What are you selling your customers? Are you selling an emotion or some sort of strange detached feeling of satisfaction? Most companies nowadays do that. Then just sell your IT product with a nice looking GUI and lots of nice little buttons and habe the marketing dept. take some pictures and add their phrases. They'll ask you about a noteworthy feature or two and present it in such a way you wont recognize your own product anymore. It will sell like hot cakes.
If, on the other hand, your selling really JUST the product and the truth that comes along with it - combine it with a consulting business that checks wether the product is the right thing for your customer or not. I tell my customers flat out if my thing isn't the right one. I'm that honest. On the other hand they do get a remark from me when they buy third party crap and complain to me later on. Especially if I told them so before. There are very few people who work this way and they even, naturally, have the habit of rejecting certain customers. Old Book Stores come to mind as an example. There you get exactly what your asking for. But be prepared to be told that you're not the kind to actually judge if the product you interested in even is the right one for you and you better go look somewhere else, cause they don't really want you as customer. I'm actually looking forward to the time when my business has grown that far that I have a customer que were my (and my employees) biggest job is to pick the right ones and reject the others. That's the only way a business built on truth will be able to work in the long run imho. To be true you absolutely need a customer who knows what he wants. All else is just the usual stuff.
I'm not upset about importing a swf into a quicktime or worried about the browser plugin handling video, but that is more of a issue I have with creating stand alone projectors for use in CD-ROM and kiosks.
I wasn't talking about importing Flash to Quicktime either. Import the Quicktime into flash and convert them to single swf's containing only the video. Works well in MX 2k4 Pro and is the way I do it.
I just wish it worked the same way it does in director but without, ya know, lingo (shudders). You mean the Lingo of the Director of the Macromedia please, don't you?:-))) I had a Job once, programming Lingo/Director 8 hours a day. It was terrible.
Finally a Flash rant that doesn't come from a total dickhead.
But you've got some serious wrongs in your rant. Haven't got much time so I'll speed through a few (my refererenc is Flash MX 2004 Pro, btw):
10. Poor buffering of streaming mp3's
Completely wrong. Works perfectly if you write your own AS 2-liners that control delayed playback dependent on bandwidth. Which is what you should do in the first place anyway.
8. Lack of "onload" feature for Loadvariables()
Bad example. Loadvariables() is an ancient artifact thats only left in for compatability reasons. Load an XML document with your stuff (loadvariables() sucks anyway. I remember hacking a dynamic flash app with that in Flash 5. Creepy.) and you can check loadstatus and totalload anytime you want.
7. Lack of videsupport
Incorrect. Importing into swf doesnt bloat Quicktimes and FLV is the best streaming format out there. Or do you want the plugin to be a full range video player? Isn't that a bit much for a VM with so much features allready? I'd rather keep VM size down then support all video formats in existance. We get new ones every odd week anyway. No use trying to keep up with that.
6. Separation of Movieclip and Button class objects
Yeah, shure. Stop the nitpick allready. Heavens crickey, that button thing is a built-in for those who are used to clicking together their apps by hand since Flash 3 using the old style paradigms of keeping your brain switched off. AS is a full range PL with a set of libs. Don't like them? Ignore them and build your own.
THat's for a quick comment of mine. Aside from that: Congrats to a rather educated remark on flash in a long time. Rare thing here on/. .
Before that I used a Motorola T22, which I still own. Both are equally good, the siemens having a better form factor and a modem built in, the Motorola having a regular 3,5 mm earpiece/mic connector, lit keys and volumecontrols that can be opereated whilst phoning. Both have experienced extreme mistreatment over the years. Dropping, bounching, scratching, various liquids and so forth. They both have required a batterypack removal at some point (unrelated to anything that happend to the phone physically) in order to be resetted, but that's about it. The M35 appears to be a phone that can be backed in an oven at 200 degrees centigrade, thrown from a 5 story building, run over by a tank and dropped into a foot-deep acid-beacon and then eventually still be used as a fully functional phone. It's for reasons like this that I, as the usual techno geek, am very conservative when it comes to updating my cellphones. I'm a freelancer and dependant on a working phone. I do have a PDA aswell, which I bought 2 weeks ago, but it is the most unspectacular model I could find with a 320px color screen (a Palm Tungsten E). It has all the features needed and probably will stay reliable for me a long time. Bottom Line: If you're buying a piece of hardware that your gonna use in situatins where you can't afford it to get in your way, go for reliability over featureitis. Less newfangled 1st generation gizmos built in == more reliable. My 2 cents.
