So it's just a coincidence that people who look the same (genetically similar) group themselves together in geographical areas and share the same culture? Isn't that worth defending?
Nationalisim is a psychosis. Culture isn't. Yet culture has nothing to do with colored pieces of cloth hanging from poles and where exactly in the sand an imagenary line runs that some people call 'border'. To sort of quote Robert Anton Wilson: Flags are real. Languages are real. Guns are real. Katjushas are real. 'Holy' Books are real. But Nations and Religions are social ficton. Or, as I like to put it more percisely imho, mass-psychosis. In the middle east these days definitely.
Sad if it's about the current war in the ME.
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Lead PHP Developer Quits
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Sad if it's about the current war in the ME. Nationalisim is basically nothing more than a mass-psychosis, with fanatisim and fundametalisim being the extremer variants. Conducted by a few who know each other well to have millions of people who don't know each other compete or fight. You'd expect a high profile OSS dev intelligent enough to shake it.
The ones that deserve to be shot are Nasralla, some back-room Zionists and a few old-school fanatic muslims in Gaza and Syria. The rest would get along quite well actually. Just the other day I saw a newsfeed where an israeli arab (sitting in a cafe with his jewish friend) hit it on the spot (paraphrased): "It's allways gouverments and organisations fighting. The common people just what to live in peace, sip their cafe and play backgammon. Jews, Muslims and whomever else." True that is. Let's hope this crap is over soon and the maniacs fit's come to an end.
It's not the "next big thing." In fact, it's the old big thing that kept me running Windows XP on a machine at home.
Bingo. Right on. What we are seeing now is the reality that the experts saw coming 6-7 years ago is finally seeping into mainstream. Shrinkwrap software only business is over. Win2k/XP is mostly just a driver layer and gaming bios these days. The OSS vendors like Novel/SuSE/RedHat have been screwing around to much, that's what's held Linux/OSS back the last few years. Now with Canonical/Ubuntu finally getting the obsticles out of the way (zero-fuss hardware compliance) things are finally picking up speed. I've even considerd going back to Non-Apple Hardware after 3 years of OS X just because of that. I definitely see Linux Desktops become mainstream real soon now.
Knock it off allready. I've had enough of the eternal Dimwits constantly bashing this or that with "MySQL not scalable" "PHP not scalable", blablabla. PHP has arrived in the enterprise market. That's a fact. Yes, I know, Java has been there for 8 years, PHP is messy and quirky (so is Perl), MySQL isn't a DB, we've heard it all before. In case you haven't noticed: PHP 5 is out. It's a full blown, mature PL and arguably the 400 pound gorilla of SSI solutions with a long history. MySQL 5 is out aswell. It's a full blown DB and comes with tons of free x-platform admin and design tools that make building the outline of a large webapp a walk in the park and thus scares the living daylights out of Oracle and IBM. You may have noticed IBM virtually giving their DB2 away for free (beer) since just a few months ago. Guess how that happend. Imagine someone would come along and tell you that large-scale webapps in Perl are a pipedream. Not to far-fetched in this context, no? And what about slashdot and kuro5hin?
PHP is as good a technology as any other in use when it comes to building large webapps (point in case: www.rubyonrails.org/index.php/ ). Industry strength PHP Frameworks are poping up left, right and center and other places like mushrooms after the rain. And as for MySQL "not being ready for large, scalable apps" - you're being silly.
Oh, so buzzwords can be used to disguise laziness and bad implementation? Where's the news? Even in his satire of XML (and don't you think I'm a big XML fan) he shows that he doesn't understand.
For one: 'utterance_in_a_state_of_speechlessness' should be 'utterance state="speechlessness"'
And further: Using sophisticated design techniques doesn't replace the work, but it can help a piece of software reach it's maximum potential. On the inside of every shop there is a silver bullet: It's called education. A model doesn't replace programming and somewhere beyond the ususal CRUD there's allways work to be done on procedural details - that's where part of the fun in sw developement is. Every developer worth his money knows this. If he where ranting at academics, I'd understand, but as far as I'm conserned he's preaching to the choir.
TFA is definitely not 'well-thought-out'. In fact it's a tad pointless.
Games Workshop is the Microsoft of the gaming world. Many RPG and Tabletop enthusiasts still have vivid memories of GW severly abusing their market power to push independent vendors to take minimum quantities of their stuff only to prepare and probe the market for their GW-only outlets in close proximity to these exact shops. This all started in the early to mid nineties. GW is a mean bunch of quasi-monopolists pushing overpriced stuff and comes at position #2 for killing of diversity in the Tabletop/Fantasy/RPG Market - right after Magic. As a result I don't buy stuff from them and encourage any Tabletopper to play game from other vendors. Warmachine from http://www.privateerpress.com/ is a very neat (I'd say better) alternative to Warhammer. Check it out.
Since we're on the topic: Does anyone know of a CMS that does CMS-y things, but renders out to static pages that can be uploaded to any host?
