The Video itself actually is quite good. It goes head-to-head with OOo and banks on the prime benefits of MSO compared to OOo. Familiarity, existing macros, performance on Windows, wide-spread usage as an advantage in itself, cost of switching, etc. I've seen use cases where current Excel versions beat OOo Calc in terms of features and performance.
That all being said, the main point about MS Office that we all have had in the last 12 years is adressed aswell: I'm sure nobody in his right mind here would object to using MSO if the reasons are sound. However, we musn't forget that the illegal practices of MS have cause entire generations of users to be brainwashed of the concept of word-processing and spreadsheet tools and instead have used the terms 'Word' and 'Excel' as synonyms for the former without even noticing. OpenOffice *and* this commercial have changed that. And that is a huge step forward in reparing the damage that was done by MS. Which in itself is a good thing.
All along I too am sure that in the long run open will win - as I've said 5 years ago allready. This ad shows we're still headed the right way.
Let us not forget that most houses are built with a bunch of plywood or chipboard, and with loads of PVC; both release metric shitloads of dioxin when burned (way more than burning trees.)
I beg to differ. Most US American houses are built of plywood and chipboard... and recylced egg cartons or something like that. The houses here are built of bricks, concrete, mortar and roofed with clay roofpans most of the time. Allthough you can also get other variants, like slate (http://www.cuersgen.de/images/Schieferdach-1-Gross.png ) which is pretty cool and lasts ages.
You USians over there ought to stop building shite that only stands until the next tornado season or collapses when someone inside sneezes or something. Aren't there any buildings left from the real-estate bubble that where build with lasting in mind maybe?
Anyway, when it comes to the local building code I am for once greatful for German burocracy. I allways cringe when I hear from my family that a californian summer fire has burnt some friends house down to the ground. I allways think: Why don't they just build a little smaller but in bricks and mortar? It can't be that difficult to get that idea, no?
First of all: Join the modding community. Find a mod that is in active develpoment and that you like and join the team. See what you like most on the project and if you tend more to the programming or the designing side.
Depending on that you have various options: Joining a special course in Game Developement, Animation, etc. like Full Sail or the likes if you're a Designer type. Or regular CS with a focus on Application Development if you are the programmer type.
Anyway you do it, joining the modding community is a must before anything else.
I've always stopped playing for the same reason, too much advantage for the paying gamers (I can't stand it even as a paying customer myself).
Which is up to you. A fact is that 80% of our players don't pay anything at all and they seem to enjoy themselves just fine. As for the pay-advantages: Yes there are some. But most of them are of the meta-advantage type, like additional slots in building-queues, better overviews and such which means you don't have to check your status as often as without them.
Most of our paying customers get by very fine with 1-3 dollars worth of pay-features per month. For hours and hours of fun in return - a fair deal if you ask me.
As for those publishers taking 300$ from someone to put him at the top of the highscore list - that is shortsighted and stupid and pisses off your userbase beyond repair - which is why we don't do it. OGame has been running for approx. 7 years and still is a successful Browsergame for that very reason.
Maybe you've been mixing up our games with others?
1.) Approximately 70% of our company is comprised of Nerds and Geeks, most of which are your Type A RPG, Comic, Star Wars and Star Trek fan. I can go on babbling all day about *anything* that interests me and I'll never get a stupid look, since nearly everybody knows what I'm talking about all of the time. Be it obscure Monty Python references or anything computer and software related. Or, as the case might be, SciFi stuff.
And since a lot of us are Trekkies, nobody here wants to screw this up. Every inhouse title goes through thorough inhouse play-testing, so the Trekkies will be all over the Product Team like a pile of bricks if they screw around with the StarTrek universe. It's convenient for this sort of thing that we *all* are in the same complex, 300 meters appart at most. From Alex (our CEO) and the upper Board across development and marketing all the way to Community Management.
2.) We actually know how to do Browsergames. We've raked in quite a few prestigious rewards and gained a solid reputation with our inhouse titles like Ikariam, Europe 1400, Wildfire and OGame and judging from the numbers they are *very* successful - and for good reasons too. I've been playing OGame and Wild Guns and both are solid fun right up to flat out addictive. We do have some not-so-spectacular acquired & redone B titles to fluff up the Portfolio, but even most of those astonishingly fun to play, although I really couldn't say why (play a round of Tanoth to see what I mean:-) )
Bottom line: We have a hoard of Trekkies right here on our team and we know how to make a fun game. IMHO that's a good foundation for building a neat DSN MMO.
I don't want a robot washing my hair. I'll either do it myself or - as a viable alternative - I'll have that cute hairdresser with that sexy grundge outfit and the punky rasta hairdo with scissors and comb tattooed on to her arm (!) wash my hair after cutting it. I bet I could get like 10 000 haircuts + washing from her for the price of that robot.... This robot must be a insanely expensive maintenance nightmare - and it's no where nearly as attractive as aforementioned hairdresser.