...(what a few hundred Slashdotters seem incapable of):
I'd say right now the "classic" CS market is as bad as it can get. Which means: You have the distinct advantage of, what germans call "studying anti-cyclic", which means when you're finished you can expect there will be a growing demand again.
That been said: No other area is in such a rapid and extreme fast-forward evolution than the IT sector. The way people work, earn their money and which kind of work is needed in order to solve problems changes at least twice a decade. What I'm saying is, do be aware of this: We are living in the steam-age of IT. Standards change every odd month. Weird things like the once so hip Java showing signs of age and having it's market slowly nibbled at by PHP - who would've figured? HTML & JScript Hacking was a big fat hairy deal a tad more than 5 years ago, now it's not even good for a joke. OSS is around the corner, posed and ready to kill off large chunks of an entire world-wide 800-and-something billion industry which will then bit by bit be fed into entirely new industry stuctures and business models. Nerds hacking their Minix clones have grown to demi-gods of the industry and some other nutcase is making a huge fortune by forcebly ignoring classic IT concepts and selling little harddisks in white (and pink and pastel blue, etc.) cases that play music with a computer 3000 times the power of what your fields ancestors used to programm on for a living. In other words & bottom line: We're heading full-throttle into a large-type badass Age of Cyberpunk. Wether or not you you want to stand admidst in the fray in ten years from now is up to you. Go figure. My 2 cents.
It's called "Matter Compiler" and plays a major role in Neal Stephensons yet-again-visionary novel "The Diamond Age" (That's the one he wrote after SnowCrash). He quite precisely describes how a utopian post-cyberpunk society where such devices are common would look like. BTW: The age describe in the novel is called the diamond age because of precisely that: diamond has replaced glass because it's substancially cheaper as it's just built from carbon molecules inside MCs.
Blender is an industry strength 3D package, has a full fledged game engine and even has it's own Video NLE built in. It's been used for the animatics during the Spiderman Movies preproduction. It's newest release (just 3 weeks ago) has a large amount of new features that move it to a new, very professional level. Anything you'd want to do with, f.e., the Unreal Editor to make Machinima Clips you'll probably be better of doing with Blender. And maybe even you'll choose to use acutally CGI rendering. The award winning industry strength Blender-Plugin Makehuman has all you need to go for "real" CGI in the first place. And there are other Plugins such as Topixcloth that can do a lot more. I strongly recommend that you give Blender a try. If it's not your thing you can allways switch to something else such as the Unreal Editor. But as I said, I wouldn't recommend it.
Avtually English and German are both my mothertounge. It's just that I've lived in germany longer. BTW, I actually think my german spelling is just as "bad" as my english spelling. Which I'm actually quite happy with as you can imagine.:-)
Apple survives on getting people to pay very high prices for cool looking products. Once Apple gets people buying iPods, it would only make sense that those same sheeps would also start buying overpriced but pretty Macs.
I've been dealing with computers since the mid 80ies. Programming, experimenting, using and depending on them. Since 3 years I've been a Linux/x86 guy only. Half a year ago I bought an 12" iBook. My first Mac. Btw, the cheapest Subnotebook available.
This is a fact: Macs are not any more expensive that equivalent PCs. On the contrary. If I buy a Mac, I unpack it, plug it into the grid outlet, turn it on and it works. It's got zero-crap hardware in a package that had 5 people thinktanking half a year about how to design the power supply. And an equal effort put into everthing else. It's got an optional widescreen that plain and simply imidiately shuts every PC zealot up the moment he sees it in real life, no matter how expensive it may be. (And those actually *are* really expensive) It's got a high end industry strength reference grade quality OS with tons of high end industry strength reference grade quality software preinstalled. On top of that, there is not a single multimedia related thing I can't imidiately do with absolutely zero fuss and hassle. I pop in a DVD: It works. I fire up zshell (works out of the box) scp (works out of the box) my python programm from my Linux PC onto my Mac and run it. And guess what: I works out of the box. I scp the jedit jar from my Linux PC (!) put it on my Mac Destop and run it (works... you know the drill). Guess what fuss it took to get Java running smoothly on Linux... And on top of that, Swing on a Mac finally doens't look like someone did doo-doo on my screen anymore. And that without even caring about what Java is.
By now I predict the following: Within the next 5 years we will see a substancial increase of Linux usage (critical mass nearly reached in some countries, germany, f.e.) and an increase in Mac usage. Linux serving the low-cost, full-power no-floss desk and business workhorse enviroment, mac serving the media/sleek and cool appliance market. The MS-PC market will be caught in the middle and, I wouldn't be suprised, probably be squished quite a bit aswell. I actually do expect the MS market to be marginalized by 2010. (and nealy everything I've predicted up to now has come true in one way or the other)
If I had the ability I would mod your post to -10^100 frustratingly redundant. Read the manual and discover the power and wonder of virtual desktops. GIMP IS a viable alternative to PS, but not if you're so stubborn to belive that PS is where every such application should be.
