Lightweight? Don't no nothin' 'bout Linux? You want Xubuntu. The official Ubuntu variant using the XFCE Desktop. Monodevelop will use quite a bit of GTK stuff though, IIRC. Anyway, it's faster then Windows, so no downside here. But if Mono isn't enough, then I'd recommend staying with Windows. Unless, however, you want to learn more of Mono to slowly shake lose of MS. Monodevelop looks a very fine and dandy OSS IDE and even makes me curious about this Mono stuff. Good luck and welcome on board.
I keep reading here 'you get the same as regular PC for the same money with more power'. WTF?
No, you don't. This thing is the size of a friggin' external HDD! It probably consumes less than a third of the power of a regular desktop and - optical media, hardcore gaming and CAD aside - can do everything a bulky box can do. And a gaming rigg or CAD machine costs a 4-digit sum anyway and serves a totally different market.
About half a year ago I replaced my large linux tower with the first ATX casing ever (an Inwin from 1996 - still the best tinker-case ever) - which weighs something like a metric ton, has the size of a minivan and sounds like a 747 taking off *and* requires me to crawl under the table when hooking up USB or Ethernet - with the smallest Mac Mini I could get. I pimped it out with 3 GB and shudder with horror whenever I boot up that cludgy thing to migrate data or something. The 1,8 Ghz Mac Mini sits *under* my 20" samsung cinema flatscreen at an arms-length away from my ears and I only hear it when I play Sauerbraten for more than 5 minutes.
I can't believe that anybody other than hardcore gamers, video compositors or 3D Fx people even consider getting a midi tower these days, let alone a bigtower.
I believe this new Asus stunt will finally tap yet another new market of zero-fuss one-stop workstation solutions and have the midi and maxi towers finally go the way of the dodo for most markets. Personally, I sure do hope so. It's about time too.
I like the concept of Stackware such as HyperCard. I personally have programmed and maintain an Application built in RunRev that has a custom designed pixel-true layout of the UI. Aside from the strange language associated with RunRev ('Transscript') which is something like "Lingo done right" (Yeah, I know how bizar that sounds) it is a neat concept and lets you roll procedural, extremely visual oriented apps with zero fuss. Building my App in something like Java would have been a Nightmare. However, working with Stackware only takes you so far and only if you plan your application well. Stackware is the anti-thesis of object-orientation (visual objects aside) and the virutal machines used for existing solutions are performance hogs as soon as it goes beyond trivial applications. As soon as serious componentisation and scalability is required, Stackware solutions hit a brick wall - especially if they use a programming language that tries to ape the english language. Which in the end is impossible to do.
Stackware still enjoys it's ecological niche in the programming world - and for good reasons too. The community hasn't changed or evolved that much since HyperCard, but it still is alive and kicking. Which goes to show that it still has it's place. However, as soon as an application leaves the desktop and becomes distributed, or based on working, documented, standardised technology, the air gets very thin for this sort of solution. No matter how step the learning curve and how difficult the preperation for an application in a classic programming technology may seem at first sight. It allways has been that way and allways will be.
Bottom line: Stackware is neat and fine and dandy, and there's no thing like it when it comes to definite frozen-speced custom specialised GUI Apps for vertical markets. Anything beyond that is much better served with regular PLs or even the most obscure OSS scritping enviroment, be it Java/Swing or Perl/TK or whatever.
Oh, look, nice picture. "The HTC X7510 Advantage is a hard device to label. Technically it is a smartphone, because it runs the Windows Mobile 6.1 Profes..." *click* (closes the tab)
By far the largest problem (95%+) with security isn't technology but the procedures involved with true security. Use any system that is safe and easy to handle. A good PGP setup (costs money), a good GPG setup (costs time) or - this is what I would do - file encrypter programms like KGPG. Those are the most hassle free to use - contrary to those bizar multi-standard email encryption setups that can easyly fail due to incompatabilities. There even are file compressors and archive programms out there that support encryption (check for the strength of that beforehand though).
Once you've done that and have esablished a secure pipeline to your adjacent on the other end see to it that his procedures are as secrue as yours. It might even be the best just taking an ecrypted stick or HDD over to him in person and help him migrate the data. That way you can ensure there is no leak on that end. If you're really serious about security, that's the way to do it.
People here are giving well meant advice like 'Cycle to work', 'Change diet', etc.
However, I've observed that most of my geek friends - including my once slender geek buddy now turned fatso - have gained the habit of eating far beyond their appetite. And my fat buddy does a lot of exercise.
Newsflash: Exercise doesn't help you lose weight very effectively. There is a far more effective solution: Eat less.
Whenever I notice my jeans pinching and my belly gaining (my thighs have gained to much allready - I ought to get them a tad thinner aswell) and my belt going up a notch I simply eat less. It's become something of a bi-monthly rythym of eating normal or what my spoose has trained me to consider normal (read: eating to much!) and barking at her or simply refusing to eat when she heaps to much on to my plate despite me telling her that I'll help myself.
Eating over your appetite has become a social thing, and if you refuse to do it you get queer looks from all sides. Especially if you're still what other *call* slender. Well, guess why I *am* slender, fat-ass!? It's not because I'm doing Aikido twice a week. I simply restrain myself from stuffing my face. Eating slowly helps btw. Eating to fast is one of my prime cause for overweight tendency.
Bottom line: If you can't come up with anthing better, switch to scheduled Broughth and Ramen for 10 weeks and you'll be suprised how well your body starts eating away at those extra pounds stored all over the place. And train yourself to eat less, even if it takes a few ups and downs along the JoJo String. You'll eventually reach your ideal weight if you apply reason to your image in the mirror.
There are quite a few of the usual ideas listed here (Spreadsheet, Buzhug, get a better Editor, etc.). However I second those that suggestes Kexi, as it also has a flatfile DB built in (I just checked). You can build your own forms with it and have your own, custom single table Database App up and running in minutes.
Kexi is the way to go, and you'll even know your way around a neat DB frontend when you need to connect to some SQL persistance later some time.
If you truly can "out-develop any graduate you've met", prove it. Go get the little slip of paper that gives them the career advantage over you.
You may even learn something at Uni that you didn't realize you should need to know.
You have a point there. That's why I started Uni last Semester. However, 27 hrs. of required presence per week and 500 Euros of tuition per semester take it's toll. It's impossible for me to get a degree in a time and income neutral fashion, which was the reason why I quit. But even if I where on the way to get one (which I may be again if I don't get any project or contract any time soon) I'm starting to doubt that it would be much of a benefit if I had a degree.
If I ever get one, it will be for my own sake. Industry be damned. If the industry has no need for my skills, I might aswell earn my minimum wage doing little jobs for small web firms and do open source work in the rest of my time.
I've been hearing this litany in Germany for quite some time now. Not enough expert workers, no engineers, no IT people, Jada-Jada-Jada. Every 5 years or so the industry goes through the same bullshiting ritual. How else is it then that I'm struggling to survive as a freelance Software Developer with 8 years of experience under my belt? Why is it that I'm not even considered because I don't have a grade - allthough I can easyly out-develop any graduate I've met?
This whining is nothing but a salary lowering measure. The best that will happen for true experts is that salaries and benefits will reach the old levels.
