I find the LOTR characters "shallow" and undeveloped.
Like Beowulf? Or Sir Gawain? (and the Green Knight, for that matter) The Norse Aesir?
Critiquing Tolkein for supposed dodgy character development is rather missing the point...his models are historical epics and legendaria, not Don Quixote. The sweep of history and it's effects on it's participants is the thing to him, not necessarily the mental state of Frodo as he stood at the Crack of Doom. Or the specific worldview of Boromir as affected by the dysfunctional dynamics of his family of origin.
I would argue that casting his actors as somewhat tabulae rasae (and you are given just enough tantalizing background on most of the characters to at least have a jumping-off point) potentially deepens the reading experience--readers have to fill in the blanks, to the degree they are interested in/motivated to doing so. Sometimes it's the stuff left out which makes things interesting.
You're free to not like this school of writing, of course, but trying to pop him in the box of "only character-driven literature is worthy of the label" and then finding him wanting is myopic and unfairly constraining. There are many models of literature after all...
The 14th district cuts across a broad swath of northern Illinois [as can be seen in the map in the Wikipedia] in the time-honored fashion that would make it a generally safe seat for the conservative Republican.
Yes, we do know how to take care of our incumbents here in Illinois, don't we?
Any other Republican candidate, I would unreservedly agree with you. Oberweis may have to demonstrate something resembling a clue however...there's quite a bit of Republican backlash building up here and I don't think he'll be a shoo-in unless he can somehow demonstrate he's something more than a rich, petulant ass-clown. The 14th isn't completely the rural conservative haven it's made out to be by some...DeKalb is a good-sized college town that will probably swing hard Democrat this fall, and Aurora has a significant minority population that consistently votes Democrat as well. Even in Denny's day, I think people kept him around as much for his seniority in the delegation (and the attendant perks it brought) as any other ideological reason.
It'll be a hard-fought election, no question, and I'm girding myself up for the next round of supremely annoying, content-free attack ads both candidates will be airing for the next 6 months. Yecch...
The first term congressman does not make policy. He will be two years learning the job and lucky to get a committee assignment that is remotely relevant to anything more significant than the coastal defense of Wyoming.
What everyone is missing is that this election seats him only until the next election this fall (he's filling the seat vacated by Dennis Hastert.) He and Jim Oberweis (his Republican opposition) do it all over again for the November election.
Given that legislative activity pretty much drops off the map by summer of an election year, he'll probably be able to nominate a few deserving kids to West Point, march in a few parades, send a few letters out and not much more of consequence.
I do hope he gets elected to the full 2-year term this fall; Oberweis is a perpetual candidate with seemingly very little to offer his electorate beyond regular screeds bashing "tax and spend Democrats" and braying how immigration is slowly dissolving the moral fiber of the Republic...
During more than two hours of testimony, scientists and religious representatives argued over whether teaching that humans evolved from a single-celled species over hundreds of millions of years should be taken as gospel.
Not sure that's the word said scientists would use in this context themselves...
I'm still trying to make sense of using anything other than Tomcat, but some corps just like to spend money, I guess.
Tomcat is my container of choice for servlets and JSPs...but it won't help you much as an EJB container unfortunately. That was, once upon a time, a big selling point for the BEA stack. And, probably not coincidentally, as EJB's began to acquire a bit of a bad smell in the J2EE community BEA became a bit less attractive an option given the alternatives available for the J2EE stack (JBoss anyone?)
Normally very true. Muddled somewhat in this case by the overall bland reputation of the Oracle products that overlap BEA's (is anyone even using Oracle's app server for something other than supporting Oracle apps these days?)
My guess is BEA's customers are in for more of a re-branding than a product EOL: many of the BEA stack component technologies would be folded into the Oracle product mix and renamed. I'm not convinced the BEA brand was a big draw for new business these days anyway, so it would be a manageable pain from Oracle's perspective. The biggest headache in this case may be getting BEA's current customer base to not cut bait and migrate once they see Oracle's product pricing, post-branding.
One big EOL risk (IMHO) is the AquaLogic stuff, given Oracle's big push into SOA the past couple of years--Ellison, et al, may not want to eat that R/D.