I'm sorry, but you're into serious slashdot-level bullshitting territory here. The parent post is absolute right on the relation between Gimp and PS. Gimp is a tool that is usefull and actually can be used for true professional productive work. It may at some points be a good alternative to Jasc Paint Shop Pro and Corel Photopaint. But it is no where near PS. And from what I gather from the Gimp team, at the point it doesn't even try (or claim) to be. You people claiming Gimp were a PS killer are just being silly. PS has tons of extremely productive features that no other grafics tool has. Even stripping everything but the PS Filters and the PS protocol would be enough to put PS at least 2 major releases ahead of Gimp. Actually, Gimps version numbers coherelate quite well to one another. PS 5.5 (which I still use) is really like at least 3 major releases ahead of the current version of Gimp. And all that has nothing to do with Gimp having the imho anoying habbit of opening a window for each litte thingy it wants to display. And I _do_ use Fluxbox when using Gimp. It's the only WM that the old Gimp interface was actually bearable with.
Dot Bombies are 120% done for over here. I have to say that I'm actually quite happy with that, since I don't have to compete with complete Schmocks anymore. Now when I say I'm good at IT stuff, people actually believe me because I ought to be if I'm still in business. Employment in the field is slowly picking up, but the economy is probably in for a serious downhill ride next year here in germany, so the detension in the IT Jobs market may be just a drop in the bucket. One thing that has me alerted is that Linux/OSS will reach critical mass here any time soon and OSS people are rare and looked for at the moment. Which is just what I predicted and why I started my little business.
For me things look fair. Flying under the radar, always close to going broke, but no need to hassle with assholes who think they know better than I just because they had the millions to burn a few years ago. A new market for socially capable Linux/OSS experts up ahead and a nice little group of early adopters who are willing to listen to what I have to say and gladly pay for my services. I wouldn't say that I can complain.
Having studied and practiced art professionally for 8 years I can say that, just like programming, the essence of making art boils down to about 10 to 20 rules. Yet grasping these rules to the full extend and improving your skills to actually apply these rules usefully is long hard work. A basic tip I'd give is to copy the artists you consider best. The rest follows the usual pure and simple rule:
There is no secret. Work your ass off.
And, btw, no amount of powertools will bend that rule. Just as is it is with programming.
I was talking about "making hardware fast and reliable" not "mix 10 technologies because you can handle a single one of them and want to fiddle" and compensate for that by charging your customer for quadrupled hardware". That is a big difference. And it's strange, but wereever I go I encounter a hideous mess of tangled systems set up by nerds that can't even use the right screws to fasten a harddrive, have set up 3 servers, two DB's a webserver and a MTA with some cryptic (read: crappy) perl glue, were one solid workstation with a good harddrive some extra ram and a good email client with three filters applied can do the job faster, more reliable and with MUCH less maintainance costs. Any geek who thinks he's cream because he knows how to set up 10 different DBs and 5 distros (and I only use Debian/Zope) whom I have to clean up after (just happend today) is not a computer expert but a moron to me. And usually an arrogant nusciance (spelling?) on top of that.
Zope X3 is NOT , I repeat, is NOT Zope 3. It's an essential tool on the way to Zope 3, but not Zope 3 itself. So if you're not joining the Zope devteam, quit weighing in on their servers.:-)
Re:OK we need some input from the Zope heads
on
Zope X3 3.0.0 Released
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· Score: 5, Informative
Is it really an Application Server and if so what services does it provide? I ask because the programmers tutorial makes it look like a run of the mill framework for generating webpages.
Most that I can think of. It even comes with it's own webserver, so you can spare yourself the Apache installation. Good for testing out of the box.
Is it compiled into native code? I know this is more a Python thing but even mentioning an application server built in a scripting language will have me ridiculed out the door.
1st of all: Python isn't any more a "scripting language" (whatever that is) than Java (which you mention for comparsion in another place)). But to answer your question: Performance critical parts are written in C (and iirc a little in C++), the rest is Python.
Any performance indications or comparissons? Anyone port Petshop and compare it against JBoss or Geronimo perchance? Compared to other solutions that have the DB totally seperated it is generally considered slower when used with no second thought on optimization. Which imho is the whole point of Zope, as it makes building data driven networked applications nearly as simple as clicking together a website in dreamweaver. My philosophy is to make the hardware fast and reliable and to keep speed optimizations as far away from the code as possible. This btw is usually more sufficent and measurabley cheaper for the customers aswell.
