KDE 4 is unfinished. It says everywhere in the official sources. Since KDE 2 the.5 releases basically where the stable targets. It's only with 4 that with the.0 release they didn't care about finish at all, and thus provides Über-suckage. 4.5 will be the stable finished 4 release. No news here. What's the big fat hairy deal?
That said, KDE 3.5 still kicks Gnomes ass usability and integration wise. However - and this *is* true - Gnome has actually stopped sucking in 2008. For the first time in history Nautilus is usable also for non-total-fanboys, and allthough the featureset and power is no where near that of Konqueror, it also has become intuitive to use. For the first time ever since I moved from Debian, I'm using Ubuntu instead of Kubuntu (also due to the flak KDE 4 has gotten) and for the first time I didn't remove it after 10 minutes. It is far away from the KDE featureset and I'm still convinced that a well configured KDE 3.5 is the best desktop in the world and also outperforms Mac OS X usability wise (fyi: I'm typing this on a mac), but the Ubuntu foundation work done on my Dell Volstro is so awesome, I don't really care that much about any nitpicky details. Maybe I'll dick around with E or something if I get bored by it. Both Gnome and KDE are so far beyond Windows - which I use at work - that it doesn't really matter that much to me. Especially with the improvement Gnome obviously has seen lately.
Since Linus actually cares squat about the Desktop, as long as it works, his statements actually make sence in current context. No surprise here either.
I just posted a witty reply to this story. Reading TFA again it occured to me that this is most likely MS fake news and/or astroturfing. It requires quite a few clicks to actually customize a Laptop at Dell and have it come with Ubuntu rather than some MS Windows variant. I'd say this might very well be fake news.
Seriously. You don't need an Inet uplink. Or a computer. You *might* want to take one if it makes the books you need easyer to carry (read: in digital form). Use the space you'd need for an outdoor computer for other usefull stuff. Like a camera, something to read or survival stuff. The time on this trip will be over in no time. If you absolutely must, take a portable with solar panels along and do some coding. Otherwise just write a diary. With a pen and paper.
Looking at Ubuntu 8.10 vs. WinXP and Vista, the following is dawning on me: Sometime in the future, when printing has become a zero fuss issue just like graphics and 3D drivers have now become a zero-fuss issue on Linux, Windows will be steamrolled into insignificance, just like Google did with Altavista. No way MS can compete with that level of quality in the long run if it comes for free.
We've heard it all. Cut it out allready. Those ranting about Pythons whitespace are the ones that don't know what they are talking about because they have *never* even programmed in Python, and if it only were for half an hour. To all you suckers out there: Freaking write at least one simple bubblesort in Python, before you go out on a limp and talk about stuff you don't know.
I find that age gives me the edge. There may be some biografic details to that, but being a end-30ties geek and nerd I find the big stars among my peers dimishing and me rising to new heights. It is only last year that I had my second and third sex & love-affair ever, and all three (including my first) know about each other and accept it. I remember nearly killing myself over not having ever had a girl at the age of 23 back in the early nineties. Now I find myself growing cooler by the year.
My geekishness and passion for the things I liked doing still burns and reflects back on me and has early twen PYT students at currently hip CS flat-sharing parties judge me about late 20ish and brake into heavy flirting.... That 22 yr. old nurse at the last party was particularly cute. *sigh*
I was the typical nerd that didn't consume great amounts of alcohol back then and stopped drinking 20 years ago, which starts to give me an brainpower edge over my former-jock-now-fat-ass springbreaking peers. Instead I stayed up late on Fidonet, RPG and Tabletop sessions, pimping my social skills, my typign, wording, debating skills and my literacy. On top of that, everything awkward and geeky back then is super hip now. Comics (now Mangas), Fantasy, IT and computers, programming (gives you the status of some high priest at some occasions nowadays) and gaming.
Now I work at a game dev company with a current growth rate so bizar you wouldn't believe it, and am one of the oldest and most experienced amoung a team of currently 180 people. The 'young' guys come to me every odd day with a question, and when I give them an advice they listen and are gratefull.
I got my ass kicked by the pricks at school so many times, I still burn with fury sometimes just thinking about it. I've practiced performing and martial arts since the end of highschool and today I'd outrun every jock, who have all grown fat and lazy and/or have tar-lungs because they where cool back then and started smoking. And then I could still beat the living piss out of them, 5 at a time.
IMPORTANT ADVICE TO EARLY TWEEN NERDS: If you are a young male geek and nerd, rejoice. You're time is ten to fifteen years into the future, when your peers, girls included, have enough life experience to have learned what you know allready. Pratice art, take your time to learn about style, fashion and manners geek style (i.e.: learn it systematically like a new PL), stay in shape, go and take dancing lessons (I'm picking up Tango again next month), cut smoking and alcohol and live healthy and at the age of 30+ you'll be able to take your veritable pick of the litter of good-looking girls who can appreciate intelligent, reasonable men. When the pricks have burned all their karma and you'll kick their ass on every scale available and of interest to attractive women. Oh, and the sex will be awesome. Promise.
I've just gotten fluent with SVN versioning after using it for a few years now. I understand that part of what bothers me about it is what bothers Linus Torwalds aswell and had him write Git and I can follow his reasoning in his famous Google speech on Git *and* I understand the hype that ensues around Git and welcome it. That said, until Git has a neat set of stable mature GUI tools to use with it, I'm sticking with Subversion, TortoiseSVN and/or Subclipse. A mature working toolkit that I know how to handle and that works more or less flawlessly. Even a toolset like that would've costed thousands ten years ago. That goes to show how far we have come in some areas of the software field.
They maxes out at 30Hz/eye. Maybe you got a better kind somehow? Mine were bundled with a Gefore 2. Yours?