Typo3 can switch to static documents very easyly. Joomla needs a little tweaking, iirc. As far as I know most of the current OSS CMS support generation of static content. It's the easyiest way to enable a cheap and easy means of caching.
WoW is to PC Games what Magic was to pen & paper RPGs. Sort of. I remember back in the early nineties when Wizards of the Coast was a > 10 employee shop that published this little Card Game called Magic. All hell broke lose and 4 years later the RPG market was crushed beyond recognition. The only ones that survived and still are around and not bought by Hasbro or crushed are Steve Jackson Games and Palladium Books. I have the feeling WoW is doing the same. It's the only game that's still selling well that runs well on my box. Guild Wars only means of success is being not like WoW and cheaper (free) to play.
If what you say is true you have a very good chance of getting at least part of your tuition refunded for the semester you've been dealing with. In court definitely.
Not to stupid. No, not stupid at all. This is nothing but Video on Demand using existing infrastructure (iTunes client & server) to offer a thing in a way it will work. Rather than the others that are still choking at with windows media player problems, bandwidth problems, active x problems, caching problems and connection problems and compatibility issues (T-Online VoD over here only works with IE and Media Player and Windows).
Now all we need is an easy way to dump this data into a non-self-destructing format.:-)
Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes" -- Edsger Dijkstra quotes (Dutch computer Scientist. Turing Award in 1972. 1930-2002)
I see this quote everywhere, and just because it's by some semi-famous academic, nodody questions it and takes it for granted. The quote is utter rubish.
With astronomy you have stars, which aren't man made and thus only scarcely understood and the tools we use to look at them, teleskopes, which are man-made. We understand them.
Computers and Computer Science are both things that are entirely man-made. There is no natural phenomenon that we call 'computer' and a science that studies this natural phenomenon called "computer science". It's all one thing. The quote is rubbish and contains no usefull information whatsoever. On the contrary: the conclusion it draws in abolutely false.
Wow, so Blender is only 15 years behind the times now?
Sorry, I think I'll stick with maya for making movies
Sorry, but you're a dick. I hope Autodesk, Mayas new owner, makes you pay through the nose, Mr. Oh-I'm-so-professional Moviemaker. Allthoug I doubt you've got a legal licence. Then I hope they sue your ass off. Finally Blender has overcome the largest part of it's shortcomings compared to bizarely priced 3D Studio Crap and Co. and all you've got is a wiseass remark. Let's see you're great "Maya Movie Work". I doubt it comes even near Elefants Dream in any respect. In case you haven't gotten the drift yet: Blender is on the fast lane to becoming the 3D industries business model nightmare and allready is causing prices to drop and quality rising left, right and center. Try that with Gimp vs. Photoshop.
Bottom line: Quit being a jerk and give the Blender team some credit and cudos allready. If anybody deserves it in the OSS design app dept. it's them first. Many times over.
>>1. You get to meet and work with people who are pretty clear about what they want.
>I do that now. Why do I need graduate school for this?
A degree helps clearly advertise that you know what you want. Helps with communication with others. Something of a social contract. "Look here, I spent x years pondering this field of expertise. After doing x years of practical suff in the field."
>>2. The rest of the world suddenly takes you more seriously.
>I just negotiated and won approval for a $600k project. The people I care about already take me seriously.
Good for you. I live in germany. Degree is everything over here. No degree? Stupid kid, no wiener. (yes, it's Wiener, with ie) Which doesn't mean I'm doing it for the money. But I rather live a lower lifestyle doing the stuff I like in more depth than having to deal with idiots who mock me because I consider Linux and PHP an alternative to Windows and ASP.
>>3. You can use graduate school as an ideal environment for beginning work on a startup.
>Or you can spend some time working for startups and parter on the next project with people who have experience and credentials starting a company, not just wild ideas.
Yeah, right. You can join a startup with people who digg the field your in and get some BA courses while your doing so, or you can join a startup with experienced businesspeople who are good at ripping you off and won't let you at the helm because you're just a codemonkey and got no PhD. And don't even think about getting a credit or quality time with some VC.
>>4. You can use graduate school as a pivot to change your career.
>If it took you that long to figure out you picked the wrong career.
"Find out what you love. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking."
- Steve Jobs Smart man. And if you haven't found out yet that realizing your dream takes dekades and not years, then you haven't picked a career at all.
>>5. You get to pick your choice of work and your work hours.
>I do that now.
Good for you. I, for my part, am aiming for to be able to pick my hours *and* be in charge *and* others listening to my advice (usually happens *after* people are willing to pay you big bucks for it) *and* paying me well *and* beeing gratefull for it. I'm sorta one third to halfway there. Give me another few years and some hand-on experience with C++ and Case-Tools. And a PhD along the way. See you there.
>>6. You can get involved in projects that can actually impact the real world.
>You can do that in the work force and be well paid for it.
Yes, you can. As a company trained specialist. That actually *is* a way to do a career. Not my way. No way would I have been able to study art and do the things I did / have been doing. A friend of mine joined VW relatively early. Piech (VW CEO a few years ago) started as an assembly line worker trainee. Way to go, but not mine.
