Like it or not ie is the "standard-defying standard."
If you are taking technical advice from your customers, then perhaps you are in the wrong line of work. Customers don't understand all the implications. You know as well as I do that there are (or will be) a gazillion web-browsing devices out there all running different browsers. For example, my Nokia has a version of Opera on it which works great, and it's really annoying when I hit a site that does browser-checking and locks me out for no real reason other than "they don't like how their site will look on a non-approved browser". I don't really care in that case, I just want the functionality/content. This was the promise of HTML standards to begin with.
Incidentally the charge arrangement I usually do see is a bit different from what you mention- the higher figure usually includes Windows IE compatibility, the numerous problems of which are well-documented. The fact that Microsoft is even referring to that site to fix the next version of IE says a lot.
I might have a bit of a grudge as I was hired to work on a web/DB app that "only works in Windows IE". My boss says "they couldn't include cross-browser testing in the budget" when in my opinion it shouldn't have even been posed as a question to begin with. I'm really tired of that mentality.
Hey, good luck. I program on Windows all day at work and have a Powerbook at home and it's a fantastic machine. If you're unfamiliar with OS X, you might consider the purchase of a reference oriented towards Windows users, to get you thinking the Apple way.
Just as an FYI: WoW and all the Unreals not only exist on Macs but came out right around the time the PC versions did. It's especially interesting that you mentioned WoW as Blizzard has always been a staunch Mac supporter going all the way back to Warcraft I. I also am under the impression that Rome:TW is on its way. In the meantime, C&C:G works quite nicely.
Sure, we might not get ALL the games as Mac gamers but I'm fine with "the best of the best" as that's all I have time for, really.
See my other post in this forum "Confession: I am a gamer AND a Mac user".
I have a PC I use for testing (unfortunately it's not new enough for games) but the Mac does all the "heavy lifting" AND the game-playing (and the tv watching, the dvd watching and ripping, the HDTV recording, the music library, etc. etc.) AND it gets to sit in the DMZ of my router, handling any and all incoming requests::gasp!:: Try THAT with a windows machine;)
The irony with that is that what I seem to find more frustrating when I play with PC-gamer friends is not the fact that they're playing games that I don't have (which is, sure, there, but not predominant), it's that their voice chat software (of all things) does often not have a Mac version. (!) So I've just gotten really good at typing messages while moving and shooting.;)
Here are just a few of the popular games that I've been able to play with PC-using friends while they were still popular:
World of Warcraft Warcraft III Starcraft Call of Duty Medal of Honor (plus expansions) Battlefield 1942 (admittedly late, but still heavily played), especially with the Desert Combat mod C&C:Generals Homeworld 2 All the Dooms and Quakes (except Doom 3, a little late on that one...) Neverwinter Nights (and expansions... monks rule!)
And guess what. That's about all I have had time for. I have to admit that I SERIOUSLY consider a "Windows gaming machine" every time Valve's stuff keeps *not* coming out for Mac, but Windows is absolutely awful. Plus, I have a job, and a life outside the computer. And a while back, I discovered that a little exercise really helps you in a lot of little ways, even if it takes a little time to get it in (and at 33 and coding for a living in a sedentary job, you really have to fight off the gut with tooth and nail). So basically, the thin Mac game market is going to hurt the 15-22 year old pimply inactive males who have plenty of time to kill. I'd say it's no huge loss, but in fact it is, as I was once a member of that demographic myself, and those guys will make purchases in the future...
I hope the situation improves, as they say "any good competition helps everyone".
I think the most promising thick-client app development model is the Model-View-Controller paradigm, as seen in such well-designed app frameworks as Cocoa for OS X, and of course Ruby on Rails, and although I see Skunkworks improving the "typical" drudgery of web-app dev, I would wonder what it provides in the way of code management when it comes time to test your controller without worrying about how the view renders it or the model stores it.
And I know this is a personal preference and all, but... Python's significant whitespace? Yuck... I hope you don't copy/paste much, you might forget a tab somewhere (not to mention, copying from webpages is an adventure in itself...) To me this is like drinking cider instead of beer. Why would anyone consider such a thing worthwhile? Just to avoid some begin/ends or curly braces?
Python does have a more complete library but I am pretty sure Ruby and friends are catching up (and of course, no real word on Parrot yet...) Ruby also just seems to do the whole object-oriented thing nicer (abbreviated getter/setters, everything is an object, no self-referential hacks or whatever...)
FYI- I replied to your anonymous reply to me. Forgot one bit.
Is it okay to say "homosexuality is good because animals do it" but not "pedophilia is good because animals do it"?
