The Website, RMSes Passport Portrait, Emacs itself,... just looking at it makes it appear beyond bizar. As if I had taken some extremely mind altering substance. I couldn't describe the experience to someone who hasn't had it himself. Emacs may once have been an extremely powerfull tool and the best possible thing for a remote tty command line mainframe uplink some 25 years ago. I nearly started learning it back in 1996. But all this nowadays and with a stance that is way far out even by slashdot standards... heavens crickey. How about calling it quits? Donald Knuth stopped TeX when it was finished. And it actually still is a usable tool today. Then again, Donald Knuth is a normal, respected developer, not some strange fringe-dimension entity:-) .
I'm using a 7130 Blackberry because I wanted to merge PDA and Phone (works well btw.), wanted to me MS free and wanted a good sync to my Mac. SureType works fair enough. And the "Missing Sync" for Blackberry costs 39$ and works perfect - better than the crappy Palm conduit I had to use before. I costed 5$ and a 2 year contract - which I renewed anyway. I don't watch movies and my maxfield mp3 player is fine too.
Then again, the Blackberry in some places has such a crappy interface and usability I seriously question the designers sanity. This is why the iPhone will be able to compete. The people building the Blackberries and other devices are often just to f*cking dumb to get it right. With Apple you have the Boss himself using the device and cross-checking if the engineers have lost it on the way or still are on track. Which is exactly how I would do it too.
I whish apple the very best for this launch. They deserve it.
For once we don't have some wannabe mocking others
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Linus on GIT and SCM
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· Score: 1
Linus has enough credentials and competence to give his opinion some serious weight. And even if he does run roughshod on SVN and CVS quite a bit, he is right in a lot of points.
I've started using SCM on a regulary basis with Subversion for about half a year now and more often than once have I thought: 'This can't be the way SCM is done right'. Only one thing I know of that SVN does better than CVS is pure entire-project version numbers. CVS seemed like a kiddiebike with training weels that wanted to be as complicated as Kornshell. SVN did away with that but still has downsides that we needn't put up with for any reason. SCM metadata stored in each project directory is one of those little things that bug the hell out of me for instance. And when Linus says that his brain isn't damaged into thinking CVS is an OK way of doing things because he only used it when forced to - I believe him. I wasn't aware that his project Git had come so far so fast until two weeks ago, but when he says that any SCM that he can do better in two weeks of coding on his own isn't worthwhile - and SVN is one of those - that really has me thinking. I'm not so much into software developement with large groups that I could exactly tell how bad SVN is, but I'm sure Linus can.
To use an analogy: CVS was a Ford Model T, SVN is an improved Ford Model T, but I think we should start looking for a current BMW or something. It might be a good idea to do that *before* we move a larger audience to using SCM.
What is it that you are proposing as an alternative? I hear alot of complaining, but you dont see to be offering anything else that might work better.
I believe the reason that RDBMS's are the way they are (at the core, not the peripheral feature sets) is that the problem they are trying to solve is a fundamentally 'hard' one (hard in the CS sense).
I totally agree. (said something simular a while ago) The link to the real world and it's limitations has to be the way it is in most places. I even don't see a problem in having a persistance layer with the bazillion means of configuration such as MySQL. It offers the needed flexibility and learning about the details here isn't pointless.
However I do expect an alternative to SQL and it's countless dialects. As I think I brought across quite clearly in the above post. The alternative being, of course, no second language at all. Or should I say 'no extra language per DB in use'. All open source languages I know of offer wonderfull devices for filtering and moving data from A to B in every which way one could imagine. Each and every SQL variant is at least 5 steps back from all of these.
Let's look at PHP for an example: #Possible PHP way (current): array_search($user.names, "Miller");
#Possible PHP way (fictional persistance layer integration): $user.names['miller'];
#SQL way for PHP: "SELECT * FROM user WHERE name=".$myName.";";
Now it's given that PHP isn't the most elegant of OSS PLs and that it's well within it's achestors tradition (Perl) in being a tad quirky. But it hardly get's any more complicated and weedy in PHP, no matter how complex your requests are. But try linking 3 entities in SQL and comprehending the error messages while trying to do that in any Database and you know what I'm talking about. Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP, whatever only would need a handfull of additions to deal with any solvable problem that occurs when connecting to the persistance layer. And no, what goes through as 'Database Abstraction Layers' nowadays is not what I'm talking about. Just ponder the concept of DBALs for a minute and it will strike you how backwards it is. The best we can come up with is automatic SQL generation and for my taste that is just to much overhead for a technology that doesn't deserve to (still) be there in the first place. Whenever I get back to that I feel like I'm back in 86 at my Sharp computer and hacking it with Basic Peek'n'Poke and Opcode. At least that made sense in making my code faster and more flexible.
What I'm basically saying is this: The devices and concepts SQL offers for handling data are so out of line of everything else we deal with it isn't funny anymore. I have no problem with RDBMses and I have great respect for people taking on the task of dealing with our HDDs and taking the load of Filesystem developers for another few years. But why this all has to happen seperate of all the other stuff that has moved on so fast in the last 10 years I really don't understand.
Let me emphasise yet a little more by giving a proof positive for things that can't be stopped from sucking: XML. XML is relatively new. But XML sucks. But XML sucks because it serialises n-Dimensional structures. It squishes them into 1-dimensional streams of data. That's a classic hard problem in CS - and it will allways suck. Until the end of the universe it will. Considering that, XML is a perfect solution (RelaxNG fans, please don't get nittpicky) as it is our way on agreeing how this problem can be expected to suck. Thus I can focus on getting my data in line when dealing with XML, but needn't be to annoyed about the standard.
SQL on the other hand sucks where it musn't. It's old and the people back then didn't know better. In fact, they probably did, but they wrote SQL for to be typed by humans live into a terminal connection. It must have been magic back then for that kind of task. But explain to a CS guy from '78 what we are doing today with SQL (using it for fully automated data linkage and juggling) and he'll shake his head in disbelief.
My 2 cents. Educated opinions welcome, please join in.
Some of us make a living doing this and the tools we use on the server have one job.
No, really? I do to too actually.
That job is to send content to the client as fast as possible.
Wrong. That job is to get the job done, fast, good and cheap, and if that doesn't work (which it never does) it's to evaluate the best tradeoffs without bugging the client to much. And by client I mean the one with the two legs and the checkbook that doesn't give a damn wether you're using Ruby or PHP or Django or Symfony or Zope or Rails or whatnot but wants to see his webapp ASAP.
There are numerous tradeoffs in the architecture and configuration of web servers and scripting languages and when you're working with this stuff everyday the sub-optimal becomes irritating.
And you know what the suboptimal and the optimal is? No? Well, then you are aware of more than most posters I sorta quoted above.
If it's all a bit over your head, I suggest you instead participate in discussions at a level you're more comfortable with.