The Netbook totally rocks. IIRC it has 40 hrs of uptime on a single battery load, which blows every protable PC (even the Transmeta Lifebooks pimped with Powerbattery and OD Battery) out of the water. But get your head straight about pocessing power and running some Linux derviate or something on it. That won't fly.
Because, allthough it is a fully fletched out business system with a neat Java 1.1 enviroment on top of some custom Epoc OS (way ahead of it's time), you can absolutely forget any more that rudymentary surfing on that thing. I strongly suggest you get the brand new and super cheap One A110 and hack youself some external power option if you want to reach the Netbooks uptime.
And, yes, uptime is what I'd be looking for in any subnote who's prime purpose is to be used for generic tasks while on the road. In that respect a Netbook really is the bar. But the One A110 and the Asus EEE are the new generation (nearly 10 years newer!) and they are actually those up to the Netbook. I'd say they've re-introduced the Handheld era. Might aswell pay that respect and get one.
I consider Joomla a potential Web-CMS-market killer application for various reasons:
- Installation is a breeze. Far superiour to any other CMS of simular featureset.
- It looks good and is usable. To many webkits look like crap once they are set up for end user mode. Top-of-the-line web designers have pimped Joomlas UI so much that it is a feast to work with. And other projects are scrambling to catch up. Which is a good thing aswell. I find it nearly unbelievable how they managed to improve the 1.5 UI over the 1.0 UI, even though the 1.0 UI allready is way beyond anything else out there.
- It's built with the ever present LAMP stack in mind, albeit beind independant of it.
- It's featureset is well thought out and there are countless extensions for it.
However there are things that the Joomla core team needs to address before they can claim leadership in the field:
- Flexible Access Controll is missing. There is a hardwired access controll with around about 5-8 roles, but a full blown CMS needs to have as many as the admin needs. Especially if non-trivial extensions are involved. This is a major issue and probably will be addressed in some future release. I hope they do it right and don't screw it up - which easyly can happen with badly implemented access control.
- People warned me not to look at the data/object model of Joomla 1.0 - so I didn't. I just had looked at that of Typo3 4.0 and barely survived the resulting shock. I presume that the Joomla 1.5 object model still has a few issues, probalby also due to 1.5 having a legacy mode for backwards extension compatability. A (still) less than optimal archtecture could be a showstopper for people who want to build larger applications on top of Joomla 1.5 and the new Joomla 1.5 Framework.
- They reinvented the wheel like so many others and rolled their own web application framework. I asked the lead developer why they did that instead of using CakePHP or Symfony or something like that and he reasured that they had solid reasons (legacy mode being one) but I'm still wondering if it hadn't been better not to do that. If however the Joomla Framework improves it's API and Documentation enough to catch up with the other large PHP Frameworks this could turn out to be a very good thing. Since the Joomla CMS lowers the barrier of entry into the Framework considerably - especially for non-developers.
Oh, and btw: Hagen Grafs Book on 1.5 was pushed out of the door even during Beta phase. The German edition even has 'Beta' in the title. I remember thumbing prints of it which where still warm from the press on the last years German Joomladay and Alex Kempkens (a core dev) walking up from behind and saying "That screenshot there isn't up to date anymore - I changed that interface two days ago." Duh. Talking about writing about a moving target:-) . Despite the unusual publishing strategy, Hagen Grafs books - the German ones anyway - are good to get you started. I still have a copy of his old Beginners Guide to Mambo.
The German publisher actually published an updated version of the Joomla 1.5 book a few weeks ago allready.
And as for the translation and German style wording... maybe I should offer Hagen some help on that for the next release... Gonna check if he's on Skype right now.:-)
That's easy: Pay 3-5 devs to get renderman on to Blender. RenderMan im*and* export. I'd actually add extra wondows-specific compliler directives to the Blender source just for that. All File format problems solved for all platforms and the last showstopper for using Blender in Hollywood pipelines removed.
But we all know that ain't going to happen, so basically it's a waste of time.
- Custom furniture / top-of-the-line design furniture. Price be damned. Premium payed woodworkers to implement the required shelves and built-to-fit elements.Ornganic material and material treatment only. And if it tripples work-hours - no problem.
- Interiour pre-designed for optimal lighting and style in 3D, setups tested with mockup scenarios. Have 2 or 3 Feng-Shui experts do a review.
- Style mixed if the need be. I'm sitting at my desk 10+ hrs per day, I don't give a shit if my chair doesn't match my desk 110% as long as both are the best there is.
- Organic wall decorations, colors and plastering. Painters to design own sections with whatever I consider cool. Magna-Carta or any other cool looking Manga characters, Mondrian/Frank Stella rippoffs, shelves integrated with neat wall-sculptures. Add in a little Hundertwasser here and there.
- Parquet. The best money can buy. Even in the server, storage and maintenance rooms.
- Planned space for tools, equipment and cabeling.
- Eco-friendly Air Conditioning and filtering using organic components, materials and agents. If it takes up extra space: Buy it.
- Custom fixed blackboards for project work with optimized drain for muck-free cleaning.
- Best Hardware available, stored in own climated room if it makes noise or is to big. And anything bigger that a Mac Mini is. I hate these ugly large boxes taking away space. External drives at all desks for all optical / movable media needs.
- Best Screens, KBs & Mice. The offices shown on the pictures look neat. The tools shown look pretty standard fare. In fact they show pretty crappy Dell junk on some. My hardware right here is better. And that's only a small Mac Mini with some generic widescreen attached.
- Sreensize: 30" whereever somebody doesn't explicitly say he doesn't want it. Dual or triple 30" for those who can't get enough.
- No budget cieling for initial production pipeline setup. Find out some bizarely priced CASEtool is neat to work with and can ease production on a regular basis? Buy it, no matter the price! Buy the training for it aswell. Set up custom hardware config if needed, design workspace accordingly. Like for people who use grafic tablets all the time.
- Largest Screens/Touchscreens money can buy for Group-OOAD. Pay a team of X-Org developers to implement multi-focus / multi-mouse/multi-kb support if it turns out usefull.
- Living-kitchen. The best of the best. Own industry-grade italian coffee machine.
- Full scale bathrooms with sauna and changing quarters. I'm a software developer, dammit. I get the urge to take a good shower or bath *in* a good shower or bathroom at the most bizare times of the day (3 o'clock in the morning isn't that rare). If I'm through a 30 hrs coding spree with only 3 hrs of sleep I want to change my clothes, like, *right now*, no matter what time of day it is.
- Well payed and specifically trained service personell for cleaning and maintenance. This often is overlooked as one, if not *the* essential part of a good workplace. If I need to unwind and like doing so by cleaning my KB for 20 minutes, I'll do so. But most of the time I'd like well-payed office assistance to do so for me. Without wiping my screen with a mucky handtowel.
- Cook for once or twice per month office dinner.
- Inhouse, trained cleaning service.
- Cycle park garage. Custom built. The one on the Six-Apart pictures is a joke.
- Best server on the planet. Blade station, Sun/IBM Mainframe with complete virtualisation. Whatever, you name it.
- Custom built library and conference room.
- Selected plants and plant arrangements. Part- or full-time Ikke-Bana florist to maintain them.
- Optional standing desks whereever applicable. I personally want one in my office.
