Whenever the chance arises I talk my potential interns into Python or some other OS PL and away from Word and Excel. I also bug them into using and learning jEdit. Geeks gotta learn to spread the love to prevent MS from taking over. Todays Comps are to bloated to show their inner workings imediately, we have to help the Padavans look inside of them.
Isn't this a solution to a problem that goes in the wrong direction? As far as I can tell regularly typing code it disapearing any time soon anyway. They should put the research into an open source object-relational case tool and be done with typing code. Any code that requires typing it extra special and involves more thinking than typing. The more effective my functions get, the more I have to ponder them.
In ten years from now we'll be building code out of virtual 3D blocks with sensory input for and from arms, hands and eyes.
If the ID is neutral and uniquely identifies the person carring it and each living person has a right to one without any discriminatory markings on them... so if the card is _really_ only a peronal ID, then it could be a good idea. Identity theft and other things would become much more difficult.
The bureau handing out the cards should be directly controlled by the people and be law required to be neutral. The cards could have SSN and other info on them and be used as a transport medium for own usage like bank account access or medical data if one whishes.
If all that would be than they'd be an advantage and would make life easyer imho. We've got compulsory IDs here in germany. The most bugging thing about them is that they are to big to fit into a wallet without folding and that they can't be used for usefull stuff.
I read this and shrugged my shoulders. Who cares? All the people here getting all worked up seem to be really addicted to Windows. I just ran Win2K the other day - considering to use it as a webdev plattform. Took me 10 minutes to drop that idea once again. Task Manger had 30+ processes running and was slowpoking about as if it were my old Cyric 150Mhz CPU. God, does that OS suck. I'm sticking with Mac OS X and Linux. I really couldn't care less about Windows. And you shouldn't either.
My spouse needed some music from her dance classes. We found nearly all on iTunes. I bought, DLd and burnt them on a CD-Rom. Perfect. Steve Jobs, Apple and the Industry got their fair share from me today. Zero hassle, zero fuss and a DRM that interests NOBODY who doesn't do illegal stuff. So I can't burn a playlist more than 7 times. Who cares. WHY DOES IT HAVE TO BE ANY MORE COMPLICATED THAN THAT, I ASK?
Bottom line: Get pissy with me, and I'll be off your customer list again. Play nice and you'll get my money. BTW: I recommend Magnatune.com to everybody. They've got some really cool stuff on their download site. All formats (including FLAC and OGG) all bitrates and no DRM. And 50% goes to the artists directly. Oh, and the music is good.
I don't know FF7 but I know an arrogant asshole when I see one. Or read an article by one for that matter. So this game had some stuff that made it cream of the crop for a large fanbase. Judging from the screenshots it had some really neat looking 3D Anime characters by the standards of those days. Apparently he doesn't comply with the majorities opinion. So what's the big deal? Using D&D as the bar to define Roleplaying - not matter if Pen & Paper or Videogame - goes to show that this guy is nothing but a halfwit with an over-inflated opinion of himself. And a very obnoxious attitude and writing style. That alone is enough to dismiss the article. No matter how many points he may have along the way or not. I want my 5 Minutes back.
I'm 36 and in IT for a living since the dot-boom. If you like IT, do it. Don't do it for the money. Do it because you like it. I actually studied art and have a diploma in arts. I jumped into IT (web stuff) as a sidestep. I studied Art for the fun of it. Now I'm doing IT (mostly) for the fun of it.
General rule goes like this: The easiest way to success is 1) Doing what's fun. 2) Doing it good. 3) Telling people about it.
Mind you, IT being a difficult subject and still a booming industry, it is not that a bad carreer choice.
As for the future of IT I can only ashure to you that IT is extremely rapidly becoming an industrialized profession. Code Generation, extensive OOAD everywhere, low-level OS commodity, ubiqious high speed solid-state storage just around the corner, etc... Once it's all there we'll start seeing the world moving into new territory like robotics and a growing field of robot-AI programming.
If you wan't a hint: Don't waste your time with ready-made proprietary lock-in software (read: stay away from Microsoft, SAP, etc.). Companies come and go, OSS is here to stay. But don't waste to much of your time with Linux/BSD/Whatever admining either! Learn the basics (programming, File Herarchy Standard, etc.) and then move to OOAD quickly. If you want a compromise between fun and money, Java could be a good choice for the plattform these days (even though it's a compromise between OSS and closed source). Whatever you do, don't get so obsessed with your favourite pet technology that you don't see the world advancing around you. You'll be part of last years league faster than you think.