Apples, meet oranges. Pedophilia is a crime with definite victims, victims who end up needing counseling and carry a lot of pain. I live in Boston, so I know all about those::grumble:: priests::grumble::, as the victims are in the news all the time. Homosexuality, meanwhile, is a victimless crime. Figure out the difference. Who the hell is harmed by two people wanting to sign away the rest of their lives to be with someone (who happens to be the same sex)? Hell, I'm hetero and even I can't come around to that yet, more power to them. As long as it's a loving relationship. I am no judge and neither should you be.
So what are your non-religious reasons for being against that? Allow me to deconstruct every other possible argument against it in a single post:
1) It seems "wrong". Do you ever remember when sex, period, seemed wrong? Like, before you started fantasizing? The first time someone told me about sex, I was fairly grossed-out. Why the hell would someone do THAT? Funny what some happy endorphins primed with didn't-ask-to-have-them fantasies will do for a person's opinion on exchanging bodily fluids, though. I do loves me some women... But this effect never bothered to make me think same-sex wasn't gross. I still think it is... but then again, I know I wasn't primed to like it, so who the hell am I to judge?
2) It is not procreative. Hmmm, seems like few sex acts actually are...
3) It is a choice made by perverts. Oh, how I love this one. Funny, I never remembered choosing to like sticking it in girls, so perhaps some small percentage of us also didn't choose to like sticking it in the same sex? Hmmm?
4) "Unnatural" aka, appeal to an incomplete understanding of evolution. Evolution would appear to prefer those who actually bother to procreate, eh? Makes sense, right? Guess what. Game theory predicts that even though homosexuality might not be good for the individual, it might be good for the species. In fact, my personal belief is that homosexuality is a "short-term biological cost" of a long-term gain in... sexual dimorphism! (I have a degree in psych, so I know a little bit about this.) That's right, the possible side effect of having two very distinct sexes that are very hot for each other and thus have lots of babies (a huge resource drain, by the way...), is that occasionally, a few are born so hot to trot that they scrimmage instead of compete, so to speak;)
And that's a wrap. I challenge anyone to shoot me down, as I have taken this topic up as a pet peeve of mine, even though I am quite firmly in the heterosexual camp.
People who have these sorts of arguments never seem to have very nice pets.;) Regardless of what a crusty old book written by some long-dead people has to say about our relationship to the animal kingdom, simple observation of non-humans would reveal the following obvious truths:
1) Animals seem to love 2) Animals seem to miss 3) Animals play, animals cry, animals laugh 4) Animals have saved humans on countless occasions without being "ordered" to 5) Animals pair-bond, or what we refer to as "marry". 90% of all bird species are monogamous, which is quite astonishing considering they supposedly descended from the dinosaurs! 6) And last but certainly not least, animals engage in all sorts of sexual behaviors, not all of which produce offspring. If you enjoy oral sex, as probably 95% of your human brethren do, you're enjoying without procreating. And most of the time it's done in the context of a loving relationship. I suppose hell is a small price to pay.;)
I don't think that spiritual development (which I also believe in) is somehow mutually exclusive or incongruous with "everything our evolving beings have learned along the way so far while they were still animal-like and not spiritually-aware". To me this is like saying that since we've built up the skyscraper to the great view on the 300th floor, we might as well remove floors 1-100 since we've gone "beyond" those and don't need them anymore. Everything has ALWAYS built on what came before, but has never totally eclipsed it. Cars did not completely replace horse-drawn carriages, calculators did not replace understanding math. Corporations did not replace mom-and-pop stores, and money did not completely replace bartering. Computers did not replace, well, everything (as some of us geeks would have preferred;) )
So basically, go fly a kite, open your eyes and stop listening to dogma for a minute and THINK FOR YOURSELF, as we're not as different from the animals as some ancient power-grabbing pontificators who had no extensive experience with animals (or science for that matter) would indicate.
On a somewhat unrelated note, Jesus never dictated any sort of religious hierarchy. In fact, I'm pretty sure he was all about tearing those down. Otherwise "The System" wouldn't have been so interested in getting rid of him. And here we are again, with a religious hierarchy trying to dictate its views to us within the sheeps' clothing of the Republican party. Where's Jesus when you need him to f*** some sh** up?;)/former-altar-boy-now-lapsed-catholic
Ruby on Rails has some easy-to-use AJAX features mixed in for good measure. And Ruby as a language is pretty nifty.
Scalable Vector Graphics, whenever most browsers get around to supporting it (the spec is kind of complex/full-featured), will enable another round of cool stuff. Especially when you consider the XML can be slurped in the background using AJAX
Now if the browsers would only fix/clean up the mouse and keyboard event model (jscript/ecmascript abstraction layers only help so much) and finish CSS2 support, we REALLY might get some interesting things going... At that point you could have your drawing app and eat xml, too...