- Aquarium if applicable and the Feng-Shui/Interiour guys suggest one. Which they often do.
- Custom setup printer room.
And, as an extra:
- Building exterior and fixed interiour (layout, wintergardens, custom room-fountain(s)) (co-)designed by this guy.
>> and this has exactly what to do with MS? the coding habits of programmers has NOTHING to do with MS. >It have plenty to do with MS. MS is supporting this behavior.
Gosh, am I happy that all the lib-paths and libCs are so consistent on Linux.... *Ta-Dum!* *Crash!* *Thud!* Thank you, thank you, I'm here all week. Try the fish.
Mac OS X is a usable Unix with integrated hardware. And *cheap* integrated unix & hardware. Of course it's gaining critical mass. Mac OS X is stepping in where Linux somehow couldn't reach within the last few years. I have yet to find anything remotely resembling the Mac Mini in bang for bug, handling, usability and stable MS-independant desktop applicability.
Which actually suprises me since Laptops are falling below the 500 Euro line regularly now. I wonder why nearly nobody hasn't built a cheap mac mini equivalent for the linux market yet.
That, however, could change quickly once prices drop below other barriers (Asus EEE anyone?). Once that happens, even Apple will have a tough time justifying a hermetic system, no matter how sleek it is.
I don't know your daughter and wether she is a potential savant or not. Asking such questions at the age of 7 could indicate that. However, it is more likely that she's just like any other child. Meaning that at about the age she is in, normal healthy children ask questions for the sake of asking questions. They practice the task of asking. You can observe this when they repeat a question or when they inmediately follow up with another question without really pondering your last answer that much. Because they really can't fathom what you're saying actually. It's the general process of Q&A their interested in. That doesn't mean you should lie - just stick to answers that are low on the abstract and rich on images. And - honestly now - screw any conserved media. A wildlife documentary around the age of 10 or so every once and a while is ok - but it's not before well into teenage that children can really gain knowledge from these. Other means of education are far more important before that.
By far the biggest screwup of modern western education - with huge, seemingly unrelated consequences for society - is that it treats kids under teenage and even teenagers far to much like intellectually fully developed grown-ups. Appealing to pure reason and logic in a 7-year old does more damage than good, with consequences that show up far later in life (lack of will and motivation, concentration problems, undeveloped social skills, restlessness, etc. - we geek kids of the 80ties know all this). If here questions are of the usual nature (her *praticing* the process of questioning!) then see it as a game and follow along, even if it turns into seemingly strange circular Q&A sessions. Ask her repeating questions in return yourself - she's praticing the act of questioning, the subject hardly matters ("Where do you live?" and a few other related questions repeatadly asked and answered, is a classic for this sort of thing). You'll actually notice that this questioning goes away after a while and comes back during the teenages if it was dealt with appropriately at younger age.
The first specs of true scientific interest come at the age of about 9. And then a trip to the library or the zoo or a science park and you sticking to personal and live explainations (that needant be all that scientifically detailed) of real phenomenon (weather, "Where do rivers come from?" "How can a car drive?", etc.) are all she needs. And don't worry - if you give her the right kind of education at the right time, she'll be a bright kid all by herself when her intellect and her strength for own reasoning fully awakes. Usually at the age of adolescence - as parents all around the world know very well. In fact, her reasoning will be far more healthy and her own if she doesn't get intellectually challenged to early in life. And it will be supported by a healthy own will, if she has the correct treatment as a child to look back on. There are other things children need to develop before they can develop a healthym intellectual reasoning. It's for that exact reason that the question "What would you like?" often is totally misplaced towards a toddler or small child.
And FYI: Yes, that is an essential conclusion of waldorf education. An educational methodology sometimes considered heretic by other educational trends. I've found it to be spot on. Make you own experiences, but do your and your sibling a favour and don't burry your kid in all kinds of media to early before you know what's really going on.
Tags can intermingle You can have multiple tags on one mail, but you can't put a mail in multiple folders.
If you use folders, I suggest you reduce your amount of them to a maximum of three: Important, Archive & Junk. You can even actuallly reduce that to Inbox and Archive. Or make a list of [Name]SawIt folders. The last one in the alphabet is responsible for archiving it into archive. That way you can make sure everyone read the important stuff. Just move it to the next userfolder in line after you've read it.
Bottom line: Folders only make sense if you reduce their amount to a minimum following one single standard that everyone understands in 3 minutes. Tags are more flexible.
Rails was the cat's pajamas two years ago. The future. The in-thing. Revolutionary. Exciting. Radical. Amazing!
Wrong. Actually it wasn't. Never was, never will be, and, dare I say, never was meant to be. Ruby on Rails is, believe it or not, relatively standard fare when it comes to frameworks. And no, they did *not* invent Active Record. And, as far as I can tell, aside from the usual marketing 'ours is the best' even the Rails people never insisted that RoR is the start and end all of all webkits.
In fact, IIRC, the RoR crew speak fairly respectfull of other frameworks aswell - like the django project. AFAIK the teams even are drinking buddies - or some equivalent of that. No, Rails never was the "Revolutionary. Exciting. Radical. Amazing!". Not with experienced web developers anyway. It was the Java communities darling because they like Ruby and RoR came at a time Ruby was getting some attention and PHP and others were caving in on Java *and* thus the Java crew needed something to join the fray without loosing face. Enter Ruby/RoR. That aside, there are far more innovative and mature projects out there that can serve as the bar for all things serverside than RoR - and most people doing web stuff know that.
There is one thing however that Rails did better than anybody else and with which Rails actually has changed the face of the Open Source Web forever: Marketing. Before Rails OSS projects would present themselves on the crappiest of sites you could find on the web and displayed no intention whatsoever of moving towards end-users and end-developers in order to win them over for a solution. Rails changed that by 180 degrees within months. They practically invented screencasts and the now obnoxious '15 minute weblog' video presentation which basically has replaced "Hello World" in the webkit community. And boosted the revenue of Macromates, the makers of TextMate - nothing much more that a grafically pimped Emacs for OS X - by doing so. It is because of said marketing spree that Rails has gained such a widespread following within the Java community. Which goes to show that these people fall for good marketing - no matter what the truth or reality behind it. And given that Java devs - after a decade of non-web but Enterprise progamming - have a standing as opinion leaders with management, it is only natural that RoR took off. It's since Rails there is no new project in the world that can dare to enter the community with a crappy presentation.... Ok, Glassfish maybe (*cringes at recalling the website*). But that's Java. They got the big gigs anyway - they don't need marketing.
Prado, Zope, Mojavi, Ars Digita and other solutions are ancient by RoR standards, and some are way ahead technology wise. And most of the professionals I talk to are aware of that.... Except for maybe some post-grad, still-wet-behind-the-ears tweens who are just out of college and weren't there for the first bubble.
RoR is a neat framework and scores 30+ hits on a booksearch on Amazon. Which bodes well for RoR. But no one with real world web experience I know of was all that mesmerized by RoR as you claim.
The problem is that 'mystic' has a negative co-notation of 'un-scientific'. Which is wrong. Just because a scientist precisely predicting some phenomenon or a programmer doing seemingly decoupled things to suddenly make an automated process work might appear mystic/magical to non-scientists and non-programmers doesn't mean there is nothing but simple reasoning based on true insight into the matter involved.