WTF? I've been programming since '86 and have been doing webstuff for a living since 2000. I don't see nothing over my head here. Just a tad incoherent for a community made up of what seems like 90% part-time webdevs with each their own favorite toolset. A community of which 80% act as if they where members of the Linux Kernel Team and come across a bit silly at times. Don't get me wrong, there are interesting posts here. But for each of those it looks as if three 'expert' posts sound like what I was moking. And that what I was poking at with the parent post.
Blah, Blah, PHP sux, Ruby rules, Blah, Blah, Ruby sux, Perl rules and is faster and more mature anyway, Jada , jada, Apache sux, lighthttpd 0Nwz0rZ, Blah, Blah, lighthttpd is only for special cases it sux in RL compared to Apache, Blah, Blah, APache is ultra l4m3 and OMFG! unsafe! Yeah!, Blah, Blah, the new MS IIS kicks all others in the butt Blah, Blah. crap article, Blah, Blah, good article but forgot to mention C is fastest for webapps, blah blah...
Did you guys all get stoned for Pentecost or what?
The dialogs between my 9 year old daughter and friends over which Playmobile toy is better are more coherent than this.
It doesn't surprise me that both articles don't really contain much usefull information. It's like two people debating wether FreeDOS or MS DOS is better. No actual real-life or even academic issue.
[rant] The more and more I do professional projects that go beyond a 'single freelancer' scope the more and more RDBMSes bug the piss out of me. Databases suck. What we call databases today is nohing much more of a historically grown apocalyptic chaos. With one of the oldest and crappiest programming languages ever as a cornerstone of its technology. A weedy mumbojumbo of wanna-be virtual machines, wanna-be server daemons, makeshift security layers, obstrusive user management and pseudo operating systems and a bazillion proprietary variants of said programming language that make a Perl debugging session look like a walk in the park in comparsion. With features bolted on left right and center. This basically is the case with any current DB in widespread use, be it MySQL, Oracle or anything inbetween. And if you look at the core of it Database technology and how long it has been that way there isn't much hope that DB's will go anywhere anytime soon. Mostly because people are to thick to f*cking drop the notion that SQL has some sort of value in itself.
It litterally scares me to see many experienced developers who are so brainwashed by unquestioned traditions that they truely believe they need something different than the programming language they're using for their application to handle the persistance layer. A Database PL and 30+ dialects of it from back in the days when we flew to the moon using a slide-ruler as primary means of calculation. A PL that would have any CompSci student score a clean 'F' in compiler and parser building would he deliver something like it as project today. A PL so broken the only other I know that compares to it is Lingo. We waste tons of money and manpower educating DBAs with technology and concepts that are a pain in the ass and not even very tranferable. And the technology doesn't even do it's job very well! Relational Trails, true hassle free de-normalisation, true hassle-free scalabilty - no go. Nowhere. And no, having to need three 200$/hour Oracle DBAs who spent years stuffing their brains with proprietary sh*t to move from one server to 10 is _not_ what I call 'scales well' nowadays. So Postgres (and maybe some others) have entity inheritance. Halleluja. Big fat hairy deal. And the new DB2 can do nested sets with XML (serialized data). I am over-f*cking-welmed. Hello? What time are we living in?
I understand that something like SAP has a hermetic market and they are the proprietary king of the ERP hill with a licence to print money. Their army of suits is the right thing for dealing with CEOs and special SAP devs have to deal with ABAP as a tradeoff. I can get that, it's a marketing thing, not a software thing. They get paid enough anyway.
I also understand that we are still living in the early days of comodity computing and that universal unicode and some other stuff I as a webdeveloper run into every day - and bugs me just as much - still need another few decades to even themselves out. After all I can't force all my users to use Firefox 1.5+ and pure unicode on their clients.
But it's nearly *only* developers that deal with RDBMSes. Our code writes the data and gets the data. But why so many devs who all are in total control of the backend and what it uses put up with this pile of doo-doo we call 'database technology' nowadays is totally beyond me. [/rant]
My 2 cents. (SQL-fanboys please cue remarks about how I don't know what I'm talking about below)
To the ignorants here: Microwaves are unhealthy
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How Bad Can Wi-fi Be?
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· Score: 1
(Disclaimer: This is an edited repost from this comment here: #14784373
Before people go about shouting 'crackpots' again: Microwaves damage health. Period. The debate is at which intensity do they start doing that. I generally turn my Wifi of if I'm not using it and have stopped carrying my cellphone close to my body, since it's on all day. I turn it off at night. I also hold it away from my head when I make a call until the cell handshake is over and the remote connect is there. Handshake you ask? That's the high-power meep-meep-meep you hear in nearby active FM radios just before you make or recieve a call. It's what establishes the connection to the cell network for communication. On it goes: My father was a radar electronics engineer - with Military (Nato, Cruise Missile), Airbus, Nasa/Grumman Aircraft (Lunar Module, Space Shuttle, etc) and some others. He forbid us to have a Microwave oven (they ALL leak Microwaves) and steared clear and went the other way whenever we got to close to a radar bubble when going hiking. There are people who've had terminal brain tumors due to intense cellphone usage and I work with doctors (medical IT) who keep all equipment far away and well cased according to the swedish TCO norms. I'm not saying that people using Wireless are going to quickly die a painfull death. There are a ton of carcinogenics around us that are often far more dangerous that elektro-smog (as it is called in germany), but effects are there, can be measured and it's absolutely not unlikely that they can have a long-term effect on our health.
Bottom line: Don't think it's not unhealthy just because most people don't care. A little common sense and forsight is needed when handling technology. You don't get universal flawless wireless connectivity without a tradeoff. Anyone who believes that is a crackpot himself.
As a direct descendant of Enkidu I hereby demand that humanity as a whole pay up 170 Quadrillion gold spheres the size of the earth for using the concept of language and all western glyphs that descended from the sumerian culture as licence fee for copyrighted glyphs.... What an idiot. If this comes around I'm so inventing my own language and set of glyphs and forbidding anybody from using them who thinks perpetual copyright and thought patents (aka software patents) are a good thing.
The screencast is interesting - sort of
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Microsoft Using .MS TLD
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The screencast shows live object/entity linking through a bloated RIA interface that probably needs a 3 GHz CPU and a 400$ GFX card to render properly. Let alone an MS operating system and their bloated, insecure, barely beta and closed-source proprietary silverthingie stuff. The rotating entitiy cubes are pointless, anoying and distracting and are probably just there to hide the fact that we are basically looking at a RIA case tool with a restricted featureset. Everybody knows that things are going this way, but I doubt MS will get all things right to capture a larger audience and developer base. Meanwhile I'm sticking with Laszlo for true cross-plattform RIA developement. After all even Adobe Flex is scrambling to catch up with them. And Laszlo went completely open source way before anybody else.
I admit they and the/. article actually had me curious for about 7 seconds.
Sorry, Microsoft Popfly doesn't support your browser at this time...
Maybe someone ought to explain the concept of Web 2.0 to them again? A key attrribute of which is hassle free plattform indendence. Uhhmmm... never mind.