>>7. You can get involved in projects that have absolutely no impact on the real world. You can work on things simply because they're interesting and fun. You often get paid to do this.
>And then you can become a professor/researcher at the school and continue to get paid piddling amounts for someone with your talents. Which might be okay if you had free choice in what you wanted to investigate, but you don't have free choice. You have to write proposals and sell your ideas to various committees and sponsors and fight your way through some vicious office politics on the way. So in the end you don't work on what you want to, but instead settle for what you can get approved.
>>8. You can do things that you missed out on in your undergraduate school. It's a second chance.
>If you need a second chance. But if grad students are folks who needed a second chance to get it right, what does that say about their abilities?
Second chance? I'd call it 'The Next Step' (TM). Oh, and, btw:
Slashdot - Where Rails gets the hype.
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Ruby For Rails
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Quit the hype allready. There are at least 3 oss web packages out there that are better in more than just a few aspects: django ( http://www.djangoproject.com/ ) Symfony ( http://www.symfony-project.com/ ) Zope ( http://www.zope.org/ ) Zope is by far the oldest and most sophisticated. Django is Rails done right and in Python and Symfony is a PHP metaframework that includes Propel and some other third party goodies with tons of very neat PHP 5 foundation work. Each one of these kick Rails up and down the street when it comes to ease of use, ease of deployment, available documentation and performance (Zope may be a little slower, but they have a full-blownobject relational DB built in that makes SQL look like peek and poking a c64 back in 1985). And since the Ruby on Rails people use PHP to power their Rails website (oh, the irony; http://rubyonrails.org/index.php ) I'd trust in even PHP being able to perform more than good in the newest lineup of Frameworks.
So quit the rails-only hype allready, it's anoying.
Wrong. MS is getting a major ass chewing for breaking anti-trust laws in the EU. Break the law == deal with the consequences. It's that simple. The EU even was playing nice. Other businesses would've been sued to chunky kibbles by their competitors allready. It's just that MS is so big, it's competitors are to scared and don't have the resources to go against them in a regular civil court trial. Here's where the EU steps in.
Comparing Sharepoint to Zope is beyond silly. Zope is an object relational application server, making it slower than anything else running standard DB's. Technologically wise Zope is ten years ahead of Sharepoint - this is payed for with performance hoging and heavy-weight memory usage. 2Gigs is not enough for running Zope/Plone in a serious production enviroment. Sharepoint is a monolithic built-to-fit solution that was grown over the course of almost a decade and finally has turned into something that doesn't crash every odd hour and - at last - performs the way it was supposed to back in 2001. Keeping in mind that Zope was allready working back in 2001 and actually hasn't changed all that much since then. The entire redo - Zop 3.0 - still is in developement. Sharepoint is usually used for CMS purposes, while Zope is usually used for highly abstracted business application developement. Nobody in his right mind would get the idea to build an ERP system with Sharepoint.
Bottom line: These guys didn't know what they where testing.
If I had a few Billion left over and wanted to build an iPod Killer I'd do this:
1) Thinner. Half the thickness 2) 60 GB in Flash RAM 3) Tilt screen aspect ratio 90, narrow player down so it fits in hand easyly (think "Palm minus 1 cm width") 4) Screen display alignment flipable in all 4 directions, enabling to put the clickwheel above the screen for easyer use with one hand 5) 20-30 hrs battery time - shouldn't be to difficult with flash 6) spray water and shock resistant 7) eloxated aluminium, 30 different colors in gloss or opaque option, extra special gold and silver plated options, titanium option, pure gold + diamonds option crafted by Fabergé + leather pouch by Hermés (limited) 8) I'd do extensive test lineups for a variant without a clickwheel but a larger touchscreen that can handle human fingers without problems, screen buttons layed out for fingers 9) hidden speaker for audio input feedback, tests for normal playback with speaker (I see a lot of people doing that with their cellphones lately , sounds crappy but they seem to like this kind of mini gettoblaster) 10) 10 elite designers with 24 months time to design packaging, UI, cradle, cables and music programm UI, I'd put extreme emphasis on *not* looking like an iPod. I'd try a totally different style. Maybe something like the Casio G-Shock line that came out when everybody else was just building their watches thinner and thinner. I'd probalby explicitly show the screws instead of hiding them for instance 11) Insanely strudy cables, earphones, plugs and sockets 12) exchangeable battery 13) highest possible quality audio 'intestines' in earphones (ask Beyerdynamic on board, blow a few million on research), customisable cushions for ideal individual fit 14) Same 30*2 variant paint/coating job option for earphones, remote, power adapter and optional periferals 15) easy to repair/replace spare parts; official retailer repair training and manuals, normed parts and software interfaces for third party friendlyness, special toolkits for trained retailers + parts purchasing account 16) all formats playback, video and audio 17) 20 full-time paid experts and 2 years time to come up with a solid brandname, 0.8 Billion campaing upon introduction featureing top-line artists and exclusive content 18) I'd try to get Nintendo on board for an optional clip-on GBA or DS extension that uses the players screen and audio 19) Zero hassle integration with existing PC programs (iTunes) 20) season based textured versions by various famous designers (very much like the Swatch watches and their season lineups - actually make that *exactly* like Swatch and their season lineups) 21) see #20 + full discography of famous artists 22) I wouldn't race for the bottom line in pricing. I'd try to keep pricing reasonable and establish the player as a solid brand famous for strudyness, maintainability and customizability 23) no linkage to existing brands whatsoever (Sony, MS, etc) - I'd establish an entirely new brand with no weight - also to see if the product catches on and not just the existing brand, make mistakes fast, correct them faster,... etc. You know the drill.