The problem with the current wide following of materialisim is that it somehow synthetically imposes a decoupling of the spiritual and the material, in order to then be able to fully dismiss the spiritual as non-sense. In that way todays abundant confession of pure materialisim is just as off the mark as the exact opposite: spiritualisim. Which tries to project the laws and mechanisims of the material world on to the spiritual.
Of course does math have more in common with mysticisim that with natural science - there is no way you can measure or weigh Math. We can sense it in the reflection of our sentinent minds only. That doesn't make it less real. I'd even go further: I say a modern Mathematician or even a natural scientist has *much* more in common with ancient religious prophets and leaders than somebody simply performing rituals with no understanding of their origins or intent.
Modern belief seperates *knowledge* of the spritual and *knowledge* of the material just as it would seperate the material and the spiritual itself - despite any kind of knowledge or consciousness allways being spiritual. And very real indeed. Not seeing that clearly imho is the single largest misconception of todays materialisim. Or as a famous philosopher once pointed out: Todays thinkers use all the might of their spirit for the strangest of tasks: To prove that it itself doesn't exist.
The problem with the current wide following of materialisim is that it somehow synthetically imposes a decoupling of the spiritual and the material, in order to then be able to fully dismiss the spiritual as non-sense. I that way todays abundant confession of pure materialisim is just as wacky as the exact opposite: spiritualisim. Which tries to project the laws and mechanisims of the material world on to the spiritual. Of-f*cking-course does math have more in common with mysticisim that with natural science - there is no way you can measure or weigh Math. We can sense it in the reflection of our sentinent minds only. That doesn't make it less real. It's called the spiritual world, you twit!
I'd even go further: I say a modern Mathematician has *much* more in common with ancient religious prophets and leaders than todays blind followers and proponents of constructed confessions people call 'religion'. Be they some variant of the monotheistic theme or some degenerated kit of current liturgies modelled after pantheistic beliefs and traditions, carried out with no true sense of their initial meaning *and* - even worse - with no intent whatsoever to explore or discover, none-the-less discuss their origins.
In my point of view a bright and carefull thinking & observing philosopher or is far closer to God than some evangelistic priest. The big problem is however that these people often propone pure materialisim and neglegt all holisticisim as pure and utter nonsense. And yet again, with the islam fundamentalists gaining so much attention these days and the most powerfull country in the world run by a evangelistic loonie (both claiming to base their actions on a religious and spiritual inclination and insight) I somehow can't blame them.
A friend of mine takes every chance to make a point of him not buy from RIAA companies anymore. He buys independant and small label only since a few years now. You get the stuff as download from the web, in FLAC quality if you wish, it's all non-drm and the variety is *huge*. Something for every taste. There are countless websites offering DRM free music that way. A good place to start is Magnatune. I recently bought an album from the German indie chillout/ambient crew moodorama. It's great. And those 10 Euros for an entire album go straight to the band.... And just visiting their indie-publisher to test the link tells me I'm probably going to do some music shopping this afternoon.
Bottom line: NOBODY needs the RIAA crew anymore - not even people like me, listening to stuff like chillout(!!). Especially not the people technically savy enough to know what a piece of crap DRM is and what dickheads the people are forcing it on to the end-users. I.E. all of us slashdotters. SO STOP F*CKING BUYING/LISTENING TO RIAA CRAP! Problem solved.
Even after you know it, the UI still sucks. There's not enough feedback, it's too modal, the tools for aligning objects are weak, the keyboard shortcuts manual is over forty pages, and things that aren't implemented just silently don't work. Other than that...
Once again lots of Blender UI bashing from the less knowledgable here. Please listen to this:
3D kits are difficult to handle. Period. That goes for Maya, Softimage, Lightwave, 3DSMax, Houdini and Blender. That even goes for Cinema 4D, allthough they claim to be the easiest to use in the pro legue.
Pro-level 3D with pro-level tools is a non-trivial task, and trying out every feature in each of these packages and learning to use it takes well over a year, a stack of books and porbably even some hands on training by a professional. Somebody who is good at operating a 3D kit usually knows nothing else about computers. These software behemoths are like Emacs with the brakes removed - allmost an operating system by themselves.
That you need a stack of tutorials to get going with a full-range 3D package is the *norm*, not an exception. Blender has some unusual UI concepts (most of which make perfect sense and actually are and allways were innovative) but it is definitely not any more difficult to handle than Lightwave or 3DSMax. Take that from someone who has a full commercial license of Lightwave 8 *and* has been using Blender since 1.8.
Does Fedora have a neat zero-fuss hardware recognition and will it install and run out of the box just as fritionless as Ubuntu or Knoppix?
And what about switching desktops and WMs? Can I switch from Gnome/Metacity to KDE/Kwin to Fluxbox to Enlightenment with zero fuss without the Fedora desktop manager (whichever it chooses) looking like shit or X-Free, X-Org or whatever fucking up my screen-resolution?
Will multi-source audio work out of the box? (wether with esound demon or whatever... gosh, just asking this question brings back those memories... )
What about generic wireless stuff and extra function keys and all that? Especially on those new sub 1000 Euro laptops popping up everywhere? If I get a fairly cheap generic laptop with all of todays bells and wistles, will I be able to scrap Windows Fister and slap Fedore over it and utilize all the extra features or will it take a week of expert-tweaking (which I don't have time and nerve for anymore) to get those things running?
What's with Flash? Java? The server stack, LAMPhp (... I'm a web-developer)? Zero fuss install/uninstall/upgrade/dependancy tracking and resolution? Or will I be hand-hacking my way to a safely running PDT Eclipse roundtrip debugging enviroment with XDebug (as with every other OS on this planet)?
What's with DVDs? Will I have to install 6 players of which only two kinda-sorta-maybe work 75% of the time or will there be *ONE* (1) DVD player that actually plays DVDs without getting into a hissy fit over CSS (I'm willing to install a Fedora DeCSS package by hand from a 'non-offical' source for that or do any other documented non-hacky actions in order to prepare for that)
What's with Video? What's with 3D?
Fedore Fan Crew - here's your chance to get a Debian/Ubuntu guy to give Fedora a try next time around. I'd like to read your thought on the issues above. Thanks.
The simple fact that you regularly post substancial information on hot MySQL topics here personally tells me that using MySQL as the prime choice for the persistance layer can't be bad. I personally hate SQL as an additional language and would like it removed from the generic application stack ASAP, but all things RDBMS being more or less equal in the DB world, I choose the most frictionless DB which is MySQL in my view.
Being someone who runs a small business around OSS myself I fully understand your position and reasoning, and personally think it's a good decision. It might even be a sustainable business model keeping SQL alive to bug people with it as long as possible and sell tools to avoid it for those who can afford them:-) .
Thank you for staying commited and so close to the communtiy.
A satisfied customer
P.S.: One more thing: Could you *please* go down and tell the Workbench crew to finally finish up the.Net prototype and start with the versions that run on MacOS X and Linux? That would be nice. Thank you.:-)
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Lightweight? Don't no nothin' 'bout Linux?
You want Xubuntu. The official Ubuntu variant using the XFCE Desktop. Monodevelop will use quite a bit of GTK stuff though, IIRC.