Not good times right now for the majority of BEA's staff though, in any event...
There are many, many possible ways to reply to this. I'll go with what I believe to be the most direct and simple.
Find a copy of a support contract (Microsoft or any other large vendor's, it doesn't matter.) Find the section or clause in it that obligates the vendor to respond to your issue with a functional remedy to your satisfaction and what period the remedy will be provided within. Note that "acknowledgement of" or "recording of" or "response to" the issue does not constitute a remedy, for purposes of this discussion. A remedy is something that mitigates the issue, nothing less.
Still looking?
Still looking?
Given up yet? Probably should, as you won't find it (unless your relationship with the vendor truly does fall into the "incredibly powerful" category I mentioned previously.) No vendor, not one, will contractually surrender such an amount of freedom for any but the most extraordinary relationships. That is the whole of the point I was making, which presentation so offended you. You are guaranteed nothing in terms of a functional remedy by such a contract; whatever is provided is provided at the vendors discretion and generally on their timetable. Nothing in this represents a rubbishing of Microsoft or any other vendor; it is simply what is. Were I running a company, I would be loathe to give up that kind of control of my timelines, I certainly can't fault any other vendor for having the same view.
There are many valid reasons to purchase a support contract, not the least of which is having de-facto access to other customer's tales of woe and the vendor's attempts to help said customers. Such means can indeed provide an appropriate resolution, and often do, and that may be worth the associated expense. Note though in this case, the vendor is providing something they already have, at their convenience, which is quite another case from what you're positing.
I also do indeed believe that support is taken seriously by many vendors, who do indeed view it as part of the brand experience and reply accordingly (sadly nearly offset by the set of vendors who view it otherwise, but that's another discussion.)
The above notwithstanding however, the notion of entering into a support contract as a mechanism to force timely mitigation behavior from a major vendor like Microsoft...my apologies if I don't lend that much credence.
(Any may God help me if I feel the need to stoke the techno-populist fires on Slashdot to reinforce my own self-esteem...)
Really? Cause I thought that was exactly what putting in a trouble ticket through a paid support contract did... Let me know if that's really not true, cause I'd have pretty good grounds for a hefty law suit.
So...you're saying waving your twee little support contract at the mighty Redmond is sufficient for them to drop whatever they're working on, abandon any strategic assumptions that factor into their release schedules, and do a code drop for your specific benefit?
Bollocks. You're either incredibly powerful or unfathomably mental, and deeply disturbing to us mere mortals in either case. Although the image of someone standing outside the main door at Microsoft, waving a piece of paper and bellowing for satisfaction is rather amusing in a Python-esque way.
GP post is spot-on: support guarantees you nothing. Nothing at all, beyond someone picking the phone up and listening to you (hopefully politely) for a few moments. It should at least include a reasonable attempt to diagnose your problem, but even that seems dodgy these days. It certainly won't swerve a major vendor an whit off of any bigger plans, which do typically encompass release schedules for a product that helps ensure lock-in like IE does.
Guess it's time for a sit-down with your legal representation, let us know how your suit proceeds. In the meantime, someone please mod this down to something reflecting reality...it certainly isn't insightful.
Even though my gag reflex is kicking in hard at the thought of some nebulous sequel to the Hobbit being made, there is some potential ground he could cover that might not completely suck:
Aragorn's backstory, his upbringing and pre-LOTR adventures (I can see the tagline now: "Aragorn...The Thorongil Years!" ((shudder)). Plenty of potential for hack-n-slash, plus more gooeyness for the romantic types when Arwen enters the picture.
Balin's ultimately-doomed attempt to re-establish Khazad-Dum
The various goings-on of the White Council...elves and wizards and rings, oh my! More hack-and-slash goodness, especially if he films the expulsion of Sauron from Dol Guldur.
Some cobbled-together bits on how Frodo came to be Bilbo's ward and heir.
Maybe I should whip a quick script proposal together...
The death-by-pastiche potential of such a movie is off the charts. But I'd (grudgingly) take any/all of them over some "elves at Helm's Deep"-style, ego-driven plot lunacy he arrives at from whole-cloth.
self.primary_key = "whatever_your_key_column_is"...and you set the value yourself prior to saving the record. Whatever you want to stuff into the field, have a ball.