Of course MS won't come up with this. They're to bloated and will add yet another one to the landfill of iPod Killers.
Yet I'm shure it could be done. Give me a few billion and three years max. and I'd make an iPod killer. Apple has it's parts where it's caught up itself - that's where one could get them.
As far as I've come into contact with developers there never has been the slightest doupt what the right thing is. Tabs where introduced as the solution to this very problem. The only problem is that ancient vi and emacs aparently can't deal with them properly. Or their users sometimes are to lazy to set them up properly. The big problem is when experienced professionals follow suit with some blockheads and a few years later themselves insist on everybody using spaces at any time. Why should everybody degrade the sourcecode because some dick on the team insists on using a 25 year old editor? Why should we be forced to use spaces in interpreted webapp languages because some webserver is to crappy to deal with tabs in the right manner? Unless there's some exotic situation - which I can't think of right now - that requires spaces to be used the stored source should be tabs. Then everyone can decide by himself how wide his indents are without bugging anybody else with his habbits. And if you're to fucking lazy to set up your vi or emacs properly to deal with the problem (either by back and forth conversion of tabs2spaces/spaces2tabs or by altering the display of code) and thus insist on the team following your whim you're nothing but a fucking assh*le. Get with the 3 millenium allready and get yourself a proper editor. There areenougharoundallready.
This whole discussion reminds me of 5 Million mindless dumb and stubborn outlook idiots establishing fullquote bloat and degrading email to something worse than AOL chat for everybody else, just because their mailer is so crappy.
Bottom line: The solution linked is a solution to a problem that doesn't exist because in a professional enviroment everyone can decide for themselves how their code is displayed, how large tabs are and if they're automatically converted into spaces if I want to use edlin.
P.S.: In the recent years, so I've heard, we even got a new problem popping up: People mixing spaces and tabs in the same sourcefile. Now there's a bunch that deserves to be shot at sight.
The essential part about all this is the collaboratively filtered and collected data, right? And that is out in the wild and still available as a package, correct? Copy, Fork, Install, Build a cool website, have yourself a fresh OSS project. No big deal. Ideal for anyone who needs to make themselves a name as DB admin / web services expert....Mmmmh... Coming to think of it... does anyone know the mean load of late freedb?
Anyway, a handfull of weeks and we'll have an alternative and freedb will be history (no pun intened).
"unprecedented timeliness and effectiveness for enterprise software support"
I'm sorry, but I thought I need support when something unusual occurs or I want to do something unusual with the software. Timeliness and effectiveness is allways required, but how can a 'bot provide support? Support is one of things that explicitly is *not* provided by software but by humans, no? Our does this software include automatic hacking attacks and phone pranks on OSS developers that don't update, bugfix or document their projects or what?
Marketing babble. Won't work. Let me guess: Some guy at marketing discovered how neat filtering and spidering works with Regular Expressions combined with some http lib and had is favourite programmers bolt some system together. Sorry, guys, but you've got yourself a piece of shelfware on your hands, errm, shelf. No Wiener. Back to square one.
Please don't tell me this is true? You've wasted your braintime on the most milked franchise in the history of mankind only to be sued to chunky kibbles by Sony/LucasArts/YouNameIt the instant this goes gold? Please, no, don't tell me this is true. If only they had put their efforts into Planeshift to get it on with a viable open source alternative to WoW and GuildWars. But, no, they had to ripp a commercial product. Great. Wonderfull. What a waste of brainpower.
Steve Balmer, CEO and soon-to-be dictator of Microsoft of Bill Gates Mercy, opened up his purse yesterday bought the 'Business 2.0' online news franchise and sacked the entire staff after they signed a contract that permitted their employer to use their mugshots in a Flash Online Game to be set up on the site. Details where revealed after the layoffs. The Game will be called "Steve-o-Balmers Super Deluxe Office-Chair-Throw", subtitled "Hit as many stupid online journalists as possible and score!". The layoffs weren't available for interviews and stated through their representatives that they had signed an NDA that would oust their soul to MS if they talked about the issue to anyone.
Slashdot Mirror
So it's just a coincidence that people who look the same (genetically similar) group themselves together in geographical areas and share the same culture? Isn't that worth defending?