Apart from that Zope offers nearly infinite methods for optimization, inlcluding load balancing functions for a Zope farm, intergration of classical external DBs and usage of Zope in conjunction with other products such as the Apache Webserver.
Zope is a web application server with an integrated object relational database and a turnkey web administration frontend. It's basically a prototype of what application servers and databases are going to look like in 5 to 10 years. From having worked with Zope I can say the power of this tool simply is breathtaking. Technology wise it's way beyond anything else I've seen, including J2EE and the bazillion other Appservers that come with it and other to-date solutions like the ones based on.Net. It's downsides were the lack of consitent documentation for some parts, slow extra basic components (called "Products") and a lack of filtering in the Zope community. Like top grade Zope solutions right next to crappy beta level coding experiments. Lot of this has improved throughout the last 2 years though. Still missing is a larger support by ISPs running Zope on their servers. Bottom line: If anyone wants to build a special application with lot of custom server side programming, Zope is the powertool of choice. Technology wise it beats any other solution hands down. Think "The Linux of Application Servers".
To get things straight: I'm not a creationist and I'm certainly not a creationist as normaly the word is understood in the US. I personally think it's an extreme act of heresy and blasphemy to presume that, so to speak, a day in god's time is just as long as a day in human time. Dispelling the "10 000 years" bullshit creationists like to spread. I think your standard US bible-belt creationists are crazy nutheads that ought to be excommunicated from ever which religious organization they belong to ASAP. And that they ought to be prohibited from calling themselves 'christians'. That being said: The Bombardier Bug has an extremly effective defense tactic agains Frogs an the likes. He shoots two liquid components of a two-component explosive that hit each other at a distance and explode, causing an explosion simular to that of a small gunshot. He does so by timing and aiming the squirt of each component liquid in such a way that he isn't hurt himself. Timing takes place in a frame of Milliseconds. The explosion this bug causes is more than enough to instantly kill it if it happens to close or inside it. Where the two components are safely kept seperately until used. There is no way what-so-ever that a something like this could evolve using 100% pure so-called darwinisim. (Sidenote: The most important darwinist actually says that darwinisim alone doesn't explain everything. That one being Darwin himself.) Bottom Line: To me it is an evident fact that - how shall we put it without sounding stupid - 'hyper sentinence' was involved in the evolution of the physical universe. That not necessarly be a god as he is usually described, and absolutely not as creationists usually describe. Maybe one could think of a kind of "hive intelligence" by all living things. But nevertheless and anyway: To me - and a lot of scientists - it is evident that the physical universe didn't come to be as it is by pure accident alone. The Bombardier Bug being a nice little indicating evidence in case.
They beat Blender, which required 100 000 Euro to be raised in order to buy out the source into GPL. But nevertheless I find the Blender fundraise more impressive as it didn't have a full page add for offering but "only" a cool piece of special software and a cool community.
Rant and hiss all you want. This application has the potential to move an entire generation of mid-40ish "Windows and VB4 still works for me" people - who are basically stating the truth - to Linux / OSS enviroments. And no Blahblah about Eclipse Basic being somewhere close to RAD or QTDevelop being a sort-of half way kinda RAD tool and "whats all the excitement about, I only need Perl and a few bazillion extra libs and dependency resoltions to write nice TK-Apps that are ugly as hell" will change that.
As for me, I'm sold. Congratulations to the Gambas team.
.. I presume the air will get thin for MS in the long run. Look at those features. It's like "Gee, that would be really cool to have" and three years later OS X has it, 5 years ahead of all the rest. I find the Automator one of those supercool things. Those things that will eventually put me out of business when everybody can automate his tasks with a few mouseklicks. But it's cool nonetheless.
MS should adapt to Linux/OSS? No shit. How is this news? They should've done it 3 years ago. Instead they chose to bash the GPL as unamerican. The stupidest thing they ever did. Nobody cared squat about software licences anyway until MS started making them care, casing CEO to notice the MS licencing crap they were putting up with. If they just would've offered a MS Linux Distribution everybody would've thought "MS bought Linux" and they'd be in the game. Now it's way to late for that. Unless they make an all out attack, admit they where wrong and openly join the OSS fray alongside a large-type MS style marketing campaign promoting MS DX for Linux (only 80$ per seat!), download and update services, their OS monopoly is done for in 18 months from now the latest. My 2 cents.
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What are you selling your customers?
Are you selling an emotion or some sort of strange detached feeling of satisfaction? Most companies nowadays do that.