Seeing this reminds me of the fact that it's not only always software developers endeavoring on notably harebrained (no pun intended) ideas.
Whenever I see fairly powerful human-interaction-robots like these I can't help myself but think of the possibilities of malice with one of those. Take this one for instance: Imagine this one with a virus on it that reprograms it to crush your skull instead of gently massaging it. I wouldn't want to use one, not only because of this, but for reasons I'll mention in another comment as well.
What I've discovered in the recent years is that I don't need 10 000 Books. Not in a private Library, be in dead tree form or in electronic form.
What I do need, is the attention span and the concentration to stick to those good books on the topics that interest me. And finish them one at a time. Java Programming, Cooking, Philosophy, or a good Stephen King or the latest William Gibson, Vernor Vinge or Neal Stephenson. And have the time to reread those that are very good, interesting and/or difficult to understand.
I used to pack up quite a few books on whatever trip I went and even if it was just going on a 2 day trip. Roleplaying Sourcebooks, various OReillys on my current PL of interest and then a novel I was currently reading. I've come to notice that that was waste of time, since I hardly ever got to actually finish one, besides the good novels. Given, that new German PHP Cookbook is a 1200 Page... Cookbook, and not something you read from back to back like a novel. And those type of books are quite close to pointless in paper form and best delivered in electronic form.... But I don't need an E-Book reader for that. I use them on the box I'm currently programming on and carry them around with me on a USB-Stick.
The latest novel I'm reading will hold out a few week - and I'm fine carrying that around in paper.
As for my library I had and partly still have: I have been reducing it bit by bit and am aiming for a sweetspot of maybe 50 - 100 books, comic albums and RPG Books included. That is more than enough to read and more than enough to lugg around when I move.
Maybe I'll get an eBook reader some day, the Kindle 3 looks impressive. But it's not that I really need it. Because what goes for Books certainly goes for electronic gadgets and computer games too.
You non-fanboi stuff was all nice and well until you decided to let it out right at this sentence. Fairly obvious ! Let me guess: Flash for Blackberry is not yet ready. Quick! Enemies of my enemies are my friends!
Wrong. You didn't read my parent post. Flash is a VM. And notably unsuitable for mobile phones, trackball/pad and touch input.... Goes to show your in with the usual crowd here on/. when it comes to Flash.
To the issue: I don't use my Phone for surfing. And I certainly wouldn't use it for the things I build and maintain in Flash. However, I do use it for taking notes, as a calendar and for managing my contacts. I might use it for Facebook, Mail or the one or other utility website, like Trainschedules or something. But that's not primary concern for me.
If I get a new phone other than my current BB 8310 I expect it to react less sluggish (BB uses Java too), sync my calendar and contacts without further hassle with desktop applications using open and/or documented formats and have a working, offline-capable navigation as the new plus compared to my current phone. I'll take whatever phone delivers that best. Be it with Android, iOS, Symbian or whatever.
And it might even be that I stay with BB. They've finally got a OS X syncapp by now and the keyboard on the BB8310 and simular BBs is the best there is. I'll be checking the new models when time is due.
What people don't get is that Jobs makes his claims based on reason and foresight, not on current numbers. And what you will have to admit, most of the time he is dead on.
I don't like Apples Content Delivery Lock-In as much as the next guy, but what most people rarely get when talking about Steve Jobs and the things he claims is that this guy actually knows what he is talking about.
He said it time, and time again: Flash got a no-go on the iPhone BECAUSE ADOBE COULDN'T GUARANTEE A MINIMUM PERFORMANCE without hogging the entire iPhone CPU! And given, that is, of course, due to the VM nature of Flash. Ever since the dawn of ActionScript 2, Flash is a plattform, not a mere animation plugin.... Ok, so this is Slashdot, and most people contiuously ragging on Flash here don't know squat what it actually is all about, but I guess I'll never give up trying.
Get it in to your freaking skull: Steve said it time and time again: NO VMs and no inner frameworks or inner operating systems on the iPhone. Period. End of story. I might emphasise that he was absolutely right with his strategy, hence the bizarly massive return on investment the iPhone line is racking in to this very day. Check out the smooth performance of the iPhone and the third-party apps crutching around on last generation Android Phones to see what I'm talking about.
And I am *not*, I repeat *NOT* an iPhone fanboy - in fact, I am, if at all, most probably going to replace my BlackBerry with an Android Phone whenever the need arises. Given, I might take an iPhone after all, if Android and Ubuntu 10 turn out to be just as prissy as last years versions.
... like playing sounds from Youtube/Flash on Firefox and Rythmbox at the same time, without having to wait 5 Minutes after FF closes, for PulseAudio to reinitialize or whatever, to be able to hear Rythmbox or VLC sound.