What really has me wondering is this: Isn't spyware a subcategory of trojans and isn't distributing those effectively called hacking? I.e. illegal break and entry into a computer system or whatever it's called in US legal terms? I'm suprised a 'spyware company' would step so far out into the open let alone attract attention by sueing people/companies. What is stopping Homeland Security or any other of the new nazi-style US agencies (pardon the polemics) from raiding their offices and imprisoning everybody in site without trial for 'enemy combatant terrorist activities' or something.? I'd actually try to get something like that rolling if I lived in the US and some spyware company woukld start sueing me. They sure have some guts.
Modding is the way to go. Q&A will probably get you a job quick, but no where near a real position in a project. Modding with a good team on the other hand can get you attention with the big boys quite fast actually. I know a lead modeler from the Star Wars Movie Battles Crew and they are on the radar of Lucas Arts for quite some time now. (Not that Lucas Arts is where you want to be... but that's another story). Modding is fun and rewarding in itself and as soon as you are good enough you get to pass all the crap standard career people have to go through. You might even get your own project from the beginning if you sell it well. Q&A sounds to me more like a thing to put you off if you need a reason to get out of the gaming industry.
Bottom Line: Start modding. Join a good modding crew and work yourself up - it's pretty much the same as with any running OSS project. You'll find out pretty fast if you've got the stuff it takes to do larger game projects and you'll have a good skill kit if you chose to make it your profession.
The man is bullshitting and we all know it. It's the exact opposite. After 3 years of Mac OS X, I've taken a night off today and upgraded my 3,5 year old Debian Woody System (mostly used as a server since my iBook purchase) to the brand new Kubuntu 7. I'm using it just now writing this post. I'm so over-f*cking-welmed that I'm actually considering to drop my next memory-pimped Mac Mini purchase I had planned and moving back to a price-performant Laptop Linux again. It's been by far my easiest OS install ever. Even the Tiger upgrade didn't go that smooth. I'm listening to a demo-track from the MagnaTune.com shop integrated into KDEs Amorok audio player as I'm writing this. The last Amorok I saw was pointless - now it's right up there with iTunes and yet better - and with more features.It has been for the last 3 years that a well configured KDE was easier and faster to use than OS X - it's now that it nearly needs no configuration (not with Kubuntu anyway) to kick every other setup I know up and down the street usability wise. Why anyone would even consider Vista after seeing this is totally beyond me. It's this stuff that scares MS big time. Linux & OSS are continuously moving forward into MS territory and when they've reached the watershed of critical mass and the people get to notice the huge differences in quality and usability there will be no way to stop them and MS knows it. That's why it's spreading FUDaganda on OSS more and more often these days. This steaming heap of BS is no different.
Check out TinyERP. To me it looks like the most promissing ERP OSS solution using the most recent of the feasable technologies. IIRC it's also integrated with the Joomla CMS and VirtueMart, Joomlas prime 3rd party shop extension.
It's either that with maybe even more solutions added to the mix or you roll your own entirely out of one package. Check out the Zope Application Server (www.zope.org) for that and look the various PHP, Python, Whatnot webframeworks such as django, cakephp, symfony, turbogears, etc.
The last SMB ERP/CRM/Bllling system I built was written as a large extension to a small commercial PHP CMS. If you look into the processes thouroughly and do a clean design it's not that difficult to model a custom ERP around your specific business case. Especially with the possibilities of the modern OSS languages and frameworks it isn't. We're currently building various plattforms and business webapps on top of PHP5 and MySQL5 and with the mostly OSS tools where using (Eclipse, MySQL Desktop Apps, Navicat, Winmerge, Nusphere) and a proper pipeline setup (SVN, local, staging & live systems) I get the growing feeling that practically anything is possible. Don't dissmis the possibilty of building your own system entirely. Planning and carefull testing of business applications is crucial, but they are not a mistery reserved for SAP.
Build a first stable version with 80%+ features intended. Then you can release it as open source. Don't start earlyer. When you release, do count on doing 20% project, website and community management at least. And count in a week or so to get accustomed to sourceforge.
Let's face it friends: IT is where the car industry was in the 1920s. Which is where you want to be if you want to have it relatively safe, relatively exiting and grab some nice cash along the way. You don't seem that desperate. Having moved from full-time stage art (Diploma in an expressive stage dance) into IT (and feeling the drag just the same at times... today for instance:-( ) may I suggest the following:
You sound to me like a typical case of 'in need for a serious contrast programm'. You should get one. Find a non-work-time thing that you can dive into the next 25 years. Learn to play the violin, the chello, learn Kung-Fu or Aikido. And I don't just mean as half-assed sort-of hobby thing. Do it as the main thing in your life. I'm currently doing a german GED (tough stuff) and working freelance. Since 9 months I haven't had the time for my regular Aikido at the local Dojo anymore, which I picked up due to the lack of dancing. I'm starting to feel depressed just because of that. If all you do is IT you are bound to lose perspective and get depressed, no matter how much fun it initially is.
Don't drop out just yet. Find something you like - maybe together with your SO - and practice that on an expert level without the downsides of practicing it as a professional. You'll feel much better in a few months, as you have something to look forward to whenever your workday sucks to much again. You can allways drop out later if it really becomes a drag. Art is eternal and it's not without reason that true artists can put up with such a material minimum - because they have another lifeblood.
As I said: I strongly recommend some sort of performing art. Good contrast to all the sitting, and good against uprising depression. And your IT kills will come in handy when designing a choreography or grasping musical scales. I do miss my dancing and/or Aikido at days like these btw. And if I don't pick it up again soon or start Aikido again, I'll get more miserable. And fatter.:-) Yet I'd only do it full time again if I where a millionaire. Be smart. Work in IT, practive the neat stuff in your spare time - you'll save yourself some misery.
Summary: 'Blah, Blah, AJax is crap here comes JavaX Will it finally free us from the threat of eternal slavery in an Ajax ruled world?'
grok -> synthetic, geek-wanna-be term for 'to understand'
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I looked at the official JavaFX pages and it's the most buzz-word ridden and content free 3 paragraphs and pseudo FAQ I've seen in a long time. Which is kind of a suprise since it's from Sun who usually keep that thing to a standard minimum.
Here's what I make of it: RIAs are a current big thing. Ajax, Flash, Laszlo, Flex, Curl, Apollo, XUL and whatnot are involved in a huge technology mayhem over who's gonna rule the new additional client side layer that promises to end all x-plattform problems. Just in time for us to move on the the next set of problems (wether we display out stuff on a thumbnail-screen, an immersive VR cybergoggle enviroment or on something of the 10 bazillion variations inbetween).
JavaFX is most certainly *not* aimed at Ajax. I don't think Sun cares to much abot Ajax. After all, the more Ajax you've got, the more servers you need. Which is what Sun can only hope for. It is, of course, aimed at the thing to which Java has been the only true potential competitor for 10 years now and the next big market area that Java really has a chance in: Flash. Flash is the most widespread end-user plattform in existance (OK, JME aside, but that doesn't count since cellphones can be considered outside of the computer game for now, and to me it looks barely turing complete). The next most widespread client-plattform to Flash is Java.