I remember running my Sony Trinitron 17" Monitor at 100 Hz in order to use the glasses 50 Hz - so no, mine weren't limited to 30 Hz. However, it was a late-isch GeForce 2 (V7700 GTS with all kinds of paraphenalia in it), including analog video conversion, a bunch of kables and connectors and said glasses. I remember having heard about the technology a year or so before, so the tech probably was matured allready.
Nothing new. I got these with my Asus V7700 GFX card (a very good card, btw!) - but they had a cable rather than wireless sync. The GFX card had an extra connector for these. The glasses worked but needed calibrating and were a guarantee for headache after playing for 10 minutes or so. But Dark Reign 2 and simular games looked really cool with them. For 3D RTS I think something like this can even give you an advantage - if you can raise your monitor refresh rate enough, that is.
- Take old drive. - Screw drive apart. (Might require Torx screwdriver or bit) - Take percision manufactured aluminum seperation washers and use them as keyrings, strap-loops or simular stuff. - Take drive platters and work over them with fine grained sandpaper. - Move head magnets over them a few times. - Work over them with even finer grain afterwards. - Dishwash platters and polish afterwards. - Dry and clean platters. - Precisely glue thick undied felt to one side of platter using cut-to-fit carpet tape. - Cut out platter shape and hole with a sharp knife. - Use and/or sell as avantgarde design coasters (10$ - 12$ a piece). - Bring the rest of the dives to recycling, seperating electronics from scrap metal first.
No way anybody will recover any usefull data of a platter after this treatment. And the platter will look like in mint condition. And they make way cool coasters.
I've lived in a town in Germany with one of the largest Vietnam communities and also knew a few Vietnam expats. The best thing I like about the language is that they adopted variants of the Latin glyphset as their written language back in the day, which makes Viet relatively easy to read for westeners. I actually started learning a little Viet but didn't carry on with it. Maybe I should pick up some classes or something, now that I'll also be able to use my favourite OS in it. 'Can never hurt to learn a new language, and from what I can tell the vietnam girls - at least those I know - are sweeet.:-)
As of today, we shall call this sort of stuff MBR - Mediocre Blog Rubbish.
Newsflash: Businesses care squat about technology. They're in it for the money. I'm currently employed in a gig with a 300 percent growth rate (and rising!) and we build our stuff by standards that are close to outdated in some parts. So what? Who cares if the application model is a mess and half the team barely know how to use versioning?... Well, I do, actually, and I tell my teammates to *use* versioning and f*cking comment their commits, but I try not to be to pesky about it, it leads no where. A few weeks ago I showed one programmer on my team that you could mark a line by pressing shift and the down key. He didn't know that. No joke. He didn't know Keyboard Computer Interface 101, first lesson and has been programming in this company for 1.5 years and has quite some IT experience prior to this. Is he stupid? No. Ignorant? Maybe. But I trust he just didn't know and nobody had shown him yet. And from his reaction - he was glad I showed him and wanted to hear some more 'tricks':-) - I judge he is an open minded fellow in this respect.
And as long as we are able to push out the code faster than our competitors do and are able to deliver products our customers like, we'll all keep our jobs. And if the company shrinks some time in the future, wether I know how to correctly normalise an app-model, what the LAMP stack actually looks like from the inside and why the MS Windows line of OSes actually really *does* suck in ways beyond most regular IT peoples imagination and my teammates don't, doesn't matter squat when we all are scheduled for layoff. The only difference is that I take more interest in certain details of my field and have more experience than some of them and that I am thus more suitable for research or foundation work. Such as building better tools, training or optimising the pipeline. Which I intend to (continue) to do in the future, for my projects, my department and my team.
Bottom line: If you're oh-so-much smarter than the rest around you, get in to management, team-lead, FOSS project maintenance or an academic gig in computer science. Otherwise shut the fuck up.
1) Frequently, the best and most successfull games our at least their proofs-of-concept don't come from the industry anymore, but from the modding community. In fact, the modding community is such a powerfull force in gaming you *must* play ball with it, if you want to be taken for granted. However, the modders, being passionate freebee providers themselves, have considerably different ethics on some issues. In ways they are even more pragmatic than the OSS vs. FOSS crowd. And they have to be, as they have a completely different goal, which is: Building good games. Duh. Right now, Valve and the Source engine are pulling over quite a few of the modders, for the simple reason that they have one of the best engines.
2) The best people built games primarly because it's their passion, not because they are paid. However, these people want to build games, and not have to dick around with XFree86 crap with problems which, believe it or not, that sorry excuse of an operating system called Windows solved something like 2 decades ago.
3) As with #2, game builders want to build games. They want a working production pipeline. As long as that is virtually non-exsitant on OSS, they won't use OSS. Plain and simple. Cudos to the Blenderteam for hacking away at this problem one step at a time. However, modders use free versions of Softimage or Maya or UT Editor to build their stuff, and they quite frankly care squat wether it's FOSS or not, as long as it gets the job done.
And last but not least: Good software takes time. From an non-expert end-user standpoint, Linux is barely stopping to suck with Ubuntu 8.10 - and only if you don't want plug-and-play your printer or want to play games that don't run on Wine without a hitch. AFAIAC, Gnome & Nautilus has just stopped sucking a few months ago (I like(d) KDE/KUbuntu much better before) and one-stop zero-fuss printing as in Mac OS X will probably take another year or two until the vendors finally catch on. The very same goes with games.
And lets face it and be realistic: The first thing you want out of the way is your grafics layer, and that has been sucking long enough with XFree86 (Yeah, I know, neat networking, whatever, XFree fanboy, screw you, that's a total non-issue nowadays). Since that appears to be out of the way and desktops are rapidly maturing left, right and center all over the OSS community it is now moving to productivity apps. And AFAICT only now are Evolution and KMail slowly closing in on closed source apps in the field. (Allthough I could be wrong, the KMail crew could still be flat out lying about their ability to provide viable working mail encryption, as they have done for many years).
