I know a lead modder of the Star Wars Movie Battles mod. He is 22 and better at game stuff than most of us could ever be. All he'd need is a CS, since he rocks at project management (naturally) and sucks at programming.
Dealing with the game industry tools you can teach yourself. Since the piplelines change twice a year that's a good idea anyway. A regular 'boring' CS teaches you the basics. What the heck is a Game Design degree anyway? We have these here in germany aswell. Sound mostly like snake oil to me.
Errrm, No. All whos been dividing the last few years was Novell. And all that they where dividing were themselves. The marketing and branding mess they've been pulling off the last 24 months including the inability to fire up the SuSE factor give of a sad impression. If there is one ally we want MS to have it's the current Novell. Sad that is, but true.
I like both WW and CCP. WW basically brought avantgarde RPG Gaming into US american mainstream and finally established a standing alternative to the ancient (A)D&D crap (I don't like (A)D&D;-) ), and CCP has a neat MMORPG title on their hands.
I do believe a well-minted 'Exalted Online' could be a competitor to WoW. I don't know if CCP can pull it off though. Spaceships and Planets are easy compared to a MMORPG like WoW. I'd be happier if WW had teamed up with Arenanet and their GuildWars line. A GuildWars MMORPG based on Exalted would totally kick ass and would be fitting aswell.
Then again they could combine the Trinity/Aeon Universe with Eve - which would rock just as much I suppose. Nice prospects indeed.
Wouldn't this have been the better way: 1) Inmediate hack-patch at runtime: Add column or extra 1:1 table, whichevers faster, 2) add super-quick hack that adds a new index beyond 2^24. (some/. Perl crack probably can do this in 5 minutes) 3) Add third column, migrate/merge/rebuild new index at runtime 4) Switch to new index 5) remove old code and columns 1&2 after correct functionality is confirmed
Most People probably wouldn't even have noticed.... Then again, if someone didn't do his homework and slashcode is a messy hack, this could be troublesome.
PHP is a descendent of Perl - it was originally programmed in Perl to extend Perl with templating functionality. That's long ago, but it still shows in the overall quirkyness of PHP wich is of a simular 'flavour'.
That been said, PHP has by far the largest set of available tools to help you do big projects of any web-oriented PL. Tons of commercial and/or OSS IDEs (PHPEclipse - especially the easyeclipse distribution - is awesome for a free tool), Debuggers, etc. It's pratically maried to MySQL (tons of tools aswell) and half of googles database is filled with PHP tutorials and forum threads on common PHP/MySQL gotchas.
If you want to do web stuff and unless you're in on some super complex parsing and data migration problem I'd strongly recommend PHP. If you're doing serial data-migration and plan on heavy use of Regular Expressions to solve your problem or have some other exotic procedural problem to solve that doesn't involve building a webapp, I'd suggest Perl over PHP.... I'd actually recommend looking at Python aswell (my personal favourite), but that's not what you asked for.;-)
If they actually got smart, it could be to late. 4 years ago they could've switched to Linux and everybody would've thought 'they bought Linux'. Vista could've easyly been something like an extreme Linux Distribution. Now it's to late I suspect. Then again, Vista probably is the last old-school OS from MS. Unix has won. Nothing cheaper than pushing a Linux Distro with a custom Direct X 10 layer,.Net and Active Directory as the successor to Vista. I recall Balmer actually sweet-talking about Linux a few years ago (before the 'commieware' thing) and just critisizing that they should get they're 'Desktops' under one roof. MS probably has had a distro in the drawers for years - they just have to pull it out when the time seems fit.
This is squarely aimed against OSS and all it stands for. Desktop Linux hasn't caught on. Not yet. But PHP has. Like it or not, PHP has turned into the king of the server-side. MS must have noticed how much it's gnawing at ASPs marketshare (Just did a comment on that the other day). PHP even has turned into a brigdehead for Linux at this point. That they'd team up with Zend is an unexpected but somewhat fitting move. I've never really known what to make of Zend. Their PHP groundwork is fair enough, but all-in-all I allways was weary about what they're up to. Their entire Zend Plattform sheebang allways came across to me as somewhat suspicious. Could it be that MS tries to take on OSS via the popular OSS languages? Zend seems to be the right candidate and can - like everyone else - easyly be convinced by a fat wad of MS cash to fork of 90% of their time on 'optimizing' for MS. And we all know what that means.
