Whoa there Feng Shui. I'm of the school that says work shouldn't resemble a polsci frat house picnic. Once you start getting above a bare minimum of ammenities, you get into the realm of goofing off. Work should be fun, but that doesn't mean it should be massages and comfort food. A lot of the work involved with computers can be avoided by making a well informed decision with a level head, which is trumped when addled by sugar and caffeine.
In fact, we've got a guy who, just like you, stocks his area with goodies in an attempt to produce more. He bangs away at his keyboard from 9 to 5, then finds himself here on the weekends when his spaghetti code turns out to be undercooked.
Seriously. I get most of my work done after everybody leaves...nobody shooting the sh_t or asking me questions or for status reports. There's an emotion around here that open floors equate productivity, but that's just not true...I get more done the hour after the boss walks out than I do in an entire day of his polling and sneaking.
Speaking of which, this post is cutting into that time...gonna make it short.
Stock for Fox broadcasting's parent company, NewsCorp, is down 20% on speculation it won't be able to use "World's Stupidest Car Chases" to fill in for the next witty, original show that they cancel due to poor marketting.
The other day on cdnow I noticed, whilst perusing the new "arsonists" disc, that I could down some "CD Quality" MP3s. I was quite excited.
Then I noticed that each track would cost me $1.60. Whoa man -- that's more expensive than a can of pringles, and for one song. Ten second skits and intros cost the same. All told, to download the whole album would have cost me 12x$1.60 = 19.2$, for an album that cost $16 to buy and ship.
And their definition of "CD Quality" is 128bit. I'm not sure if you're aware of the arsonists, but they're a hip hop group that relies heavily on vocal texture -- they may have three of four guys rapping behind the main guy, as well as a thick beat and a nice, crisp loop.
Hopping on half.com, I noticed I could buy the disc & ship it for $10. The artists make no money, but I save $9 from the mp3 solution.
Cost effectiveness is the key...i worked out that on my hosting service ($10 per month for 1 gig, www.webslum.net, we love you), a 5 gig MP3 download costs the host $.05. And that's after our service markup! An artist selling that track for $.20 is making a profit of $.15 per download, close to $2 per album.
Really? Well, I got this virus the another night that was intentionally installed along with KaZaa. The virus watches every packet I send across the internet and reports it back to the hackers that control it.
Some people call it "ad ware" or "annoyance ware," but since I didn't want it, it reduces the effectiveness of my PC, and I wasn't alerted to its presence, I consider it a virus.
Can I sue the manufacturers for damages?
Re:This is an important issue.....
on
No-click Mouse?
·
· Score: 1
In Windows, you can use the space bar and the tab key. Does linux support this paradigm?
Plenty...if you design an OS whose paradigm isn't precise action but instead precise movement. It would require a bit more training, but could be very useful. I've written some apps for Win CE with a constant tap philosophy -- once the stylus hits the pad, it's movement of the stylus that alters menus and commands, rather than the tap itself. A guy even wrote a keyboard that works this way, and it's pretty quick once you get use to the paradigm...i was faster with that than I am with Fitaly.
Also, nothing says you can't rely on synnergy between keyboard and mouse to drive commands. I play a lot of FPS like this -- use the moust as a targetting device but control everything else with the other hand. That way the pressure of a finger on the trigger won't mess up motion.
In other news, bars and clubs are coming under fire for being havens for drunks, deviants and criminals. Churches are coming under fire because we need to protect our kids from secual deviants using the lord's work to help them out. Universities and libraries are known hide outs for communists, terrorists and dangerous foreign nationals called "graduate students." Shopping malls and "high schools" are breeding grounds for gangs of teenagers associated through shocking dress, style and manors of speech that are anathem to the status quo; these kids want to shake things up in deadly new ways. Department stores are selling guns, cigarettes, alcohol and dangerous narcotics such as aspirin and caffeine. Oh, and private homes -- which are difficult to monitor due to laws designed to protect criminals and prevent beneficial government employees from knowing what's really going on -- are the worst of all. People are torturing kids, raising deadly animals and polishing guns, ready to start a revolution against your great american goverment.
And I don't totally trust this "Applebees" restaurant chain, neither. John Birch says they're pinkos.