The attempts Java up to now has made into the Flash area are factually non-existant. Suns JMF (Java Media Framework - yes there is such a thing) and JMF Video Demos from 2002 are a joke compared to Flash, and mm developement in Java also is factually non-existant. Java thrived in an area it initially wasn't intended for at all: The server side. Sun was happy with that and felt fine selling servers for good money and being able to offer the relative performance hog called Java on top of them for a safe and flexible way to buld heavyweight server apps. Yet Flash client programming, even though ActionScript has become a full blow all-frills PL just like Java, hasn't really picked up that much in the RIA app market as it could have. Due to the image Flash has with most people, due to them slowpoking around with the complete Flash VM redo (which they only recently finished) and due to a base of implementers that have given Flash a bad reputation since the emergance of Ajax and working CSS. Still Flash is the only RIA plattform of today that can deliver.
Now computers are getting smaller and faster and clientside Java isn't that sluggish anymore. Java is GPLd, servers are probably running so-so and now, finally, Sun probably has noticed that they can get serious with true Flash competing RIAs. You can pave the road with supposed RIA kits and generators - one with the most hot air in buzzwords and no real project to prove itself in being Eclipse RIA. IBM flapping their wings can't go unnoticed by Sun, they're still a little pissed about that 'eclipse' joke I presume.
Yet in the end it all boils down to one thing: Do you have a widespread tried, true, tested and trustworthy virtuall machine that runs everywhere. Only Flash and Java have that. Adobe just OSSd their Flex generator, nullifying a big advantage of Laszlo. Good for them. Allthoug I personally am still giving Laszlo the underdog-bonus whenever applicable. But Sun GPLd Java aswell, a move which Adobe basically just followed suit. And if Sun finally manages to get serious with Java RIAs and multimedia - then Adobemedia *finally* has a real competitor in the Flash area. MS Silversomething was a small hickup, squished 10 days later when Adobe anounced Flex open sourcing last month. But Sun now announcing this JavaFX thing, despite being not much more than a buzzword ridden press release, should have all Flash RIA developers pointing their ears. At least it officially puts Sun i
As far as I can tell K3D and Moonlight haven't moved an inch in the last 5 years. They both look like students summer projects to me. Blender has weedy parts in its codebase, everyone knows that. Any programm this complex and mature has those. But they are being replaced fast and thouroughly by a thriving core team lead by the founder of Blender. Blender runs out of the box on 7 plattforms and has a featureset that closely competes with current topline commercial tools. Try to catch up on that alone 'in a few months' Mr. Smartass. Blender is responisble for the recent price drops in the 3D tool industry alone and when it eventually fully supports Renderman yet some toolmakers are going to have to redo their businessmodel big time.
The usual UI bickering is bogus aswell. Apart from being just as hard to learn as any tool of same capabilities, blenders UI has been comletely OpenGL accelerated from the begining - one of the things it's unique in iirc. Blender's learning curve is steep, as with any high-end 3D tool without a stack of books. But with the amount of material and books available on the web for free nowadays makes this learning curve not nearly as hard as it was 5 years ago. The featureset is breathtaking and has commercial providers such as Newtek struggling to catch up in some areas (notice the recent addition of an improrved node editor to Lightwave 9 - nothing but a response to Blenders node editor). Sidenote: I own a professional licence of LW 8, a commercial licence of Blender (from the NaN days) *and* use Blender since back in the days of 1.8. I haven't updated to LW 9 for the very reason that Blender 2.43, a few little things aside, offers everything professional 3D needs. And then some - an full-blown integrated compositor for instance.
Blender is as mature and developed as any open source project could wish for. As *any* software project could wish for actually. Features and improvement are being added on a regular basis and it's fully backwards compliant with any blender file, and it's professional roots not only show but have become more and more visible.
Bottom line: The submitter of the above article either doesn't know what he is talking about or is a troll. Or both.
A USB fax modem with memory is handy for this sort of thing. Just delete the ones you don't want, archive/print/whatever the rest. A better idea is to install a tolled number as your fax number. You can actually do both. Fax modem *and* tolled number. 1/2$ per call. Then post your fax number everywhere. Instant profit. You'll have ROI for your fax modem in an instance. You get just get the best there is with no need to worry. Zyxel used to have some with internal memory that ran on their own with no PC needed. Refinance your real customers who fax you stuff in their next bills.
I think the cheapest would be a bluetooth cellphone and a bluetooth mini keyboard. The next in line I'd recommend would be Palm OS Treo, Blackberry (better KB than Nokia), Sidekick and then that Nokia Full-KB cellphone. BTW: The ears are the closest to being repareable with cybernetic enhancements. There are completely deaf people who've had implants with mics and coils attached to their hearing nerves (or so) who can now hear. I saw this on a TV show about 10 years ago, it should be a relatively regular thing now. You might want to look into that subject.
I feel sorry for your hearing loss - especially because it's due to the Iraq invasion, which I personally consider the biggest screw-up of an US Administration since Vietnam. I hope you'll manage well further on.
Just reading the comments here emphasises what I think of todays state of IT: We are still in the steam age of computing. Wether what moves around in a CLI is streams of text or a bunch of objects doesn't really make a difference. Just today I was trying to get SuSE Linus to install mc over a remote ssh connection. [Sidenote to Windows-only people: Doing this sort of thing in the MS world still is factually impossible] Anyway I was there in SuSE CLI and fired up YaST 2 (MS speak: the SuSE Installer) in it's CLI version. And here it comes: 1) The characters wouldn't render correctly because the charset wasn't the right one. 2) I was logged in from OS X / Terminal and the keycodes from my Mac KB wouldn't reach out to remote PC SuSE with [fill in charset 'XXXX-uft8b32-centralusbekistany-ZZZZ' here] aktivated. 3) A pure real literal high-quality unobscured 'Ctrl-C' tranferrend via the context-menue option of OS X term (smart people these apple guys) didn't work either due to SuSE/PC/Whatnot keycode/charset/whatnot issues
I had to ask our Windows Admin next to me to log in via putty and to the install (duh.). Given, it was SuSE, it was 9.3 and it was totally bugged up. YaST 2 CLI sux and is no where near Debian apt or OS X Fink. [x86 Debian and OS X play ball very nicely btw. Great server/workstation combo]
But as long as I have to spend 40 hours fixing character renderings of a web application the only possible way that isn't even mandatory according to w3c standards adn evaluation and as long as the VI is the only way to be halfway safe to work over remote ssh and then only if im using the right keyboard and have the right charset (of a set of something around 60)... as long as we're actually still working this way and this way is the most effective possible (as mentioned earlyer, we are way out of Windows league here) - we are still in the early steam age of computing. I predict it will take another 20 for this crap to finally iron out and everyone is using Bash or ZShell, keycodes and charcodes and glyphs are all in line and everyone not using the standard gets fried by pure marketforce. Sort of like the automobile industry today.... But as I said: IT still is in the steam age.
Slashdot Mirror
The Website, RMSes Passport Portrait, Emacs itself, ... just looking at it makes it appear beyond bizar. As if I had taken some extremely mind altering substance. I couldn't describe the experience to someone who hasn't had it himself. ... heavens crickey. :-) .