Then just sell your IT product with a nice looking GUI and lots of nice little buttons and habe the marketing dept. take some pictures and add their phrases. They'll ask you about a noteworthy feature or two and present it in such a way you wont recognize your own product anymore. It will sell like hot cakes.
If, on the other hand, your selling really JUST the product and the truth that comes along with it - combine it with a consulting business that checks wether the product is the right thing for your customer or not.
I tell my customers flat out if my thing isn't the right one. I'm that honest. On the other hand they do get a remark from me when they buy third party crap and complain to me later on. Especially if I told them so before.
There are very few people who work this way and they even, naturally, have the habit of rejecting certain customers. Old Book Stores come to mind as an example. There you get exactly what your asking for. But be prepared to be told that you're not the kind to actually judge if the product you interested in even is the right one for you and you better go look somewhere else, cause they don't really want you as customer.
I'm actually looking forward to the time when my business has grown that far that I have a customer que were my (and my employees) biggest job is to pick the right ones and reject the others. That's the only way a business built on truth will be able to work in the long run imho. To be true you absolutely need a customer who knows what he wants.
All else is just the usual stuff.
I'm not upset about importing a swf into a quicktime or worried about the browser plugin handling video, but that is more of a issue I have with creating stand alone projectors for use in CD-ROM and kiosks.
:-))) I had a Job once, programming Lingo/Director 8 hours a day. It was terrible.
I wasn't talking about importing Flash to Quicktime either. Import the Quicktime into flash and convert them to single swf's containing only the video. Works well in MX 2k4 Pro and is the way I do it.
I just wish it worked the same way it does in director but without, ya know, lingo (shudders).
You mean the Lingo of the Director of the Macromedia please, don't you?
+4 Interesting.
Heavens crickey.
Welcome to slashdot, land of the total dickheads.
Finally a Flash rant that doesn't come from a total dickhead.
/. .
But you've got some serious wrongs in your rant. Haven't got much time so I'll speed through a few (my refererenc is Flash MX 2004 Pro, btw):
10. Poor buffering of streaming mp3's
Completely wrong. Works perfectly if you write your own AS 2-liners that control delayed playback dependent on bandwidth. Which is what you should do in the first place anyway.
8. Lack of "onload" feature for Loadvariables()
Bad example. Loadvariables() is an ancient artifact thats only left in for compatability reasons. Load an XML document with your stuff (loadvariables() sucks anyway. I remember hacking a dynamic flash app with that in Flash 5. Creepy.) and you can check loadstatus and totalload anytime you want.
7. Lack of videsupport
Incorrect. Importing into swf doesnt bloat Quicktimes and FLV is the best streaming format out there. Or do you want the plugin to be a full range video player? Isn't that a bit much for a VM with so much features allready? I'd rather keep VM size down then support all video formats in existance. We get new ones every odd week anyway. No use trying to keep up with that.
6. Separation of Movieclip and Button class objects
Yeah, shure. Stop the nitpick allready. Heavens crickey, that button thing is a built-in for those who are used to clicking together their apps by hand since Flash 3 using the old style paradigms of keeping your brain switched off. AS is a full range PL with a set of libs. Don't like them? Ignore them and build your own.
THat's for a quick comment of mine. Aside from that: Congrats to a rather educated remark on flash in a long time. Rare thing here on
Before that I used a Motorola T22, which I still own. Both are equally good, the siemens having a better form factor and a modem built in, the Motorola having a regular 3,5 mm earpiece/mic connector, lit keys and volumecontrols that can be opereated whilst phoning.
Both have experienced extreme mistreatment over the years. Dropping, bounching, scratching, various liquids and so forth. They both have required a batterypack removal at some point (unrelated to anything that happend to the phone physically) in order to be resetted, but that's about it. The M35 appears to be a phone that can be backed in an oven at 200 degrees centigrade, thrown from a 5 story building, run over by a tank and dropped into a foot-deep acid-beacon and then eventually still be used as a fully functional phone.
It's for reasons like this that I, as the usual techno geek, am very conservative when it comes to updating my cellphones. I'm a freelancer and dependant on a working phone. I do have a PDA aswell, which I bought 2 weeks ago, but it is the most unspectacular model I could find with a 320px color screen (a Palm Tungsten E). It has all the features needed and probably will stay reliable for me a long time.
Bottom Line:
If you're buying a piece of hardware that your gonna use in situatins where you can't afford it to get in your way, go for reliability over featureitis. Less newfangled 1st generation gizmos built in == more reliable. My 2 cents.
...(what a few hundred Slashdotters seem incapable of):
I'd say right now the "classic" CS market is as bad as it can get. Which means: You have the distinct advantage of, what germans call "studying anti-cyclic", which means when you're finished you can expect there will be a growing demand again.
