Actually, the regular three-column layout that is popular all over the web really isn't that hard to implement in CSS
But that isn't a liquid layout, i.e. one in which all three columns can change size to fit their content, like the GP asked for. It's necessary to fix the size of at least one of the columns to make it function with the CSS that's implemented by common browsers.
Why bother with allowing the HTML mimetype, if it has no advantages other than it's what was done in the past?
Because XHTML adoption has been slowed by a lack of backwards compatibility: you can't currently deliver XHTML in a standards-compliant way and expect it to work on anything other than a small minority of browsers. Sending the data with content type 'application/xhtml+xml' or whatever confuses the current installed base of internet explorer, making it an extremely bad idea, and probably unusable for general consumption sites for at least the next 5 years. See this excellent article for more reasons why this is a good idea.
Are you trying to say that building software in short increments and with a supportive atmosphere for the programmers isn't a good idea? Because from where I'm sitting, both of those look like really good plans, whether you're doing agile development or not.
You make it sound like the advice of the article is to do agile development, but that's really not what it's saying at all. Yes, a couple of their suggestions happen to overlap with agile methods, and one of the people they're quoting is an agile proponent. But there is more to agile techniques than what they recommend. The main reason agile doesn't really work for large projects (and I know some people who'd dispute that assertion, but I'll let it pass because I have no large project experience) is that it actively avoids up-front planning, prefering instead to fix design faults as they are noticed. The article does not advocate this technique.
Based on those numbers and my own experience, my question is: Instead of trying to "fix" all these broken IT projects, why not just shit-can them before you've spent X many man-years on them? So many of them fail, but the failure of the project does not cause the failure of the company.
Agreed. In fact, agile development methods consider it a success when this happens: one of the stated aims is to deliver the best value for the business, and if that is best delivered by not producing software, it's the development team's responsibility to point this out.
Seriously, though the classic problem with IT projects are two-fold: 1) Unclear Requ2irements and, 2) Scope Creep.
The two are one and the same, of course, because they both mean that the program you're writing might not be the one that's actually needed.
IMHO, You have to assign someone from IT to LEARN THE BUSINESS before trying to create solutions.
This is an interesting approach, and it certainly has merit. Another option, one espoused by the agile development community, is to have someone who already knows the business assigned to IT for the duration of the project. It might not be as good as your suggestion, but it may be more realistic, particularly for shorter projects.
Nice code! I'd suggest, however, that the class name "DefaultFactory" isn't adequately descriptive. You should rename it to "StandardOutputMessageStrategyFactory" for the sake of clarity.
Fructose used responsibly is actually beneficial. Fructose is substantially sweeter than glucose, so consuming it could allow you to reduce your sugar intake. Consuming as much fructose as you would otherwise consume glucose is clearly bad for you, but there is an opportunity to reduce intake.
The HFCS used in most soft drinks is (I believe) 50% fructose. It is metabolised almost identically to sucrose: there is an initial enzyme that splits sucrose into glucose and fructose at similar ratios to the contents of the corn syrup, after that the metabolism is identical. It seems unlikely therefore that there is any substantial difference in health effects, and most of the studies quoted in the wikipedia article linked from the main story tend to agree with that.
Nothing's wrong with entertaining people. But suing people over it is just being a fucktard. I read both articles, nothing's changed, he's still a fucktard. Hey, I calls 'em like I sees 'em.
Well, yeah, he's been behaving like this for a while now. A couple of years ago, he tried to patent an idea for a reality TV show, and threatened to sue ABC when they produced something similar... "I will speak to my patent attorney -- I own the idea."
One solution that exists in the RIAA versus filesharer cases is that the RIAA has to provide a copyright registration certificate proving ownership of a song before they can proceed in court.
That's not actually true. You can prosecute a copyright infringement case without registration, but the damages you can receive are reduced if you do so, so they are *motivated* to provide copyright registration certificates, but they do not have to do so.
I went to school with the daughter of the inventor of Mountain Dew. The whole purpose of the formula was to let them pump as much caffeine into it without it tasting overly nasty.
You probably sit a little further away from your 20" screen than you did your 9" one. That said, bringing my editor out to full screen I see I can fit 162 columns on it without changing my font size, and I only have a 17" screen...
I find I tend to work to about 100 - 110 columns most of the time. I'm not precise about it, but I find that that width lets me use a readable font and still have enough space at the side of the code for a window with which to perform useful work (e.g. list of files in current project for easy access / unit testing GUI).