In the end this can only turn out bad if MS stays with PHP. They are still way to powerfull and have to much mindshare to not overtake things. Joining a Linux shop would be suspicious and they'd give themselves away. Joining a big player of an OSS language though is something entirely different. Zend with PHP is the ideal candidate for such a move.
Right know that I've gone PHP fullscale they do a stunt like this. 'guess I'm gonna continue to keep my Python skills up-to-date aswell.... Just imagine the same crap as with Ecma JavaScript and MS JScript with OSS PHP and the "MS PHP Engine" or something. Give me the creeps just thinking of it.... Oh, and not to forget the RoRails zealots in the OSS camp. They're gonna have a field week ranting over PHP with this new ammunition. Just great. Thank you, MS, you made my day once again.
Is it just me or do other people also consider the WMP one of the shittiest pieces of Bundleware we still have to put up with? A bloated memory and performance hog, long outrun by it's free and shareware equivalents, a relic of the nineties with features bolted on left, right and center and a performance as bad as ever, despite computer power having increased ten-fold since back in the days. WinAmp and VLC could do things years ago that this sorry excuse of 'convienienceware' will ever be able to do. No?
Someone calling 'Java Web Programming' boring and PHP a fad. [sarcasm]Gee wizz, what kind of person could that be?[/sarcasm]
1) Neither Java or Webprogramming or both together are boring. It's jobs and projects that can be boring. If it isn't your thing, don't do it. And if the webstuff your doing in Java actually *is* boring, you might want to consider switching your framework? The current, somewhat justified hype is Rails but I'd actually suggest Symfony. Which, in second instance. is a PHP framework.
2) Sorry to be raining on your parade, but you're talking out of your ass. PHP isn't a fad. It was an Open Source SSI template solution that scratched an itch ten years back that could be solved satisfactory with Perl alone. Now it has grown to number two in the server side game, moping the floor with Cold Fusion, ASP and a few failed, sad and sorry attempts at consistent Java webframe projects. It's easy to learn, has by far the largest amount of very mature and successfull OSS webprojects and scares the living piss out of BEA, Intersystems and the occasional MS web plattform division.
PHP is a descendant of Perl and thus simularly crazy, no doubt - but calling it a fad puts you in the classic position of an anti-social, they're-all-holding-me-back Lisp/Ocaml/Eifel/[fill in rare academic PL here] crack that's actually best off *not* doing any stuff that requires frequent team interaction, such as - believe it or not - web projects. Ever considered doing exotic science stuff on large supercomputers or bio-IT or so? Chances are you'll feel like a bug in a rug in those fields.
Real world programming is about learning to cope with the restrictions of the real world, called load distribution, wacky and stone-age database concepts (you call PHP a fad but don't lose a word on SQL - how am I supposed to take your opinion for granted?), inconsistent and/or non-existing developement pipelines in dire need of updating, shoestring budgets and the occasional boss/client poping in and overthrowing everything. Programming and IT is about helping the people along, raising your boss/client to be aware of the needs of solid IT and it's resulting advantages and, in the end - believe it or not - acually delivering marketable results. All together makes up the skill of a good programmer. Pick your technology - whatever it may be it doesn't matter, only OSS may be a prerequisite - and get on with becoming one.
That's 2 cents from a client- and server-side web developer.
Globalization in IT is the 'better' Globalization - because it levels faster. A guy in india that has reliable broadband, a working development pipeline, good planning skills and team good enough to compensate for the spacial and timezone distance will ask about as much as I do (living in germany). The cost to maintain his infrastructure in india, is a about as much as mine here, allthough distributed differently. It's like I said earlier this year: I wouldn't panic to much. Globalisation is allmost once around the globe by now. It only takes so long for countries to arrive at a simular level as others. Especially when both are racing for the true bottom line. The ones from the top and the others from the bottom. Ten years ago Taiwan was the lowest bidder in the bicyce business. Now their luxury and the bikes are built in vietnam. Not before long Gary Fisher will have a team welding somewhere in the US again.