It's this kind of crap that's getting us no where and still has Apple being a viable alternative for productive workers despite their cheapest 13" Laptop currently being twice as expensive than a 17" Dell Vostro running Ubuntu. And despite Apple moving into MS-Borg territory very fast with content distribution lock-in and all that.
I thought I was going to switch to Linux entirely this year, now that I don't play Windows Games anymore and currently don't develop Flash for a living and the newest Mac Mini suddenly costs upwards of 800 Euros. But it's crap like this that still has me fiddling with fstab IN FUCKING 2010(!!) when I want to mount my daughters Cellphones MicroSD Card and then still being unable to mount the damn thing rw, as any other sane OS would do.
John-Jesus H.B Christ, could we please try to get shit done, like, for instance, building a vialbe AD clone or something before tracking faces with some obscure library that only 10 people know how to compile and has absolutely no practical application what-so-ever? No matter how much money Shuttleworth has, he doesn't have enough to burn it on something like this I'd suppose. No?
It's not that I wouldn't like to help, but, honestly, there is so much work to be done, I don't know where to start and sh*t like the stuff mentioned in TFA isn't very encouraging to have me join in.
Aaaah, the beauty of open source at work. Doesn't that just feel good? Linux does still suck in a few ways (My Ubuntu still can't handle playing sound from Firefox/Flash and Rythmbox at the same time - quite unbelievable, yes, I know) but you have to hand it to the Kernel teams all over the world: when it comes to finding, announcing and fixing critical bugs, nothing beats the Linux crew.
Couldn't the slashdot community buy the brand? If everybody donates a few bucks and we bid that sum for the brand and then use it to release FOSS, print cool t-shirts and use the sco website to make fun and jokes about MS, Mc Bride or whatever the f*ck his name is and his entourage. Wouldn't that be worth it? Ever since they did the caldera back-and-forth and then switched to pissing of the entire nix community the brand is dead anyway. It can't be that expensive, no?
We could also release a debian rebrand as 'SCO Unix 2010' for 200$ a pop and donate the proceeds to EFF, FSF and any other organisation that goes against patent and IP trolls. That would actually be usefull, no?
Today Europeans in general and Germans particularly know what happens if you let governments screw around to much. We've already tried out the prime example of a fascist regime, the one and only, the Mercedes-Benz class of totalitarian states, so to speak. And it ain't pretty, trust me on that one. Curiously enough, I have the entire spectrum of sides in the 'Third Reich' in my family. My US Grandpa was there on D-Day, my German Grandpa is a Type-A Waffen-SS/SD Officer - (Kompanieführer) still alive and kicking at 96, (blacklisted in the US too... the whole shebang), and my uncle was a Jew on the run from the Gestapo and the SS, hiding away in sewers and all that. We've basically got it all here in one spot, German post-war offspring from US soldiers (f.e. me), old Nazis, art-class comrades that where 'unerwünschte Personen' ('unwelcome persons') in eastern Germany before the reunification, etc. pp. If you're only the slightest bit interested, you get a full-scale rundown of what happens when things in politics and public affairs go hairwire or head down the wrong road. The mechanisims aren't trivial, but there all the same, be they Nazi, Commie, Fundamentalist Islam or whatnot. Very interesting live history lessons to be made here indeed. One of the upsides of living in Germany.
And while a basic trust in law and order is commomplace around western Europe Civil - manly due to the dence population and a historically grown optimization of things, civil disobedience and a basic sence of educated distrust is also quite commonplace around here. I presume the latter is due to a (still) relatively high level of education among the general population.
God help us all when the US comes around to taking it's shot at fascisim.
Dude, WTF is that kind of a question? Isn't the answer obvious?
I don't think I understand your problem. Compared to back in the day it's paradise today. We've got bizarely powered hardware that fits in you hands and costs less than a good stereo set. You can get in anywhere and have it up and running in no time. We've got the best publishers competing with each other in writing concise witty indepth books on any IT subject you can think of and we have a very solid open source eco system with all the pickings you like for free (beer & speech).
I suggest you get yourself a cheap laptop from dell our something, install ubuntu on it and start coding in one of the cool new programming languages. I personally recommend Python, because it really is the only PL I know that is used in every professional field I can think of while still being a neat new open source PL. For getting up to speed fast you want to check out the books available from O'Reilly and Pragmatic Programmers Bookshelf. Any subject they don't have a book on isn't worthwhile picking up. That's a good rule of thumb.
That aside, it really doesn't matter wether you're 18 or 80, just dive into it. I know good programmers aged between 17 and 60 and all of them learn new things every day and have no trouble doing so. Age issues are mostly hysteria. If you're interested and hooked, you'll pick up a subject fast, no matter how old you are.
Welcome back.
Total Shameless Plug: We've got some very neat BGs
on
JavaScript/HTML 5 Gaming?