Emacs may once have been an extremely powerfull tool and the best possible thing for a remote tty command line mainframe uplink some 25 years ago. I nearly started learning it back in 1996. But all this nowadays and with a stance that is way far out even by slashdot standards
How about calling it quits? Donald Knuth stopped TeX when it was finished. And it actually still is a usable tool today. Then again, Donald Knuth is a normal, respected developer, not some strange fringe-dimension entity
I'm using a 7130 Blackberry because I wanted to merge PDA and Phone (works well btw.), wanted to me MS free and wanted a good sync to my Mac. SureType works fair enough. And the "Missing Sync" for Blackberry costs 39$ and works perfect - better than the crappy Palm conduit I had to use before. I costed 5$ and a 2 year contract - which I renewed anyway. I don't watch movies and my maxfield mp3 player is fine too.
Then again, the Blackberry in some places has such a crappy interface and usability I seriously question the designers sanity. This is why the iPhone will be able to compete. The people building the Blackberries and other devices are often just to f*cking dumb to get it right. With Apple you have the Boss himself using the device and cross-checking if the engineers have lost it on the way or still are on track. Which is exactly how I would do it too.
I whish apple the very best for this launch. They deserve it.
Linus has enough credentials and competence to give his opinion some serious weight. And even if he does run roughshod on SVN and CVS quite a bit, he is right in a lot of points.
I've started using SCM on a regulary basis with Subversion for about half a year now and more often than once have I thought: 'This can't be the way SCM is done right'. Only one thing I know of that SVN does better than CVS is pure entire-project version numbers. CVS seemed like a kiddiebike with training weels that wanted to be as complicated as Kornshell. SVN did away with that but still has downsides that we needn't put up with for any reason. SCM metadata stored in each project directory is one of those little things that bug the hell out of me for instance. And when Linus says that his brain isn't damaged into thinking CVS is an OK way of doing things because he only used it when forced to - I believe him. I wasn't aware that his project Git had come so far so fast until two weeks ago, but when he says that any SCM that he can do better in two weeks of coding on his own isn't worthwhile - and SVN is one of those - that really has me thinking. I'm not so much into software developement with large groups that I could exactly tell how bad SVN is, but I'm sure Linus can.
To use an analogy: CVS was a Ford Model T, SVN is an improved Ford Model T, but I think we should start looking for a current BMW or something. It might be a good idea to do that *before* we move a larger audience to using SCM.
What is it that you are proposing as an alternative? I hear alot of complaining, but you dont see to be offering anything else that might work better.
I believe the reason that RDBMS's are the way they are (at the core, not the peripheral feature sets) is that the problem they are trying to solve is a fundamentally 'hard' one (hard in the CS sense).
I totally agree. (said something simular a while ago) The link to the real world and it's limitations has to be the way it is in most places. I even don't see a problem in having a persistance layer with the bazillion means of configuration such as MySQL. It offers the needed flexibility and learning about the details here isn't pointless.
However I do expect an alternative to SQL and it's countless dialects. As I think I brought across quite clearly in the above post. The alternative being, of course, no second language at all. Or should I say 'no extra language per DB in use'. All open source languages I know of offer wonderfull devices for filtering and moving data from A to B in every which way one could imagine. Each and every SQL variant is at least 5 steps back from all of these.
Let's look at PHP for an example:
#Possible PHP way (current):
array_search($user.names, "Miller");
#Possible PHP way (fictional persistance layer integration):
$user.names['miller'];
#SQL way for PHP:
"SELECT * FROM user WHERE name=".$myName.";";
Now it's given that PHP isn't the most elegant of OSS PLs and that it's well within it's achestors tradition (Perl) in being a tad quirky. But it hardly get's any more complicated and weedy in PHP, no matter how complex your requests are. But try linking 3 entities in SQL and comprehending the error messages while trying to do that in any Database and you know what I'm talking about. Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP, whatever only would need a handfull of additions to deal with any solvable problem that occurs when connecting to the persistance layer. And no, what goes through as 'Database Abstraction Layers' nowadays is not what I'm talking about. Just ponder the concept of DBALs for a minute and it will strike you how backwards it is. The best we can come up with is automatic SQL generation and for my taste that is just to much overhead for a technology that doesn't deserve to (still) be there in the first place. Whenever I get back to that I feel like I'm back in 86 at my Sharp computer and hacking it with Basic Peek'n'Poke and Opcode. At least that made sense in making my code faster and more flexible.
What I'm basically saying is this: The devices and concepts SQL offers for handling data are so out of line of everything else we deal with it isn't funny anymore. I have no problem with RDBMses and I have great respect for people taking on the task of dealing with our HDDs and taking the load of Filesystem developers for another few years. But why this all has to happen seperate of all the other stuff that has moved on so fast in the last 10 years I really don't understand.
Let me emphasise yet a little more by giving a proof positive for things that can't be stopped from sucking: XML. XML is relatively new. But XML sucks. But XML sucks because it serialises n-Dimensional structures. It squishes them into 1-dimensional streams of data. That's a classic hard problem in CS - and it will allways suck. Until the end of the universe it will. Considering that, XML is a perfect solution (RelaxNG fans, please don't get nittpicky) as it is our way on agreeing how this problem can be expected to suck. Thus I can focus on getting my data in line when dealing with XML, but needn't be to annoyed about the standard.
SQL on the other hand sucks where it musn't. It's old and the people back then didn't know better. In fact, they probably did, but they wrote SQL for to be typed by humans live into a terminal connection. It must have been magic back then for that kind of task. But explain to a CS guy from '78 what we are doing today with SQL (using it for fully automated data linkage and juggling) and he'll shake his head in disbelief.
My 2 cents.
Educated opinions welcome, please join in.
Some of us make a living doing this and the tools we use on the server have one job.
No, really? I do to too actually.
That job is to send content to the client as fast as possible.
Wrong. That job is to get the job done, fast, good and cheap, and if that doesn't work (which it never does) it's to evaluate the best tradeoffs without bugging the client to much. And by client I mean the one with the two legs and the checkbook that doesn't give a damn wether you're using Ruby or PHP or Django or Symfony or Zope or Rails or whatnot but wants to see his webapp ASAP.
There are numerous tradeoffs in the architecture and configuration of web servers and scripting languages and when you're working with this stuff everyday the sub-optimal becomes irritating.
And you know what the suboptimal and the optimal is? No? Well, then you are aware of more than most posters I sorta quoted above.
If it's all a bit over your head, I suggest you instead participate in discussions at a level you're more comfortable with.
WTF? I've been programming since '86 and have been doing webstuff for a living since 2000. I don't see nothing over my head here. Just a tad incoherent for a community made up of what seems like 90% part-time webdevs with each their own favorite toolset. A community of which 80% act as if they where members of the Linux Kernel Team and come across a bit silly at times. Don't get me wrong, there are interesting posts here. But for each of those it looks as if three 'expert' posts sound like what I was moking. And that what I was poking at with the parent post.