Anyway, it's faster then Windows, so no downside here. But if Mono isn't enough, then I'd recommend staying with Windows. Unless, however, you want to learn more of Mono to slowly shake lose of MS. Monodevelop looks a very fine and dandy OSS IDE and even makes me curious about this Mono stuff.
Good luck and welcome on board.
I keep reading here 'you get the same as regular PC for the same money with more power'.
WTF?
No, you don't. This thing is the size of a friggin' external HDD! It probably consumes less than a third of the power of a regular desktop and - optical media, hardcore gaming and CAD aside - can do everything a bulky box can do. And a gaming rigg or CAD machine costs a 4-digit sum anyway and serves a totally different market.
About half a year ago I replaced my large linux tower with the first ATX casing ever (an Inwin from 1996 - still the best tinker-case ever) - which weighs something like a metric ton, has the size of a minivan and sounds like a 747 taking off *and* requires me to crawl under the table when hooking up USB or Ethernet - with the smallest Mac Mini I could get. I pimped it out with 3 GB and shudder with horror whenever I boot up that cludgy thing to migrate data or something. The 1,8 Ghz Mac Mini sits *under* my 20" samsung cinema flatscreen at an arms-length away from my ears and I only hear it when I play Sauerbraten for more than 5 minutes.
I can't believe that anybody other than hardcore gamers, video compositors or 3D Fx people even consider getting a midi tower these days, let alone a bigtower.
I believe this new Asus stunt will finally tap yet another new market of zero-fuss one-stop workstation solutions and have the midi and maxi towers finally go the way of the dodo for most markets. Personally, I sure do hope so. It's about time too.
I like the concept of Stackware such as HyperCard. I personally have programmed and maintain an Application built in RunRev that has a custom designed pixel-true layout of the UI. Aside from the strange language associated with RunRev ('Transscript') which is something like "Lingo done right" (Yeah, I know how bizar that sounds) it is a neat concept and lets you roll procedural, extremely visual oriented apps with zero fuss. Building my App in something like Java would have been a Nightmare.
However, working with Stackware only takes you so far and only if you plan your application well. Stackware is the anti-thesis of object-orientation (visual objects aside) and the virutal machines used for existing solutions are performance hogs as soon as it goes beyond trivial applications.
As soon as serious componentisation and scalability is required, Stackware solutions hit a brick wall - especially if they use a programming language that tries to ape the english language. Which in the end is impossible to do.
Stackware still enjoys it's ecological niche in the programming world - and for good reasons too. The community hasn't changed or evolved that much since HyperCard, but it still is alive and kicking. Which goes to show that it still has it's place. However, as soon as an application leaves the desktop and becomes distributed, or based on working, documented, standardised technology, the air gets very thin for this sort of solution. No matter how step the learning curve and how difficult the preperation for an application in a classic programming technology may seem at first sight. It allways has been that way and allways will be.
Bottom line: Stackware is neat and fine and dandy, and there's no thing like it when it comes to definite frozen-speced custom specialised GUI Apps for vertical markets. Anything beyond that is much better served with regular PLs or even the most obscure OSS scritping enviroment, be it Java/Swing or Perl/TK or whatever.
Oh, look, nice picture. ..." *click* (closes the tab)
"The HTC X7510 Advantage is a hard device to label. Technically it is a smartphone, because it runs the Windows Mobile 6.1 Profes
By far the largest problem (95%+) with security isn't technology but the procedures involved with true security. Use any system that is safe and easy to handle. A good PGP setup (costs money), a good GPG setup (costs time) or - this is what I would do - file encrypter programms like KGPG. Those are the most hassle free to use - contrary to those bizar multi-standard email encryption setups that can easyly fail due to incompatabilities. There even are file compressors and archive programms out there that support encryption (check for the strength of that beforehand though).
Once you've done that and have esablished a secure pipeline to your adjacent on the other end see to it that his procedures are as secrue as yours. It might even be the best just taking an ecrypted stick or HDD over to him in person and help him migrate the data. That way you can ensure there is no leak on that end. If you're really serious about security, that's the way to do it.
People here are giving well meant advice like 'Cycle to work', 'Change diet', etc.
However, I've observed that most of my geek friends - including my once slender geek buddy now turned fatso - have gained the habit of eating far beyond their appetite. And my fat buddy does a lot of exercise.
Newsflash: Exercise doesn't help you lose weight very effectively. There is a far more effective solution: Eat less.
Whenever I notice my jeans pinching and my belly gaining (my thighs have gained to much allready - I ought to get them a tad thinner aswell) and my belt going up a notch I simply eat less. It's become something of a bi-monthly rythym of eating normal or what my spoose has trained me to consider normal (read: eating to much!) and barking at her or simply refusing to eat when she heaps to much on to my plate despite me telling her that I'll help myself.
Eating over your appetite has become a social thing, and if you refuse to do it you get queer looks from all sides. Especially if you're still what other *call* slender. Well, guess why I *am* slender, fat-ass!? It's not because I'm doing Aikido twice a week. I simply restrain myself from stuffing my face. Eating slowly helps btw. Eating to fast is one of my prime cause for overweight tendency.
Bottom line: If you can't come up with anthing better, switch to scheduled Broughth and Ramen for 10 weeks and you'll be suprised how well your body starts eating away at those extra pounds stored all over the place. And train yourself to eat less, even if it takes a few ups and downs along the JoJo String. You'll eventually reach your ideal weight if you apply reason to your image in the mirror.
My 2 cents.
There are quite a few of the usual ideas listed here (Spreadsheet, Buzhug, get a better Editor, etc.). However I second those that suggestes Kexi, as it also has a flatfile DB built in (I just checked). You can build your own forms with it and have your own, custom single table Database App up and running in minutes.
Kexi is the way to go, and you'll even know your way around a neat DB frontend when you need to connect to some SQL persistance later some time.
You just answered your own question.
If you truly can "out-develop any graduate you've met", prove it. Go get the little slip of paper that gives them the career advantage over you.
You may even learn something at Uni that you didn't realize you should need to know.
You have a point there. That's why I started Uni last Semester. However, 27 hrs. of required presence per week and 500 Euros of tuition per semester take it's toll. It's impossible for me to get a degree in a time and income neutral fashion, which was the reason why I quit. But even if I where on the way to get one (which I may be again if I don't get any project or contract any time soon) I'm starting to doubt that it would be much of a benefit if I had a degree.
If I ever get one, it will be for my own sake. Industry be damned. If the industry has no need for my skills, I might aswell earn my minimum wage doing little jobs for small web firms and do open source work in the rest of my time.
I've been hearing this litany in Germany for quite some time now. Not enough expert workers, no engineers, no IT people, Jada-Jada-Jada. Every 5 years or so the industry goes through the same bullshiting ritual.
How else is it then that I'm struggling to survive as a freelance Software Developer with 8 years of experience under my belt? Why is it that I'm not even considered because I don't have a grade - allthough I can easyly out-develop any graduate I've met?
This whining is nothing but a salary lowering measure. The best that will happen for true experts is that salaries and benefits will reach the old levels.