With IT and OSS it's all the same. Only does it happen a tad faster than everything else.
So this is gonna fuel the debate wether binary drivers are ok or not? WTF? Wether drivers are binary or not has absolutely *NOTHING* to do with wether there's an exploit or not. This is only gonna be abused by the 'all FOSS at all costs' faction. Linux and OSS owe a great deal of their success in recent years due to the all-out 100% fully official support of Linux by Nvidia. Knowing Nvidia they'll have a fix out at least as fast as any OSS project. Cut them some slack allready. It's not that everthing else in the Linux world has never had an exploit.
His name isn't tarnished at all. Not yet. He's been arrested. On circumstantial evidence. So what? As far as I can tell this really is no big deal in the US. Let's not forget this is the country that arrests 12 year olds and drags them before the judge in chains for losening their litttle sisters pants and sitting them on the pot. I'm sure many still remember that little swiss kid and the uproar the bizare american legal system caused throught the world when that happend. So, no, being arrested shouldn't be a big deal at all.
Back to Reiser: Innocent until proven guilty. Ring a bell? It should even still apply in the US at most times. Unless they find his wife dead and the evidence that he killed her his name shouldn't be tarnished a bit. She's probably just off and undercover with that other guy and will turn up in a week or two.
One would be: Storage on Linux, Playback on OS X - if you can automate it.
Otherwise I recommend getting someone from an OSS video project (mplayer, VLC, whatever) to come and do some work on the gaps you have. Non-compression playback would be one I'd guess. Aside from that it's just about CPU speed and data throughput. Which todays PCs are sufficient for.
Here's the deal: I'll give you support for Linux with KDE without Apps (besides KMail and Konqueror) but a totally bugged up version of Noatun and the KDE Clock. With nothing but Korn-Shell and ls as CLI tool. Which is about the equivalent of Win XP. For 10$ dollars including money-back guarantee if it doesn't work as advertised - that's more than you get from MS. Plus I'll charge you $2000 for Exim + Kollab and another $15000 for Zope when need arises. How does that sound for a good deal?
Anyway, to me it sounds like you're a troll. Go download Debian and call Progeny when you start scaling business into some strange requirements that standard Linux can't meet anymore. Whatever that's supposed to be. Dollars to Doughnuts you'll go cheaper by margins of magnatude than with MS or some Systemhouse. Good luck with running your business with the hodgepodge of solutions you named anyway. You sure you're into IT related stuff?
As a lead-maintainer / developer of a successfull open source project and a freelancer and company partner who focuses on OSS I have a three-part question:
1) How do I get to talk to someone like you? What would be the best approach?
2) What do you want to see from someone who approaches you? Neat, well formulated ideas? Implementations? Finished business plans? A running company? All four?
3) What bores you to death and what talks have you had with VC seekers that where a total waste of your time? What where the things they did wrong?
I allmost felt like ranting about Debian and their suposedly stupid policy, but then it came to mind:
1) Their probably right. The trademark is probably less free than debian requires.
2) Nobody chooses Debian over good looks or automatic visual consistency anyway. And those who do to customize their optical appearance of the Desktop use their own special themes anyway.
3) There's a reason why Ubuntu is so successfull and this is a staple case for that. It can only be better if both Debian and it's most successfull derivate distinguish from each other by emphasising "One Desktop only" or "We are super free and nothing else" policies.
There are parts I really do like about the german law system. For one, it's 'loser pays all'. Which means, if you're right, it's actually reasonable to defend yourself, even if it costs a little. And this also means that big entities can't just go around sueing everybody and everything to chunky kibbles. Because if they lose, they have to pay. Which even corporations can only afford that often. #2: Civil lawsuits over money have their amount also judged by the jury, which prevents insane amounts being sued over and keeps the legal-system-trolls in check. These are both 2 large downsides I'd actually change about the US legal system right away.