Blah, Blah, PHP sux, Ruby rules, Blah, Blah, Ruby sux, Perl rules and is faster and more mature anyway, Jada , jada, Apache sux, lighthttpd 0Nwz0rZ, Blah, Blah, lighthttpd is only for special cases it sux in RL compared to Apache, Blah, Blah, APache is ultra l4m3 and OMFG! unsafe! Yeah!, Blah, Blah, the new MS IIS kicks all others in the butt Blah, Blah. crap article, Blah, Blah, good article but forgot to mention C is fastest for webapps, blah blah ...
Did you guys all get stoned for Pentecost or what?
The dialogs between my 9 year old daughter and friends over which Playmobile toy is better are more coherent than this.
It doesn't surprise me that both articles don't really contain much usefull information. It's like two people debating wether FreeDOS or MS DOS is better. No actual real-life or even academic issue.
[rant]
The more and more I do professional projects that go beyond a 'single freelancer' scope the more and more RDBMSes bug the piss out of me.
Databases suck. What we call databases today is nohing much more of a historically grown apocalyptic chaos. With one of the oldest and crappiest programming languages ever as a cornerstone of its technology. A weedy mumbojumbo of wanna-be virtual machines, wanna-be server daemons, makeshift security layers, obstrusive user management and pseudo operating systems and a bazillion proprietary variants of said programming language that make a Perl debugging session look like a walk in the park in comparsion. With features bolted on left right and center. This basically is the case with any current DB in widespread use, be it MySQL, Oracle or anything inbetween.
And if you look at the core of it Database technology and how long it has been that way there isn't much hope that DB's will go anywhere anytime soon. Mostly because people are to thick to f*cking drop the notion that SQL has some sort of value in itself.
It litterally scares me to see many experienced developers who are so brainwashed by unquestioned traditions that they truely believe they need something different than the programming language they're using for their application to handle the persistance layer. A Database PL and 30+ dialects of it from back in the days when we flew to the moon using a slide-ruler as primary means of calculation. A PL that would have any CompSci student score a clean 'F' in compiler and parser building would he deliver something like it as project today. A PL so broken the only other I know that compares to it is Lingo. We waste tons of money and manpower educating DBAs with technology and concepts that are a pain in the ass and not even very tranferable. And the technology doesn't even do it's job very well! Relational Trails, true hassle free de-normalisation, true hassle-free scalabilty - no go. Nowhere. And no, having to need three 200$/hour Oracle DBAs who spent years stuffing their brains with proprietary sh*t to move from one server to 10 is _not_ what I call 'scales well' nowadays. So Postgres (and maybe some others) have entity inheritance. Halleluja. Big fat hairy deal. And the new DB2 can do nested sets with XML (serialized data). I am over-f*cking-welmed. Hello? What time are we living in?
I understand that something like SAP has a hermetic market and they are the proprietary king of the ERP hill with a licence to print money. Their army of suits is the right thing for dealing with CEOs and special SAP devs have to deal with ABAP as a tradeoff. I can get that, it's a marketing thing, not a software thing. They get paid enough anyway.
I also understand that we are still living in the early days of comodity computing and that universal unicode and some other stuff I as a webdeveloper run into every day - and bugs me just as much - still need another few decades to even themselves out. After all I can't force all my users to use Firefox 1.5+ and pure unicode on their clients.
But it's nearly *only* developers that deal with RDBMSes. Our code writes the data and gets the data. But why so many devs who all are in total control of the backend and what it uses put up with this pile of doo-doo we call 'database technology' nowadays is totally beyond me.
[/rant]
My 2 cents.
(SQL-fanboys please cue remarks about how I don't know what I'm talking about below)
(Disclaimer: This is an edited repost from this comment here: #14784373
Before people go about shouting 'crackpots' again:
Microwaves damage health. Period.
The debate is at which intensity do they start doing that.
I generally turn my Wifi of if I'm not using it and have stopped carrying my cellphone close to my body, since it's on all day. I turn it off at night. I also hold it away from my head when I make a call until the cell handshake is over and the remote connect is there.
Handshake you ask? That's the high-power meep-meep-meep you hear in nearby active FM radios just before you make or recieve a call. It's what establishes the connection to the cell network for communication.
On it goes:
My father was a radar electronics engineer - with Military (Nato, Cruise Missile), Airbus, Nasa/Grumman Aircraft (Lunar Module, Space Shuttle, etc) and some others. He forbid us to have a Microwave oven (they ALL leak Microwaves) and steared clear and went the other way whenever we got to close to a radar bubble when going hiking.
There are people who've had terminal brain tumors due to intense cellphone usage and I work with doctors (medical IT) who keep all equipment far away and well cased according to the swedish TCO norms.
I'm not saying that people using Wireless are going to quickly die a painfull death. There are a ton of carcinogenics around us that are often far more dangerous that elektro-smog (as it is called in germany), but effects are there, can be measured and it's absolutely not unlikely that they can have a long-term effect on our health.
Bottom line:
Don't think it's not unhealthy just because most people don't care. A little common sense and forsight is needed when handling technology. You don't get universal flawless wireless connectivity without a tradeoff. Anyone who believes that is a crackpot himself.
As a direct descendant of Enkidu I hereby demand that humanity as a whole pay up 170 Quadrillion gold spheres the size of the earth for using the concept of language and all western glyphs that descended from the sumerian culture as licence fee for copyrighted glyphs. ...
What an idiot.
If this comes around I'm so inventing my own language and set of glyphs and forbidding anybody from using them who thinks perpetual copyright and thought patents (aka software patents) are a good thing.
The screencast shows live object/entity linking through a bloated RIA interface that probably needs a 3 GHz CPU and a 400$ GFX card to render properly. Let alone an MS operating system and their bloated, insecure, barely beta and closed-source proprietary silverthingie stuff.
The rotating entitiy cubes are pointless, anoying and distracting and are probably just there to hide the fact that we are basically looking at a RIA case tool with a restricted featureset. Everybody knows that things are going this way, but I doubt MS will get all things right to capture a larger audience and developer base.
Meanwhile I'm sticking with Laszlo for true cross-plattform RIA developement. After all even Adobe Flex is scrambling to catch up with them. And Laszlo went completely open source way before anybody else.
I admit they and the /. article actually had me curious for about 7 seconds.
...
... never mind.
Sorry, Microsoft Popfly doesn't support your browser at this time
Maybe someone ought to explain the concept of Web 2.0 to them again?
A key attrribute of which is hassle free plattform indendence.
Uhhmmm
What really has me wondering is this: Isn't spyware a subcategory of trojans and isn't distributing those effectively called hacking? I.e. illegal break and entry into a computer system or whatever it's called in US legal terms? I'm suprised a 'spyware company' would step so far out into the open let alone attract attention by sueing people/companies. What is stopping Homeland Security or any other of the new nazi-style US agencies (pardon the polemics) from raiding their offices and imprisoning everybody in site without trial for 'enemy combatant terrorist activities' or something.? I'd actually try to get something like that rolling if I lived in the US and some spyware company woukld start sueing me.