The Netbook totally rocks. IIRC it has 40 hrs of uptime on a single battery load, which blows every protable PC (even the Transmeta Lifebooks pimped with Powerbattery and OD Battery) out of the water. But get your head straight about pocessing power and running some Linux derviate or something on it. That won't fly.
Because, allthough it is a fully fletched out business system with a neat Java 1.1 enviroment on top of some custom Epoc OS (way ahead of it's time), you can absolutely forget any more that rudymentary surfing on that thing. I strongly suggest you get the brand new and super cheap One A110 and hack youself some external power option if you want to reach the Netbooks uptime.
And, yes, uptime is what I'd be looking for in any subnote who's prime purpose is to be used for generic tasks while on the road. In that respect a Netbook really is the bar. But the One A110 and the Asus EEE are the new generation (nearly 10 years newer!) and they are actually those up to the Netbook. I'd say they've re-introduced the Handheld era. Might aswell pay that respect and get one.
I consider Joomla a potential Web-CMS-market killer application for various reasons:
:-) .
... maybe I should offer Hagen some help on that for the next release ... Gonna check if he's on Skype right now. :-)
- Installation is a breeze. Far superiour to any other CMS of simular featureset.
- It looks good and is usable. To many webkits look like crap once they are set up for end user mode. Top-of-the-line web designers have pimped Joomlas UI so much that it is a feast to work with. And other projects are scrambling to catch up. Which is a good thing aswell. I find it nearly unbelievable how they managed to improve the 1.5 UI over the 1.0 UI, even though the 1.0 UI allready is way beyond anything else out there.
- It's built with the ever present LAMP stack in mind, albeit beind independant of it.
- It's featureset is well thought out and there are countless extensions for it.
However there are things that the Joomla core team needs to address before they can claim leadership in the field:
- Flexible Access Controll is missing. There is a hardwired access controll with around about 5-8 roles, but a full blown CMS needs to have as many as the admin needs. Especially if non-trivial extensions are involved. This is a major issue and probably will be addressed in some future release. I hope they do it right and don't screw it up - which easyly can happen with badly implemented access control.
- People warned me not to look at the data/object model of Joomla 1.0 - so I didn't. I just had looked at that of Typo3 4.0 and barely survived the resulting shock. I presume that the Joomla 1.5 object model still has a few issues, probalby also due to 1.5 having a legacy mode for backwards extension compatability. A (still) less than optimal archtecture could be a showstopper for people who want to build larger applications on top of Joomla 1.5 and the new Joomla 1.5 Framework.
- They reinvented the wheel like so many others and rolled their own web application framework. I asked the lead developer why they did that instead of using CakePHP or Symfony or something like that and he reasured that they had solid reasons (legacy mode being one) but I'm still wondering if it hadn't been better not to do that. If however the Joomla Framework improves it's API and Documentation enough to catch up with the other large PHP Frameworks this could turn out to be a very good thing. Since the Joomla CMS lowers the barrier of entry into the Framework considerably - especially for non-developers.
Oh, and btw: Hagen Grafs Book on 1.5 was pushed out of the door even during Beta phase. The German edition even has 'Beta' in the title. I remember thumbing prints of it which where still warm from the press on the last years German Joomladay and Alex Kempkens (a core dev) walking up from behind and saying "That screenshot there isn't up to date anymore - I changed that interface two days ago." Duh. Talking about writing about a moving target
Despite the unusual publishing strategy, Hagen Grafs books - the German ones anyway - are good to get you started. I still have a copy of his old Beginners Guide to Mambo.
The German publisher actually published an updated version of the Joomla 1.5 book a few weeks ago allready.
And as for the translation and German style wording
That's easy: Pay 3-5 devs to get renderman on to Blender. RenderMan im*and* export. I'd actually add extra wondows-specific compliler directives to the Blender source just for that.
All File format problems solved for all platforms and the last showstopper for using Blender in Hollywood pipelines removed.
But we all know that ain't going to happen, so basically it's a waste of time.
My dream office from the top of my head:
/multi-kb support if it turns out usefull.
- Custom furniture / top-of-the-line design furniture. Price be damned. Premium payed woodworkers to implement the required shelves and built-to-fit elements.Ornganic material and material treatment only. And if it tripples work-hours - no problem.
- Interiour pre-designed for optimal lighting and style in 3D, setups tested with mockup scenarios. Have 2 or 3 Feng-Shui experts do a review.
- Style mixed if the need be. I'm sitting at my desk 10+ hrs per day, I don't give a shit if my chair doesn't match my desk 110% as long as both are the best there is.
- Organic wall decorations, colors and plastering. Painters to design own sections with whatever I consider cool. Magna-Carta or any other cool looking Manga characters, Mondrian/Frank Stella rippoffs, shelves integrated with neat wall-sculptures. Add in a little Hundertwasser here and there.
- Parquet. The best money can buy. Even in the server, storage and maintenance rooms.
- Planned space for tools, equipment and cabeling.
- Eco-friendly Air Conditioning and filtering using organic components, materials and agents. If it takes up extra space: Buy it.
- Custom fixed blackboards for project work with optimized drain for muck-free cleaning.
- Best Hardware available, stored in own climated room if it makes noise or is to big. And anything bigger that a Mac Mini is. I hate these ugly large boxes taking away space. External drives at all desks for all optical / movable media needs.
- Best Screens, KBs & Mice. The offices shown on the pictures look neat. The tools shown look pretty standard fare. In fact they show pretty crappy Dell junk on some. My hardware right here is better. And that's only a small Mac Mini with some generic widescreen attached.
- Sreensize: 30" whereever somebody doesn't explicitly say he doesn't want it. Dual or triple 30" for those who can't get enough.
- No budget cieling for initial production pipeline setup. Find out some bizarely priced CASEtool is neat to work with and can ease production on a regular basis? Buy it, no matter the price! Buy the training for it aswell. Set up custom hardware config if needed, design workspace accordingly. Like for people who use grafic tablets all the time.
- Largest Screens/Touchscreens money can buy for Group-OOAD. Pay a team of X-Org developers to implement multi-focus / multi-mouse
- Living-kitchen. The best of the best. Own industry-grade italian coffee machine.
- Full scale bathrooms with sauna and changing quarters. I'm a software developer, dammit. I get the urge to take a good shower or bath *in* a good shower or bathroom at the most bizare times of the day (3 o'clock in the morning isn't that rare). If I'm through a 30 hrs coding spree with only 3 hrs of sleep I want to change my clothes, like, *right now*, no matter what time of day it is.
- Well payed and specifically trained service personell for cleaning and maintenance. This often is overlooked as one, if not *the* essential part of a good workplace. If I need to unwind and like doing so by cleaning my KB for 20 minutes, I'll do so. But most of the time I'd like well-payed office assistance to do so for me. Without wiping my screen with a mucky handtowel.
- Cook for once or twice per month office dinner.
- Inhouse, trained cleaning service.
- Cycle park garage. Custom built. The one on the Six-Apart pictures is a joke.
- Best server on the planet. Blade station, Sun/IBM Mainframe with complete virtualisation. Whatever, you name it.
- Custom built library and conference room.
- Selected plants and plant arrangements. Part- or full-time Ikke-Bana florist to maintain them.
- Optional standing desks whereever applicable. I personally want one in my office.
- Aquarium if applicable and the Feng-Shui/Interiour guys suggest one. Which they often do.