This is the typical machiavellian style corporate/political anouncement. They'll tune down a little on the real DRM just before release and then all the dumbass ords will say "No, they changed that. It's not that bad as you say. MS are nice people and they build cool stuff." In the end people will get screwed over.... and they'll probably approve.
You're either good technically or a good artist. Not both. That's the way it's always been.
Wrong. I'd even go so far and say you won't excel at either if your not good in the other. I'm a professional software developer and a multimedia designer with a diploma in arts. I'd say I'm quite good at both *and* I'm aware that both are hard work and I also know the difference between crappy programming and good programming and the difference between crappy design and good design.
The problem with being at home in both areas is that you have to force yourself on one field of expertise at a time. Right now I'm doing a project where I only do the programming side. It's wonderfull having a designer do the neat looking stuff at the frontend without me having to worry zilch about it. Especially if he's doing a good job - which he is. Not having to explain to fellow programmers that it's important that your webappp doesn't look like shit is a big bonus aswell. The other way around, the desinger doesn't know very much about programming, so I have to tell him that mixing template stuff with haphazard logic the templates provide is a bad idea - and he doesn't get it all the time. Which can be anoying.
Again, it's difficult to handle both areas at once, but in the long run you come out on top, no matter what field you focus on. MM Designers who don't know programming are a pain in the upper leagues and so are programmers who don't know nothing about design. Steve Jobs is a good example of a guy who knows his way around technical stuff and pretty design quite well. And AFAICT he's getting along.
Email is a service that's older than the internet. It's a hodgepodge of crummy protocolls bolted on oneanother throughout the years, spoiled by a bunch of incompliant clients and their interpretation of how email is supposed to look. 4 standards of encryption and millions of people who think the way outlook breaks email is ok. There is no way that email will ever get repaired. It would be best if email would die on the spot and be replaced by a strictly enforced open standard with integrated threading, seperation of content, logic and presentation, unbreakable, meta-data based quoteing and forced encryption. I'd give a three-digit sum of money for that to happen.
I think it's a mediocre app compared to the rest. But I also consider your little post somewhat idiotic. I've used OS 8 and 9 and they sucked. I thought: "Smart move." when Apple/Steve Jobs switched to Unix. And I'm now using Mac because OS X has matured, I've got zero hardware and GUI fuss with full-blown, out-of-the-box OSS integration, zero security problems and I don't have to deal with Idiots. Because either they are very smart and acknowledge that OS X has something going for it and has a special place in everyones heart in the *nix community or they are just plain users who say "I know nothing 'bout computers I just want to use it and Windows crashes too often and generally looks and behaves like crap, Ipod rocks and I-Chat is cute and the Mac Mini looks like a computers supposed to nowadays and not like a trashcan from the early nineties."
All in all very nice people to deal with and the girls quota isn't to bad either. Better than with my second OS, Linux, anyway. And no matter what, they usuall don't have the significant lack of social skills the one or other Linux geek displays. As for the lack of Idiots in the User Demographics of Mac OS X, you appear to maybe be an exception to the rule. You sure you don't wanna have a look at WinXP? You might like it.:-)
jEdit (www.jedit.org) - best editor in existance, unmatched functionality Dreamweaver 8 (on OS X) DW is an outdated way to do things, but it still is very powerfull Quanta (Quanta Gold for Win or OS X - > http://www.thekompany.com/products/quanta/; Quanta Plus for Linux -> http://quanta.kdewebdev.org/) PHPEclipse (has anoyances but very good PHP tools)
For a redo of that old site of yours I recommend simply installing a CMS and migrating the content by hand if neccesary. That's probably faster and more effective than anything else. Static HTML just isn't the way to go these days, which eliminates most of the need for a large-type HTML editor. Check out joomla! (www.joomla.org)
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I know a lead modder of the Star Wars Movie Battles mod. He is 22 and better at game stuff than most of us could ever be. All he'd need is a CS, since he rocks at project management (naturally) and sucks at programming.