Once that is all aside and the more complex apps required for multimedia are nearing their true 1.0 release in the OSS community and we finally get a FOSS 3D game engine and a 3D production pipeline that doesn't suck by todays standards, we will see games pop up left right and center as the modding community joins the FOSS fray. And we all will be blown away by the quality they bring to the table. The gaming industry will be hit just as hard as other software fields and will have to adapt with pay-for-content or simular strategies.
Bottom line: If you want to know how the future of FOSS gaming looks like, check out the modding community. And yes, it's a 120% Windows world right now. And, yes, believe it or not, for its very own very good reasons too.... (I can't believe I just said that.)
I just got a Laptop for Christmas. Had a Vista Licence and XP preinstalled. Thought: "Ok. XP is on it, might as well take it for a ride." Installed all software I wanted to use on it. Netbeans/JavaFX, Gimp, Quake 3 Arena and some other stuff. Then it wouldn't shut down. Our Windows guy told me that when a app in userspace tries to do something like access WLAN and can't come by, Windows regularly freezes for 15 minutes or more on shutdown. Forced it through a powercycle and managed a shutdown without problems. Then I noticed WinXP accessing the HDD every second. Windows guy: "Oh, that's normal. You should be glad Vista wasn't preinstalled. Vista would be accessing the HDD constantly." Then he went on to tell me stories about WGA and how it kills your system after 30 days if it thinks your licence isn't valid.
The last time I used Windows professionally was back in 2001. The last install of Windows I used for leisure (games) was Win2k in 2003 or something. The 2.5 hrs with WinXP were enough to shoo me away again for another 5 years at least.
I can safely say that in my 23 years of computing - from obscure custom Sharp OSes and Commodore PET through early versions of DOS and Linux and Mac OS X - Windows XP, a proactively castrated piece of software, is one of the shittiest pieces of software I've come across. And I don't get the notion that Windows Vista is any better.
How anybody except the most novice users with no or nearly no computing experience who have been tricked into buying a computer with todays shit from MS installed is totally beyond me.
This isn't news at all. Mount Everrest actually is a mountain for sissies, technically speaking. The standard route to the summit is more of an extended hike than an actual climb compared to 'real' mountains such as the Cerro Torre. At sea level it would be a more like a walk in the park, literaly.
The difficult part with Everest is taking your time to aclimatise - which can take up to half a year. Which most people don't do. Others take O2 with them. Yet O2 only means you won't die inmediately in the death zone if your gear doesn't fail, it doesn't mean making the summit is a sure bet. Most people die on Everest because the lack of O2 gets to their brain and they start doing stupid things. Meaning more stupid things than going up there unprepared in the first place. That's why the standard route is littred with corpses.
If it were a real mountain that required actual high-profile tech-climbing skills, we'd have much less idiots dying up there, simply because they couldn't reach the death-zone.
I don't really understand your question, respectively the reason you're asking it. However, I can tell you this much: If you're just starting with programming, start with OOP, otherwise your barriers to enter OOP will be significantly higher. In your case it could be that you're spoiled already and will have a steeper climb towards OOP. In that respect C is just about the same distance away from OOP as Basic.
That aside, I don't really see your problem other that you're problably to preoccupied with the academic approach to programming, which is, quite frankly, something like 20 years behind reality.
Just go out, get an OReilly - I recommend the Python line of books (http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596513986/#top), as it is a neat universal PL - start working through it and then find an FOSS project and join it or start your own, preferably some academic stuff you're doing just now and are interested in. Don't get to wound up about the OOP/imperative/functional 'war', as most of the ragging on one or other 'programming paradigm' - whatever the f*ck that is exactly anyway - is not much more that professional trolling to make oneself or the discussion sound more important. Find your PL, become good at it and get the job done. All else is just icing on the cake and you'll find out early enough when to add it.
Hitler was Avantgarde. He and his marketing-message of merging socialisim and nationalisim was super-hip back in the day. And don't dare think for a moment that it only was hip with the Germans, no Sir. Aside from a sophisicated marketing machinery he was a breathtakingly unscrupulous dictator. He killed off the entire SA leader-cadre right after scoring the Machtübernahme. EVERYBODY knew he did it and ALL were scared shittless to even say 'Peep'.
Goebbels would've built broadband to every home and casted speeches of the Führer to every household and make the web a cornerstone of some Kraft durch Freude programm and at least 50% of the people would've loved him for it. And the rest of the world would've admired the Germans.
No, folks, Hilter, Himmler, Bormann and the Nazis were a very special type of evil people and they were outstandingly good it. Bin Laden, Ayatolla Comeni and Co. look like orphans compared. I have no doubt they would've use the Internet to their advantage and excelled at it.
Think todays Republic China or a healthy version of North Korea with the brakes removed and fueled by a nation of well educated people known for their drive towards technical perfection in most aspects of life - very much as the Germans are generally percieved - and you get the picture of what the Nazi Regime was made of. If anything, something like the internet would've fueled their agenda. I have little doubt in that.
Yeah, right. The male population in frogs and alligators in north america has decreased due to them watching to much internet porn. And not because US petrochem and modern lifestyle shit puts PCBs in *everything* and amphibious animals are very sensitive to enviromental damages.... How the f*ck does something like this get modded +5 insightfull? RTFA and do some googleing, for heavens sake.
Even risking to repeat some of the stuff allready said, here's my list of my recommendations of which some were earned very hard on my part:
1) If you want to get going easyly, you need a main client. You otherwise will allways end up with a net loss, unless you are extremely disciplined at only billing for actuall work done. Which is nearly impossible in the first year or so for someone in this field without prior experience.
2) A lesson hard learned by me: End-customers know much, much less about IT and the web than you can possibly imagine. Chances are they won't understand a word you're saying on your first meetings. Take that into account from day one! They *will* compare you to the son of a friend who can do the same thing in MS Frontpage for a tenth of the cost. If that happens: WALK AWAY!! Somebody like that is *NOT* your customer! Trust me on that one.