The semi-funny parent post goes along on the trouble of installing Oracle as compared to MySQL and/or Postgres. My experience is that any DB Server requires solid knowledge of it's workings in order to do a clean install. Postgres from scratch is just as painfull as any other. And just because you can apt-get install mysql doesn't mean it's usually easy to install.
My question: Isn't it the big problem with various DB engines that they are more or less very simular but all still have the anoyances we all associate with DBs since 25 years ago? (I'm asking the experts here, folks, not some wannabees) Are there any truly essential differences between, let's say, MySQL 5 and the current Oracle release?
They both use some SQL variant, they both are a fuss to get up and running and they both provide some kind of sort-of-usable bridge between the real world and true object-relational dreamland. Isn't that so? Correct me if I'm wrong. And before you go on about service and all that, detail on what Oracle has to offer that MySQL AB can't provide for equal or less costs. Thanks for any usefull reply.
I've been a long time Linux user (Debian) and it still is my favourite OS on custom built PCs. But what still bugs me about it - especially after using OS X for almost two years now - is that you need to be a computer expert to get it running. I know you have to be the same when installing Windows from scratch, but I've stopped taking Windows as the bar like 6 years ago.
I recently did an update on my debian box and again the german keyboard is gone and I've got wrong (english) characters everywhere. There goes half and hour of research and fixing again. When I go about and reinstall it (or Ubuntu or something else) I better be fully aware of all my hardware and it's chipsets or else I will have serious trouble getting Linux to work. When you run Linux you usually know your HW inside out but it's been nearly 3 years ago since I last did some larger setup and config. I write my HW specs on small stickers that I put everywhere on my cards and MB but thats quite a prospect - opening your box so you can prep for a fresh Linux install that will take 20hrs.+ before everything is where it was before.
Obviously I'm getting old and gotta get real work done rather than fiddling with crummy x86 architectures, but admit it, I've got a point, no? Remember the C64? Unpack, plugin, works. That's how modern computers should work.
This is an add from somebody pushing some new Ajax Shop. Probably that company salesforce.com that's mentioned 3x a sentence.
Wether SaaS or not, soon it will make no difference. People will be able to choose between having their OSS solution of choice set up on their own hardware in their own shop or an OSS solution set up on the servers of their favourite IT service company.
Preping customer hardware with software or running it for them on your own servers is not that much of a difference anyway. Not nowadays it is.
SaaS will, if anything, blur the line between OSS and closed source - because people (customers and vendors) won't care anymore. And that will push OSS rather than closed source.
I had an IBM Thinkpad once. It was an IBM PS/2 Note N33 SX. A Notebook with a 33Mhz 386 and up to 6 MB of Memory. I think it was one of the first notebooks ever. I have yet to see a Notebook with a keyboard of that quality. There is something to it, the ThinkPad quality I mean.
No. Eclipse has enough quirks and bugs to justify having Netbeans around. Just have the Netbeans lot decide to support other languages better than Eclipse and integrate jEdit and Netbeans is on top again. I'm currently doing PHP stuff with Eclipse and while it's nice for free it certainly isn't the bar for OSS IDEs. There is plenty of room for Netbeans and I don't see the 'momentum' you're talking about taking any effect on real-world usability of eclipse. They even still don't have a devent FTP connectivity.
I'm of for the day for an interview for a game developer position tomorrow. Here's what they had in my application allready: Professional Enviroment, competent colleagues, room for creative initiative, professional workflow and solid & fair payment. Tomorrow I'm going to add 'no standard overtime' to that list. 2 Pro's with a proper workflow pull more in 8 hour days than 6 people with 12 hour days. That's the simple truth. I'm not subventioning stupid management with my mental and physical health.
They've gotten to me by a headhunter bureau and wanted an interview right away, so they must be desperate. But I'm not gonna be a fireextinguisher for an overdue project (my spider sense is tingling that way somehow) in some messy enviroment that has no version control, no OOAD and no designers and coders working together and a no boss that give enough rope and is open for ideas.
