking outside of my own bubble, for non-geeks the concept of a CD or DVD burner that works exactly like a tape recorder is just fine. At least then you don't have to teach them how to use DVD Decrypter and DVDShrink and all that crap.
The hardware to put that in place is peanuts compared to what an actual wiretap costs, equipment, time, wages etc.
Having interviewed way too many prospective employees both in and out of IT, I can tell you right now that your "ex-military" woes have less to do with the military and more to do with poor staffing. Yes, military people are overconfident, that's just the kind of circle-jerk bullshit you have to develop in that kind of environment. What I think is happening at your workplace is your interviewers can't see past the strong attitude and get duped far too easily. The common "curve balls" used in interviews can easily backfire, that is a science in itself.
I learned early on that I'm a very charismatic candidate when it comes to job interviews. It doesn't matter what the job is, people either love me to death and think I'm the god of [insert business arc] or they think I'm the most arrogant, irreverent bastard they've ever met. It all boils down to bad hiring practices; an inexperienced or just plain bad interviewer will be easily deceived by someone who can talk the talk, if you can fake the jargon and make up for it with confidence and personality you can get any job. I've talked myself into jobs where the boss/manager thought I was going to be a phenomenon, yet a few weeks into it I knew it just wasn't meant to be, shocking the suits ghost-white with my resignation. It's kind of like poker, you could have a pair of deuces, but if your bluffing game is strong you will be in control.
The moral of this story is: if you have a bunch of ex-military applicants, learn to communicate effectively with them and find out what YOU want to know about the person, not what THEY want to tell you. This could be as simple as hiring a military staffing consultant to teach you how to talk to these people, or perhaps a psychologist to help you write a personality test like many of the top companies use.. you know, those stupid things that ask "If you found a ten dollar bill in front of a bank, would you return it?" kind of bullshit. Hey, they work!
Ok little interference here. I've been a web developer since early HTML and Netscape 2.0. I've been trying to come to grips with CSS for a few years now, but the bulk of the information available on CSS involves working around browser bugs. There is no consistent implementation of CSS anywhere, I don't care what you Opera zealots thing, it's still not right. CSS itself is lacking in many areas, most notably tables. Sure, the HTML table system is a pain in the butt, having to futz with ROWSPAN/COLSPAN and the link, but CSS can't even do that yet.
I still have to mix them both almost all the time, so I usually end up using CSS to describe fonts, colors and chrome, but decade-old HTML to describe the layout. My biggest peeve with CSS positioning is that of the few options available, half of them are unsupported, especially if they relate more to screen than print, such as when you're trying to present a web application.
Just try to put down a consistent status bar docked to the bottom of the browser, another across the top, and a task pane on the left; Outlook-style. The wealth of CSS trickery required to just make it work is horrible. Sure, getting the accessory panes up there is easy, it's getting the remainder of the window to flow naturally that's a disgusting hack. Your content pane ends up being the full size of the client area because those toolbars and status bars are "floating", so you have to set hard margins everywhere, but then you have to nest DIVs or else your scrolling will be fubarred. Really, how hard would it be for a browser that just rendered a bunch of rectangles, to figure out how much space is left for the remaining items ? Something like good old "frameset N,*" that flows automatically when resized.. trivial functionality yet it's not there thanks to some angry god-fearing designer.
Dude, Xbox.
I've got a couple dozen emus on my Xbox, with rom sets thanks to a hard drive upgrade. The hardest part is figuring out a button layout that's comfortable on the Xbox controller, once that's set up it's smooth sailing.
4. Profit!!!!
3. ????
2. purchase one pair of freaky hypoallergenic cats
1. second mortgage
... and the auto makers would go out of business because it would not only cost more to manufacture (steel is easier to shape and cut), but your car would last longer. These days the engines last longer than the body, especially for us beavers up in Canada with our ridiculous weather shifts and the beloved road salt they pile on every winter.
If you want Apache to take over IIS, just wrap a nice idiot-proof gui around it, replacing the irritating .conf files, then charge a modest amount of money for it.. something like $199 or so for the software with pay-per-incident support, or $599 for the same thing with unlimited phone support. It doesn't matter whether a product is good or not, it's all about how you package it, how it appears to the untrained eye, because let's face it, a lot of the people with buying authority couldn't tell a web server from a powerpoint presentation, as long as the powerpoint has a picture of a globe on it.
How is this better than just having 256mb of extra ram ? Since we're talking notebooks, there's a battery backup so having a big r/w disk cache is not a problem, your data won't vanish during a brownout (america's national pastime).
Hell, I have 4 gb ram in my desktop and it's the best damn speed booster I've ever had. The OS caches everything and syncs whenever the PC is idle, letting me run my bursty, data-intensive processes at full speed without any concern for disk throughput.
I think the real reason why I'm suspicious is the volatile nature of hard drives. Why would I want a hybrid drive that needs replacing every few years, when the part that breaks down is the cheaper half of the device ? Seems like a way for the HD manufacturers to squeeze more profit out of their mediocre products.
Err because it's a good idea ? Just because you can afford to throw out a pizza after taking just one bite doesn't mean it's a good idea.
I'm all for high-performance low-power chips. For most uses, we don't need the super-multi-ghz light-flickering beasts anyway. Frig, my main PC needs a 600 watt power supply just to breathe. Give me an 8-cpu low-voltage rig and I'll be happy, not to mention saving a chunk on my hydro bill. Hell, I'd build servers around massively-parallel mobile CPUs if I could.. just give me a board for it! Less power = less heat = longer life. I'm sure the nearest small biz with a dozen servers wouldn't mind an extra ten grand a year just in power savings for using low-voltage chips.
You lost all credibility in my eyes with that last zinger about Delphi. Delphi six years ago was just another VB, yes. Delphi today is downright scary in its breadth and performance. I haven't written a Delphi app in over a year now but I still swear by it. C++ needs to be taken down a notch or two.. sure it works, as long as you buy all the utilities to fix it :P BoundsChecker, Lint, Purify.. one isn't enough, usually. It's like MS Windows - it works once you throw in Ad-Aware, Spybot, WinRar etc.
I guess I live in a world where time = money, thus a faster development cycle with Delphi means I can get paid and move on to the next project in record time.
In the web world, it's like PHP vs Java. PHP is the slender, rebellious RAD tool, while Java is the fat, tempermental, old-fogey weapon of choice for people with too much time and money (that means Money^2) to spend. I'm not saying to write every app in PHP, that would be painful, but keep that Java away from the web server! It used to be that we'd write the complex logic in whatever native language we preferred, then simply used Perl/PHP as the glue - the presentation layer. What's so wrong with that practice ? It milked a whole lot more performance out of old server than today's big iron seems to handle.