No. They do, however, act as a middleman, introducing people to each other who have. Generally speaking, legally, this would make them an accessory or accomplice to the crime. A valid defense would be either being completely unaware that it was occurring, or doing everything they could reasonably be expected to do to stop it happening. In this particular case, it would be hard to determine exactly how much effort they should be expected to go to. Their current practice (they claim) is to remove anything they receive a complaint about, but I've seen torrents on their site that have had people complaining in the comments contain kiddy porn. Should they have acted on those comments? Should they even be proactively downloading torrents that sounds as though they may contain illegal content to make sure? Or would this open them up to even further prosecution? At the extreme, should they even run the site if they cannot stop it?
I'm sure the latter isn't the correct approach here. But I'm not sure where on the spectrum the right thing to do does lie. It depends, apart from anything else, on the volume and seriousness of the illegal content that's present, something which I can't really judge.
I thought about that argument and then I realized "Well, they could always goto a pub that doesn't allow smoking."
Right. And you find one of those... where?
Seriously. The commercial pressures are such that it is almost business suicide for a pub to go no smoking, unless there are no alternative smoking pubs in its local area. Saying the market should cater for the requirement is all nice & libertarian, but in practice it has been shown not to work.
Um, the comparison was more than fair. It compared the.NET SYSTEM stuff to the POSIX spec. To re-quote: "Tabulating only MSCORLIB.DLL and those assemblies that begin with word System..." I mean, doesn't.NET consist of more than an interface to the operating system?
Err... The "System" heirarchy in.NET contains a lot more than OS interfacing. It contains, among other things, basic data types including string and number handling, a collections library, class reflection and runtime invocation, a GUI framework, database access, XML and HTML DOM implementations, an in-memory database implementation that uses the XML DOM as its storage target, a framework for writing web applications, image manipulation libraries, three data serialization frameworks (binary, xml and soap), remote procedure call handling, and a whole load of other useful junk.
So, are you going to write a significant Windows app with only MSCORLIB.DLL and the "assemblies that begin with the word System"?
Yes. I have written a reasonably complex domain-specific CAD application in C++/CLI using only System packages (System, System::ComponentModel, System::Collections, System::Windows::Forms, System::Data, System::Drawing, System::IO and System::Runtime::Serialization::Formatters::Soap). The only library-like code I had to write was a set of domain-specific objects that could be included in drawings.
Something's wrong with your machine. I'm on a 2.7GHz Celeron D / 1GB, and Eclipse is pretty responsive. Startup time is a little slow, at 27s (compared to 8s for VS2005), but responsiveness once the app's loaded is pretty-much flawless.
Java has been around a bit longer, so it actually has a bit more 3rd party support industry wide, certainly more stable support. It has a lot of open source libraries which are commonly shared across the industry, so new tools/products are generally very quick to learn and if you need to work around something a library doesn't handle well, it's a bit easier to do it in a maintainable way.
This is something I was going to mention too. Java development has a culture of free tools that seems to be lacking in the.net world. Stuff like Apache Jakarta, Spring, Hibernate, HSQL, POI, and so on are all particularly useful tools that (it seems from my brief experience of.net programming) I would spend a while looking for and then spend some cash to get hold of if I wanted something similar for a.net application.
presents problems with IP; specifically, section 4d, which boils down to providing code for the user to recompile that links to the LGPL'd libraries (not likely with most commercial IP models), or depending on the fact that the user has the library on their system already, which you can't do, because if they don't, your app, and therefore your whole commercial premise, is down the drain.
1. Section 4d (0) doesn't require source code, it requires something that can be relinked. This could be a '.o' file produced by linking together all of your source code and stripping internal symbols, if you wish.
2. 4d (1) doesn't mean what you think it means, either. The word "already" applies "at run time", which means that it is fine for your program to be executed by a wrapper program that checks for the presence of the library and installs it if it is not already present. The program then starts running, and finds the library "already" present, and links to it.
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Why do you Brits always insist on using French spellings?
Because the word was imported into the language from French? Dunno, just guessing here.
I have it. Call it HTML 2.0.
You mean HTML 2 Standard Edition 1.5, surely?
Actually, the regular three-column layout that is popular all over the web really isn't that hard to implement in CSS
But that isn't a liquid layout, i.e. one in which all three columns can change size to fit their content, like the GP asked for. It's necessary to fix the size of at least one of the columns to make it function with the CSS that's implemented by common browsers.