Nationalisim is a psychosis. Culture isn't. Yet culture has nothing to do with colored pieces of cloth hanging from poles and where exactly in the sand an imagenary line runs that some people call 'border'.
To sort of quote Robert Anton Wilson:
Flags are real. Languages are real. Guns are real. Katjushas are real. 'Holy' Books are real. But Nations and Religions are social ficton. Or, as I like to put it more percisely imho, mass-psychosis. In the middle east these days definitely.
Sad if it's about the current war in the ME. Nationalisim is basically nothing more than a mass-psychosis, with fanatisim and fundametalisim being the extremer variants. Conducted by a few who know each other well to have millions of people who don't know each other compete or fight.
You'd expect a high profile OSS dev intelligent enough to shake it.
The ones that deserve to be shot are Nasralla, some back-room Zionists and a few old-school fanatic muslims in Gaza and Syria. The rest would get along quite well actually. Just the other day I saw a newsfeed where an israeli arab (sitting in a cafe with his jewish friend) hit it on the spot (paraphrased): "It's allways gouverments and organisations fighting. The common people just what to live in peace, sip their cafe and play backgammon. Jews, Muslims and whomever else."
True that is.
Let's hope this crap is over soon and the maniacs fit's come to an end.
It's not the "next big thing." In fact, it's the old big thing that kept me running Windows XP on a machine at home.
Bingo. Right on.
What we are seeing now is the reality that the experts saw coming 6-7 years ago is finally seeping into mainstream. Shrinkwrap software only business is over. Win2k/XP is mostly just a driver layer and gaming bios these days. The OSS vendors like Novel/SuSE/RedHat have been screwing around to much, that's what's held Linux/OSS back the last few years. Now with Canonical/Ubuntu finally getting the obsticles out of the way (zero-fuss hardware compliance) things are finally picking up speed. I've even considerd going back to Non-Apple Hardware after 3 years of OS X just because of that. I definitely see Linux Desktops become mainstream real soon now.
Knock it off allready.
I've had enough of the eternal Dimwits constantly bashing this or that with "MySQL not scalable" "PHP not scalable", blablabla.
PHP has arrived in the enterprise market. That's a fact. Yes, I know, Java has been there for 8 years, PHP is messy and quirky (so is Perl), MySQL isn't a DB, we've heard it all before.
In case you haven't noticed: PHP 5 is out. It's a full blown, mature PL and arguably the 400 pound gorilla of SSI solutions with a long history. MySQL 5 is out aswell. It's a full blown DB and comes with tons of free x-platform admin and design tools that make building the outline of a large webapp a walk in the park and thus scares the living daylights out of Oracle and IBM. You may have noticed IBM virtually giving their DB2 away for free (beer) since just a few months ago. Guess how that happend.
Imagine someone would come along and tell you that large-scale webapps in Perl are a pipedream. Not to far-fetched in this context, no? And what about slashdot and kuro5hin?
PHP is as good a technology as any other in use when it comes to building large webapps (point in case: www.rubyonrails.org/index.php/ ). Industry strength PHP Frameworks are poping up left, right and center and other places like mushrooms after the rain. And as for MySQL "not being ready for large, scalable apps" - you're being silly.
Oh, so buzzwords can be used to disguise laziness and bad implementation? Where's the news? Even in his satire of XML (and don't you think I'm a big XML fan) he shows that he doesn't understand.
For one: 'utterance_in_a_state_of_speechlessness' should be 'utterance state="speechlessness"'
And further: Using sophisticated design techniques doesn't replace the work, but it can help a piece of software reach it's maximum potential. On the inside of every shop there is a silver bullet: It's called education. A model doesn't replace programming and somewhere beyond the ususal CRUD there's allways work to be done on procedural details - that's where part of the fun in sw developement is. Every developer worth his money knows this. If he where ranting at academics, I'd understand, but as far as I'm conserned he's preaching to the choir.
TFA is definitely not 'well-thought-out'. In fact it's a tad pointless.
Games Workshop is the Microsoft of the gaming world. Many RPG and Tabletop enthusiasts still have vivid memories of GW severly abusing their market power to push independent vendors to take minimum quantities of their stuff only to prepare and probe the market for their GW-only outlets in close proximity to these exact shops. This all started in the early to mid nineties.
GW is a mean bunch of quasi-monopolists pushing overpriced stuff and comes at position #2 for killing of diversity in the Tabletop/Fantasy/RPG Market - right after Magic.
As a result I don't buy stuff from them and encourage any Tabletopper to play game from other vendors. Warmachine from http://www.privateerpress.com/ is a very neat (I'd say better) alternative to Warhammer. Check it out.
Since we're on the topic: Does anyone know of a CMS that does CMS-y things, but renders out to static pages that can be uploaded to any host?
Typo3 can switch to static documents very easyly. Joomla needs a little tweaking, iirc. As far as I know most of the current OSS CMS support generation of static content. It's the easyiest way to enable a cheap and easy means of caching.