2. Composite Key
Take your pick of a number of plugins. My preference is CompositeKeys.
Is there some other key specification case you feel AR doesn't adequately support?
is the Kensington Orbit Optical trackball. The ball is about an inch and three quarters in diameter (larger than the typical Logitech offering) and, more importantly, about 3/4 of the surface area is exposed for tracking/rolling, which provides very smooth and consistent pointer movement without having to arch your fingers over the top of the roller or wag your finger back and forth constantly. Price point (US$ 30 or so) is also very attractive. My only complaint is that it's two-button and you need to chord to get middle-button functionality, but that's a pretty minor quibble.
Highly recommended, if you'd like to try out a good quality trackball without spending a hundred dollars.
(btw, I'm not affiliated with Kensington in any way, other than a long-time product user.)
you seem to be making the assumption that its talking about Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007. Its not.
I did indeed make that assumption; thanks for the correction. Strike the "very expensive" rhetoric.
That done, however, I stand by everything else in the comment, and certainly by the "non-open" adjective. At the end of the day, the software responsible for all of the meaty, heavy-lifting stuff remains closed, while a highly specialized library providing limited general functionality is provided in open form. A godsend for it's particular users, I'm sure, but of limited practical value.
This is still just another variant of the "expensive closed platform + free SDK " strategy Microsoft has been using for the past two decades now, but wrapped in warm fuzzy open source market-speak. Absolutely nothing that's materially new.
Also...no 'karma burn', not from me at least. I don't hate MS, not at all. But rubbish is still rubbish, and needs to be called as such. And this is most certainly rubbish.
Worse still, with this so-called 'product' in particular. The article goes into long,loving prose describing the development of the learning kit, it's functional origins in a now-defunct product, how it provides great value to education users, promotes peace throughout the land, etc... and omits how useless it is without having already purchased a decidedly non-open and very expensive SharePoint product.
Where is the value here for the customer? This is an improvement,how? Great, customers get a development kit optimized for producing a certain type of SharePoint object set. Just another SDK...whoop-dee-bleeping-doo. How is this different from the legion of Microsoft SDKs and APIs produced over the last 25 years?
Same tired horse, different saddle. Not that I'm very surprised.
Slashdot Mirror
Like Beowulf? Or Sir Gawain? (and the Green Knight, for that matter) The Norse Aesir?
Critiquing Tolkein for supposed dodgy character development is rather missing the point...his models are historical epics and legendaria, not Don Quixote. The sweep of history and it's effects on it's participants is the thing to him, not necessarily the mental state of Frodo as he stood at the Crack of Doom. Or the specific worldview of Boromir as affected by the dysfunctional dynamics of his family of origin.
I would argue that casting his actors as somewhat tabulae rasae (and you are given just enough tantalizing background on most of the characters to at least have a jumping-off point) potentially deepens the reading experience--readers have to fill in the blanks, to the degree they are interested in/motivated to doing so. Sometimes it's the stuff left out which makes things interesting.
You're free to not like this school of writing, of course, but trying to pop him in the box of "only character-driven literature is worthy of the label" and then finding him wanting is myopic and unfairly constraining. There are many models of literature after all...
And what happens when the Sharepoint server hosting all of this wonderousness goes offline?
+5 Insightful? Give me a flippin' break...
Yes, we do know how to take care of our incumbents here in Illinois, don't we?
Any other Republican candidate, I would unreservedly agree with you. Oberweis may have to demonstrate something resembling a clue however...there's quite a bit of Republican backlash building up here and I don't think he'll be a shoo-in unless he can somehow demonstrate he's something more than a rich, petulant ass-clown. The 14th isn't completely the rural conservative haven it's made out to be by some...DeKalb is a good-sized college town that will probably swing hard Democrat this fall, and Aurora has a significant minority population that consistently votes Democrat as well. Even in Denny's day, I think people kept him around as much for his seniority in the delegation (and the attendant perks it brought) as any other ideological reason.