I'd rather work as a barista and continue developing my own game in my spare time than being the assmonkey for some idiots with an overdrawn budget that were to stupid to do it right in the first place. And probably wouldn't have listend to my advice because of me having no degree in CS or something....
Then again, maybe they are the cool shop I hope they are (the dev on Linux exclusively - can't be that bad) and I get to meet some very neat team tomorrow. Keep your fingers crossed that all goes well - one way or the other.
I remember registring domains that I though sounded cool back in the dot-bomb days. Except for maybe one, they still wouldn't be occupied today. I recently registred a quite cool.com name that I want for a project. I usually take me 5 minutes to come up with a unique name that's easy to use and not occupied by anyone else who is a serious competition in the field. What'st the big fuss? A friend of mine spent 200 Euro to buy a german word domain. Who cares? No one. The most famous URL is google.com. I doupt a registrar would have that in his portfolio if they'd start their company today. I hope all registrars go broke. But I guess as long as people are willing to shell out $$ for cooldomain.com they will make money. Stupid people.
He's right. Any Unix like OS is a behemoth. Allways has been. Linux never was an exception. It allways needed stronger hardware than Windows a few years ago. That's slowly changing, but parts of the Linux experience are serious slowpokes and demand top range hardware for up-to-date performance. Pure BeOS would probably be the prototype of a modern system that runs fast and lightweight.
Yet I still can't shake the notion of this project approaching the problem the wrong way.
Let me explain: I've got a Sharp PC 1403 right here. It's the successor to my first computer I've ever had, a PC 1402. It runs on two buttoncells for something like 200-300 hrs. I've yet to see a comp that runs of the grid for such a long time. The 1403 has 32 KB which isn't very much at all. But this computer is 15 years old! The 1402 I bought back in 1985!
What if you take, let's say, a PC 500-S (the lates of the sharp series, still available), give it a good large (80x40) monocromatic passive LCD display, 4-8 MB of memory, two slowpoke non-x86 CPUs and a good solar display and some kind of rugged connectivity (some serial port or something). Put it all into one super stable box that is easy to open and repair and build them for 30$ a piece. It can't be that hard. Who in the 3rd world needs a Linux Box??? I don't even need one - and I make a living using Debian (I'm typing this on a Mac). Back in the day DOS 5 and Works 5 on a 4-greyscale LCD PC the size of a chocolate bar (1994 it was) was perfect for everything. And it still would be today. It's just that we what to see neat little pictures. The Fidonet was text-only and the quality of content was 10x better.
Nobody in the outskirts of Africa needs Linux and noone there has 100$.
Search Engine optimisation is a contradiction in term
How come does anybody, not to speak of web designers, get the stupid idea that one has to optimise ones website for search engines anyway? Isn't that totally backwards? I should optimise my website for *users* and their expierience and the general webstandards. If the search engine is to stupid to find content on my site that is relative to a search, then it certainly isn't my job to optimise for them. That's the job of search engines themselves. That's where the name comes from. Guess why Altavista missed out when Google appeared. The had the more optimised search engine.
I allways thought (and still think) that so-called webdesigners that offer their customers 'search engine optimisation' (whatever that's supposed to be) to be the used-car sales and multilevel marketing lot of IT field. Some shady semi-professionals offering some non-product. Whenever I'm finished building a Web CMS Site for customers I take the time to feed the URL into the searchbots so they do the first scan of the site more quickly, but that's it. If anyone comes to me bickering about the bad search results a searchengine comes up with I usually tell them that if the searchengine sucks, they should use a different one. It's that simple, really.
Bottom line: If you're doing *anything* on the web, forget about search engines and just build a good site. If your site is good and the search engine is good, both will find each other fast. All else is just bogus.
German has a simular term. It's called having or "being in the red numbers" (in den roten Zahlen sein) or "writing red numbers" (rote Zahlen schreiben) which all mean making loss. The same as the english "red ink" used to write 'red numbers'.
Cutting through red tape means having to make a big issue to be able to enter somewhere (as in cutting the red tape across the street of a new bridge).
So it should be "red ink" and not "red tape" when talking about Sonys losses of lately. Though the two idoms sound simular, they bouth mean different things.