2b) Likewise, people know squat about modern webdesign and, to be honest, chances are that you don't either. This is the top league, and if you're not playing in it and don't plan joining it (i.e.: scoring a regular official entry in csszengarden and building an accoring personal site - which basically means putting 1500 hours into webdesign, alistapart and such and getting really good at it) STAY THE F*CK AWAY from web-design. The field is fubared enough as it is. If you insist on building your own CSS and HTML, learn a CSS framework. I strongly recommend YAML (as in CSS, not config-language) as the foundation to all your custom design work. But double-check your artistic abilities with proven pros befor doing so. I happen to be gifted with both programming and artistic skills and there are some others like that too, but that is more rare than most geeks like to admit.... And earning money with programming is much easyer anyway - you know, the son doing Frontpage and all that...
3) Learn one (1!!!!, ONE!) FOSS web-app-kit. As in: *NOT* two or more. But ONE. And focus on it. Find out which of the big ones suits you best. For instance, Typo3 owns the German market (yeah, whatever, cue bloatware jokes below), so it's a safe bet if you live there and want some freelance gigs to roll in fast. Others are Zope/Plone, Django, TurboGears, CakePHP, Symfony, ZendFW, Prado, Joomla, Drupal and EZ Publish. Some are CMSes, others are Appkits, some try to be both at the same time and usually manage quite well. Which one you choose nearly matters squat, they all have their ups and downs. However, it *is* important that you pick exactly one, and one only, and become a pro at it. It takes about 3000 hours and a few years of work with one community to achieve that. Do it. Help them out with bugtracking from the get-go and make room for developement-branch of the project in your pipeline. And try to join the core crew or at least the bugsquad or something. I'm in the Joomla bugsquad, which is sort of my sorry excuse to say I'm helping out. It does give me a little bragging advantage with the one or other customer though.
Bottom line on this one: Concentrate! I can't emphasise this one enough - you have to restrict your geek-experimentation drive when running a business. Do it from day one on!
4) Have a working one-stop zero-fuss pipeline custom built to fit the FW you use *before* you start. In fact, make that your first task to do before even considering going freelance! Automation, Versioning, Bugtracking, Project-Management, DB-sync and project-deployment, local and remote LAMP stack and all. Set it up and use it! If you don't know versioning and issue-tracking, you have no f*cking business doing freelance web-work. That's a fact! We have to many n00bs joining the fray as it is! Join me on a gig some time in the future and not know versioning and I'll have your ass for dinner, even if you live on the other side of the planet! I can't tell you ho
Whatever the issue is here and no matter how unscientific and loony some anti-regular-medication crackpots are, there is one thing I'd like to note: Let's not forget that Pharmacorps *do* have a vested interest in the increase of widespread vaccination for every little pissy childhood bug and other oh-so-dangerous disease in existance - even for those our immune system today can actually handle quite well and also use as a training for more severe diseases - as it's a very cheap revenue booster. For example: the rise of measles vaccination in the last 3 decades has absolutely zilch to do with the medical need for it, and all to do with pharmacy corporations looking for some huge wads of extra cash scored on the backs of taxpayers and public healthcare here in Europe and whereever else such vaccinations are sponored by the public.
Bottom line: No matter which side voices its opinion in this debate, I don't trust either further than I can throw them.
Laszlo is a Generator for a few things - which also include Flash, nonetheless. Much like the old Macromedia Flash Generator, the Ming Libraries or the Macromedia Laszlo Rippoff 'Flex'.
JavaFX on the other hand is an all-out leveraging of the Java VM for RIAs, something Laszlo can't offer. It's its own VM (naturally) plus a toolkit for building content and applications. While there are overlaps between the two, JavaFX is clearly aimed at Flash - the biggest advancement being a much more streamlines deployment of the Java VM (I just installed it with a sinlge click of a mouse, supported by some nifty Ajax widget that streamlined the process even more).
And, contrary to Silverlight, Java actually has a chance to dethrone Flash, as it is the most mature cross plattform available, despite Flash being the most widespread plattform in general. I'm really interested in how this will play out.... And am downloading the free JavaFX IDE as I'm typing this. If it doesn't get in my way building RIAs, I will probably never purchase a Flash IDE licence again.
Holy Halleluja! Unbelievable!
on
Sun Releases JavaFX
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· Score: 5, Insightful
They've done it! They have *finally* done it. Beyond all hype, potential vaporware and marketing bullcrap they have - for once - actually pulled through with RIAs. People this is the first time in history that Sun has actually pulled through with implementing a piece of Java in a form that Java was initially meant for: A cross plattform rich & powerfull client enviroment. Finally Java and its VM have stepped up and entered the ring with Flash!
Only intially releasing for OS X and Windows is a large downside, as it will get negative votes from opinion leaders in the field, but the simple fact that they pulled through and didn't stop at 20% with some half-assed crappy Java Media Framework or some other piece of sh*t they've released ever since Flash took the helm at rich clients 10 years ago is a very big supprising plus!!! And the release-website (why the f*ck isn't this, the most important prime sorce even linked in the GP metaarticle???) doesn't even look like total crap.
If they actually manage to pull through with a broad parallel release policy for this in the near future, manage to reduce JFX deployment to zero-fuss Flash-style and release the java-based FOSS tools and IDEs for JFX as announced a year ago, we will - for the first time in the history of the web - see a true competitor to Flash rise. This is good news in so many ways I can't even describe. If Sun plays its cards right and continues applying common sense and not screwing around this time and Adobe isn't on its toes, we will have a fully free open source rich client platform in just a few years and Flash will be history. Yay! Go, Sun, go!
I can't tell you how much I and many other professional Flash developers have waited for this moment for the last 8 years.
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KDE 4 is unfinished. It says everywhere in the official sources. Since KDE 2 the .5 releases basically where the stable targets. It's only with 4 that with the .0 release they didn't care about finish at all, and thus provides Über-suckage. 4.5 will be the stable finished 4 release. No news here. What's the big fat hairy deal?