Dealing with the game industry tools you can teach yourself. Since the piplelines change twice a year that's a good idea anyway. A regular 'boring' CS teaches you the basics. What the heck is a Game Design degree anyway? We have these here in germany aswell. Sound mostly like snake oil to me.
Errrm, No.
All whos been dividing the last few years was Novell. And all that they where dividing were themselves. The marketing and branding mess they've been pulling off the last 24 months including the inability to fire up the SuSE factor give of a sad impression. If there is one ally we want MS to have it's the current Novell. Sad that is, but true.
I like both WW and CCP. WW basically brought avantgarde RPG Gaming into US american mainstream and finally established a standing alternative to the ancient (A)D&D crap (I don't like (A)D&D ;-) ), and CCP has a neat MMORPG title on their hands.
I do believe a well-minted 'Exalted Online' could be a competitor to WoW. I don't know if CCP can pull it off though. Spaceships and Planets are easy compared to a MMORPG like WoW. I'd be happier if WW had teamed up with Arenanet and their GuildWars line. A GuildWars MMORPG based on Exalted would totally kick ass and would be fitting aswell.
Then again they could combine the Trinity/Aeon Universe with Eve - which would rock just as much I suppose. Nice prospects indeed.
Wouldn't this have been the better way: /. Perl crack probably can do this in 5 minutes)
... Then again, if someone didn't do his homework and slashcode is a messy hack, this could be troublesome.
1) Inmediate hack-patch at runtime: Add column or extra 1:1 table, whichevers faster,
2) add super-quick hack that adds a new index beyond 2^24. (some
3) Add third column, migrate/merge/rebuild new index at runtime
4) Switch to new index
5) remove old code and columns 1&2 after correct functionality is confirmed
Most People probably wouldn't even have noticed.
PHP is a descendent of Perl - it was originally programmed in Perl to extend Perl with templating functionality. That's long ago, but it still shows in the overall quirkyness of PHP wich is of a simular 'flavour'.
... I'd actually recommend looking at Python aswell (my personal favourite), but that's not what you asked for. ;-)
That been said, PHP has by far the largest set of available tools to help you do big projects of any web-oriented PL. Tons of commercial and/or OSS IDEs (PHPEclipse - especially the easyeclipse distribution - is awesome for a free tool), Debuggers, etc. It's pratically maried to MySQL (tons of tools aswell) and half of googles database is filled with PHP tutorials and forum threads on common PHP/MySQL gotchas.
If you want to do web stuff and unless you're in on some super complex parsing and data migration problem I'd strongly recommend PHP. If you're doing serial data-migration and plan on heavy use of Regular Expressions to solve your problem or have some other exotic procedural problem to solve that doesn't involve building a webapp, I'd suggest Perl over PHP.
If they actually got smart, it could be to late. 4 years ago they could've switched to Linux and everybody would've thought 'they bought Linux'. Vista could've easyly been something like an extreme Linux Distribution. Now it's to late I suspect. .Net and Active Directory as the successor to Vista. I recall Balmer actually sweet-talking about Linux a few years ago (before the 'commieware' thing) and just critisizing that they should get they're 'Desktops' under one roof.
Then again, Vista probably is the last old-school OS from MS. Unix has won. Nothing cheaper than pushing a Linux Distro with a custom Direct X 10 layer,
MS probably has had a distro in the drawers for years - they just have to pull it out when the time seems fit.
This is squarely aimed against OSS and all it stands for.
... Just imagine the same crap as with Ecma JavaScript and MS JScript with OSS PHP and the "MS PHP Engine" or something. Give me the creeps just thinking of it. ... Oh, and not to forget the RoRails zealots in the OSS camp. They're gonna have a field week ranting over PHP with this new ammunition. Just great.
Desktop Linux hasn't caught on. Not yet. But PHP has. Like it or not, PHP has turned into the king of the server-side. MS must have noticed how much it's gnawing at ASPs marketshare (Just did a comment on that the other day). PHP even has turned into a brigdehead for Linux at this point. That they'd team up with Zend is an unexpected but somewhat fitting move.