That been said:
No other area is in such a rapid and extreme fast-forward evolution than the IT sector. The way people work, earn their money and which kind of work is needed in order to solve problems changes at least twice a decade.
What I'm saying is, do be aware of this:
We are living in the steam-age of IT. Standards change every odd month. Weird things like the once so hip Java showing signs of age and having it's market slowly nibbled at by PHP - who would've figured? HTML & JScript Hacking was a big fat hairy deal a tad more than 5 years ago, now it's not even good for a joke.
OSS is around the corner, posed and ready to kill off large chunks of an entire world-wide 800-and-something billion industry which will then bit by bit be fed into entirely new industry stuctures and business models. Nerds hacking their Minix clones have grown to demi-gods of the industry and some other nutcase is making a huge fortune by forcebly ignoring classic IT concepts and selling little harddisks in white (and pink and pastel blue, etc.) cases that play music with a computer 3000 times the power of what your fields ancestors used to programm on for a living.
In other words & bottom line:
We're heading full-throttle into a large-type badass Age of Cyberpunk. Wether or not you you want to stand admidst in the fray in ten years from now is up to you. Go figure.
My 2 cents.
It's called "Matter Compiler" and plays a major role in Neal Stephensons yet-again-visionary novel "The Diamond Age" (That's the one he wrote after SnowCrash).
He quite precisely describes how a utopian post-cyberpunk society where such devices are common would look like.
BTW: The age describe in the novel is called the diamond age because of precisely that: diamond has replaced glass because it's substancially cheaper as it's just built from carbon molecules inside MCs.
Blender is an industry strength 3D package, has a full fledged game engine and even has it's own Video NLE built in. It's been used for the animatics during the Spiderman Movies preproduction. It's newest release (just 3 weeks ago) has a large amount of new features that move it to a new, very professional level.
Anything you'd want to do with, f.e., the Unreal Editor to make Machinima Clips you'll probably be better of doing with Blender. And maybe even you'll choose to use acutally CGI rendering. The award winning industry strength Blender-Plugin Makehuman has all you need to go for "real" CGI in the first place. And there are other Plugins such as Topixcloth that can do a lot more.
I strongly recommend that you give Blender a try.
If it's not your thing you can allways switch to something else such as the Unreal Editor. But as I said, I wouldn't recommend it.
Anybody saying otherwise is bullshitting.
Avtually English and German are both my mothertounge. It's just that I've lived in germany longer. BTW, I actually think my german spelling is just as "bad" as my english spelling. Which I'm actually quite happy with as you can imagine. :-)
Apple survives on getting people to pay very high prices for cool looking products. Once Apple gets people buying iPods, it would only make sense that those same sheeps would also start buying overpriced but pretty Macs.
I've been dealing with computers since the mid 80ies. Programming, experimenting, using and depending on them. Since 3 years I've been a Linux/x86 guy only. Half a year ago I bought an 12" iBook. My first Mac. Btw, the cheapest Subnotebook available.
This is a fact: Macs are not any more expensive that equivalent PCs. On the contrary.
If I buy a Mac, I unpack it, plug it into the grid outlet, turn it on and it works. It's got zero-crap hardware in a package that had 5 people thinktanking half a year about how to design the power supply. And an equal effort put into everthing else. It's got an optional widescreen that plain and simply imidiately shuts every PC zealot up the moment he sees it in real life, no matter how expensive it may be. (And those actually *are* really expensive)
It's got a high end industry strength reference grade quality OS with tons of high end industry strength reference grade quality software preinstalled. On top of that, there is not a single multimedia related thing I can't imidiately do with absolutely zero fuss and hassle. I pop in a DVD: It works. I fire up zshell (works out of the box) scp (works out of the box) my python programm from my Linux PC onto my Mac and run it. And guess what: I works out of the box. I scp the jedit jar from my Linux PC (!) put it on my Mac Destop and run it (works... you know the drill). Guess what fuss it took to get Java running smoothly on Linux... And on top of that, Swing on a Mac finally doens't look like someone did doo-doo on my screen anymore. And that without even caring about what Java is.
By now I predict the following: Within the next 5 years we will see a substancial increase of Linux usage (critical mass nearly reached in some countries, germany, f.e.) and an increase in Mac usage. Linux serving the low-cost, full-power no-floss desk and business workhorse enviroment, mac serving the media/sleek and cool appliance market. The MS-PC market will be caught in the middle and, I wouldn't be suprised, probably be squished quite a bit aswell. I actually do expect the MS market to be marginalized by 2010. (and nealy everything I've predicted up to now has come true in one way or the other)
If I had the ability I would mod your post to -10^100 frustratingly redundant.