WoW is to PC Games what Magic was to pen & paper RPGs. Sort of. I remember back in the early nineties when Wizards of the Coast was a > 10 employee shop that published this little Card Game called Magic. All hell broke lose and 4 years later the RPG market was crushed beyond recognition. The only ones that survived and still are around and not bought by Hasbro or crushed are Steve Jackson Games and Palladium Books.
I have the feeling WoW is doing the same. It's the only game that's still selling well that runs well on my box. Guild Wars only means of success is being not like WoW and cheaper (free) to play.
Now this is what I call an interesting looking game. The Portal gun also has the gravgun capabilities - did you notice?
Nice to see Valve putting their HL2 revenue to good use instead of just milking the HL cow.
If what you say is true you have a very good chance of getting at least part of your tuition refunded for the semester you've been dealing with. In court definitely.
Not to stupid. No, not stupid at all. This is nothing but Video on Demand using existing infrastructure (iTunes client & server) to offer a thing in a way it will work. Rather than the others that are still choking at with windows media player problems, bandwidth problems, active x problems, caching problems and connection problems and compatibility issues (T-Online VoD over here only works with IE and Media Player and Windows).
:-)
Now all we need is an easy way to dump this data into a non-self-destructing format.
Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes" -- Edsger Dijkstra quotes (Dutch computer Scientist. Turing Award in 1972. 1930-2002)
I see this quote everywhere, and just because it's by some semi-famous academic, nodody questions it and takes it for granted. The quote is utter rubish.
With astronomy you have stars, which aren't man made and thus only scarcely understood and the tools we use to look at them, teleskopes, which are man-made. We understand them.
Computers and Computer Science are both things that are entirely man-made. There is no natural phenomenon that we call 'computer' and a science that studies this natural phenomenon called "computer science". It's all one thing. The quote is rubbish and contains no usefull information whatsoever. On the contrary: the conclusion it draws in abolutely false.
"support for anisotropic materials"
Wow, so Blender is only 15 years behind the times now?
Sorry, I think I'll stick with maya for making movies
Sorry, but you're a dick. I hope Autodesk, Mayas new owner, makes you pay through the nose, Mr. Oh-I'm-so-professional Moviemaker. Allthoug I doubt you've got a legal licence. Then I hope they sue your ass off.
Finally Blender has overcome the largest part of it's shortcomings compared to bizarely priced 3D Studio Crap and Co. and all you've got is a wiseass remark. Let's see you're great "Maya Movie Work". I doubt it comes even near Elefants Dream in any respect.
In case you haven't gotten the drift yet: Blender is on the fast lane to becoming the 3D industries business model nightmare and allready is causing prices to drop and quality rising left, right and center. Try that with Gimp vs. Photoshop.
Bottom line: Quit being a jerk and give the Blender team some credit and cudos allready. If anybody deserves it in the OSS design app dept. it's them first. Many times over.
>>1. You get to meet and work with people who are pretty clear about what they want.
>I do that now. Why do I need graduate school for this?
A degree helps clearly advertise that you know what you want. Helps with communication with others. Something of a social contract. "Look here, I spent x years pondering this field of expertise. After doing x years of practical suff in the field."
>>2. The rest of the world suddenly takes you more seriously.
>I just negotiated and won approval for a $600k project. The people I care about already take me seriously.
Good for you. I live in germany. Degree is everything over here. No degree? Stupid kid, no wiener. (yes, it's Wiener, with ie) Which doesn't mean I'm doing it for the money. But I rather live a lower lifestyle doing the stuff I like in more depth than having to deal with idiots who mock me because I consider Linux and PHP an alternative to Windows and ASP.
>>3. You can use graduate school as an ideal environment for beginning work on a startup.
>Or you can spend some time working for startups and parter on the next project with people who have experience and credentials starting a company, not just wild ideas.
Yeah, right.
You can join a startup with people who digg the field your in and get some BA courses while your doing so, or you can join a startup with experienced businesspeople who are good at ripping you off and won't let you at the helm because you're just a codemonkey and got no PhD. And don't even think about getting a credit or quality time with some VC.
>>4. You can use graduate school as a pivot to change your career.
>If it took you that long to figure out you picked the wrong career.
"Find out what you love. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking."
- Steve Jobs
Smart man.
And if you haven't found out yet that realizing your dream takes dekades and not years, then you haven't picked a career at all.
>>5. You get to pick your choice of work and your work hours.
>I do that now.
Good for you.
I, for my part, am aiming for to be able to pick my hours *and* be in charge *and* others listening to my advice (usually happens *after* people are willing to pay you big bucks for it) *and* paying me well *and* beeing gratefull for it. I'm sorta one third to halfway there. Give me another few years and some hand-on experience with C++ and Case-Tools. And a PhD along the way. See you there.
>>6. You can get involved in projects that can actually impact the real world.
>You can do that in the work force and be well paid for it.
Yes, you can. As a company trained specialist. That actually *is* a way to do a career. Not my way. No way would I have been able to study art and do the things I did / have been doing. A friend of mine joined VW relatively early. Piech (VW CEO a few years ago) started as an assembly line worker trainee. Way to go, but not mine.