D-Link Business Development and Strategic Partnerships, E-mail: bdm@dlink.com
>>> To whom ever it may concern:
Hello. I just learned of you companies notably persistent inability and unwillingness to deal with a serious design flaw in a growing range of your products. This flaw is severly disrupting internet services for a large amount of internet participants and even though you have been informed in detail of these effects your products are having, you have done nothing of substance to resolve the issue and compensate for the damage done.
Until I learn that the issue described in the open letter do D-Link, available under http://people.freebsd.org/~phk/dlink/, was resolved in a professional and mutualy satisfying manner I will not purchase any D-Link products and will strongly discourage anybody asking for my expertise as a professional in the IT field from buying D-Link products or from engageing in any sort of business relationship with D-Link.
Sincerely An Internet User
Mistakes in this one? Please post corrected version below and then add a 'mailto' link to the address. Grammar Nazis, it's your turn!
- OSS? Check. - Avantgarde Language known for neat concepts, hippness and good results? Check. - Compiled rather than the bazillion interpreted PLs I've got allready (Python, Perl, PHP, etc...)? Check. - No C/C++ suckage even though it's a compiled language? Check. - Comes with neat OSS IDE now costing 0 as opposed to the 4900$ last week? Check. - Zero fuss hassle free cross-plattform deving? Check. - Zero fuss ultra hassle free cross-plattform GUI kit? Dunno... gotta find that out.
Mmmmh..., looks like the Eiffel bunch has me looking into their favourite PL with some quality time.
The article got it all backwards. Why are there other collab tools in the first place? That's because E-Mail sucks so bad at what it does, there is room for other tools!
Redesign the E-Mail protocoll to something that isn't totally crapped up by a decade of MS Outlook, supports all languages, enforce a single ecryption, request for pass and signature standard, force threading, true metadata seperation (adress based quoting included), thread-based versioning and integrate vcard, ical and XHTML Strict into it and all other tools will go the way of the dodo.
But the reality is we have a totally messed up set of semi-standards based on a design from 35 years ago, when networks didn't even exist.
The truth is, E-Mail is a bunch of crap, miles away from what it could be with an ease. Bazillions of clients, each with it's own approach to dealing with every aspect of E-Mail and no sign of convergence. Add Spam into the mix and you see why productive people avoid E-Mail as much as possible.
Zope - What RoR wants to be when it grows up.
on
Ruby On Rails Goes 1.1
·
· Score: 3, Informative
You know a thing is superhyped when v1.1 is mentioned on slashdot. Mind you RoR is cool compared to j2EE. Then again, it's allmost as if C is cool when compared to J2EE. J2EE sucks big time for server side web - even the Java Gurus agree on that. End of discussion, no news here. But RoR isn't the end all of ssi frameworks. Django is at least as good (I'd say better and cleaner than RoR) and Zope has been around since the ninties and still is years ahead of the rest. People with an overview over the technologies generally agree on that. I had a story submission (rejected) on that the other week. Check out the linked webcast, it's a very interessting analysis of a set of technologies and solutions:
||||| Nasa/JPL Web Framework Shootout
In an educative and entertaining webcast, Sean Kelly, a Nasa/JPL software engineer, goes into the details of a project based comparsion between a set of web application frameworks and servers. Including the much hyped Ruby on Rails and Django. Various Java technologies, Ruby on Rails, Django, TurboGears and Zope are covered. Details and traits of each are mentioned. For people involved with web developement there are not to many suprises though, yet the presentation and Kellys commenting are fun to watch. In a nutshell: EJB, Hibernate and various other Java flavours fail spectacularly, Zope scores a clear victory with Django, RoR and TurboGears relatively close behind. Development speed, error-gotchas, the need for hand-tweaking and the requirement of handwritten SQL and available documentation go into the measuring. As does an overall tongue-in-check "fun-factor". The details are interessting though. TurboGears 'error-driven' developement gets a positive review, RoRs automated controller generation aswell and Zope gets a complete rundown on it's astounding set of features. In the end long-time Java developer Kelly convinces us that - no matter what we do - we really, positively, don't want to use EJB or Hibernate for this kind of stuff. Very entertaining and informative indeed. |||||
Slashdot Mirror
Got news for you:
It actually *was* Unix. Check here: http://www.determinate.net/webdata/seg/tdfsb.html
Allthough I don't know if that's the correct version she was using.
Right on. Putting that shaky-cam homevideo on #2 is a plain insult.