- Custom setup printer room.
And, as an extra:
- Building exterior and fixed interiour (layout, wintergardens, custom room-fountain(s)) (co-)designed by this guy.
>> and this has exactly what to do with MS? the coding habits of programmers has NOTHING to do with MS.
... *Ta-Dum!* *Crash!* *Thud!* Thank you, thank you, I'm here all week. Try the fish.
>It have plenty to do with MS. MS is supporting this behavior.
Gosh, am I happy that all the lib-paths and libCs are so consistent on Linux.
Mac OS X is a usable Unix with integrated hardware. And *cheap* integrated unix & hardware. Of course it's gaining critical mass. Mac OS X is stepping in where Linux somehow couldn't reach within the last few years. I have yet to find anything remotely resembling the Mac Mini in bang for bug, handling, usability and stable MS-independant desktop applicability.
Which actually suprises me since Laptops are falling below the 500 Euro line regularly now. I wonder why nearly nobody hasn't built a cheap mac mini equivalent for the linux market yet.
That, however, could change quickly once prices drop below other barriers (Asus EEE anyone?). Once that happens, even Apple will have a tough time justifying a hermetic system, no matter how sleek it is.
I don't know your daughter and wether she is a potential savant or not. Asking such questions at the age of 7 could indicate that. However, it is more likely that she's just like any other child. Meaning that at about the age she is in, normal healthy children ask questions for the sake of asking questions. They practice the task of asking. You can observe this when they repeat a question or when they inmediately follow up with another question without really pondering your last answer that much. Because they really can't fathom what you're saying actually. It's the general process of Q&A their interested in. That doesn't mean you should lie - just stick to answers that are low on the abstract and rich on images. And - honestly now - screw any conserved media. A wildlife documentary around the age of 10 or so every once and a while is ok - but it's not before well into teenage that children can really gain knowledge from these. Other means of education are far more important before that.
By far the biggest screwup of modern western education - with huge, seemingly unrelated consequences for society - is that it treats kids under teenage and even teenagers far to much like intellectually fully developed grown-ups. Appealing to pure reason and logic in a 7-year old does more damage than good, with consequences that show up far later in life (lack of will and motivation, concentration problems, undeveloped social skills, restlessness, etc. - we geek kids of the 80ties know all this). If here questions are of the usual nature (her *praticing* the process of questioning!) then see it as a game and follow along, even if it turns into seemingly strange circular Q&A sessions. Ask her repeating questions in return yourself - she's praticing the act of questioning, the subject hardly matters ("Where do you live?" and a few other related questions repeatadly asked and answered, is a classic for this sort of thing). You'll actually notice that this questioning goes away after a while and comes back during the teenages if it was dealt with appropriately at younger age.
The first specs of true scientific interest come at the age of about 9. And then a trip to the library or the zoo or a science park and you sticking to personal and live explainations (that needant be all that scientifically detailed) of real phenomenon (weather, "Where do rivers come from?" "How can a car drive?", etc.) are all she needs. And don't worry - if you give her the right kind of education at the right time, she'll be a bright kid all by herself when her intellect and her strength for own reasoning fully awakes. Usually at the age of adolescence - as parents all around the world know very well. In fact, her reasoning will be far more healthy and her own if she doesn't get intellectually challenged to early in life. And it will be supported by a healthy own will, if she has the correct treatment as a child to look back on. There are other things children need to develop before they can develop a healthym intellectual reasoning. It's for that exact reason that the question "What would you like?" often is totally misplaced towards a toddler or small child.
And FYI: Yes, that is an essential conclusion of waldorf education. An educational methodology sometimes considered heretic by other educational trends. I've found it to be spot on. Make you own experiences, but do your and your sibling a favour and don't burry your kid in all kinds of media to early before you know what's really going on.
My 2 cents as a father of a 10 year old daughter.
Tags can intermingle You can have multiple tags on one mail, but you can't put a mail in multiple folders.
If you use folders, I suggest you reduce your amount of them to a maximum of three: Important, Archive & Junk. You can even actuallly reduce that to Inbox and Archive. Or make a list of [Name]SawIt folders. The last one in the alphabet is responsible for archiving it into archive. That way you can make sure everyone read the important stuff. Just move it to the next userfolder in line after you've read it.
Bottom line: Folders only make sense if you reduce their amount to a minimum following one single standard that everyone understands in 3 minutes. Tags are more flexible.
Rails was the cat's pajamas two years ago. The future. The in-thing. Revolutionary. Exciting. Radical. Amazing!
... Ok, Glassfish maybe (*cringes at recalling the website*). But that's Java. They got the big gigs anyway - they don't need marketing.
... Except for maybe some post-grad, still-wet-behind-the-ears tweens who are just out of college and weren't there for the first bubble.
Wrong.
Actually it wasn't. Never was, never will be, and, dare I say, never was meant to be. Ruby on Rails is, believe it or not, relatively standard fare when it comes to frameworks. And no, they did *not* invent Active Record. And, as far as I can tell, aside from the usual marketing 'ours is the best' even the Rails people never insisted that RoR is the start and end all of all webkits.
In fact, IIRC, the RoR crew speak fairly respectfull of other frameworks aswell - like the django project. AFAIK the teams even are drinking buddies - or some equivalent of that. No, Rails never was the "Revolutionary. Exciting. Radical. Amazing!". Not with experienced web developers anyway. It was the Java communities darling because they like Ruby and RoR came at a time Ruby was getting some attention and PHP and others were caving in on Java *and* thus the Java crew needed something to join the fray without loosing face. Enter Ruby/RoR. That aside, there are far more innovative and mature projects out there that can serve as the bar for all things serverside than RoR - and most people doing web stuff know that.
There is one thing however that Rails did better than anybody else and with which Rails actually has changed the face of the Open Source Web forever: Marketing. Before Rails OSS projects would present themselves on the crappiest of sites you could find on the web and displayed no intention whatsoever of moving towards end-users and end-developers in order to win them over for a solution. Rails changed that by 180 degrees within months. They practically invented screencasts and the now obnoxious '15 minute weblog' video presentation which basically has replaced "Hello World" in the webkit community. And boosted the revenue of Macromates, the makers of TextMate - nothing much more that a grafically pimped Emacs for OS X - by doing so. It is because of said marketing spree that Rails has gained such a widespread following within the Java community. Which goes to show that these people fall for good marketing - no matter what the truth or reality behind it. And given that Java devs - after a decade of non-web but Enterprise progamming - have a standing as opinion leaders with management, it is only natural that RoR took off. It's since Rails there is no new project in the world that can dare to enter the community with a crappy presentation.
Prado, Zope, Mojavi, Ars Digita and other solutions are ancient by RoR standards, and some are way ahead technology wise. And most of the professionals I talk to are aware of that.
RoR is a neat framework and scores 30+ hits on a booksearch on Amazon. Which bodes well for RoR. But no one with real world web experience I know of was all that mesmerized by RoR as you claim.
The problem is that 'mystic' has a negative co-notation of 'un-scientific'. Which is wrong. Just because a scientist precisely predicting some phenomenon or a programmer doing seemingly decoupled things to suddenly make an automated process work might appear mystic/magical to non-scientists and non-programmers doesn't mean there is nothing but simple reasoning based on true insight into the matter involved.