What a dumb thing to say -- any requirement you make for Open Source will be totally ignored by a good segment of the population no matter how good an idea it is. You can't make demands of a free community simply because much of the population are idiots. It's those idiots losing their jobs when the servers become infested with hackers that is going to teach them to update their software. Putting in artificial expiry dates only leaves another worthless feature to debug.
Expiry is for shareware...open source's trademark is its install once, run forever (for most applications) reputation. And for machines properly behind firewalls, this reputation is justified, even with the holes. Who is going to be rooting the print server at our church with no internet access.
Seriously, when is somebody gonna prosecute one of these nefarious "free" software companies for attaching rider code with no easy way to remove it? Isn't this a virus, same as iloveyou or anna, attaching itself to something people want to download/lookat and exposing their computers to the world?
Sure, maybe the distributed client has more of a sandbox security model than your average virus. But these are not nice guy brilliant cowboy poet programmers riding into the sunset...they're wagemages forced to design an application to annoy people. Their hearts probably weren't in it. The code is probably full of buffers to overflow and apis to exploit. And since this code arrives along with an app people enjoy, it'll go right past their normal email wariness and antivirus paranoia.
Yes, it is a very useful metric. It is also very old -- sufficiently old to be considered historical and therefore having little bearing on the current status of the net. Furthermore, a decrease over one year does not a trend make.
Am I the only one who considers a drop in usage from two years ago to one year ago to be somewhat useless today?
First off, forgetting even that the trend is a year old, and that that amounts to a whopping 10% of the internet's life (and something like half its life in the popular vein), the internet of 2000 was vastly different from the internet of 2001. Search engines and "best of breed" info sites had gotten smarter. If you don't have to search as hard, you don't spend as much time. Natch.
Second: since the internet has continued to evolve into 2002, we find that these numbers probably have less bearing than ever before. There is no longer as big of a problem with getting online, in part thanks to broadband and the prevalence of huge modem arrays at the biggest ISPs, but also because machines are generally left logged in. If you don't need to set aside all your internet time at once. Furthermore, the sites visited now are different sites than a year ago; many of the old big'uns are gone, and there are new big'uns in their place. Not to mention that a lot of browser time is being eaten up deleting spam and searching kazaa.
In the end, a metric from a year ago is the most useless thing the internet can have -- so useless that the Times should be embarrassed that they wasted newsprint that could have held a hawt Donna Karran ad with this piece of trash article. The internet, which has become like language and culture in that it is a tremulous, uncertain entity that can only be defined in snapshots, craves instant data. It needs the archive.orgs and Jupiter mm's of the world to tell us what's really going on at the moment...not what was going on at this moment last year.
Might as well tell us what heiroglyphic porn sites the Pharoahs visited, or Judas Iscariot's favorite message board on Freenet.
Maybe I shouldn't have had all those lunchbeers...
Are totally worthless. How many of them have a small clause at the bottom that says "this statement is not a guarantee, we reserve the right to change our minds and alter it at any time without telling you." How many simply say, in fancy legal language, "yeah we're still gonna sell everybody your email address, but it's private. like, we won't tell people on the street without them paying us first."
The only real privacy on the internet is the privacy we give ourselves through subterfuge, care, and lying outright.
Iomega is the worst. When they drop a product, they DROP a PRODUCT. I bought a Buz multimedia box back in 1997 and was very impressed -- excepti with the fact that it wouldn't work with my k6-2. Their answer? "Buy a pentium class system." So I did, you know. The card performed like a DC-30+ for half the cost and i needed a new machine anyway. I bought a dual p2. The card worked -- but not in NT, which is the OS i was using (so the second chip wouldn't just heat the room). The answer? "We'll have drivers with NT 5.0"
They dropped the product in 1999 for poor driver support -- before win2k came out -- and suspended work on their drivers. Come to find that their drivers had just matured, and the beta "1.3" drivers for win9x were just awesome. There were NT 4.0 drivers, too -- that nobody had except reviewers under three levels of NDA.
Now, this card is my only SCSI driver. It is useless in 2k, Me, XP...and I've undertaken the task of converting the linux drivers, which work amazingly well, into 2k drivers. It's a pet project that is absolutelyu meaningless because the DC-30+ can be found for a few hundred right now. But I am so pissed at Iomega's disrespect for their customer base that I long to see the now cheap "Buz SCSI card" installed in media labs across the country. It would serve them right for killing a great product with dumb management.