Goes to show the blockheads sad and sorry inability for marketing.
Same with Mambo that became 'Joomla!'. Great CMS, crappy name.
And, Yes, we should care.
Whenever the chance arises I talk my potential interns into Python or some other OS PL and away from Word and Excel. I also bug them into using and learning jEdit.
Geeks gotta learn to spread the love to prevent MS from taking over. Todays Comps are to bloated to show their inner workings imediately, we have to help the Padavans look inside of them.
Isn't this a solution to a problem that goes in the wrong direction? As far as I can tell regularly typing code it disapearing any time soon anyway. They should put the research into an open source object-relational case tool and be done with typing code. Any code that requires typing it extra special and involves more thinking than typing. The more effective my functions get, the more I have to ponder them.
In ten years from now we'll be building code out of virtual 3D blocks with sensory input for and from arms, hands and eyes.
Germany is a federation aswell. Where do you draw the line?
If the ID is neutral and uniquely identifies the person carring it and each living person has a right to one without any discriminatory markings on them ... so if the card is _really_ only a peronal ID, then it could be a good idea. Identity theft and other things would become much more difficult.
The bureau handing out the cards should be directly controlled by the people and be law required to be neutral. The cards could have SSN and other info on them and be used as a transport medium for own usage like bank account access or medical data if one whishes.
If all that would be than they'd be an advantage and would make life easyer imho. We've got compulsory IDs here in germany. The most bugging thing about them is that they are to big to fit into a wallet without folding and that they can't be used for usefull stuff.
I read this and shrugged my shoulders. Who cares?
All the people here getting all worked up seem to be really addicted to Windows. I just ran Win2K the other day - considering to use it as a webdev plattform. Took me 10 minutes to drop that idea once again. Task Manger had 30+ processes running and was slowpoking about as if it were my old Cyric 150Mhz CPU. God, does that OS suck.
I'm sticking with Mac OS X and Linux. I really couldn't care less about Windows. And you shouldn't either.
My spouse needed some music from her dance classes. We found nearly all on iTunes. I bought, DLd and burnt them on a CD-Rom. Perfect. Steve Jobs, Apple and the Industry got their fair share from me today. Zero hassle, zero fuss and a DRM that interests NOBODY who doesn't do illegal stuff. So I can't burn a playlist more than 7 times. Who cares.
WHY DOES IT HAVE TO BE ANY MORE COMPLICATED THAN THAT, I ASK?
Bottom line:
Get pissy with me, and I'll be off your customer list again. Play nice and you'll get my money. BTW: I recommend Magnatune.com to everybody. They've got some really cool stuff on their download site. All formats (including FLAC and OGG) all bitrates and no DRM. And 50% goes to the artists directly. Oh, and the music is good.
I don't know FF7 but I know an arrogant asshole when I see one. Or read an article by one for that matter. So this game had some stuff that made it cream of the crop for a large fanbase. Judging from the screenshots it had some really neat looking 3D Anime characters by the standards of those days. Apparently he doesn't comply with the majorities opinion. So what's the big deal?
Using D&D as the bar to define Roleplaying - not matter if Pen & Paper or Videogame - goes to show that this guy is nothing but a halfwit with an over-inflated opinion of himself. And a very obnoxious attitude and writing style. That alone is enough to dismiss the article. No matter how many points he may have along the way or not.
I want my 5 Minutes back.
I'm 36 and in IT for a living since the dot-boom. If you like IT, do it. Don't do it for the money. Do it because you like it. I actually studied art and have a diploma in arts. I jumped into IT (web stuff) as a sidestep. I studied Art for the fun of it. Now I'm doing IT (mostly) for the fun of it.
General rule goes like this:
The easiest way to success is
1) Doing what's fun.
2) Doing it good.
3) Telling people about it.
Mind you, IT being a difficult subject and still a booming industry, it is not that a bad carreer choice.
As for the future of IT I can only ashure to you that IT is extremely rapidly becoming an industrialized profession. Code Generation, extensive OOAD everywhere, low-level OS commodity, ubiqious high speed solid-state storage just around the corner, etc... Once it's all there we'll start seeing the world moving into new territory like robotics and a growing field of robot-AI programming.