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
Total Shameless Plug (TM): We've got some very neat Browsergames in our top line, such as OGame, Ikariam or Guild 1400 aka 'Europe 1400' (english name), all of them have scored multiple independant awards and are state of the art. No arcade stuff yet, but we've totally pushed the envelope in Flash with the upcoming release of Warpfire It's internal Beta right now and maybe will get a slightly different name and branding when it goes public beta shortly, but it really rocks.
We've got a stash of generic BG stuff that's isn't very spectacular and I usually don't recommend, but the aforementioned ones all are developed inhouse by very dedicated teams and gamedesigners and are definitely worthwhile checking out. Last winters big OGame Facelift for instance had a crew of 10 working almost 2 years to pimp the UI with JavaScript - don't try to run in on an iPhone though:-)
You can register a single cross-game account at MMOGame.com... Thus endeth my Plug for a very cool employer I happen to work for.:-) Have fun!
Register ment*rb**k.c*m (*o) Install appropriate Web CMS / Community system. Ads won't rake in the cash, but I'd presume some specialised service like target classifieds for companies looking for experts or some Thesis Printing Service or something like that might cut it. Definitely worth a try.
Congratulations. You've just got yourself a brand new niche market web venue. Good luck. Drop us a line when your sipping Pina Coladas somewhere on the Bahamas after your sell-out.:-)
I find they handled it all very reasonable. They could've milked the whole thing for way more money. Instead they saw to it that dave is shielded from creeps and griefers on the web, set up a small kitchen table business and generally where laughing along with the crowd, david aswell. He has a brief appearance in one superbowl commercial and went to ROFLCON with his dad. No biggie, imho, and certainly no unduely exploitation of him. And they've allready donated measurable sums of the generated income to charity.
I for one whish dave and his family a good time. I'd be proud if I'd've had the occasion to score my family 150000$ with a little episode like this as a kid. I hope he makes the most of his college later on, now that it is paid for.
And last but not least, 62 Million views on youtube, that actually *is* quite impressive, even by todays inflated standards.
This is, by far, the most subtle, elegant and superior form of bragging I've ever witnessed in my 10 years on the slashdot community. Congratulations, sir. I am - positively - impressed. Well done.:-)
Like others have pointed out: You're screwing around. If you have to develop an internal rich client, chose one (1) cross-plattform browser to develop against and go for it. Whenever the app breaks, fix it, so that it smoothly runs in said browser. And I really would recomment Firefox, as Opera is closed source. If you want pixel-perfect printing you're outa luck. This is the web, n00b, and 1on1 dynamic clientside printing can only be done relyably with Flash. Which even I, as a very experienced full time Flash developer, wouldn't recommend! It's overkill for what you're doing, and actually quite restricted in its results (precompiling of templates required, for instance).
Use OpenOffice and the CLI connector on the serverside. Build some Templates in RTF, using OpenOffice, load the generated outputs in OO and export PDFs from that. Send those to the client. That sounds like a bizar hack, but it actually is the smoothest way to takle this problem and your customers will be happy to be able to edit, change and add printing templates later on. And you can actually test your print layouts and generators manually, as it is, well, OpenOffice. Duh.
Otherwise quit screwing around and stop chasing waterfalls. One browser, one Ajax Framework and Printing via Serverside PDF Generation. For Ajax check out Tibco GI if this is a non-trivial Business Web Application. GI is basically Swing Components in Ajax on Crack, and thus only runs on current versions of I.E. (juck!) and Firefox. Very restricted in that way, but very powerfull and extremly fast to develop business frontends in. The IDE & drag'n'drop Builder are actually written in Ajax themselves - you launch the IDE by loading a html page from your local GI Builder directory into Firefox (No joke!). And since you're going for a single browser anyway, you might aswell reap the benefits. No more fiddling about with jQuery or other x-browser Frameworks. Not the worst Idea for building complex Inhouse Apps, imho.
Good luck. Sounds like you've bitten of quite a lot. Hope you can chew and swallow.... And that your customers are paying a fair price.
My 2 cents from a professional Rich Client developer.
Yepp. The King of a sinking ship that is continuously raking in bizar amounts of revenue, Revenue of which about a 10th would suffice to build a solid golden nuclear sub for the entire Nintendo Mobile division to blast the remains of console competitors like the PSP and its botchjob buddy PSP Go into chunky kibbles. As long as they have a licence to print money and make money from the first unit sold onward I think Nintendo couldn't care less wether the rest of the world thought that mobile consoles where a sinking ship or not. For Sony, maybe, but not really for Nintendo.
Slashdot Mirror
... well, there isn't even effective deployment documentation for oOo.
Official OpenOffice Deployment Documentation
If you're using KDE:
'sudo apt-get install openoffice.org-kde'
If you're using Gnome:
'sudo apt-get install openoffice.org-gnome'
Glad I could help.