They sure have some guts.
Modding is the way to go. Q&A will probably get you a job quick, but no where near a real position in a project. Modding with a good team on the other hand can get you attention with the big boys quite fast actually. I know a lead modeler from the Star Wars Movie Battles Crew and they are on the radar of Lucas Arts for quite some time now. (Not that Lucas Arts is where you want to be ... but that's another story). Modding is fun and rewarding in itself and as soon as you are good enough you get to pass all the crap standard career people have to go through. You might even get your own project from the beginning if you sell it well. Q&A sounds to me more like a thing to put you off if you need a reason to get out of the gaming industry.
Bottom Line: Start modding. Join a good modding crew and work yourself up - it's pretty much the same as with any running OSS project. You'll find out pretty fast if you've got the stuff it takes to do larger game projects and you'll have a good skill kit if you chose to make it your profession.
My 2 cents.
The man is bullshitting and we all know it. It's the exact opposite. After 3 years of Mac OS X, I've taken a night off today and upgraded my 3,5 year old Debian Woody System (mostly used as a server since my iBook purchase) to the brand new Kubuntu 7. I'm using it just now writing this post. I'm so over-f*cking-welmed that I'm actually considering to drop my next memory-pimped Mac Mini purchase I had planned and moving back to a price-performant Laptop Linux again. It's been by far my easiest OS install ever. Even the Tiger upgrade didn't go that smooth. I'm listening to a demo-track from the MagnaTune.com shop integrated into KDEs Amorok audio player as I'm writing this. The last Amorok I saw was pointless - now it's right up there with iTunes and yet better - and with more features.It has been for the last 3 years that a well configured KDE was easier and faster to use than OS X - it's now that it nearly needs no configuration (not with Kubuntu anyway) to kick every other setup I know up and down the street usability wise. Why anyone would even consider Vista after seeing this is totally beyond me.
It's this stuff that scares MS big time. Linux & OSS are continuously moving forward into MS territory and when they've reached the watershed of critical mass and the people get to notice the huge differences in quality and usability there will be no way to stop them and MS knows it. That's why it's spreading FUDaganda on OSS more and more often these days. This steaming heap of BS is no different.
Check out TinyERP. To me it looks like the most promissing ERP OSS solution using the most recent of the feasable technologies. IIRC it's also integrated with the Joomla CMS and VirtueMart, Joomlas prime 3rd party shop extension.
It's either that with maybe even more solutions added to the mix or you roll your own entirely out of one package. Check out the Zope Application Server (www.zope.org) for that and look the various PHP, Python, Whatnot webframeworks such as django, cakephp, symfony, turbogears, etc.
The last SMB ERP/CRM/Bllling system I built was written as a large extension to a small commercial PHP CMS. If you look into the processes thouroughly and do a clean design it's not that difficult to model a custom ERP around your specific business case. Especially with the possibilities of the modern OSS languages and frameworks it isn't. We're currently building various plattforms and business webapps on top of PHP5 and MySQL5 and with the mostly OSS tools where using (Eclipse, MySQL Desktop Apps, Navicat, Winmerge, Nusphere) and a proper pipeline setup (SVN, local, staging & live systems) I get the growing feeling that practically anything is possible. Don't dissmis the possibilty of building your own system entirely.
Planning and carefull testing of business applications is crucial, but they are not a mistery reserved for SAP.
Indeed. Adium == awesome.
It has a green duck that jumps up and down! What more could you ask for?
It get's even awesomer! You can change the color of the duck to purple, orange and even more colors. True. (Mine is purple btw.)
Build a first stable version with 80%+ features intended. Then you can release it as open source. Don't start earlyer. When you release, do count on doing 20% project, website and community management at least. And count in a week or so to get accustomed to sourceforge.
Do they arrest people in Germany for the love scenes in Shakespeare's _Romeo and Juliet_ between two underage kids, but played by adults?
Nobody was arrested. They were banned from SL. Not quite the same thing.
Let's face it friends: IT is where the car industry was in the 1920s. Which is where you want to be if you want to have it relatively safe, relatively exiting and grab some nice cash along the way. You don't seem that desperate. Having moved from full-time stage art (Diploma in an expressive stage dance) into IT (and feeling the drag just the same at times ... today for instance :-( ) may I suggest the following:
:-) Yet I'd only do it full time again if I where a millionaire. Be smart. Work in IT, practive the neat stuff in your spare time - you'll save yourself some misery.
You sound to me like a typical case of 'in need for a serious contrast programm'. You should get one. Find a non-work-time thing that you can dive into the next 25 years. Learn to play the violin, the chello, learn Kung-Fu or Aikido. And I don't just mean as half-assed sort-of hobby thing. Do it as the main thing in your life. I'm currently doing a german GED (tough stuff) and working freelance. Since 9 months I haven't had the time for my regular Aikido at the local Dojo anymore, which I picked up due to the lack of dancing. I'm starting to feel depressed just because of that. If all you do is IT you are bound to lose perspective and get depressed, no matter how much fun it initially is.
Don't drop out just yet. Find something you like - maybe together with your SO - and practice that on an expert level without the downsides of practicing it as a professional. You'll feel much better in a few months, as you have something to look forward to whenever your workday sucks to much again. You can allways drop out later if it really becomes a drag. Art is eternal and it's not without reason that true artists can put up with such a material minimum - because they have another lifeblood.
As I said: I strongly recommend some sort of performing art. Good contrast to all the sitting, and good against uprising depression. And your IT kills will come in handy when designing a choreography or grasping musical scales. I do miss my dancing and/or Aikido at days like these btw. And if I don't pick it up again soon or start Aikido again, I'll get more miserable. And fatter.
My 2 cents.
Summary: 'Blah, Blah, AJax is crap here comes JavaX Will it finally free us from the threat of eternal slavery in an Ajax ruled world?'
grok -> synthetic, geek-wanna-be term for 'to understand'
---
I looked at the official JavaFX pages and it's the most buzz-word ridden and content free 3 paragraphs and pseudo FAQ I've seen in a long time. Which is kind of a suprise since it's from Sun who usually keep that thing to a standard minimum.
Here's what I make of it:
RIAs are a current big thing. Ajax, Flash, Laszlo, Flex, Curl, Apollo, XUL and whatnot are involved in a huge technology mayhem over who's gonna rule the new additional client side layer that promises to end all x-plattform problems. Just in time for us to move on the the next set of problems (wether we display out stuff on a thumbnail-screen, an immersive VR cybergoggle enviroment or on something of the 10 bazillion variations inbetween).
JavaFX is most certainly *not* aimed at Ajax. I don't think Sun cares to much abot Ajax. After all, the more Ajax you've got, the more servers you need. Which is what Sun can only hope for.
It is, of course, aimed at the thing to which Java has been the only true potential competitor for 10 years now and the next big market area that Java really has a chance in: Flash.
Flash is the most widespread end-user plattform in existance (OK, JME aside, but that doesn't count since cellphones can be considered outside of the computer game for now, and to me it looks barely turing complete). The next most widespread client-plattform to Flash is Java.