I've never really known what to make of Zend. Their PHP groundwork is fair enough, but all-in-all I allways was weary about what they're up to. Their entire Zend Plattform sheebang allways came across to me as somewhat suspicious. Could it be that MS tries to take on OSS via the popular OSS languages? Zend seems to be the right candidate and can - like everyone else - easyly be convinced by a fat wad of MS cash to fork of 90% of their time on 'optimizing' for MS. And we all know what that means.
In the end this can only turn out bad if MS stays with PHP. They are still way to powerfull and have to much mindshare to not overtake things. Joining a Linux shop would be suspicious and they'd give themselves away. Joining a big player of an OSS language though is something entirely different. Zend with PHP is the ideal candidate for such a move.
Right know that I've gone PHP fullscale they do a stunt like this. 'guess I'm gonna continue to keep my Python skills up-to-date aswell.
Thank you, MS, you made my day once again.
Is it just me or do other people also consider the WMP one of the shittiest pieces of Bundleware we still have to put up with? A bloated memory and performance hog, long outrun by it's free and shareware equivalents, a relic of the nineties with features bolted on left, right and center and a performance as bad as ever, despite computer power having increased ten-fold since back in the days.
WinAmp and VLC could do things years ago that this sorry excuse of 'convienienceware' will ever be able to do. No?
Someone calling 'Java Web Programming' boring and PHP a fad. [sarcasm]Gee wizz, what kind of person could that be?[/sarcasm]
1) Neither Java or Webprogramming or both together are boring. It's jobs and projects that can be boring. If it isn't your thing, don't do it. And if the webstuff your doing in Java actually *is* boring, you might want to consider switching your framework? The current, somewhat justified hype is Rails but I'd actually suggest Symfony. Which, in second instance. is a PHP framework.
2) Sorry to be raining on your parade, but you're talking out of your ass. PHP isn't a fad. It was an Open Source SSI template solution that scratched an itch ten years back that could be solved satisfactory with Perl alone. Now it has grown to number two in the server side game, moping the floor with Cold Fusion, ASP and a few failed, sad and sorry attempts at consistent Java webframe projects. It's easy to learn, has by far the largest amount of very mature and successfull OSS webprojects and scares the living piss out of BEA, Intersystems and the occasional MS web plattform division.
PHP is a descendant of Perl and thus simularly crazy, no doubt - but calling it a fad puts you in the classic position of an anti-social, they're-all-holding-me-back Lisp/Ocaml/Eifel/[fill in rare academic PL here] crack that's actually best off *not* doing any stuff that requires frequent team interaction, such as - believe it or not - web projects. Ever considered doing exotic science stuff on large supercomputers or bio-IT or so? Chances are you'll feel like a bug in a rug in those fields.
Real world programming is about learning to cope with the restrictions of the real world, called load distribution, wacky and stone-age database concepts (you call PHP a fad but don't lose a word on SQL - how am I supposed to take your opinion for granted?), inconsistent and/or non-existing developement pipelines in dire need of updating, shoestring budgets and the occasional boss/client poping in and overthrowing everything. Programming and IT is about helping the people along, raising your boss/client to be aware of the needs of solid IT and it's resulting advantages and, in the end - believe it or not - acually delivering marketable results. All together makes up the skill of a good programmer. Pick your technology - whatever it may be it doesn't matter, only OSS may be a prerequisite - and get on with becoming one.
That's 2 cents from a client- and server-side web developer.
Globalization in IT is the 'better' Globalization - because it levels faster. A guy in india that has reliable broadband, a working development pipeline, good planning skills and team good enough to compensate for the spacial and timezone distance will ask about as much as I do (living in germany). The cost to maintain his infrastructure in india, is a about as much as mine here, allthough distributed differently.
It's like I said earlier this year: I wouldn't panic to much. Globalisation is allmost once around the globe by now. It only takes so long for countries to arrive at a simular level as others. Especially when both are racing for the true bottom line. The ones from the top and the others from the bottom. Ten years ago Taiwan was the lowest bidder in the bicyce business. Now their luxury and the bikes are built in vietnam. Not before long Gary Fisher will have a team welding somewhere in the US again.