It'll be a hard-fought election, no question, and I'm girding myself up for the next round of supremely annoying, content-free attack ads both candidates will be airing for the next 6 months. Yecch...
What everyone is missing is that this election seats him only until the next election this fall (he's filling the seat vacated by Dennis Hastert.) He and Jim Oberweis (his Republican opposition) do it all over again for the November election.
Given that legislative activity pretty much drops off the map by summer of an election year, he'll probably be able to nominate a few deserving kids to West Point, march in a few parades, send a few letters out and not much more of consequence.
I do hope he gets elected to the full 2-year term this fall; Oberweis is a perpetual candidate with seemingly very little to offer his electorate beyond regular screeds bashing "tax and spend Democrats" and braying how immigration is slowly dissolving the moral fiber of the Republic...
"Mr. Gygax, care to explain why I wasn't included in Deities and Demigods?"
Not sure that's the word said scientists would use in this context themselves...
They'll only introduce evil villains they would have a plausible chance of defeating. Maybe a Mitch Kapor or Mark Andreesen doll would work...
We are all appreciative of your taste and good manners. In return, I promise to not comment on anything relating to cartesian products...
How long until an Augmentor appears?
Victorian-era people called said gentleman a "butler". I never realized how ahead of their time they actually were until now...
...my dog.
And now everyone on the Internet knows it.
Tomcat is my container of choice for servlets and JSPs...but it won't help you much as an EJB container unfortunately. That was, once upon a time, a big selling point for the BEA stack. And, probably not coincidentally, as EJB's began to acquire a bit of a bad smell in the J2EE community BEA became a bit less attractive an option given the alternatives available for the J2EE stack (JBoss anyone?)
Normally very true. Muddled somewhat in this case by the overall bland reputation of the Oracle products that overlap BEA's (is anyone even using Oracle's app server for something other than supporting Oracle apps these days?)
My guess is BEA's customers are in for more of a re-branding than a product EOL: many of the BEA stack component technologies would be folded into the Oracle product mix and renamed. I'm not convinced the BEA brand was a big draw for new business these days anyway, so it would be a manageable pain from Oracle's perspective. The biggest headache in this case may be getting BEA's current customer base to not cut bait and migrate once they see Oracle's product pricing, post-branding.
One big EOL risk (IMHO) is the AquaLogic stuff, given Oracle's big push into SOA the past couple of years--Ellison, et al, may not want to eat that R/D.
Not good times right now for the majority of BEA's staff though, in any event...
There are many, many possible ways to reply to this. I'll go with what I believe to be the most direct and simple.
Find a copy of a support contract (Microsoft or any other large vendor's, it doesn't matter.) Find the section or clause in it that obligates the vendor to respond to your issue with a functional remedy to your satisfaction and what period the remedy will be provided within. Note that "acknowledgement of" or "recording of" or "response to" the issue does not constitute a remedy, for purposes of this discussion. A remedy is something that mitigates the issue, nothing less.
Still looking?
Still looking?
Given up yet? Probably should, as you won't find it (unless your relationship with the vendor truly does fall into the "incredibly powerful" category I mentioned previously.) No vendor, not one, will contractually surrender such an amount of freedom for any but the most extraordinary relationships. That is the whole of the point I was making, which presentation so offended you. You are guaranteed nothing in terms of a functional remedy by such a contract; whatever is provided is provided at the vendors discretion and generally on their timetable. Nothing in this represents a rubbishing of Microsoft or any other vendor; it is simply what is. Were I running a company, I would be loathe to give up that kind of control of my timelines, I certainly can't fault any other vendor for having the same view.
There are many valid reasons to purchase a support contract, not the least of which is having de-facto access to other customer's tales of woe and the vendor's attempts to help said customers. Such means can indeed provide an appropriate resolution, and often do, and that may be worth the associated expense. Note though in this case, the vendor is providing something they already have, at their convenience, which is quite another case from what you're positing.
I also do indeed believe that support is taken seriously by many vendors, who do indeed view it as part of the brand experience and reply accordingly (sadly nearly offset by the set of vendors who view it otherwise, but that's another discussion.)