If you wan't a hint: Don't waste your time with ready-made proprietary lock-in software (read: stay away from Microsoft, SAP, etc.). Companies come and go, OSS is here to stay. But don't waste to much of your time with Linux/BSD/Whatever admining either! Learn the basics (programming, File Herarchy Standard, etc.) and then move to OOAD quickly. If you want a compromise between fun and money, Java could be a good choice for the plattform these days (even though it's a compromise between OSS and closed source). Whatever you do, don't get so obsessed with your favourite pet technology that you don't see the world advancing around you. You'll be part of last years league faster than you think.
The semi-funny parent post goes along on the trouble of installing Oracle as compared to MySQL and/or Postgres. My experience is that any DB Server requires solid knowledge of it's workings in order to do a clean install. Postgres from scratch is just as painfull as any other. And just because you can apt-get install mysql doesn't mean it's usually easy to install.
My question: Isn't it the big problem with various DB engines that they are more or less very simular but all still have the anoyances we all associate with DBs since 25 years ago? (I'm asking the experts here, folks, not some wannabees) Are there any truly essential differences between, let's say, MySQL 5 and the current Oracle release?
They both use some SQL variant, they both are a fuss to get up and running and they both provide some kind of sort-of-usable bridge between the real world and true object-relational dreamland. Isn't that so? Correct me if I'm wrong. And before you go on about service and all that, detail on what Oracle has to offer that MySQL AB can't provide for equal or less costs. Thanks for any usefull reply.
I actually like the story of the OSS FPS Cube. It goes like this:
"You kill stuff."
I've been a long time Linux user (Debian) and it still is my favourite OS on custom built PCs. But what still bugs me about it - especially after using OS X for almost two years now - is that you need to be a computer expert to get it running. I know you have to be the same when installing Windows from scratch, but I've stopped taking Windows as the bar like 6 years ago.
I recently did an update on my debian box and again the german keyboard is gone and I've got wrong (english) characters everywhere. There goes half and hour of research and fixing again. When I go about and reinstall it (or Ubuntu or something else) I better be fully aware of all my hardware and it's chipsets or else I will have serious trouble getting Linux to work. When you run Linux you usually know your HW inside out but it's been nearly 3 years ago since I last did some larger setup and config. I write my HW specs on small stickers that I put everywhere on my cards and MB but thats quite a prospect - opening your box so you can prep for a fresh Linux install that will take 20hrs.+ before everything is where it was before.
Obviously I'm getting old and gotta get real work done rather than fiddling with crummy x86 architectures, but admit it, I've got a point, no? Remember the C64? Unpack, plugin, works. That's how modern computers should work.
This is an add from somebody pushing some new Ajax Shop. Probably that company salesforce.com that's mentioned 3x a sentence.
Wether SaaS or not, soon it will make no difference. People will be able to choose between having their OSS solution of choice set up on their own hardware in their own shop or an OSS solution set up on the servers of their favourite IT service company.
Preping customer hardware with software or running it for them on your own servers is not that much of a difference anyway. Not nowadays it is.
SaaS will, if anything, blur the line between OSS and closed source - because people (customers and vendors) won't care anymore. And that will push OSS rather than closed source.
I had an IBM Thinkpad once. It was an IBM PS/2 Note N33 SX. A Notebook with a 33Mhz 386 and up to 6 MB of Memory. I think it was one of the first notebooks ever. I have yet to see a Notebook with a keyboard of that quality.
There is something to it, the ThinkPad quality I mean.
No.
Eclipse has enough quirks and bugs to justify having Netbeans around. Just have the Netbeans lot decide to support other languages better than Eclipse and integrate jEdit and Netbeans is on top again. I'm currently doing PHP stuff with Eclipse and while it's nice for free it certainly isn't the bar for OSS IDEs. There is plenty of room for Netbeans and I don't see the 'momentum' you're talking about taking any effect on real-world usability of eclipse. They even still don't have a devent FTP connectivity.
I'm of for the day for an interview for a game developer position tomorrow. Here's what they had in my application allready: Professional Enviroment, competent colleagues, room for creative initiative, professional workflow and solid & fair payment. Tomorrow I'm going to add 'no standard overtime' to that list. 2 Pro's with a proper workflow pull more in 8 hour days than 6 people with 12 hour days. That's the simple truth. I'm not subventioning stupid management with my mental and physical health.
...