Why bother with allowing the HTML mimetype, if it has no advantages other than it's what was done in the past?
Because XHTML adoption has been slowed by a lack of backwards compatibility: you can't currently deliver XHTML in a standards-compliant way and expect it to work on anything other than a small minority of browsers. Sending the data with content type 'application/xhtml+xml' or whatever confuses the current installed base of internet explorer, making it an extremely bad idea, and probably unusable for general consumption sites for at least the next 5 years. See this excellent article for more reasons why this is a good idea.
Are you trying to say that building software in short increments and with a supportive atmosphere for the programmers isn't a good idea? Because from where I'm sitting, both of those look like really good plans, whether you're doing agile development or not.
You make it sound like the advice of the article is to do agile development, but that's really not what it's saying at all. Yes, a couple of their suggestions happen to overlap with agile methods, and one of the people they're quoting is an agile proponent. But there is more to agile techniques than what they recommend. The main reason agile doesn't really work for large projects (and I know some people who'd dispute that assertion, but I'll let it pass because I have no large project experience) is that it actively avoids up-front planning, prefering instead to fix design faults as they are noticed. The article does not advocate this technique.
Based on those numbers and my own experience, my question is: Instead of trying to "fix" all these broken IT projects, why not just shit-can them before you've spent X many man-years on them? So many of them fail, but the failure of the project does not cause the failure of the company.
Agreed. In fact, agile development methods consider it a success when this happens: one of the stated aims is to deliver the best value for the business, and if that is best delivered by not producing software, it's the development team's responsibility to point this out.
Seriously, though the classic problem with IT projects are two-fold: 1) Unclear Requ2irements and, 2) Scope Creep.
The two are one and the same, of course, because they both mean that the program you're writing might not be the one that's actually needed.
IMHO, You have to assign someone from IT to LEARN THE BUSINESS before trying to create solutions.
This is an interesting approach, and it certainly has merit. Another option, one espoused by the agile development community, is to have someone who already knows the business assigned to IT for the duration of the project. It might not be as good as your suggestion, but it may be more realistic, particularly for shorter projects.
This is simply the music industry's response to the vanity press. I first saw it commented on here.
Nice code! I'd suggest, however, that the class name "DefaultFactory" isn't adequately descriptive. You should rename it to "StandardOutputMessageStrategyFactory" for the sake of clarity.
Fructose used responsibly is actually beneficial. Fructose is substantially sweeter than glucose, so consuming it could allow you to reduce your sugar intake. Consuming as much fructose as you would otherwise consume glucose is clearly bad for you, but there is an opportunity to reduce intake.
The HFCS used in most soft drinks is (I believe) 50% fructose. It is metabolised almost identically to sucrose: there is an initial enzyme that splits sucrose into glucose and fructose at similar ratios to the contents of the corn syrup, after that the metabolism is identical. It seems unlikely therefore that there is any substantial difference in health effects, and most of the studies quoted in the wikipedia article linked from the main story tend to agree with that.
Nothing's wrong with entertaining people. But suing people over it is just being a fucktard. I read both articles, nothing's changed, he's still a fucktard. Hey, I calls 'em like I sees 'em.
Well, yeah, he's been behaving like this for a while now. A couple of years ago, he tried to patent an idea for a reality TV show, and threatened to sue ABC when they produced something similar... "I will speak to my patent attorney -- I own the idea."
One solution that exists in the RIAA versus filesharer cases is that the RIAA has to provide a copyright registration certificate proving ownership of a song before they can proceed in court.
That's not actually true. You can prosecute a copyright infringement case without registration, but the damages you can receive are reduced if you do so, so they are *motivated* to provide copyright registration certificates, but they do not have to do so.
I went to school with the daughter of the inventor of Mountain Dew. The whole purpose of the formula was to let them pump as much caffeine into it without it tasting overly nasty.
They failed.
You probably sit a little further away from your 20" screen than you did your 9" one. That said, bringing my editor out to full screen I see I can fit 162 columns on it without changing my font size, and I only have a 17" screen...
I find I tend to work to about 100 - 110 columns most of the time. I'm not precise about it, but I find that that width
lets me use a readable font and still have enough space at the side of the code for a window with which to perform useful work (e.g. list of files in current project for easy access / unit testing GUI).
Nope. TPB does not host any illegal content.