That said, KDE 3.5 still kicks Gnomes ass usability and integration wise. However - and this *is* true - Gnome has actually stopped sucking in 2008. For the first time in history Nautilus is usable also for non-total-fanboys, and allthough the featureset and power is no where near that of Konqueror, it also has become intuitive to use. For the first time ever since I moved from Debian, I'm using Ubuntu instead of Kubuntu (also due to the flak KDE 4 has gotten) and for the first time I didn't remove it after 10 minutes.
It is far away from the KDE featureset and I'm still convinced that a well configured KDE 3.5 is the best desktop in the world and also outperforms Mac OS X usability wise (fyi: I'm typing this on a mac), but the Ubuntu foundation work done on my Dell Volstro is so awesome, I don't really care that much about any nitpicky details. Maybe I'll dick around with E or something if I get bored by it. Both Gnome and KDE are so far beyond Windows - which I use at work - that it doesn't really matter that much to me. Especially with the improvement Gnome obviously has seen lately.
Since Linus actually cares squat about the Desktop, as long as it works, his statements actually make sence in current context. No surprise here either.
Technologically backwards once-sorta-big Nation releases YA rebranded Debian distro. Film at eleven.
Russian OS. Rubbish. 99.9% of that OS will have been built developers all over the world.
I just posted a witty reply to this story. Reading TFA again it occured to me that this is most likely MS fake news and/or astroturfing. It requires quite a few clicks to actually customize a Laptop at Dell and have it come with Ubuntu rather than some MS Windows variant.
I'd say this might very well be fake news.
Newsflash: Online student discovers that basic brain functions are required to run and operate a computer. Film at eleven.
Seriously. You don't need an Inet uplink. Or a computer. You *might* want to take one if it makes the books you need easyer to carry (read: in digital form).
Use the space you'd need for an outdoor computer for other usefull stuff. Like a camera, something to read or survival stuff.
The time on this trip will be over in no time. If you absolutely must, take a portable with solar panels along and do some coding.
Otherwise just write a diary. With a pen and paper.
|pimping my social skills, my typign, [...] | ;-)
That worked quite well, it seems
Noticed that typo right after final submit. Had' to laugh about it myself. :-)
Looking at Ubuntu 8.10 vs. WinXP and Vista, the following is dawning on me: Sometime in the future, when printing has become a zero fuss issue just like graphics and 3D drivers have now become a zero-fuss issue on Linux, Windows will be steamrolled into insignificance, just like Google did with Altavista. No way MS can compete with that level of quality in the long run if it comes for free.
We've heard it all. Cut it out allready. Those ranting about Pythons whitespace are the ones that don't know what they are talking about because they have *never* even programmed in Python, and if it only were for half an hour. To all you suckers out there: Freaking write at least one simple bubblesort in Python, before you go out on a limp and talk about stuff you don't know.
I find that age gives me the edge. There may be some biografic details to that, but being a end-30ties geek and nerd I find the big stars among my peers dimishing and me rising to new heights. It is only last year that I had my second and third sex & love-affair ever, and all three (including my first) know about each other and accept it. I remember nearly killing myself over not having ever had a girl at the age of 23 back in the early nineties. Now I find myself growing cooler by the year.
My geekishness and passion for the things I liked doing still burns and reflects back on me and has early twen PYT students at currently hip CS flat-sharing parties judge me about late 20ish and brake into heavy flirting. ... That 22 yr. old nurse at the last party was particularly cute. *sigh*
I was the typical nerd that didn't consume great amounts of alcohol back then and stopped drinking 20 years ago, which starts to give me an brainpower edge over my former-jock-now-fat-ass springbreaking peers. Instead I stayed up late on Fidonet, RPG and Tabletop sessions, pimping my social skills, my typign, wording, debating skills and my literacy. On top of that, everything awkward and geeky back then is super hip now. Comics (now Mangas), Fantasy, IT and computers, programming (gives you the status of some high priest at some occasions nowadays) and gaming.
Now I work at a game dev company with a current growth rate so bizar you wouldn't believe it, and am one of the oldest and most experienced amoung a team of currently 180 people. The 'young' guys come to me every odd day with a question, and when I give them an advice they listen and are gratefull.
I got my ass kicked by the pricks at school so many times, I still burn with fury sometimes just thinking about it. I've practiced performing and martial arts since the end of highschool and today I'd outrun every jock, who have all grown fat and lazy and/or have tar-lungs because they where cool back then and started smoking. And then I could still beat the living piss out of them, 5 at a time.
IMPORTANT ADVICE TO EARLY TWEEN NERDS: If you are a young male geek and nerd, rejoice. You're time is ten to fifteen years into the future, when your peers, girls included, have enough life experience to have learned what you know allready. Pratice art, take your time to learn about style, fashion and manners geek style (i.e.: learn it systematically like a new PL), stay in shape, go and take dancing lessons (I'm picking up Tango again next month), cut smoking and alcohol and live healthy and at the age of 30+ you'll be able to take your veritable pick of the litter of good-looking girls who can appreciate intelligent, reasonable men. When the pricks have burned all their karma and you'll kick their ass on every scale available and of interest to attractive women. Oh, and the sex will be awesome. Promise.
I've just gotten fluent with SVN versioning after using it for a few years now. I understand that part of what bothers me about it is what bothers Linus Torwalds aswell and had him write Git and I can follow his reasoning in his famous Google speech on Git *and* I understand the hype that ensues around Git and welcome it. That said, until Git has a neat set of stable mature GUI tools to use with it, I'm sticking with Subversion, TortoiseSVN and/or Subclipse. A mature working toolkit that I know how to handle and that works more or less flawlessly.
Even a toolset like that would've costed thousands ten years ago. That goes to show how far we have come in some areas of the software field.
They maxes out at 30Hz/eye. Maybe you got a better kind somehow? Mine were bundled with a Gefore 2. Yours?