They've gotten to me by a headhunter bureau and wanted an interview right away, so they must be desperate. But I'm not gonna be a fireextinguisher for an overdue project (my spider sense is tingling that way somehow) in some messy enviroment that has no version control, no OOAD and no designers and coders working together and a no boss that give enough rope and is open for ideas.
I'd rather work as a barista and continue developing my own game in my spare time than being the assmonkey for some idiots with an overdrawn budget that were to stupid to do it right in the first place. And probably wouldn't have listend to my advice because of me having no degree in CS or something.
Then again, maybe they are the cool shop I hope they are (the dev on Linux exclusively - can't be that bad) and I get to meet some very neat team tomorrow. Keep your fingers crossed that all goes well - one way or the other.
I remember registring domains that I though sounded cool back in the dot-bomb days. Except for maybe one, they still wouldn't be occupied today. I recently registred a quite cool .com name that I want for a project. I usually take me 5 minutes to come up with a unique name that's easy to use and not occupied by anyone else who is a serious competition in the field. What'st the big fuss? A friend of mine spent 200 Euro to buy a german word domain.
Who cares? No one. The most famous URL is google.com. I doupt a registrar would have that in his portfolio if they'd start their company today.
I hope all registrars go broke. But I guess as long as people are willing to shell out $$ for cooldomain.com they will make money. Stupid people.
He's right. Any Unix like OS is a behemoth. Allways has been. Linux never was an exception. It allways needed stronger hardware than Windows a few years ago. That's slowly changing, but parts of the Linux experience are serious slowpokes and demand top range hardware for up-to-date performance. Pure BeOS would probably be the prototype of a modern system that runs fast and lightweight.
Yet I still can't shake the notion of this project approaching the problem the wrong way.
Let me explain:
I've got a Sharp PC 1403 right here. It's the successor to my first computer I've ever had, a PC 1402. It runs on two buttoncells for something like 200-300 hrs. I've yet to see a comp that runs of the grid for such a long time. The 1403 has 32 KB which isn't very much at all. But this computer is 15 years old! The 1402 I bought back in 1985!
What if you take, let's say, a PC 500-S (the lates of the sharp series, still available), give it a good large (80x40) monocromatic passive LCD display, 4-8 MB of memory, two slowpoke non-x86 CPUs and a good solar display and some kind of rugged connectivity (some serial port or something). Put it all into one super stable box that is easy to open and repair and build them for 30$ a piece. It can't be that hard. Who in the 3rd world needs a Linux Box??? I don't even need one - and I make a living using Debian (I'm typing this on a Mac). Back in the day DOS 5 and Works 5 on a 4-greyscale LCD PC the size of a chocolate bar (1994 it was) was perfect for everything. And it still would be today. It's just that we what to see neat little pictures. The Fidonet was text-only and the quality of content was 10x better.
Nobody in the outskirts of Africa needs Linux and noone there has 100$.
Search Engine optimisation is a contradiction in term
How come does anybody, not to speak of web designers, get the stupid idea that one has to optimise ones website for search engines anyway? Isn't that totally backwards? I should optimise my website for *users* and their expierience and the general webstandards. If the search engine is to stupid to find content on my site that is relative to a search, then it certainly isn't my job to optimise for them. That's the job of search engines themselves. That's where the name comes from.
Guess why Altavista missed out when Google appeared. The had the more optimised search engine.
I allways thought (and still think) that so-called webdesigners that offer their customers 'search engine optimisation' (whatever that's supposed to be) to be the used-car sales and multilevel marketing lot of IT field. Some shady semi-professionals offering some non-product. Whenever I'm finished building a Web CMS Site for customers I take the time to feed the URL into the searchbots so they do the first scan of the site more quickly, but that's it. If anyone comes to me bickering about the bad search results a searchengine comes up with I usually tell them that if the searchengine sucks, they should use a different one. It's that simple, really.
Bottom line:
If you're doing *anything* on the web, forget about search engines and just build a good site. If your site is good and the search engine is good, both will find each other fast. All else is just bogus.
German has a simular term. It's called having or "being in the red numbers" (in den roten Zahlen sein) or "writing red numbers" (rote Zahlen schreiben) which all mean making loss. The same as the english "red ink" used to write 'red numbers'.
Cutting through red tape means having to make a big issue to be able to enter somewhere (as in cutting the red tape across the street of a new bridge).