The Video itself actually is quite good. It goes head-to-head with OOo and banks on the prime benefits of MSO compared to OOo. Familiarity, existing macros, performance on Windows, wide-spread usage as an advantage in itself, cost of switching, etc. I've seen use cases where current Excel versions beat OOo Calc in terms of features and performance.
That all being said, the main point about MS Office that we all have had in the last 12 years is adressed aswell:
I'm sure nobody in his right mind here would object to using MSO if the reasons are sound. However, we musn't forget that the illegal practices of MS have cause entire generations of users to be brainwashed of the concept of word-processing and spreadsheet tools and instead have used the terms 'Word' and 'Excel' as synonyms for the former without even noticing. OpenOffice *and* this commercial have changed that. And that is a huge step forward in reparing the damage that was done by MS. Which in itself is a good thing.
All along I too am sure that in the long run open will win - as I've said 5 years ago allready. This ad shows we're still headed the right way.
Let us not forget that most houses are built with a bunch of plywood or chipboard, and with loads of PVC; both release metric shitloads of dioxin when burned (way more than burning trees.)
I beg to differ. Most US American houses are built of plywood and chipboard ... and recylced egg cartons or something like that. The houses here are built of bricks, concrete, mortar and roofed with clay roofpans most of the time. Allthough you can also get other variants, like slate (http://www.cuersgen.de/images/Schieferdach-1-Gross.png ) which is pretty cool and lasts ages.
You USians over there ought to stop building shite that only stands until the next tornado season or collapses when someone inside sneezes or something. Aren't there any buildings left from the real-estate bubble that where build with lasting in mind maybe?
Anyway, when it comes to the local building code I am for once greatful for German burocracy. I allways cringe when I hear from my family that a californian summer fire has burnt some friends house down to the ground. I allways think: Why don't they just build a little smaller but in bricks and mortar? It can't be that difficult to get that idea, no?
My 2 cents.
First of all: Join the modding community. Find a mod that is in active develpoment and that you like and join the team. See what you like most on the project and if you tend more to the programming or the designing side.
Depending on that you have various options: Joining a special course in Game Developement, Animation, etc. like Full Sail or the likes if you're a Designer type. Or regular CS with a focus on Application Development if you are the programmer type.
Anyway you do it, joining the modding community is a must before anything else.
[Disclaimer: I work for Gameforge]
Gameforge games are all flash based
Wrong. You're talking nonsense.
I've always stopped playing for the same reason, too much advantage for the paying gamers (I can't stand it even as a paying customer myself).
Which is up to you. A fact is that 80% of our players don't pay anything at all and they seem to enjoy themselves just fine. As for the pay-advantages: Yes there are some. But most of them are of the meta-advantage type, like additional slots in building-queues, better overviews and such which means you don't have to check your status as often as without them.
Most of our paying customers get by very fine with 1-3 dollars worth of pay-features per month. For hours and hours of fun in return - a fair deal if you ask me.
As for those publishers taking 300$ from someone to put him at the top of the highscore list - that is shortsighted and stupid and pisses off your userbase beyond repair - which is why we don't do it. OGame has been running for approx. 7 years and still is a successful Browsergame for that very reason.
Maybe you've been mixing up our games with others?
[Disclaimer: I work at Gameforge]
Ok, so hear me out.
1.) Approximately 70% of our company is comprised of Nerds and Geeks, most of which are your Type A RPG, Comic, Star Wars and Star Trek fan. I can go on babbling all day about *anything* that interests me and I'll never get a stupid look, since nearly everybody knows what I'm talking about all of the time. Be it obscure Monty Python references or anything computer and software related. Or, as the case might be, SciFi stuff.
And since a lot of us are Trekkies, nobody here wants to screw this up. Every inhouse title goes through thorough inhouse play-testing, so the Trekkies will be all over the Product Team like a pile of bricks if they screw around with the StarTrek universe. It's convenient for this sort of thing that we *all* are in the same complex, 300 meters appart at most. From Alex (our CEO) and the upper Board across development and marketing all the way to Community Management.
2.) We actually know how to do Browsergames. We've raked in quite a few prestigious rewards and gained a solid reputation with our inhouse titles like Ikariam, Europe 1400, Wildfire and OGame and judging from the numbers they are *very* successful - and for good reasons too. I've been playing OGame and Wild Guns and both are solid fun right up to flat out addictive. We do have some not-so-spectacular acquired & redone B titles to fluff up the Portfolio, but even most of those astonishingly fun to play, although I really couldn't say why (play a round of Tanoth to see what I mean :-) )
Bottom line: We have a hoard of Trekkies right here on our team and we know how to make a fun game. IMHO that's a good foundation for building a neat DSN MMO.
My 2 cents.
I don't want a robot washing my hair. I'll either do it myself or - as a viable alternative - I'll have that cute hairdresser with that sexy grundge outfit and the punky rasta hairdo with scissors and comb tattooed on to her arm (!) wash my hair after cutting it. I bet I could get like 10 000 haircuts + washing from her for the price of that robot. ... This robot must be a insanely expensive maintenance nightmare - and it's no where nearly as attractive as aforementioned hairdresser.