Well, technically the worst is optical video. Any intelligent audio guy will tell you coax is better for digital...you lose no data, whereas optical drops it all the time. Optical cable crimps easily and is full of imperfections. And yet, units with optical digital out are prized by purchasers and touted by the 8 buck an hour "experts."
This is why it's essential that you find a store you can trust before buying audio components. I test mine by asking them their opinions of the new Bose stuff (utter crap with cheap paper cones that tear and sound quite soggy when compared with speakers half their cost). If they try to pass it off as TOL, I leave. If they show me a set of Tannoys, Energies or Paradigms and mention how they are larger but outperform the Bose in every respect (especially price), I feel I can trust them.
It also helps if they don't tell you everything you look at "is the last one I got and a guy was just in here looking at it." The guy who sold me my receiver and first set of eXL-16s did that to me, and though I bought the stuff anyway I really resented it.
Oh, and the dumbest thing ever? Gold plated optical connectors. I confound you all to find a single use for reflective gold plating on the outside of a plastic fiber that channels a laserbeam that never comes close to the gold plating.
At the same time, these sales idiots can really help out a floundering company.
Don't know what your direction is? Well, who's the one talking to the people who make decisions at the companies making contracts with you? The sales guy knows what your customers want to hear your product does...so you might as well just make it do it.
Of course, development of this type is totally unsupportable and encoruages the worst design imaginable. But it keeps you in business to strike with a really great product when you finally figure out what it is you want to do.
I for one am glad that GNOME is finally moving into the realm of modern GUIs. Yes, maybe modern is synonymous with slow, but it's also synonymous with features.
If linux is going to make it on the desktop, it's gonna have to match closed sources OSs on a feature for feature basis. This means it has to have a level of feature bloat similar to windows -- and therefore similar compilation times.
I don't cry for those with slower machines "in parts of the world where fast machines are unavailable" (BS, by the way -- my friend in Bangladesh has a better machine than I do, and his family's yearly income is less than my weekly). They still have options: GNOME 1.x, for example. This is Linux, man, there's no need to upgrade if what you have now is working. Sure, the new toys would be great...but if the choice is Windows 3.11 or GNOME 1.x, you're still better off petting the penguin.
Untrue. Cold fusion is NOT as good as the developer that writes it...CF was my first "production" language and I have exceeded its capacity on numerous occasions. There is a point past which ColdFusion will not optimize, cannot keep up, gets buried under requests, and it's a significantly lower point than ASP or JSP/Servlets get bogged down.
We wrote the same simple i/o algorithm -- extract rows from a database and loop across them to output a table -- in practically a dozen different ways in three different languages beneath IIS, and the CF implementations (CF using a CFX tag, CF using cfquery/Cfloop, CF using a cfscript to loop and call writeoutput()) were all slower than even ASP. A servlet with a pooled connection and a persistant bean was fastest, but this is almost cheating.
We did extensive testing and have on numerous occasions sworn that we wouldn't accept ColdFusion anymore now that all the developers here know ASP and COM (all the CF only people are gone). And you know what? Despite the inefficiency and poor scalability we've noticed (which, I'll concede, is due in part to that fact that some parts of the application were not planned or coded correctly), we still do all new development in CF. It's just faster to get done because the syntax is easier and working with display is more like HTML than JSP or ASP. It's more natural.
In summary: I disagree, the lanugage does suck, but I love it. Hell, it's paying for my house!
You use ColdFusion. This language is a mess -- it's slow, expensive and embarassing to work with. It's also very easy to understand, which is why it's well worth the cost, sloth, and total lack of knowledgable people.
I came into a codebase of about 5000 cf pages. Only two of the original developers are still with my company. There is no documentation and these were not good programmers -- my portion of the application was by and large coded offsite by amateurs. And at the same time, I have never really been halted in my work by the unavailability of documentation. Hindered, maybe -- slowed a bit, especially during a set of endless includes. But never halted.