The above notwithstanding however, the notion of entering into a support contract as a mechanism to force timely mitigation behavior from a major vendor like Microsoft...my apologies if I don't lend that much credence.
(Any may God help me if I feel the need to stoke the techno-populist fires on Slashdot to reinforce my own self-esteem...)
So...you're saying waving your twee little support contract at the mighty Redmond is sufficient for them to drop whatever they're working on, abandon any strategic assumptions that factor into their release schedules, and do a code drop for your specific benefit?
Bollocks. You're either incredibly powerful or unfathomably mental, and deeply disturbing to us mere mortals in either case. Although the image of someone standing outside the main door at Microsoft, waving a piece of paper and bellowing for satisfaction is rather amusing in a Python-esque way.
GP post is spot-on: support guarantees you nothing. Nothing at all, beyond someone picking the phone up and listening to you (hopefully politely) for a few moments. It should at least include a reasonable attempt to diagnose your problem, but even that seems dodgy these days. It certainly won't swerve a major vendor an whit off of any bigger plans, which do typically encompass release schedules for a product that helps ensure lock-in like IE does.
Guess it's time for a sit-down with your legal representation, let us know how your suit proceeds. In the meantime, someone please mod this down to something reflecting reality...it certainly isn't insightful.
Maybe I should whip a quick script proposal together...
The death-by-pastiche potential of such a movie is off the charts. But I'd (grudgingly) take any/all of them over some "elves at Helm's Deep"-style, ego-driven plot lunacy he arrives at from whole-cloth.
Er, for the syntax lawyers out there, make that:
class SelfManagedKey < ActiveRecord::Base
Guess you couldn't be bothered to research how AR works...
...and you set the value yourself prior to saving the record. Whatever you want to stuff into the field, have a ball.
1. Scalar key column, non-autoincremented approach:
class SelfManagedKey ActiveRecord::Base
self.primary_key = "whatever_your_key_column_is"
2. Composite Key
Take your pick of a number of plugins. My preference is CompositeKeys.
Is there some other key specification case you feel AR doesn't adequately support?
the GGP post didn't mention onomatopoeia...
make that:
from the mouse-that-roared dept.
....what to do about the vermicious knids?
is the Kensington Orbit Optical trackball. The ball is about an inch and three quarters in diameter (larger than the typical Logitech offering) and, more importantly, about 3/4 of the surface area is exposed for tracking/rolling, which provides very smooth and consistent pointer movement without having to arch your fingers over the top of the roller or wag your finger back and forth constantly. Price point (US$ 30 or so) is also very attractive. My only complaint is that it's two-button and you need to chord to get middle-button functionality, but that's a pretty minor quibble.
Highly recommended, if you'd like to try out a good quality trackball without spending a hundred dollars.
(btw, I'm not affiliated with Kensington in any way, other than a long-time product user.)
I did indeed make that assumption; thanks for the correction. Strike the "very expensive" rhetoric.
That done, however, I stand by everything else in the comment, and certainly by the "non-open" adjective. At the end of the day, the software responsible for all of the meaty, heavy-lifting stuff remains closed, while a highly specialized library providing limited general functionality is provided in open form. A godsend for it's particular users, I'm sure, but of limited practical value.
This is still just another variant of the "expensive closed platform + free SDK " strategy Microsoft has been using for the past two decades now, but wrapped in warm fuzzy open source market-speak. Absolutely nothing that's materially new.
Also...no 'karma burn', not from me at least. I don't hate MS, not at all. But rubbish is still rubbish, and needs to be called as such. And this is most certainly rubbish.
Worse still, with this so-called 'product' in particular. The article goes into long,loving prose describing the development of the learning kit, it's functional origins in a now-defunct product, how it provides great value to education users, promotes peace throughout the land, etc... and omits how useless it is without having already purchased a decidedly non-open and very expensive SharePoint product.
Where is the value here for the customer? This is an improvement,how? Great, customers get a development kit optimized for producing a certain type of SharePoint object set. Just another SDK...whoop-dee-bleeping-doo. How is this different from the legion of Microsoft SDKs and APIs produced over the last 25 years?
Same tired horse, different saddle. Not that I'm very surprised.