Seeing this reminds me of the fact that it's not only always software developers endeavoring on notably harebrained (no pun intended) ideas.
My 2 cents.
Whenever I see fairly powerful human-interaction-robots like these I can't help myself but think of the possibilities of malice with one of those.
Take this one for instance: Imagine this one with a virus on it that reprograms it to crush your skull instead of gently massaging it.
I wouldn't want to use one, not only because of this, but for reasons I'll mention in another comment as well.
What I've discovered in the recent years is that I don't need 10 000 Books. Not in a private Library, be in dead tree form or in electronic form.
What I do need, is the attention span and the concentration to stick to those good books on the topics that interest me. And finish them one at a time. Java Programming, Cooking, Philosophy, or a good Stephen King or the latest William Gibson, Vernor Vinge or Neal Stephenson. And have the time to reread those that are very good, interesting and/or difficult to understand.
I used to pack up quite a few books on whatever trip I went and even if it was just going on a 2 day trip. Roleplaying Sourcebooks, various OReillys on my current PL of interest and then a novel I was currently reading. I've come to notice that that was waste of time, since I hardly ever got to actually finish one, besides the good novels. Given, that new German PHP Cookbook is a 1200 Page ... Cookbook, and not something you read from back to back like a novel. And those type of books are quite close to pointless in paper form and best delivered in electronic form. ... But I don't need an E-Book reader for that. I use them on the box I'm currently programming on and carry them around with me on a USB-Stick.
The latest novel I'm reading will hold out a few week - and I'm fine carrying that around in paper.
As for my library I had and partly still have: I have been reducing it bit by bit and am aiming for a sweetspot of maybe 50 - 100 books, comic albums and RPG Books included. That is more than enough to read and more than enough to lugg around when I move.
Maybe I'll get an eBook reader some day, the Kindle 3 looks impressive. But it's not that I really need it. Because what goes for Books certainly goes for electronic gadgets and computer games too.
My 2 cents.
You non-fanboi stuff was all nice and well until you decided to let it out right at this sentence. Fairly obvious !
Let me guess: Flash for Blackberry is not yet ready. Quick! Enemies of my enemies are my friends!
Wrong. You didn't read my parent post. Flash is a VM. And notably unsuitable for mobile phones, trackball/pad and touch input. ... Goes to show your in with the usual crowd here on /. when it comes to Flash.
To the issue:
I don't use my Phone for surfing. And I certainly wouldn't use it for the things I build and maintain in Flash. However, I do use it for taking notes, as a calendar and for managing my contacts. I might use it for Facebook, Mail or the one or other utility website, like Trainschedules or something. But that's not primary concern for me.
If I get a new phone other than my current BB 8310 I expect it to react less sluggish (BB uses Java too), sync my calendar and contacts without further hassle with desktop applications using open and/or documented formats and have a working, offline-capable navigation as the new plus compared to my current phone. I'll take whatever phone delivers that best. Be it with Android, iOS, Symbian or whatever.
And it might even be that I stay with BB. They've finally got a OS X syncapp by now and the keyboard on the BB8310 and simular BBs is the best there is. I'll be checking the new models when time is due.
What people don't get is that Jobs makes his claims based on reason and foresight, not on current numbers. And what you will have to admit, most of the time he is dead on.
I don't like Apples Content Delivery Lock-In as much as the next guy, but what most people rarely get when talking about Steve Jobs and the things he claims is that this guy actually knows what he is talking about.
He said it time, and time again: Flash got a no-go on the iPhone BECAUSE ADOBE COULDN'T GUARANTEE A MINIMUM PERFORMANCE without hogging the entire iPhone CPU! And given, that is, of course, due to the VM nature of Flash. Ever since the dawn of ActionScript 2, Flash is a plattform, not a mere animation plugin. ... Ok, so this is Slashdot, and most people contiuously ragging on Flash here don't know squat what it actually is all about, but I guess I'll never give up trying.
Get it in to your freaking skull: Steve said it time and time again: NO VMs and no inner frameworks or inner operating systems on the iPhone. Period. End of story. I might emphasise that he was absolutely right with his strategy, hence the bizarly massive return on investment the iPhone line is racking in to this very day. Check out the smooth performance of the iPhone and the third-party apps crutching around on last generation Android Phones to see what I'm talking about.
And I am *not*, I repeat *NOT* an iPhone fanboy - in fact, I am, if at all, most probably going to replace my BlackBerry with an Android Phone whenever the need arises. Given, I might take an iPhone after all, if Android and Ubuntu 10 turn out to be just as prissy as last years versions.
Now go ahead and mod me into oblivion.