ColdFusion is a mess to program complex things in. Cfscript is apocryphal and best replaced by simple COM and Java modules that do the same thing faster and in a much more understandable fashion. What you're left with is a base of very simple, readable code that's actually spoiled by documentation. (those <!--- tags are murder)
Oh yeah: name your variables wisely. That's the key to ColdFusion
The other problem with not commenting your work is that you can never leave. And you will want to, eventually...no job is so good that it will always cover your every social, mental and fiscal need.
We lost a developer to a non profit and have to make about 5 hours worth of contract calls to him per week. He has to take them, otherwise he'd get terrible references from us, and we have to make them because nobody can understand what it was he wrote.
Great, thick, many lined code. Totally procedural, totally in-the-now. It is my job to go through it and automate a lot of the silly manual processes that seemed less silly in 1999, and it is daunting as these 4 and 5 hour calls that interrupt him from his real job result in increasing hostility.
So yes, comments may save your job...they make also save you time in the long run.
Interesting theory. But let us say for a minute that it is four years in the future. I work for AdSpam.shop (new.net having taken over the entire tld game because their software was installed along with version six of the anna virus). I create a program for desktop linux for Napster2.com, a nice little mp3 search engine. I make it available as an RPM, use shared libraries, and my manifest won't overwrite anything. It's signed as Napster2.com, which you trust because they're napster and why should they lie or steal from anybody.
But: I've attached a rider to the binary executable (hoho!). It's not compiled with the same source code as the shared source cpp files that accompany the rest of the package. The rider does a whole shitload of things to your computer that you never knew about.
But you're safe, aren't ya? Because you have the source code and the signed rpm and you read the manifest.
The only safety a computer user has is frequent backups and trustworthy information. This is how I can run unpatched Windows 2000 for years with linux-esque uptime scores -- I never install anything from any company or any freeware developer until it's mature and analyzed enough to be leak and spy free.
I'm paranoid, connected and brilliant. It's the only way to live.
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Whoa there Feng Shui. I'm of the school that says work shouldn't resemble a polsci frat house picnic. Once you start getting above a bare minimum of ammenities, you get into the realm of goofing off. Work should be fun, but that doesn't mean it should be massages and comfort food. A lot of the work involved with computers can be avoided by making a well informed decision with a level head, which is trumped when addled by sugar and caffeine.
In fact, we've got a guy who, just like you, stocks his area with goodies in an attempt to produce more. He bangs away at his keyboard from 9 to 5, then finds himself here on the weekends when his spaghetti code turns out to be undercooked.
Don't do what Donnie Don't does.
...is sometime after 5.
Seriously. I get most of my work done after everybody leaves...nobody shooting the sh_t or asking me questions or for status reports. There's an emotion around here that open floors equate productivity, but that's just not true...I get more done the hour after the boss walks out than I do in an entire day of his polling and sneaking.
Speaking of which, this post is cutting into that time...gonna make it short.
Stock for Fox broadcasting's parent company, NewsCorp, is down 20% on speculation it won't be able to use "World's Stupidest Car Chases" to fill in for the next witty, original show that they cancel due to poor marketting.
er that's a 5 MEG mp3 download. Remember the preview button, children!
The other day on cdnow I noticed, whilst perusing the new "arsonists" disc, that I could down some "CD Quality" MP3s. I was quite excited.
Then I noticed that each track would cost me $1.60. Whoa man -- that's more expensive than a can of pringles, and for one song. Ten second skits and intros cost the same. All told, to download the whole album would have cost me 12x$1.60 = 19.2$, for an album that cost $16 to buy and ship.
And their definition of "CD Quality" is 128bit. I'm not sure if you're aware of the arsonists, but they're a hip hop group that relies heavily on vocal texture -- they may have three of four guys rapping behind the main guy, as well as a thick beat and a nice, crisp loop.
Hopping on half.com, I noticed I could buy the disc & ship it for $10. The artists make no money, but I save $9 from the mp3 solution.
Cost effectiveness is the key...i worked out that on my hosting service ($10 per month for 1 gig, www.webslum.net, we love you), a 5 gig MP3 download costs the host $.05. And that's after our service markup! An artist selling that track for $.20 is making a profit of $.15 per download, close to $2 per album.