>>7. You can get involved in projects that have absolutely no impact on the real world. You can work on things simply because they're interesting and fun. You often get paid to do this.
>And then you can become a professor/researcher at the school and continue to get paid piddling amounts for someone with your talents. Which might be okay if you had free choice in what you wanted to investigate, but you don't have free choice. You have to write proposals and sell your ideas to various committees and sponsors and fight your way through some vicious office politics on the way. So in the end you don't work on what you want to, but instead settle for what you can get approved.
>>8. You can do things that you missed out on in your undergraduate school. It's a second chance.
>If you need a second chance. But if grad students are folks who needed a second chance to get it right, what does that say about their abilities?
Second chance? I'd call it 'The Next Step' (TM). Oh, and, btw:
Quit the hype allready. There are at least 3 oss web packages out there that are better in more than just a few aspects:
django ( http://www.djangoproject.com/ )
Symfony ( http://www.symfony-project.com/ )
Zope ( http://www.zope.org/ )
Zope is by far the oldest and most sophisticated. Django is Rails done right and in Python and Symfony is a PHP metaframework that includes Propel and some other third party goodies with tons of very neat PHP 5 foundation work. Each one of these kick Rails up and down the street when it comes to ease of use, ease of deployment, available documentation and performance (Zope may be a little slower, but they have a full-blownobject relational DB built in that makes SQL look like peek and poking a c64 back in 1985).
And since the Ruby on Rails people use PHP to power their Rails website (oh, the irony; http://rubyonrails.org/index.php ) I'd trust in even PHP being able to perform more than good in the newest lineup of Frameworks.
So quit the rails-only hype allready, it's anoying.
Wrong.
MS is getting a major ass chewing for breaking anti-trust laws in the EU. Break the law == deal with the consequences. It's that simple. The EU even was playing nice. Other businesses would've been sued to chunky kibbles by their competitors allready. It's just that MS is so big, it's competitors are to scared and don't have the resources to go against them in a regular civil court trial. Here's where the EU steps in.
Comparing Sharepoint to Zope is beyond silly.
Zope is an object relational application server, making it slower than anything else running standard DB's. Technologically wise Zope is ten years ahead of Sharepoint - this is payed for with performance hoging and heavy-weight memory usage. 2Gigs is not enough for running Zope/Plone in a serious production enviroment.
Sharepoint is a monolithic built-to-fit solution that was grown over the course of almost a decade and finally has turned into something that doesn't crash every odd hour and - at last - performs the way it was supposed to back in 2001.
Keeping in mind that Zope was allready working back in 2001 and actually hasn't changed all that much since then. The entire redo - Zop 3.0 - still is in developement.
Sharepoint is usually used for CMS purposes, while Zope is usually used for highly abstracted business application developement.
Nobody in his right mind would get the idea to build an ERP system with Sharepoint.
Bottom line:
These guys didn't know what they where testing.
If I had a few Billion left over and wanted to build an iPod Killer I'd do this:
... etc. You know the drill.
1) Thinner. Half the thickness
2) 60 GB in Flash RAM
3) Tilt screen aspect ratio 90, narrow player down so it fits in hand easyly (think "Palm minus 1 cm width")
4) Screen display alignment flipable in all 4 directions, enabling to put the clickwheel above the screen for easyer use with one hand
5) 20-30 hrs battery time - shouldn't be to difficult with flash
6) spray water and shock resistant
7) eloxated aluminium, 30 different colors in gloss or opaque option, extra special gold and silver plated options, titanium option, pure gold + diamonds option crafted by Fabergé + leather pouch by Hermés (limited)
8) I'd do extensive test lineups for a variant without a clickwheel but a larger touchscreen that can handle human fingers without problems, screen buttons layed out for fingers
9) hidden speaker for audio input feedback, tests for normal playback with speaker (I see a lot of people doing that with their cellphones lately , sounds crappy but they seem to like this kind of mini gettoblaster)
10) 10 elite designers with 24 months time to design packaging, UI, cradle, cables and music programm UI, I'd put extreme emphasis on *not* looking like an iPod. I'd try a totally different style. Maybe something like the Casio G-Shock line that came out when everybody else was just building their watches thinner and thinner. I'd probalby explicitly show the screws instead of hiding them for instance
11) Insanely strudy cables, earphones, plugs and sockets
12) exchangeable battery
13) highest possible quality audio 'intestines' in earphones (ask Beyerdynamic on board, blow a few million on research), customisable cushions for ideal individual fit
14) Same 30*2 variant paint/coating job option for earphones, remote, power adapter and optional periferals
15) easy to repair/replace spare parts; official retailer repair training and manuals, normed parts and software interfaces for third party friendlyness, special toolkits for trained retailers + parts purchasing account
16) all formats playback, video and audio
17) 20 full-time paid experts and 2 years time to come up with a solid brandname, 0.8 Billion campaing upon introduction featureing top-line artists and exclusive content
18) I'd try to get Nintendo on board for an optional clip-on GBA or DS extension that uses the players screen and audio
19) Zero hassle integration with existing PC programs (iTunes)
20) season based textured versions by various famous designers (very much like the Swatch watches and their season lineups - actually make that *exactly* like Swatch and their season lineups)
21) see #20 + full discography of famous artists
22) I wouldn't race for the bottom line in pricing. I'd try to keep pricing reasonable and establish the player as a solid brand famous for strudyness, maintainability and customizability
23) no linkage to existing brands whatsoever (Sony, MS, etc) - I'd establish an entirely new brand with no weight - also to see if the product catches on and not just the existing brand, make mistakes fast, correct them faster,
Of course MS won't come up with this. They're to bloated and will add yet another one to the landfill of iPod Killers.