... like playing sounds from Youtube/Flash on Firefox and Rythmbox at the same time, without having to wait 5 Minutes after FF closes, for PulseAudio to reinitialize or whatever, to be able to hear Rythmbox or VLC sound.
It's this kind of crap that's getting us no where and still has Apple being a viable alternative for productive workers despite their cheapest 13" Laptop currently being twice as expensive than a 17" Dell Vostro running Ubuntu. And despite Apple moving into MS-Borg territory very fast with content distribution lock-in and all that.
I thought I was going to switch to Linux entirely this year, now that I don't play Windows Games anymore and currently don't develop Flash for a living and the newest Mac Mini suddenly costs upwards of 800 Euros. But it's crap like this that still has me fiddling with fstab IN FUCKING 2010(!!) when I want to mount my daughters Cellphones MicroSD Card and then still being unable to mount the damn thing rw, as any other sane OS would do.
John-Jesus H.B Christ, could we please try to get shit done, like, for instance, building a vialbe AD clone or something before tracking faces with some obscure library that only 10 people know how to compile and has absolutely no practical application what-so-ever? No matter how much money Shuttleworth has, he doesn't have enough to burn it on something like this I'd suppose. No?
It's not that I wouldn't like to help, but, honestly, there is so much work to be done, I don't know where to start and sh*t like the stuff mentioned in TFA isn't very encouraging to have me join in.
, one ... Bingo.
Aaaah, the beauty of open source at work. Doesn't that just feel good?
Linux does still suck in a few ways (My Ubuntu still can't handle playing sound from Firefox/Flash and Rythmbox at the same time - quite unbelievable, yes, I know) but you have to hand it to the Kernel teams all over the world: when it comes to finding, announcing and fixing critical bugs, nothing beats the Linux crew.
Go, Kernel team, go!
Couldn't the slashdot community buy the brand? If everybody donates a few bucks and we bid that sum for the brand and then use it to release FOSS, print cool t-shirts and use the sco website to make fun and jokes about MS, Mc Bride or whatever the f*ck his name is and his entourage. Wouldn't that be worth it? Ever since they did the caldera back-and-forth and then switched to pissing of the entire nix community the brand is dead anyway. It can't be that expensive, no?
We could also release a debian rebrand as 'SCO Unix 2010' for 200$ a pop and donate the proceeds to EFF, FSF and any other organisation that goes against patent and IP trolls. That would actually be usefull, no?
Just an idea.
Today Europeans in general and Germans particularly know what happens if you let governments screw around to much. We've already tried out the prime example of a fascist regime, the one and only, the Mercedes-Benz class of totalitarian states, so to speak. And it ain't pretty, trust me on that one. Curiously enough, I have the entire spectrum of sides in the 'Third Reich' in my family. My US Grandpa was there on D-Day, my German Grandpa is a Type-A Waffen-SS /SD Officer - (Kompanieführer) still alive and kicking at 96, (blacklisted in the US too ... the whole shebang), and my uncle was a Jew on the run from the Gestapo and the SS, hiding away in sewers and all that. We've basically got it all here in one spot, German post-war offspring from US soldiers (f.e. me), old Nazis, art-class comrades that where 'unerwünschte Personen' ('unwelcome persons') in eastern Germany before the reunification, etc. pp. If you're only the slightest bit interested, you get a full-scale rundown of what happens when things in politics and public affairs go hairwire or head down the wrong road. The mechanisims aren't trivial, but there all the same, be they Nazi, Commie, Fundamentalist Islam or whatnot. Very interesting live history lessons to be made here indeed. One of the upsides of living in Germany.
And while a basic trust in law and order is commomplace around western Europe Civil - manly due to the dence population and a historically grown optimization of things, civil disobedience and a basic sence of educated distrust is also quite commonplace around here. I presume the latter is due to a (still) relatively high level of education among the general population.
God help us all when the US comes around to taking it's shot at fascisim.
Dude, WTF is that kind of a question? Isn't the answer obvious?
I don't think I understand your problem.
Compared to back in the day it's paradise today. We've got bizarely powered hardware that fits in you hands and costs less than a good stereo set. You can get in anywhere and have it up and running in no time. We've got the best publishers competing with each other in writing concise witty indepth books on any IT subject you can think of and we have a very solid open source eco system with all the pickings you like for free (beer & speech).
I suggest you get yourself a cheap laptop from dell our something, install ubuntu on it and start coding in one of the cool new programming languages. I personally recommend Python, because it really is the only PL I know that is used in every professional field I can think of while still being a neat new open source PL. For getting up to speed fast you want to check out the books available from O'Reilly and Pragmatic Programmers Bookshelf. Any subject they don't have a book on isn't worthwhile picking up. That's a good rule of thumb.
That aside, it really doesn't matter wether you're 18 or 80, just dive into it. I know good programmers aged between 17 and 60 and all of them learn new things every day and have no trouble doing so. Age issues are mostly hysteria. If you're interested and hooked, you'll pick up a subject fast, no matter how old you are.