So it should be "red ink" and not "red tape" when talking about Sonys losses of lately. Though the two idoms sound simular, they bouth mean different things.
Ok, let's do some good. Are we slashdot, or what?
D-Link Business Development and Strategic Partnerships, E-mail: bdm@dlink.com
>>>
To whom ever it may concern:
Hello.
I just learned of you companies notably persistent inability and unwillingness to deal with a serious design flaw in a growing range of your products. This flaw is severly disrupting internet services for a large amount of internet participants and even though you have been informed in detail of these effects your products are having, you have done nothing of substance to resolve the issue and compensate for the damage done.
Until I learn that the issue described in the open letter do D-Link, available under http://people.freebsd.org/~phk/dlink/, was resolved in a professional and mutualy satisfying manner I will not purchase any D-Link products and will strongly discourage anybody asking for my expertise as a professional in the IT field from buying D-Link products or from engageing in any sort of business relationship with D-Link.
Sincerely
An Internet User
Mistakes in this one? Please post corrected version below and then add a 'mailto' link to the address.
Grammar Nazis, it's your turn!
- OSS? Check.
..., looks like the Eiffel bunch has me looking into their favourite PL with some quality time.
- Avantgarde Language known for neat concepts, hippness and good results? Check.
- Compiled rather than the bazillion interpreted PLs I've got allready (Python, Perl, PHP, etc...)? Check.
- No C/C++ suckage even though it's a compiled language? Check.
- Comes with neat OSS IDE now costing 0 as opposed to the 4900$ last week? Check.
- Zero fuss hassle free cross-plattform deving? Check.
- Zero fuss ultra hassle free cross-plattform GUI kit? Dunno... gotta find that out.
Mmmmh
The article got it all backwards.
Why are there other collab tools in the first place? That's because E-Mail sucks so bad at what it does, there is room for other tools!
Redesign the E-Mail protocoll to something that isn't totally crapped up by a decade of MS Outlook, supports all languages, enforce a single ecryption, request for pass and signature standard, force threading, true metadata seperation (adress based quoting included), thread-based versioning and integrate vcard, ical and XHTML Strict into it and all other tools will go the way of the dodo.
But the reality is we have a totally messed up set of semi-standards based on a design from 35 years ago, when networks didn't even exist.
The truth is, E-Mail is a bunch of crap, miles away from what it could be with an ease. Bazillions of clients, each with it's own approach to dealing with every aspect of E-Mail and no sign of convergence. Add Spam into the mix and you see why productive people avoid E-Mail as much as possible.
You know a thing is superhyped when v1.1 is mentioned on slashdot.
Mind you RoR is cool compared to j2EE. Then again, it's allmost as if C is cool when compared to J2EE. J2EE sucks big time for server side web - even the Java Gurus agree on that. End of discussion, no news here.
But RoR isn't the end all of ssi frameworks. Django is at least as good (I'd say better and cleaner than RoR) and Zope has been around since the ninties and still is years ahead of the rest. People with an overview over the technologies generally agree on that. I had a story submission (rejected) on that the other week. Check out the linked webcast, it's a very interessting analysis of a set of technologies and solutions:
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Nasa/JPL Web Framework Shootout
In an educative and entertaining webcast, Sean Kelly, a Nasa/JPL software engineer, goes into the details of a project based comparsion between a set of web application frameworks and servers. Including the much hyped Ruby on Rails and Django. Various Java technologies, Ruby on Rails, Django, TurboGears and Zope are covered. Details and traits of each are mentioned. For people involved with web developement there are not to many suprises though, yet the presentation and Kellys commenting are fun to watch.
In a nutshell: EJB, Hibernate and various other Java flavours fail spectacularly, Zope scores a clear victory with Django, RoR and TurboGears relatively close behind. Development speed, error-gotchas, the need for hand-tweaking and the requirement of handwritten SQL and available documentation go into the measuring. As does an overall tongue-in-check "fun-factor". The details are interessting though. TurboGears 'error-driven' developement gets a positive review, RoRs automated controller generation aswell and Zope gets a complete rundown on it's astounding set of features. In the end long-time Java developer Kelly convinces us that - no matter what we do - we really, positively, don't want to use EJB or Hibernate for this kind of stuff. Very entertaining and informative indeed.
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