No. They do, however, act as a middleman, introducing people to each other who have. Generally speaking, legally, this would make them an accessory or accomplice to the crime. A valid defense would be either being completely unaware that it was occurring, or doing everything they could reasonably be expected to do to stop it happening. In this particular case, it would be hard to determine exactly how much effort they should be expected to go to. Their current practice (they claim) is to remove anything they receive a complaint about, but I've seen torrents on their site that have had people complaining in the comments contain kiddy porn. Should they have acted on those comments? Should they even be proactively downloading torrents that sounds as though they may contain illegal content to make sure? Or would this open them up to even further prosecution? At the extreme, should they even run the site if they cannot stop it?
I'm sure the latter isn't the correct approach here. But I'm not sure where on the spectrum the right thing to do does lie. It depends, apart from anything else, on the volume and seriousness of the illegal content that's present, something which I can't really judge.
I thought about that argument and then I realized "Well, they could always goto a pub that doesn't allow smoking."
Right. And you find one of those... where?
Seriously. The commercial pressures are such that it is almost business suicide for a pub to go no smoking, unless there are no alternative smoking pubs in its local area. Saying the market should cater for the requirement is all nice & libertarian, but in practice it has been shown not to work.
There's a list of a few here.
The best known example is Eclipse.
Short answer: Java GUIs still look like crap compared to native GUIs (or Qt, for that matter).
Come again?
Could you give me a rundown on what's wrong with these screenshots compared to a "native" GUI? Because frankly I don't see the slightest difference.
Um, the comparison was more than fair. It compared the .NET SYSTEM stuff to the POSIX spec. To re-quote: "Tabulating only MSCORLIB.DLL and those assemblies that begin with word System..." I mean, doesn't .NET consist of more than an interface to the operating system?
.NET contains a lot more than OS interfacing. It contains, among other things, basic data types including string and number handling, a collections library, class reflection and runtime invocation, a GUI framework, database access, XML and HTML DOM implementations, an in-memory database implementation that uses the XML DOM as its storage target, a framework for writing web applications, image manipulation libraries, three data serialization frameworks (binary, xml and soap), remote procedure call handling, and a whole load of other useful junk.
. The only library-like code I had to write was a set of domain-specific objects that could be included in drawings.
Err... The "System" heirarchy in
So, are you going to write a significant Windows app with only MSCORLIB.DLL and the "assemblies that begin with the word System"?
Yes. I have written a reasonably complex domain-specific CAD application in C++/CLI using only System packages (System, System::ComponentModel, System::Collections, System::Windows::Forms, System::Data, System::Drawing, System::IO and System::Runtime::Serialization::Formatters::Soap)
Something's wrong with your machine. I'm on a 2.7GHz Celeron D / 1GB, and Eclipse is pretty responsive. Startup time is a little slow, at 27s (compared to 8s for VS2005), but responsiveness once the app's loaded is pretty-much flawless.
Java has been around a bit longer, so it actually has a bit more 3rd party support industry wide, certainly more stable support. It has a lot of open source libraries which are commonly shared across the industry, so new tools/products are generally very quick to learn and if you need to work around something a library doesn't handle well, it's a bit easier to do it in a maintainable way.
.net world. Stuff like Apache Jakarta, Spring, Hibernate, HSQL, POI, and so on are all particularly useful tools that (it seems from my brief experience of .net programming) I would spend a while looking for and then spend some cash to get hold of if I wanted something similar for a .net application.
This is something I was going to mention too. Java development has a culture of free tools that seems to be lacking in the
Java is fine for CLI/Server apps, but for desktop apps it doesn't have a native look-and-feel on any platform, and it lacks integration with the OS
(Cough). Have you tried SWT?
presents problems with IP; specifically, section 4d, which boils down to providing code for the user to recompile that links to the LGPL'd libraries (not likely with most commercial IP models), or depending on the fact that the user has the library on their system already, which you can't do, because if they don't, your app, and therefore your whole commercial premise, is down the drain.
1. Section 4d (0) doesn't require source code, it requires something that can be relinked. This could be a '.o' file produced by linking together all of your source code and stripping internal symbols, if you wish.
2. 4d (1) doesn't mean what you think it means, either. The word "already" applies "at run time", which means that it is fine for your program to be executed by a wrapper program that checks for the presence of the library and installs it if it is not already present. The program then starts running, and finds the library "already" present, and links to it.