Read the manual and discover the power and wonder of virtual desktops.
GIMP IS a viable alternative to PS, but not if you're so stubborn to belive that PS is where every such application should be.
I'm sorry, but you're into serious slashdot-level bullshitting territory here. The parent post is absolute right on the relation between Gimp and PS. Gimp is a tool that is usefull and actually can be used for true professional productive work. It may at some points be a good alternative to Jasc Paint Shop Pro and Corel Photopaint. But it is no where near PS. And from what I gather from the Gimp team, at the point it doesn't even try (or claim) to be.
You people claiming Gimp were a PS killer are just being silly.
PS has tons of extremely productive features that no other grafics tool has. Even stripping everything but the PS Filters and the PS protocol would be enough to put PS at least 2 major releases ahead of Gimp. Actually, Gimps version numbers coherelate quite well to one another. PS 5.5 (which I still use) is really like at least 3 major releases ahead of the current version of Gimp. And all that has nothing to do with Gimp having the imho anoying habbit of opening a window for each litte thingy it wants to display. And I _do_ use Fluxbox when using Gimp. It's the only WM that the old Gimp interface was actually bearable with.
Dot Bombies are 120% done for over here. I have to say that I'm actually quite happy with that, since I don't have to compete with complete Schmocks anymore. Now when I say I'm good at IT stuff, people actually believe me because I ought to be if I'm still in business. Employment in the field is slowly picking up, but the economy is probably in for a serious downhill ride next year here in germany, so the detension in the IT Jobs market may be just a drop in the bucket.
One thing that has me alerted is that Linux/OSS will reach critical mass here any time soon and OSS people are rare and looked for at the moment. Which is just what I predicted and why I started my little business.
For me things look fair. Flying under the radar, always close to going broke, but no need to hassle with assholes who think they know better than I just because they had the millions to burn a few years ago. A new market for socially capable Linux/OSS experts up ahead and a nice little group of early adopters who are willing to listen to what I have to say and gladly pay for my services. I wouldn't say that I can complain.
Having studied and practiced art professionally for 8 years I can say that, just like programming, the essence of making art boils down to about 10 to 20 rules. Yet grasping these rules to the full extend and improving your skills to actually apply these rules usefully is long hard work. A basic tip I'd give is to copy the artists you consider best. The rest follows the usual pure and simple rule:
There is no secret. Work your ass off.
And, btw, no amount of powertools will bend that rule. Just as is it is with programming.
"A small digital computer designed for the businessman." Very humorous indeed. LOL!
I was talking about "making hardware fast and reliable" not "mix 10 technologies because you can handle a single one of them and want to fiddle" and compensate for that by charging your customer for quadrupled hardware". That is a big difference.
And it's strange, but wereever I go I encounter a hideous mess of tangled systems set up by nerds that can't even use the right screws to fasten a harddrive, have set up 3 servers, two DB's a webserver and a MTA with some cryptic (read: crappy) perl glue, were one solid workstation with a good harddrive some extra ram and a good email client with three filters applied can do the job faster, more reliable and with MUCH less maintainance costs. Any geek who thinks he's cream because he knows how to set up 10 different DBs and 5 distros (and I only use Debian/Zope) whom I have to clean up after (just happend today) is not a computer expert but a moron to me. And usually an arrogant nusciance (spelling?) on top of that.
Zope X3 is NOT , I repeat, is NOT Zope 3. It's an essential tool on the way to Zope 3, but not Zope 3 itself. So if you're not joining the Zope devteam, quit weighing in on their servers. :-)
Is it really an Application Server and if so what services does it provide? I ask because the programmers tutorial makes it look like a run of the mill framework for generating webpages.
Most that I can think of. It even comes with it's own webserver, so you can spare yourself the Apache installation. Good for testing out of the box.
Is it compiled into native code? I know this is more a Python thing but even mentioning an application server built in a scripting language will have me ridiculed out the door.
1st of all: Python isn't any more a "scripting language" (whatever that is) than Java (which you mention for comparsion in another place)). But to answer your question: Performance critical parts are written in C (and iirc a little in C++), the rest is Python.
Any performance indications or comparissons? Anyone port Petshop and compare it against JBoss or Geronimo perchance?
Compared to other solutions that have the DB totally seperated it is generally considered slower when used with no second thought on optimization. Which imho is the whole point of Zope, as it makes building data driven networked applications nearly as simple as clicking together a website in dreamweaver. My philosophy is to make the hardware fast and reliable and to keep speed optimizations as far away from the code as possible. This btw is usually more sufficent and measurabley cheaper for the customers aswell.