Welcome back.
Total Shameless Plug (TM):
We've got some very neat Browsergames in our top line, such as OGame, Ikariam or Guild 1400 aka 'Europe 1400' (english name), all of them have scored multiple independant awards and are state of the art. No arcade stuff yet, but we've totally pushed the envelope in Flash with the upcoming release of Warpfire It's internal Beta right now and maybe will get a slightly different name and branding when it goes public beta shortly, but it really rocks.
We've got a stash of generic BG stuff that's isn't very spectacular and I usually don't recommend, but the aforementioned ones all are developed inhouse by very dedicated teams and gamedesigners and are definitely worthwhile checking out. Last winters big OGame Facelift for instance had a crew of 10 working almost 2 years to pimp the UI with JavaScript - don't try to run in on an iPhone though :-)
You can register a single cross-game account at MMOGame.com ... :-)
Thus endeth my Plug for a very cool employer I happen to work for.
Have fun!
There is no such thing as intelligence, only interest. - Richard Feynman (IIRC)
Register ment*rb**k.c*m (*o) Install appropriate Web CMS / Community system.
Ads won't rake in the cash, but I'd presume some specialised service like target classifieds for companies looking for experts or some Thesis Printing Service or something like that might cut it. Definitely worth a try.
Congratulations. You've just got yourself a brand new niche market web venue. :-)
Good luck. Drop us a line when your sipping Pina Coladas somewhere on the Bahamas after your sell-out.
I find they handled it all very reasonable. They could've milked the whole thing for way more money. Instead they saw to it that dave is shielded from creeps and griefers on the web, set up a small kitchen table business and generally where laughing along with the crowd, david aswell. He has a brief appearance in one superbowl commercial and went to ROFLCON with his dad. No biggie, imho, and certainly no unduely exploitation of him. And they've allready donated measurable sums of the generated income to charity.
I for one whish dave and his family a good time. I'd be proud if I'd've had the occasion to score my family 150000$ with a little episode like this as a kid. I hope he makes the most of his college later on, now that it is paid for.
And last but not least, 62 Million views on youtube, that actually *is* quite impressive, even by todays inflated standards.
This is, by far, the most subtle, elegant and superior form of bragging I've ever witnessed in my 10 years on the slashdot community. Congratulations, sir. I am - positively - impressed. Well done. :-)
Like others have pointed out: You're screwing around. If you have to develop an internal rich client, chose one (1) cross-plattform browser to develop against and go for it. Whenever the app breaks, fix it, so that it smoothly runs in said browser. And I really would recomment Firefox, as Opera is closed source. If you want pixel-perfect printing you're outa luck. This is the web, n00b, and 1on1 dynamic clientside printing can only be done relyably with Flash. Which even I, as a very experienced full time Flash developer, wouldn't recommend! It's overkill for what you're doing, and actually quite restricted in its results (precompiling of templates required, for instance).
Use OpenOffice and the CLI connector on the serverside. Build some Templates in RTF, using OpenOffice, load the generated outputs in OO and export PDFs from that. Send those to the client. That sounds like a bizar hack, but it actually is the smoothest way to takle this problem and your customers will be happy to be able to edit, change and add printing templates later on. And you can actually test your print layouts and generators manually, as it is, well, OpenOffice. Duh.
Otherwise quit screwing around and stop chasing waterfalls. One browser, one Ajax Framework and Printing via Serverside PDF Generation. For Ajax check out Tibco GI if this is a non-trivial Business Web Application. GI is basically Swing Components in Ajax on Crack, and thus only runs on current versions of I.E. (juck!) and Firefox. Very restricted in that way, but very powerfull and extremly fast to develop business frontends in. The IDE & drag'n'drop Builder are actually written in Ajax themselves - you launch the IDE by loading a html page from your local GI Builder directory into Firefox (No joke!). And since you're going for a single browser anyway, you might aswell reap the benefits. No more fiddling about with jQuery or other x-browser Frameworks. Not the worst Idea for building complex Inhouse Apps, imho.
Good luck. Sounds like you've bitten of quite a lot. Hope you can chew and swallow. ... And that your customers are paying a fair price.
My 2 cents from a professional Rich Client developer.
Yepp. The King of a sinking ship that is continuously raking in bizar amounts of revenue, Revenue of which about a 10th would suffice to build a solid golden nuclear sub for the entire Nintendo Mobile division to blast the remains of console competitors like the PSP and its botchjob buddy PSP Go into chunky kibbles.
As long as they have a licence to print money and make money from the first unit sold onward I think Nintendo couldn't care less wether the rest of the world thought that mobile consoles where a sinking ship or not. For Sony, maybe, but not really for Nintendo.
... but mine tastes better.
*TaDUM* *Crash* *Thud*
Thank you, thank you. I'm here all week.
Try the fish.
This is a triumph. :-)