With IT and OSS it's all the same. Only does it happen a tad faster than everything else.
So this is gonna fuel the debate wether binary drivers are ok or not? WTF? Wether drivers are binary or not has absolutely *NOTHING* to do with wether there's an exploit or not. This is only gonna be abused by the 'all FOSS at all costs' faction. Linux and OSS owe a great deal of their success in recent years due to the all-out 100% fully official support of Linux by Nvidia. Knowing Nvidia they'll have a fix out at least as fast as any OSS project. Cut them some slack allready. It's not that everthing else in the Linux world has never had an exploit.
His name isn't tarnished at all. Not yet. He's been arrested. On circumstantial evidence. So what?
As far as I can tell this really is no big deal in the US. Let's not forget this is the country that arrests 12 year olds and drags them before the judge in chains for losening their litttle sisters pants and sitting them on the pot. I'm sure many still remember that little swiss kid and the uproar the bizare american legal system caused throught the world when that happend. So, no, being arrested shouldn't be a big deal at all.
Back to Reiser: Innocent until proven guilty. Ring a bell? It should even still apply in the US at most times. Unless they find his wife dead and the evidence that he killed her his name shouldn't be tarnished a bit. She's probably just off and undercover with that other guy and will turn up in a week or two.
One would be: Storage on Linux, Playback on OS X - if you can automate it.
Otherwise I recommend getting someone from an OSS video project (mplayer, VLC, whatever) to come and do some work on the gaps you have. Non-compression playback would be one I'd guess. Aside from that it's just about CPU speed and data throughput. Which todays PCs are sufficient for.
Here's the deal: I'll give you support for Linux with KDE without Apps (besides KMail and Konqueror) but a totally bugged up version of Noatun and the KDE Clock. With nothing but Korn-Shell and ls as CLI tool. Which is about the equivalent of Win XP. For 10$ dollars including money-back guarantee if it doesn't work as advertised - that's more than you get from MS. Plus I'll charge you $2000 for Exim + Kollab and another $15000 for Zope when need arises. How does that sound for a good deal?
Anyway, to me it sounds like you're a troll. Go download Debian and call Progeny when you start scaling business into some strange requirements that standard Linux can't meet anymore. Whatever that's supposed to be. Dollars to Doughnuts you'll go cheaper by margins of magnatude than with MS or some Systemhouse. Good luck with running your business with the hodgepodge of solutions you named anyway. You sure you're into IT related stuff?
.. Eeeuuw. Sorry about the spelling.
As a lead-maintainer / developer of a successfull open source project and a freelancer and company partner who focuses on OSS I have a three-part question:
1) How do I get to talk to someone like you? What would be the best approach?
2) What do you want to see from someone who approaches you? Neat, well formulated ideas? Implementations? Finished business plans? A running company? All four?
3) What bores you to death and what talks have you had with VC seekers that where a total waste of your time? What where the things they did wrong?
I allmost felt like ranting about Debian and their suposedly stupid policy, but then it came to mind:
1) Their probably right. The trademark is probably less free than debian requires.
2) Nobody chooses Debian over good looks or automatic visual consistency anyway. And those who do to customize their optical appearance of the Desktop use their own special themes anyway.
3) There's a reason why Ubuntu is so successfull and this is a staple case for that. It can only be better if both Debian and it's most successfull derivate distinguish from each other by emphasising "One Desktop only" or "We are super free and nothing else" policies.
This is Good News.
There are parts I really do like about the german law system. For one, it's 'loser pays all'. Which means, if you're right, it's actually reasonable to defend yourself, even if it costs a little. And this also means that big entities can't just go around sueing everybody and everything to chunky kibbles. Because if they lose, they have to pay. Which even corporations can only afford that often.
#2: Civil lawsuits over money have their amount also judged by the jury, which prevents insane amounts being sued over and keeps the legal-system-trolls in check.
These are both 2 large downsides I'd actually change about the US legal system right away.
Wenn Sie verbrechen die GPL in der deutschen Landen von Germania dann Sie werden begotten sue der living daylighten out of you sorry ass. Jawohl!