I remember running my Sony Trinitron 17" Monitor at 100 Hz in order to use the glasses 50 Hz - so no, mine weren't limited to 30 Hz. However, it was a late-isch GeForce 2 (V7700 GTS with all kinds of paraphenalia in it), including analog video conversion, a bunch of kables and connectors and said glasses. I remember having heard about the technology a year or so before, so the tech probably was matured allready.
Nothing new. I got these with my Asus V7700 GFX card (a very good card, btw!) - but they had a cable rather than wireless sync. The GFX card had an extra connector for these. The glasses worked but needed calibrating and were a guarantee for headache after playing for 10 minutes or so. But Dark Reign 2 and simular games looked really cool with them. For 3D RTS I think something like this can even give you an advantage - if you can raise your monitor refresh rate enough, that is.
- Take old drive.
- Screw drive apart. (Might require Torx screwdriver or bit)
- Take percision manufactured aluminum seperation washers and use them as keyrings, strap-loops or simular stuff.
- Take drive platters and work over them with fine grained sandpaper.
- Move head magnets over them a few times.
- Work over them with even finer grain afterwards.
- Dishwash platters and polish afterwards.
- Dry and clean platters.
- Precisely glue thick undied felt to one side of platter using cut-to-fit carpet tape.
- Cut out platter shape and hole with a sharp knife.
- Use and/or sell as avantgarde design coasters (10$ - 12$ a piece).
- Bring the rest of the dives to recycling, seperating electronics from scrap metal first.
No way anybody will recover any usefull data of a platter after this treatment. And the platter will look like in mint condition. And they make way cool coasters.
I've lived in a town in Germany with one of the largest Vietnam communities and also knew a few Vietnam expats. The best thing I like about the language is that they adopted variants of the Latin glyphset as their written language back in the day, which makes Viet relatively easy to read for westeners. I actually started learning a little Viet but didn't carry on with it. Maybe I should pick up some classes or something, now that I'll also be able to use my favourite OS in it. 'Can never hurt to learn a new language, and from what I can tell the vietnam girls - at least those I know - are sweeet. :-)
As of today, we shall call this sort of stuff MBR - Mediocre Blog Rubbish.
Newsflash: Businesses care squat about technology. They're in it for the money. I'm currently employed in a gig with a 300 percent growth rate (and rising!) and we build our stuff by standards that are close to outdated in some parts. So what? Who cares if the application model is a mess and half the team barely know how to use versioning? ... Well, I do, actually, and I tell my teammates to *use* versioning and f*cking comment their commits, but I try not to be to pesky about it, it leads no where. A few weeks ago I showed one programmer on my team that you could mark a line by pressing shift and the down key. He didn't know that. No joke. He didn't know Keyboard Computer Interface 101, first lesson and has been programming in this company for 1.5 years and has quite some IT experience prior to this. Is he stupid? No. Ignorant? Maybe. But I trust he just didn't know and nobody had shown him yet. And from his reaction - he was glad I showed him and wanted to hear some more 'tricks' :-) - I judge he is an open minded fellow in this respect.
And as long as we are able to push out the code faster than our competitors do and are able to deliver products our customers like, we'll all keep our jobs. And if the company shrinks some time in the future, wether I know how to correctly normalise an app-model, what the LAMP stack actually looks like from the inside and why the MS Windows line of OSes actually really *does* suck in ways beyond most regular IT peoples imagination and my teammates don't, doesn't matter squat when we all are scheduled for layoff. The only difference is that I take more interest in certain details of my field and have more experience than some of them and that I am thus more suitable for research or foundation work. Such as building better tools, training or optimising the pipeline. Which I intend to (continue) to do in the future, for my projects, my department and my team.
Bottom line: If you're oh-so-much smarter than the rest around you, get in to management, team-lead, FOSS project maintenance or an academic gig in computer science. Otherwise shut the fuck up.
My 2 Euros.
The GP Metaarticle is wrong.
1) Frequently, the best and most successfull games our at least their proofs-of-concept don't come from the industry anymore, but from the modding community. In fact, the modding community is such a powerfull force in gaming you *must* play ball with it, if you want to be taken for granted. However, the modders, being passionate freebee providers themselves, have considerably different ethics on some issues. In ways they are even more pragmatic than the OSS vs. FOSS crowd. And they have to be, as they have a completely different goal, which is: Building good games. Duh. Right now, Valve and the Source engine are pulling over quite a few of the modders, for the simple reason that they have one of the best engines.
2) The best people built games primarly because it's their passion, not because they are paid. However, these people want to build games, and not have to dick around with XFree86 crap with problems which, believe it or not, that sorry excuse of an operating system called Windows solved something like 2 decades ago.
3) As with #2, game builders want to build games. They want a working production pipeline. As long as that is virtually non-exsitant on OSS, they won't use OSS. Plain and simple. Cudos to the Blender team for hacking away at this problem one step at a time. However, modders use free versions of Softimage or Maya or UT Editor to build their stuff, and they quite frankly care squat wether it's FOSS or not, as long as it gets the job done.
And last but not least: Good software takes time. From an non-expert end-user standpoint, Linux is barely stopping to suck with Ubuntu 8.10 - and only if you don't want plug-and-play your printer or want to play games that don't run on Wine without a hitch. AFAIAC, Gnome & Nautilus has just stopped sucking a few months ago (I like(d) KDE/KUbuntu much better before) and one-stop zero-fuss printing as in Mac OS X will probably take another year or two until the vendors finally catch on. The very same goes with games.
And lets face it and be realistic: The first thing you want out of the way is your grafics layer, and that has been sucking long enough with XFree86 (Yeah, I know, neat networking, whatever, XFree fanboy, screw you, that's a total non-issue nowadays). Since that appears to be out of the way and desktops are rapidly maturing left, right and center all over the OSS community it is now moving to productivity apps. And AFAICT only now are Evolution and KMail slowly closing in on closed source apps in the field. (Allthough I could be wrong, the KMail crew could still be flat out lying about their ability to provide viable working mail encryption, as they have done for many years).