Really? Well, I got this virus the another night that was intentionally installed along with KaZaa. The virus watches every packet I send across the internet and reports it back to the hackers that control it.
Some people call it "ad ware" or "annoyance ware," but since I didn't want it, it reduces the effectiveness of my PC, and I wasn't alerted to its presence, I consider it a virus.
Can I sue the manufacturers for damages?
In Windows, you can use the space bar and the tab key. Does linux support this paradigm?
Plenty...if you design an OS whose paradigm isn't precise action but instead precise movement. It would require a bit more training, but could be very useful. I've written some apps for Win CE with a constant tap philosophy -- once the stylus hits the pad, it's movement of the stylus that alters menus and commands, rather than the tap itself. A guy even wrote a keyboard that works this way, and it's pretty quick once you get use to the paradigm...i was faster with that than I am with Fitaly.
Also, nothing says you can't rely on synnergy between keyboard and mouse to drive commands. I play a lot of FPS like this -- use the moust as a targetting device but control everything else with the other hand. That way the pressure of a finger on the trigger won't mess up motion.
In other news, bars and clubs are coming under fire for being havens for drunks, deviants and criminals. Churches are coming under fire because we need to protect our kids from secual deviants using the lord's work to help them out. Universities and libraries are known hide outs for communists, terrorists and dangerous foreign nationals called "graduate students." Shopping malls and "high schools" are breeding grounds for gangs of teenagers associated through shocking dress, style and manors of speech that are anathem to the status quo; these kids want to shake things up in deadly new ways. Department stores are selling guns, cigarettes, alcohol and dangerous narcotics such as aspirin and caffeine. Oh, and private homes -- which are difficult to monitor due to laws designed to protect criminals and prevent beneficial government employees from knowing what's really going on -- are the worst of all. People are torturing kids, raising deadly animals and polishing guns, ready to start a revolution against your great american goverment.
And I don't totally trust this "Applebees" restaurant chain, neither. John Birch says they're pinkos.
Now, how much processor time do they need to help the e-terminators to protect e-John Conner from the e-Robot Holocaust?
Or prevent e-David Banner from turning into the e-Hulk?
What a dumb thing to say -- any requirement you make for Open Source will be totally ignored by a good segment of the population no matter how good an idea it is. You can't make demands of a free community simply because much of the population are idiots. It's those idiots losing their jobs when the servers become infested with hackers that is going to teach them to update their software. Putting in artificial expiry dates only leaves another worthless feature to debug.
Expiry is for shareware...open source's trademark is its install once, run forever (for most applications) reputation. And for machines properly behind firewalls, this reputation is justified, even with the holes. Who is going to be rooting the print server at our church with no internet access.
It's freenet without the free!
Seriously, when is somebody gonna prosecute one of these nefarious "free" software companies for attaching rider code with no easy way to remove it? Isn't this a virus, same as iloveyou or anna, attaching itself to something people want to download/lookat and exposing their computers to the world?
Sure, maybe the distributed client has more of a sandbox security model than your average virus. But these are not nice guy brilliant cowboy poet programmers riding into the sunset...they're wagemages forced to design an application to annoy people. Their hearts probably weren't in it. The code is probably full of buffers to overflow and apis to exploit. And since this code arrives along with an app people enjoy, it'll go right past their normal email wariness and antivirus paranoia.
This is dangerous shit.
Yes, it is a very useful metric. It is also very old -- sufficiently old to be considered historical and therefore having little bearing on the current status of the net. Furthermore, a decrease over one year does not a trend make.
Which was my point.
Am I the only one who considers a drop in usage from two years ago to one year ago to be somewhat useless today?
First off, forgetting even that the trend is a year old, and that that amounts to a whopping 10% of the internet's life (and something like half its life in the popular vein), the internet of 2000 was vastly different from the internet of 2001. Search engines and "best of breed" info sites had gotten smarter. If you don't have to search as hard, you don't spend as much time. Natch.
Second: since the internet has continued to evolve into 2002, we find that these numbers probably have less bearing than ever before. There is no longer as big of a problem with getting online, in part thanks to broadband and the prevalence of huge modem arrays at the biggest ISPs, but also because machines are generally left logged in. If you don't need to set aside all your internet time at once. Furthermore, the sites visited now are different sites than a year ago; many of the old big'uns are gone, and there are new big'uns in their place. Not to mention that a lot of browser time is being eaten up deleting spam and searching kazaa.