The problem with the current wide following of materialisim is that it somehow synthetically imposes a decoupling of the spiritual and the material, in order to then be able to fully dismiss the spiritual as non-sense. In that way todays abundant confession of pure materialisim is just as off the mark as the exact opposite: spiritualisim. Which tries to project the laws and mechanisims of the material world on to the spiritual.
Of course does math have more in common with mysticisim that with natural science - there is no way you can measure or weigh Math. We can sense it in the reflection of our sentinent minds only. That doesn't make it less real. I'd even go further: I say a modern Mathematician or even a natural scientist has *much* more in common with ancient religious prophets and leaders than somebody simply performing rituals with no understanding of their origins or intent.
Modern belief seperates *knowledge* of the spritual and *knowledge* of the material just as it would seperate the material and the spiritual itself - despite any kind of knowledge or consciousness allways being spiritual. And very real indeed. Not seeing that clearly imho is the single largest misconception of todays materialisim. Or as a famous philosopher once pointed out: Todays thinkers use all the might of their spirit for the strangest of tasks: To prove that it itself doesn't exist.
The problem with the current wide following of materialisim is that it somehow synthetically imposes a decoupling of the spiritual and the material, in order to then be able to fully dismiss the spiritual as non-sense. I that way todays abundant confession of pure materialisim is just as wacky as the exact opposite: spiritualisim. Which tries to project the laws and mechanisims of the material world on to the spiritual.
Of-f*cking-course does math have more in common with mysticisim that with natural science - there is no way you can measure or weigh Math. We can sense it in the reflection of our sentinent minds only. That doesn't make it less real. It's called the spiritual world, you twit!
I'd even go further: I say a modern Mathematician has *much* more in common with ancient religious prophets and leaders than todays blind followers and proponents of constructed confessions people call 'religion'. Be they some variant of the monotheistic theme or some degenerated kit of current liturgies modelled after pantheistic beliefs and traditions, carried out with no true sense of their initial meaning *and* - even worse - with no intent whatsoever to explore or discover, none-the-less discuss their origins.
In my point of view a bright and carefull thinking & observing philosopher or is far closer to God than some evangelistic priest. The big problem is however that these people often propone pure materialisim and neglegt all holisticisim as pure and utter nonsense. And yet again, with the islam fundamentalists gaining so much attention these days and the most powerfull country in the world run by a evangelistic loonie (both claiming to base their actions on a religious and spiritual inclination and insight) I somehow can't blame them.
Nobody needs the RIAA and it's members anymore.
... And just visiting their indie-publisher to test the link tells me I'm probably going to do some music shopping this afternoon.
A friend of mine takes every chance to make a point of him not buy from RIAA companies anymore. He buys independant and small label only since a few years now. You get the stuff as download from the web, in FLAC quality if you wish, it's all non-drm and the variety is *huge*. Something for every taste. There are countless websites offering DRM free music that way. A good place to start is Magnatune. I recently bought an album from the German indie chillout/ambient crew moodorama. It's great. And those 10 Euros for an entire album go straight to the band.
Bottom line:
NOBODY needs the RIAA crew anymore - not even people like me, listening to stuff like chillout(!!). Especially not the people technically savy enough to know what a piece of crap DRM is and what dickheads the people are forcing it on to the end-users. I.E. all of us slashdotters. SO STOP F*CKING BUYING/LISTENING TO RIAA CRAP! Problem solved.
Even after you know it, the UI still sucks. There's not enough feedback, it's too modal, the tools for aligning objects are weak, the keyboard shortcuts manual is over forty pages, and things that aren't implemented just silently don't work. Other than that...
I see you haven't used 3DSMax yet.
Once again lots of Blender UI bashing from the less knowledgable here. Please listen to this:
3D kits are difficult to handle. Period. That goes for Maya, Softimage, Lightwave, 3DSMax, Houdini and Blender. That even goes for Cinema 4D, allthough they claim to be the easiest to use in the pro legue.
Pro-level 3D with pro-level tools is a non-trivial task, and trying out every feature in each of these packages and learning to use it takes well over a year, a stack of books and porbably even some hands on training by a professional. Somebody who is good at operating a 3D kit usually knows nothing else about computers. These software behemoths are like Emacs with the brakes removed - allmost an operating system by themselves.
That you need a stack of tutorials to get going with a full-range 3D package is the *norm*, not an exception. Blender has some unusual UI concepts (most of which make perfect sense and actually are and allways were innovative) but it is definitely not any more difficult to handle than Lightwave or 3DSMax. Take that from someone who has a full commercial license of Lightwave 8 *and* has been using Blender since 1.8.
I'm serious: What's the big deal?
... gosh, just asking this question brings back those memories ... )
... I'm a web-developer)? Zero fuss install/uninstall/upgrade/dependancy tracking and resolution? Or will I be hand-hacking my way to a safely running PDT Eclipse roundtrip debugging enviroment with XDebug (as with every other OS on this planet)?
What does Fedora offer?
Does Fedora have a neat zero-fuss hardware recognition and will it install and run out of the box just as fritionless as Ubuntu or Knoppix?
And what about switching desktops and WMs? Can I switch from Gnome/Metacity to KDE/Kwin to Fluxbox to Enlightenment with zero fuss without the Fedora desktop manager (whichever it chooses) looking like shit or X-Free, X-Org or whatever fucking up my screen-resolution?
Will multi-source audio work out of the box? (wether with esound demon or whatever
What about generic wireless stuff and extra function keys and all that? Especially on those new sub 1000 Euro laptops popping up everywhere? If I get a fairly cheap generic laptop with all of todays bells and wistles, will I be able to scrap Windows Fister and slap Fedore over it and utilize all the extra features or will it take a week of expert-tweaking (which I don't have time and nerve for anymore) to get those things running?
What's with Flash? Java? The server stack, LAMPhp (
What's with DVDs? Will I have to install 6 players of which only two kinda-sorta-maybe work 75% of the time or will there be *ONE* (1) DVD player that actually plays DVDs without getting into a hissy fit over CSS (I'm willing to install a Fedora DeCSS package by hand from a 'non-offical' source for that or do any other documented non-hacky actions in order to prepare for that)
What's with Video? What's with 3D?
Fedore Fan Crew - here's your chance to get a Debian/Ubuntu guy to give Fedora a try next time around. I'd like to read your thought on the issues above. Thanks.
The simple fact that you regularly post substancial information on hot MySQL topics here personally tells me that using MySQL as the prime choice for the persistance layer can't be bad.
:-) .
.Net prototype and start with the versions that run on MacOS X and Linux? That would be nice. Thank you. :-)
I personally hate SQL as an additional language and would like it removed from the generic application stack ASAP, but all things RDBMS being more or less equal in the DB world, I choose the most frictionless DB which is MySQL in my view.
Being someone who runs a small business around OSS myself I fully understand your position and reasoning, and personally think it's a good decision. It might even be a sustainable business model keeping SQL alive to bug people with it as long as possible and sell tools to avoid it for those who can afford them
Thank you for staying commited and so close to the communtiy.
A satisfied customer
P.S.: One more thing: Could you *please* go down and tell the Workbench crew to finally finish up the