Once that is all aside and the more complex apps required for multimedia are nearing their true 1.0 release in the OSS community and we finally get a FOSS 3D game engine and a 3D production pipeline that doesn't suck by todays standards, we will see games pop up left right and center as the modding community joins the FOSS fray. And we all will be blown away by the quality they bring to the table. The gaming industry will be hit just as hard as other software fields and will have to adapt with pay-for-content or simular strategies.
Bottom line: ... (I can't believe I just said that.)
If you want to know how the future of FOSS gaming looks like, check out the modding community. And yes, it's a 120% Windows world right now. And, yes, believe it or not, for its very own very good reasons too.
I just got a Laptop for Christmas. Had a Vista Licence and XP preinstalled. Thought: "Ok. XP is on it, might as well take it for a ride." Installed all software I wanted to use on it. Netbeans/JavaFX, Gimp, Quake 3 Arena and some other stuff. Then it wouldn't shut down. Our Windows guy told me that when a app in userspace tries to do something like access WLAN and can't come by, Windows regularly freezes for 15 minutes or more on shutdown. Forced it through a powercycle and managed a shutdown without problems. Then I noticed WinXP accessing the HDD every second. Windows guy: "Oh, that's normal. You should be glad Vista wasn't preinstalled. Vista would be accessing the HDD constantly." Then he went on to tell me stories about WGA and how it kills your system after 30 days if it thinks your licence isn't valid.
The last time I used Windows professionally was back in 2001. The last install of Windows I used for leisure (games) was Win2k in 2003 or something. The 2.5 hrs with WinXP were enough to shoo me away again for another 5 years at least.
I can safely say that in my 23 years of computing - from obscure custom Sharp OSes and Commodore PET through early versions of DOS and Linux and Mac OS X - Windows XP, a proactively castrated piece of software, is one of the shittiest pieces of software I've come across. And I don't get the notion that Windows Vista is any better.
How anybody except the most novice users with no or nearly no computing experience who have been tricked into buying a computer with todays shit from MS installed is totally beyond me.
This isn't news at all. Mount Everrest actually is a mountain for sissies, technically speaking. The standard route to the summit is more of an extended hike than an actual climb compared to 'real' mountains such as the Cerro Torre. At sea level it would be a more like a walk in the park, literaly.
The difficult part with Everest is taking your time to aclimatise - which can take up to half a year. Which most people don't do. Others take O2 with them. Yet O2 only means you won't die inmediately in the death zone if your gear doesn't fail, it doesn't mean making the summit is a sure bet. Most people die on Everest because the lack of O2 gets to their brain and they start doing stupid things. Meaning more stupid things than going up there unprepared in the first place. That's why the standard route is littred with corpses.
If it were a real mountain that required actual high-profile tech-climbing skills, we'd have much less idiots dying up there, simply because they couldn't reach the death-zone.
I don't really understand your question, respectively the reason you're asking it. However, I can tell you this much: If you're just starting with programming, start with OOP, otherwise your barriers to enter OOP will be significantly higher. In your case it could be that you're spoiled already and will have a steeper climb towards OOP. In that respect C is just about the same distance away from OOP as Basic.
That aside, I don't really see your problem other that you're problably to preoccupied with the academic approach to programming, which is, quite frankly, something like 20 years behind reality.
Just go out, get an OReilly - I recommend the Python line of books (http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596513986/#top), as it is a neat universal PL - start working through it and then find an FOSS project and join it or start your own, preferably some academic stuff you're doing just now and are interested in. Don't get to wound up about the OOP/imperative/functional 'war', as most of the ragging on one or other 'programming paradigm' - whatever the f*ck that is exactly anyway - is not much more that professional trolling to make oneself or the discussion sound more important. Find your PL, become good at it and get the job done. All else is just icing on the cake and you'll find out early enough when to add it.
My 2 cents.
Hitler was Avantgarde. He and his marketing-message of merging socialisim and nationalisim was super-hip back in the day. And don't dare think for a moment that it only was hip with the Germans, no Sir. Aside from a sophisicated marketing machinery he was a breathtakingly unscrupulous dictator. He killed off the entire SA leader-cadre right after scoring the Machtübernahme. EVERYBODY knew he did it and ALL were scared shittless to even say 'Peep'.
Goebbels would've built broadband to every home and casted speeches of the Führer to every household and make the web a cornerstone of some Kraft durch Freude programm and at least 50% of the people would've loved him for it. And the rest of the world would've admired the Germans.
No, folks, Hilter, Himmler, Bormann and the Nazis were a very special type of evil people and they were outstandingly good it. Bin Laden, Ayatolla Comeni and Co. look like orphans compared. I have no doubt they would've use the Internet to their advantage and excelled at it.
Think todays Republic China or a healthy version of North Korea with the brakes removed and fueled by a nation of well educated people known for their drive towards technical perfection in most aspects of life - very much as the Germans are generally percieved - and you get the picture of what the Nazi Regime was made of. If anything, something like the internet would've fueled their agenda. I have little doubt in that.
Ahem... I blame internet porn!
Yeah, right. The male population in frogs and alligators in north america has decreased due to them watching to much internet porn. And not because US petrochem and modern lifestyle shit puts PCBs in *everything* and amphibious animals are very sensitive to enviromental damages. ...
How the f*ck does something like this get modded +5 insightfull? RTFA and do some googleing, for heavens sake.
Even risking to repeat some of the stuff allready said, here's my list of my recommendations of which some were earned very hard on my part:
1) If you want to get going easyly, you need a main client. You otherwise will allways end up with a net loss, unless you are extremely disciplined at only billing for actuall work done. Which is nearly impossible in the first year or so for someone in this field without prior experience.