In the end, a metric from a year ago is the most useless thing the internet can have -- so useless that the Times should be embarrassed that they wasted newsprint that could have held a hawt Donna Karran ad with this piece of trash article. The internet, which has become like language and culture in that it is a tremulous, uncertain entity that can only be defined in snapshots, craves instant data. It needs the archive.orgs and Jupiter mm's of the world to tell us what's really going on at the moment...not what was going on at this moment last year.
Might as well tell us what heiroglyphic porn sites the Pharoahs visited, or Judas Iscariot's favorite message board on Freenet.
Maybe I shouldn't have had all those lunchbeers...
Are totally worthless. How many of them have a small clause at the bottom that says "this statement is not a guarantee, we reserve the right to change our minds and alter it at any time without telling you." How many simply say, in fancy legal language, "yeah we're still gonna sell everybody your email address, but it's private. like, we won't tell people on the street without them paying us first."
The only real privacy on the internet is the privacy we give ourselves through subterfuge, care, and lying outright.
Iomega is the worst. When they drop a product, they DROP a PRODUCT. I bought a Buz multimedia box back in 1997 and was very impressed -- excepti with the fact that it wouldn't work with my k6-2. Their answer? "Buy a pentium class system." So I did, you know. The card performed like a DC-30+ for half the cost and i needed a new machine anyway. I bought a dual p2. The card worked -- but not in NT, which is the OS i was using (so the second chip wouldn't just heat the room). The answer? "We'll have drivers with NT 5.0"
They dropped the product in 1999 for poor driver support -- before win2k came out -- and suspended work on their drivers. Come to find that their drivers had just matured, and the beta "1.3" drivers for win9x were just awesome. There were NT 4.0 drivers, too -- that nobody had except reviewers under three levels of NDA.
Now, this card is my only SCSI driver. It is useless in 2k, Me, XP...and I've undertaken the task of converting the linux drivers, which work amazingly well, into 2k drivers. It's a pet project that is absolutelyu meaningless because the DC-30+ can be found for a few hundred right now. But I am so pissed at Iomega's disrespect for their customer base that I long to see the now cheap "Buz SCSI card" installed in media labs across the country. It would serve them right for killing a great product with dumb management.
Well, technically the worst is optical video. Any intelligent audio guy will tell you coax is better for digital...you lose no data, whereas optical drops it all the time. Optical cable crimps easily and is full of imperfections. And yet, units with optical digital out are prized by purchasers and touted by the 8 buck an hour "experts."
This is why it's essential that you find a store you can trust before buying audio components. I test mine by asking them their opinions of the new Bose stuff (utter crap with cheap paper cones that tear and sound quite soggy when compared with speakers half their cost). If they try to pass it off as TOL, I leave. If they show me a set of Tannoys, Energies or Paradigms and mention how they are larger but outperform the Bose in every respect (especially price), I feel I can trust them.
It also helps if they don't tell you everything you look at "is the last one I got and a guy was just in here looking at it." The guy who sold me my receiver and first set of eXL-16s did that to me, and though I bought the stuff anyway I really resented it.
Oh, and the dumbest thing ever? Gold plated optical connectors. I confound you all to find a single use for reflective gold plating on the outside of a plastic fiber that channels a laserbeam that never comes close to the gold plating.
At the same time, these sales idiots can really help out a floundering company.
Don't know what your direction is? Well, who's the one talking to the people who make decisions at the companies making contracts with you? The sales guy knows what your customers want to hear your product does...so you might as well just make it do it.
Of course, development of this type is totally unsupportable and encoruages the worst design imaginable. But it keeps you in business to strike with a really great product when you finally figure out what it is you want to do.
I for one am glad that GNOME is finally moving into the realm of modern GUIs. Yes, maybe modern is synonymous with slow, but it's also synonymous with features.
If linux is going to make it on the desktop, it's gonna have to match closed sources OSs on a feature for feature basis. This means it has to have a level of feature bloat similar to windows -- and therefore similar compilation times.