Apart from that Zope offers nearly infinite methods for optimization, inlcluding load balancing functions for a Zope farm, intergration of classical external DBs and usage of Zope in conjunction with other products such as the Apache Webserver.
Zope is a web application server with an integrated object relational database and a turnkey web administration frontend. .Net.
It's basically a prototype of what application servers and databases are going to look like in 5 to 10 years.
From having worked with Zope I can say the power of this tool simply is breathtaking. Technology wise it's way beyond anything else I've seen, including J2EE and the bazillion other Appservers that come with it and other to-date solutions like the ones based on
It's downsides were the lack of consitent documentation for some parts, slow extra basic components (called "Products") and a lack of filtering in the Zope community. Like top grade Zope solutions right next to crappy beta level coding experiments. Lot of this has improved throughout the last 2 years though. Still missing is a larger support by ISPs running Zope on their servers.
Bottom line:
If anyone wants to build a special application with lot of custom server side programming, Zope is the powertool of choice. Technology wise it beats any other solution hands down. Think "The Linux of Application Servers".
...of the Yellow Dragon when it awakens" -Napoleon
:-)
I'd think it's time to say: "Good Morning, Yellow Dragon"
To get things straight: I'm not a creationist and I'm certainly not a creationist as normaly the word is understood in the US. I personally think it's an extreme act of heresy and blasphemy to presume that, so to speak, a day in god's time is just as long as a day in human time. Dispelling the "10 000 years" bullshit creationists like to spread. I think your standard US bible-belt creationists are crazy nutheads that ought to be excommunicated from ever which religious organization they belong to ASAP. And that they ought to be prohibited from calling themselves 'christians'.
That being said:
The Bombardier Bug has an extremly effective defense tactic agains Frogs an the likes. He shoots two liquid components of a two-component explosive that hit each other at a distance and explode, causing an explosion simular to that of a small gunshot. He does so by timing and aiming the squirt of each component liquid in such a way that he isn't hurt himself. Timing takes place in a frame of Milliseconds. The explosion this bug causes is more than enough to instantly kill it if it happens to close or inside it. Where the two components are safely kept seperately until used.
There is no way what-so-ever that a something like this could evolve using 100% pure so-called darwinisim. (Sidenote: The most important darwinist actually says that darwinisim alone doesn't explain everything. That one being Darwin himself.)
Bottom Line:
To me it is an evident fact that - how shall we put it without sounding stupid - 'hyper sentinence' was involved in the evolution of the physical universe. That not necessarly be a god as he is usually described, and absolutely not as creationists usually describe. Maybe one could think of a kind of "hive intelligence" by all living things. But nevertheless and anyway: To me - and a lot of scientists - it is evident that the physical universe didn't come to be as it is by pure accident alone.
The Bombardier Bug being a nice little indicating evidence in case.
They beat Blender, which required 100 000 Euro to be raised in order to buy out the source into GPL. But nevertheless I find the Blender fundraise more impressive as it didn't have a full page add for offering but "only" a cool piece of special software and a cool community.
Rant and hiss all you want. This application has the potential to move an entire generation of mid-40ish "Windows and VB4 still works for me" people - who are basically stating the truth - to Linux / OSS enviroments.
And no Blahblah about Eclipse Basic being somewhere close to RAD or QTDevelop being a sort-of half way kinda RAD tool and "whats all the excitement about, I only need Perl and a few bazillion extra libs and dependency resoltions to write nice TK-Apps that are ugly as hell" will change that.
As for me, I'm sold. Congratulations to the Gambas team.
.. I presume the air will get thin for MS in the long run. Look at those features. It's like "Gee, that would be really cool to have" and three years later OS X has it, 5 years ahead of all the rest. I find the Automator one of those supercool things. Those things that will eventually put me out of business when everybody can automate his tasks with a few mouseklicks. But it's cool nonetheless.
MS should adapt to Linux/OSS? No shit.
How is this news?
They should've done it 3 years ago. Instead they chose to bash the GPL as unamerican. The stupidest thing they ever did. Nobody cared squat about software licences anyway until MS started making them care, casing CEO to notice the MS licencing crap they were putting up with.
If they just would've offered a MS Linux Distribution everybody would've thought "MS bought Linux" and they'd be in the game. Now it's way to late for that. Unless they make an all out attack, admit they where wrong and openly join the OSS fray alongside a large-type MS style marketing campaign promoting MS DX for Linux (only 80$ per seat!), download and update services, their OS monopoly is done for in 18 months from now the latest.
My 2 cents.