(Hopefully funny for german and english speaking people alike)
This is the typical machiavellian style corporate/political anouncement. They'll tune down a little on the real DRM just before release and then all the dumbass ords will say "No, they changed that. It's not that bad as you say. MS are nice people and they build cool stuff." In the end people will get screwed over .... and they'll probably approve.
Welcome to the world of cyberpunk.
You're either good technically or a good artist. Not both. That's the way it's always been.
Wrong.
I'd even go so far and say you won't excel at either if your not good in the other. I'm a professional software developer and a multimedia designer with a diploma in arts. I'd say I'm quite good at both *and* I'm aware that both are hard work and I also know the difference between crappy programming and good programming and the difference between crappy design and good design.
The problem with being at home in both areas is that you have to force yourself on one field of expertise at a time. Right now I'm doing a project where I only do the programming side. It's wonderfull having a designer do the neat looking stuff at the frontend without me having to worry zilch about it. Especially if he's doing a good job - which he is. Not having to explain to fellow programmers that it's important that your webappp doesn't look like shit is a big bonus aswell. The other way around, the desinger doesn't know very much about programming, so I have to tell him that mixing template stuff with haphazard logic the templates provide is a bad idea - and he doesn't get it all the time. Which can be anoying.
Again, it's difficult to handle both areas at once, but in the long run you come out on top, no matter what field you focus on. MM Designers who don't know programming are a pain in the upper leagues and so are programmers who don't know nothing about design. Steve Jobs is a good example of a guy who knows his way around technical stuff and pretty design quite well. And AFAICT he's getting along.
Email is a service that's older than the internet. It's a hodgepodge of crummy protocolls bolted on oneanother throughout the years, spoiled by a bunch of incompliant clients and their interpretation of how email is supposed to look. 4 standards of encryption and millions of people who think the way outlook breaks email is ok. There is no way that email will ever get repaired. It would be best if email would die on the spot and be replaced by a strictly enforced open standard with integrated threading, seperation of content, logic and presentation, unbreakable, meta-data based quoteing and forced encryption. I'd give a three-digit sum of money for that to happen.
Get an iMac or a Mac Mini and set it up to run in Kiosk mode.
Cheap, Zero fuss, available anywhere and it's cool.
thinks Firefox is a good Mac app...
:-)
I think it's a mediocre app compared to the rest. But I also consider your little post somewhat idiotic. I've used OS 8 and 9 and they sucked. I thought: "Smart move." when Apple/Steve Jobs switched to Unix. And I'm now using Mac because OS X has matured, I've got zero hardware and GUI fuss with full-blown, out-of-the-box OSS integration, zero security problems and I don't have to deal with Idiots. Because either they are very smart and acknowledge that OS X has something going for it and has a special place in everyones heart in the *nix community or they are just plain users who say "I know nothing 'bout computers I just want to use it and Windows crashes too often and generally looks and behaves like crap, Ipod rocks and I-Chat is cute and the Mac Mini looks like a computers supposed to nowadays and not like a trashcan from the early nineties."
All in all very nice people to deal with and the girls quota isn't to bad either. Better than with my second OS, Linux, anyway. And no matter what, they usuall don't have the significant lack of social skills the one or other Linux geek displays.
As for the lack of Idiots in the User Demographics of Mac OS X, you appear to maybe be an exception to the rule.
You sure you don't wanna have a look at WinXP? You might like it.
jEdit (www.jedit.org) - best editor in existance, unmatched functionality
Dreamweaver 8 (on OS X) DW is an outdated way to do things, but it still is very powerfull
Quanta (Quanta Gold for Win or OS X - > http://www.thekompany.com/products/quanta/; Quanta Plus for Linux -> http://quanta.kdewebdev.org/)
PHPEclipse (has anoyances but very good PHP tools)
For a redo of that old site of yours I recommend simply installing a CMS and migrating the content by hand if neccesary. That's probably faster and more effective than anything else. Static HTML just isn't the way to go these days, which eliminates most of the need for a large-type HTML editor. Check out joomla! (www.joomla.org)