I don't cry for those with slower machines "in parts of the world where fast machines are unavailable" (BS, by the way -- my friend in Bangladesh has a better machine than I do, and his family's yearly income is less than my weekly). They still have options: GNOME 1.x, for example. This is Linux, man, there's no need to upgrade if what you have now is working. Sure, the new toys would be great...but if the choice is Windows 3.11 or GNOME 1.x, you're still better off petting the penguin.
Untrue. Cold fusion is NOT as good as the developer that writes it...CF was my first "production" language and I have exceeded its capacity on numerous occasions. There is a point past which ColdFusion will not optimize, cannot keep up, gets buried under requests, and it's a significantly lower point than ASP or JSP/Servlets get bogged down.
We wrote the same simple i/o algorithm -- extract rows from a database and loop across them to output a table -- in practically a dozen different ways in three different languages beneath IIS, and the CF implementations (CF using a CFX tag, CF using cfquery/Cfloop, CF using a cfscript to loop and call writeoutput()) were all slower than even ASP. A servlet with a pooled connection and a persistant bean was fastest, but this is almost cheating.
We did extensive testing and have on numerous occasions sworn that we wouldn't accept ColdFusion anymore now that all the developers here know ASP and COM (all the CF only people are gone). And you know what? Despite the inefficiency and poor scalability we've noticed (which, I'll concede, is due in part to that fact that some parts of the application were not planned or coded correctly), we still do all new development in CF. It's just faster to get done because the syntax is easier and working with display is more like HTML than JSP or ASP. It's more natural.
In summary: I disagree, the lanugage does suck, but I love it. Hell, it's paying for my house!
Solar power, meet lunar power. Any way we can harness the moving of the spheres, as well?
Or did they disprove that theory? Dag. Such a pain in my humours this morning, I must have consumption.
You use ColdFusion. This language is a mess -- it's slow, expensive and embarassing to work with. It's also very easy to understand, which is why it's well worth the cost, sloth, and total lack of knowledgable people.
I came into a codebase of about 5000 cf pages. Only two of the original developers are still with my company. There is no documentation and these were not good programmers -- my portion of the application was by and large coded offsite by amateurs. And at the same time, I have never really been halted in my work by the unavailability of documentation. Hindered, maybe -- slowed a bit, especially during a set of endless includes. But never halted.
ColdFusion is a mess to program complex things in. Cfscript is apocryphal and best replaced by simple COM and Java modules that do the same thing faster and in a much more understandable fashion. What you're left with is a base of very simple, readable code that's actually spoiled by documentation. (those <!--- tags are murder)
Oh yeah: name your variables wisely. That's the key to ColdFusion
The other problem with not commenting your work is that you can never leave. And you will want to, eventually...no job is so good that it will always cover your every social, mental and fiscal need.
We lost a developer to a non profit and have to make about 5 hours worth of contract calls to him per week. He has to take them, otherwise he'd get terrible references from us, and we have to make them because nobody can understand what it was he wrote.
Great, thick, many lined code. Totally procedural, totally in-the-now. It is my job to go through it and automate a lot of the silly manual processes that seemed less silly in 1999, and it is daunting as these 4 and 5 hour calls that interrupt him from his real job result in increasing hostility.
So yes, comments may save your job...they make also save you time in the long run.
If only...I'd have that raise in days!
Interesting theory. But let us say for a minute that it is four years in the future. I work for AdSpam.shop (new.net having taken over the entire tld game because their software was installed along with version six of the anna virus). I create a program for desktop linux for Napster2.com, a nice little mp3 search engine. I make it available as an RPM, use shared libraries, and my manifest won't overwrite anything. It's signed as Napster2.com, which you trust because they're napster and why should they lie or steal from anybody.
But: I've attached a rider to the binary executable (hoho!). It's not compiled with the same source code as the shared source cpp files that accompany the rest of the package. The rider does a whole shitload of things to your computer that you never knew about.
But you're safe, aren't ya? Because you have the source code and the signed rpm and you read the manifest.
The only safety a computer user has is frequent backups and trustworthy information. This is how I can run unpatched Windows 2000 for years with linux-esque uptime scores -- I never install anything from any company or any freeware developer until it's mature and analyzed enough to be leak and spy free.
I'm paranoid, connected and brilliant. It's the only way to live.