2) A lesson hard learned by me: End-customers know much, much less about IT and the web than you can possibly imagine. Chances are they won't understand a word you're saying on your first meetings. Take that into account from day one! They *will* compare you to the son of a friend who can do the same thing in MS Frontpage for a tenth of the cost. If that happens: WALK AWAY!! Somebody like that is *NOT* your customer! Trust me on that one.
2b) Likewise, people know squat about modern webdesign and, to be honest, chances are that you don't either. This is the top league, and if you're not playing in it and don't plan joining it (i.e.: scoring a regular official entry in csszengarden and building an accoring personal site - which basically means putting 1500 hours into webdesign, alistapart and such and getting really good at it) STAY THE F*CK AWAY from web-design. The field is fubared enough as it is. If you insist on building your own CSS and HTML, learn a CSS framework. I strongly recommend YAML (as in CSS, not config-language) as the foundation to all your custom design work. But double-check your artistic abilities with proven pros befor doing so. I happen to be gifted with both programming and artistic skills and there are some others like that too, but that is more rare than most geeks like to admit. ... And earning money with programming is much easyer anyway - you know, the son doing Frontpage and all that ...
3) Learn one (1!!!!, ONE!) FOSS web-app-kit. As in: *NOT* two or more. But ONE. And focus on it. Find out which of the big ones suits you best. For instance, Typo3 owns the German market (yeah, whatever, cue bloatware jokes below), so it's a safe bet if you live there and want some freelance gigs to roll in fast. Others are Zope/Plone, Django, TurboGears, CakePHP, Symfony, ZendFW, Prado, Joomla, Drupal and EZ Publish. Some are CMSes, others are Appkits, some try to be both at the same time and usually manage quite well. Which one you choose nearly matters squat, they all have their ups and downs. However, it *is* important that you pick exactly one, and one only, and become a pro at it. It takes about 3000 hours and a few years of work with one community to achieve that. Do it. Help them out with bugtracking from the get-go and make room for developement-branch of the project in your pipeline. And try to join the core crew or at least the bugsquad or something. I'm in the Joomla bugsquad, which is sort of my sorry excuse to say I'm helping out. It does give me a little bragging advantage with the one or other customer though.
Bottom line on this one: Concentrate! I can't emphasise this one enough - you have to restrict your geek-experimentation drive when running a business. Do it from day one on!
4) Have a working one-stop zero-fuss pipeline custom built to fit the FW you use *before* you start. In fact, make that your first task to do before even considering going freelance! Automation, Versioning, Bugtracking, Project-Management, DB-sync and project-deployment, local and remote LAMP stack and all. Set it up and use it! If you don't know versioning and issue-tracking, you have no f*cking business doing freelance web-work. That's a fact! We have to many n00bs joining the fray as it is! Join me on a gig some time in the future and not know versioning and I'll have your ass for dinner, even if you live on the other side of the planet! I can't tell you ho
Whatever the issue is here and no matter how unscientific and loony some anti-regular-medication crackpots are, there is one thing I'd like to note:
Let's not forget that Pharmacorps *do* have a vested interest in the increase of widespread vaccination for every little pissy childhood bug and other oh-so-dangerous disease in existance - even for those our immune system today can actually handle quite well and also use as a training for more severe diseases - as it's a very cheap revenue booster. For example: the rise of measles vaccination in the last 3 decades has absolutely zilch to do with the medical need for it, and all to do with pharmacy corporations looking for some huge wads of extra cash scored on the backs of taxpayers and public healthcare here in Europe and whereever else such vaccinations are sponored by the public.
Bottom line:
No matter which side voices its opinion in this debate, I don't trust either further than I can throw them.
Laszlo is a Generator for a few things - which also include Flash, nonetheless. Much like the old Macromedia Flash Generator, the Ming Libraries or the Macromedia Laszlo Rippoff 'Flex'.
JavaFX on the other hand is an all-out leveraging of the Java VM for RIAs, something Laszlo can't offer. It's its own VM (naturally) plus a toolkit for building content and applications. While there are overlaps between the two, JavaFX is clearly aimed at Flash - the biggest advancement being a much more streamlines deployment of the Java VM (I just installed it with a sinlge click of a mouse, supported by some nifty Ajax widget that streamlined the process even more).
And, contrary to Silverlight, Java actually has a chance to dethrone Flash, as it is the most mature cross plattform available, despite Flash being the most widespread plattform in general. I'm really interested in how this will play out. ... And am downloading the free JavaFX IDE as I'm typing this. If it doesn't get in my way building RIAs, I will probably never purchase a Flash IDE licence again.
They've done it! They have *finally* done it. Beyond all hype, potential vaporware and marketing bullcrap they have - for once - actually pulled through with RIAs. People this is the first time in history that Sun has actually pulled through with implementing a piece of Java in a form that Java was initially meant for: A cross plattform rich & powerfull client enviroment. Finally Java and its VM have stepped up and entered the ring with Flash!
Only intially releasing for OS X and Windows is a large downside, as it will get negative votes from opinion leaders in the field, but the simple fact that they pulled through and didn't stop at 20% with some half-assed crappy Java Media Framework or some other piece of sh*t they've released ever since Flash took the helm at rich clients 10 years ago is a very big supprising plus!!! And the release-website (why the f*ck isn't this, the most important prime sorce even linked in the GP metaarticle???) doesn't even look like total crap.
If they actually manage to pull through with a broad parallel release policy for this in the near future, manage to reduce JFX deployment to zero-fuss Flash-style and release the java-based FOSS tools and IDEs for JFX as announced a year ago, we will - for the first time in the history of the web - see a true competitor to Flash rise. This is good news in so many ways I can't even describe. If Sun plays its cards right and continues applying common sense and not screwing around this time and Adobe isn't on its toes, we will have a fully free open source rich client platform in just a few years and Flash will be history. Yay! Go, Sun, go!
I can't tell you how much I and many other professional Flash developers have waited for this moment for the last 8 years.