Yet I'm shure it could be done. Give me a few billion and three years max. and I'd make an iPod killer. Apple has it's parts where it's caught up itself - that's where one could get them.
As far as I've come into contact with developers there never has been the slightest doupt what the right thing is. Tabs where introduced as the solution to this very problem. The only problem is that ancient vi and emacs aparently can't deal with them properly. Or their users sometimes are to lazy to set them up properly. The big problem is when experienced professionals follow suit with some blockheads and a few years later themselves insist on everybody using spaces at any time.
Why should everybody degrade the sourcecode because some dick on the team insists on using a 25 year old editor? Why should we be forced to use spaces in interpreted webapp languages because some webserver is to crappy to deal with tabs in the right manner? Unless there's some exotic situation - which I can't think of right now - that requires spaces to be used the stored source should be tabs. Then everyone can decide by himself how wide his indents are without bugging anybody else with his habbits. And if you're to fucking lazy to set up your vi or emacs properly to deal with the problem (either by back and forth conversion of tabs2spaces/spaces2tabs or by altering the display of code) and thus insist on the team following your whim you're nothing but a fucking assh*le. Get with the 3 millenium allready and get yourself a proper editor. There are enough around allready.
This whole discussion reminds me of 5 Million mindless dumb and stubborn outlook idiots establishing fullquote bloat and degrading email to something worse than AOL chat for everybody else, just because their mailer is so crappy.
Bottom line: The solution linked is a solution to a problem that doesn't exist because in a professional enviroment everyone can decide for themselves how their code is displayed, how large tabs are and if they're automatically converted into spaces if I want to use edlin.
P.S.: In the recent years, so I've heard, we even got a new problem popping up: People mixing spaces and tabs in the same sourcefile. Now there's a bunch that deserves to be shot at sight.
My 2 cents.
The essential part about all this is the collaboratively filtered and collected data, right? And that is out in the wild and still available as a package, correct? ...Mmmmh... Coming to think of it ... does anyone know the mean load of late freedb?
Copy, Fork, Install, Build a cool website, have yourself a fresh OSS project. No big deal.
Ideal for anyone who needs to make themselves a name as DB admin / web services expert.
Anyway, a handfull of weeks and we'll have an alternative and freedb will be history (no pun intened).
My 2 cents.
Prior Art, 10 times over. No case. Thank you. Next.
It will catch up later. As with EMACS, Shells, Desktops, CLI Tools, GUI Apps and all the rest. But when it does it will be there to stay.
"unprecedented timeliness and effectiveness for enterprise software support"
I'm sorry, but I thought I need support when something unusual occurs or I want to do something unusual with the software. Timeliness and effectiveness is allways required, but how can a 'bot provide support? Support is one of things that explicitly is *not* provided by software but by humans, no? Our does this software include automatic hacking attacks and phone pranks on OSS developers that don't update, bugfix or document their projects or what?
Marketing babble. Won't work.
Let me guess: Some guy at marketing discovered how neat filtering and spidering works with Regular Expressions combined with some http lib and had is favourite programmers bolt some system together. Sorry, guys, but you've got yourself a piece of shelfware on your hands, errm, shelf. No Wiener. Back to square one.
Please don't tell me this is true? You've wasted your braintime on the most milked franchise in the history of mankind only to be sued to chunky kibbles by Sony/LucasArts/YouNameIt the instant this goes gold? Please, no, don't tell me this is true.
If only they had put their efforts into Planeshift to get it on with a viable open source alternative to WoW and GuildWars. But, no, they had to ripp a commercial product. Great. Wonderfull.
What a waste of brainpower.
Steve Balmer, CEO and soon-to-be dictator of Microsoft of Bill Gates Mercy, opened up his purse yesterday bought the 'Business 2.0' online news franchise and sacked the entire staff after they signed a contract that permitted their employer to use their mugshots in a Flash Online Game to be set up on the site. Details where revealed after the layoffs. The Game will be called "Steve-o-Balmers Super Deluxe Office-Chair-Throw", subtitled "Hit as many stupid online journalists as possible and score!". The layoffs weren't available for interviews and stated through their representatives that they had signed an NDA that would oust their soul to MS if they talked about the issue to anyone.
MS stock up by 5% this morning.