The attempts Java up to now has made into the Flash area are factually non-existant. Suns JMF (Java Media Framework - yes there is such a thing) and JMF Video Demos from 2002 are a joke compared to Flash, and mm developement in Java also is factually non-existant. Java thrived in an area it initially wasn't intended for at all: The server side. Sun was happy with that and felt fine selling servers for good money and being able to offer the relative performance hog called Java on top of them for a safe and flexible way to buld heavyweight server apps. Yet Flash client programming, even though ActionScript has become a full blow all-frills PL just like Java, hasn't really picked up that much in the RIA app market as it could have. Due to the image Flash has with most people, due to them slowpoking around with the complete Flash VM redo (which they only recently finished) and due to a base of implementers that have given Flash a bad reputation since the emergance of Ajax and working CSS. Still Flash is the only RIA plattform of today that can deliver.
Now computers are getting smaller and faster and clientside Java isn't that sluggish anymore. Java is GPLd, servers are probably running so-so and now, finally, Sun probably has noticed that they can get serious with true Flash competing RIAs. You can pave the road with supposed RIA kits and generators - one with the most hot air in buzzwords and no real project to prove itself in being Eclipse RIA. IBM flapping their wings can't go unnoticed by Sun, they're still a little pissed about that 'eclipse' joke I presume.
Yet in the end it all boils down to one thing: Do you have a widespread tried, true, tested and trustworthy virtuall machine that runs everywhere. Only Flash and Java have that. Adobe just OSSd their Flex generator, nullifying a big advantage of Laszlo. Good for them. Allthoug I personally am still giving Laszlo the underdog-bonus whenever applicable. But Sun GPLd Java aswell, a move which Adobe basically just followed suit. And if Sun finally manages to get serious with Java RIAs and multimedia - then Adobemedia *finally* has a real competitor in the Flash area. MS Silversomething was a small hickup, squished 10 days later when Adobe anounced Flex open sourcing last month. But Sun now announcing this JavaFX thing, despite being not much more than a buzzword ridden press release, should have all Flash RIA developers pointing their ears. At least it officially puts Sun i
As far as I can tell K3D and Moonlight haven't moved an inch in the last 5 years. They both look like students summer projects to me.
Blender has weedy parts in its codebase, everyone knows that. Any programm this complex and mature has those. But they are being replaced fast and thouroughly by a thriving core team lead by the founder of Blender. Blender runs out of the box on 7 plattforms and has a featureset that closely competes with current topline commercial tools. Try to catch up on that alone 'in a few months' Mr. Smartass. Blender is responisble for the recent price drops in the 3D tool industry alone and when it eventually fully supports Renderman yet some toolmakers are going to have to redo their businessmodel big time.
The usual UI bickering is bogus aswell. Apart from being just as hard to learn as any tool of same capabilities, blenders UI has been comletely OpenGL accelerated from the begining - one of the things it's unique in iirc. Blender's learning curve is steep, as with any high-end 3D tool without a stack of books. But with the amount of material and books available on the web for free nowadays makes this learning curve not nearly as hard as it was 5 years ago. The featureset is breathtaking and has commercial providers such as Newtek struggling to catch up in some areas (notice the recent addition of an improrved node editor to Lightwave 9 - nothing but a response to Blenders node editor). Sidenote: I own a professional licence of LW 8, a commercial licence of Blender (from the NaN days) *and* use Blender since back in the days of 1.8. I haven't updated to LW 9 for the very reason that Blender 2.43, a few little things aside, offers everything professional 3D needs. And then some - an full-blown integrated compositor for instance.
Blender is as mature and developed as any open source project could wish for. As *any* software project could wish for actually. Features and improvement are being added on a regular basis and it's fully backwards compliant with any blender file, and it's professional roots not only show but have become more and more visible.
Bottom line: The submitter of the above article either doesn't know what he is talking about or is a troll. Or both.
A USB fax modem with memory is handy for this sort of thing. Just delete the ones you don't want, archive/print/whatever the rest.
A better idea is to install a tolled number as your fax number. You can actually do both. Fax modem *and* tolled number. 1/2$ per call. Then post your fax number everywhere. Instant profit. You'll have ROI for your fax modem in an instance. You get just get the best there is with no need to worry. Zyxel used to have some with internal memory that ran on their own with no PC needed. Refinance your real customers who fax you stuff in their next bills.
I think the cheapest would be a bluetooth cellphone and a bluetooth mini keyboard. The next in line I'd recommend would be Palm OS Treo, Blackberry (better KB than Nokia), Sidekick and then that Nokia Full-KB cellphone.
BTW: The ears are the closest to being repareable with cybernetic enhancements. There are completely deaf people who've had implants with mics and coils attached to their hearing nerves (or so) who can now hear. I saw this on a TV show about 10 years ago, it should be a relatively regular thing now. You might want to look into that subject.
I feel sorry for your hearing loss - especially because it's due to the Iraq invasion, which I personally consider the biggest screw-up of an US Administration since Vietnam. I hope you'll manage well further on.
Your reply in it's entirety pretty much emphasises my point above.
Just reading the comments here emphasises what I think of todays state of IT: We are still in the steam age of computing. Wether what moves around in a CLI is streams of text or a bunch of objects doesn't really make a difference. Just today I was trying to get SuSE Linus to install mc over a remote ssh connection. [Sidenote to Windows-only people: Doing this sort of thing in the MS world still is factually impossible]
... as long as we're actually still working this way and this way is the most effective possible (as mentioned earlyer, we are way out of Windows league here) - we are still in the early steam age of computing. I predict it will take another 20 for this crap to finally iron out and everyone is using Bash or ZShell, keycodes and charcodes and glyphs are all in line and everyone not using the standard gets fried by pure marketforce. Sort of like the automobile industry today. ... But as I said: IT still is in the steam age.
Anyway I was there in SuSE CLI and fired up YaST 2 (MS speak: the SuSE Installer) in it's CLI version. And here it comes:
1) The characters wouldn't render correctly because the charset wasn't the right one.
2) I was logged in from OS X / Terminal and the keycodes from my Mac KB wouldn't reach out to remote PC SuSE with [fill in charset 'XXXX-uft8b32-centralusbekistany-ZZZZ' here] aktivated.
3) A pure real literal high-quality unobscured 'Ctrl-C' tranferrend via the context-menue option of OS X term (smart people these apple guys) didn't work either due to SuSE/PC/Whatnot keycode/charset/whatnot issues
I had to ask our Windows Admin next to me to log in via putty and to the install (duh.). Given, it was SuSE, it was 9.3 and it was totally bugged up. YaST 2 CLI sux and is no where near Debian apt or OS X Fink. [x86 Debian and OS X play ball very nicely btw. Great server/workstation combo]
But as long as I have to spend 40 hours fixing character renderings of a web application the only possible way that isn't even mandatory according to w3c standards adn evaluation and as long as the VI is the only way to be halfway safe to work over remote ssh and then only if im using the right keyboard and have the right charset (of a set of something around 60)