How does this compare with (setting aside marketshare for a minute here) Apple's implementation of compositing various 2D and 3D technologies onto the same screen in the latest OS, performance/efficiency-wise? (Not a graphics guru...)
Basically, the evidence biased him so much that he couldn't keep his mouth shut, which caused the case to get irreparably damaged. How's that for irony?
Whatever your love or hate for Microsoft tech, my main peeve is this: With a certified monopoly at the helm, there is NO WAY for us to measure what cool things MIGHT have gotten developed had this 900 lb. gorilla not put a choke-hold on my beloved industry. Opportunity cost...
Here are some statistics gathered by me, just now, on my work laptop. This is the REAL cost of Windows, at least in a corporate environment.
Top 5 Resource Hogs in each resource category, 10 minutes after booting Showing processes from all users
CPU Time taskmgr.exe 43s mcshield.exe 39s IEXPLORE.EXE 16s svchost.exe 13s explorer.exe 12s
Mem Usage sqlservr.exe 56.4M (yup, it's a database server, alright... and it eats RAM for breakfast... AND lunch...) inetinfo.exe 31M mcshield.exe 25.8M blackd.exe 25.2M (Granted, "blackd.exe is the intrusion detection system of the BlackICE computer protection firewall"...) Hmmm. svchost.exe 23.5M
I/O Write (Bytes) tsmjbbd.exe 125,997,316 (125 megs of backup writes? At boot?...Every boot??) svchost.exe 11,617,200 services.exe 5,468,445 System 3,460,292 IEXPLORE.EXE 3,002,950
Now, ok. I know which processes these all are, being a geeky coder and voracious googler by trade and all, so let's take em one at a time by christian name.
tsmjbbd.exe aka Tivoli Storage Manager. What does it need to be doing at boot time, especially after I just booted this morning and then rebooted to take these statistics? And why so much data? With all those extra virtual memory page faults which cause a trip to disk?
mcshield.exe aka McAfee VirusScan. Well, if I ever suspected this guy was slowing down my machine, I just caught its absolute resource hogging, nay, resource grand larceny, red-handed. Sucking the life of my laptop right out of it. I know it's domain e-policy and all that, but in my humble opinion, this thing needs to be taken out back and shot with a 12-gauge. That is a lot of resource consumption, no matter how you look at it. No wonder my home "test" PC, safely behind a firewall/router and running no antivirus or antispyware, seems so much more zippy (and actually stays clean). (Won't even discuss my home Mac. That would be unfair.)
Internet Explorer. Hey, at least it's a known pig. I am a web/database developer, so I've made peace with that. Can't do much about it, except that the damn Deloitte homepage automatically opens 10 minutes after booting, which I'd like to turn off, please. I know how to get to it if I need to...
SQL Server. I need it for my development work. It's an enterprise database server, so it's just a 900 lb. Microsoft gorilla dancing around the room::cough:: Ballmer::cough:: and one just has to accept it. Can't do much about that either... unless I set it up to not run at boot and just run on demand. (Know how I can do that, or somehow defer the loading of it to maybe 15 minutes after booting? I should probably know this, already... but if you think about it, all the clients I visit insist on running it in always-on mode, for some reason...;) )
BlackICE. Wait a minute. Doesn't XP SP2 include a built-in firewall? What exactly is BlackICE doing for us, and why is it sucking resources at boot? I am always behind either a router or other fi
my Dock is actually pretty full of games right now. The Desert Combat mod for BF1942, and WoW currently rock my socks. C&C Generals, Splinter Cell, AA, Call of Duty... It's not ideal::cough:: half life 2::cough::, but there's plenty of content out there. Plenty of content, that is, unless you don't have a life, and all your time is spent playing new games...
1) Not as cheap when looking just at price, but I bet it's way lower in maintenance time, which is also a cost, unless your time is worth nothing
2) I don't know where you gather it's not quite as fast, has the mips-per-dollar figure fallen that behind with apples?
3) When it comes to apps, and especially games, as far as sheer quantity goes, I'd say Windows > Mac > *nix. Quality-wise, I'd say Mac > Windows with *nix varying widely (when you can't even standardize on a single windowing metaphor and widget set, how can a UI judgment be made?)
As Jon Stewart said in regards to vitriolic political debate, "please stop hurting each other."
Here's my belief. Take it or leave it.
There is a God. Or at least, something that was there "first". Call it "God". God made the universe, including its physical laws, and God created the first spark of life, maybe even the first cell (until we can create life in a lab, and I'm not ruling it out... I'm going to attribute it to God.). God did NOT create everything at once in static fashion, but the physical laws allow life to flourish on the surfaces of certain planets... by evolution, and the force of life itself, which strives towards... something mysterious.
A cursory survey of medicine would demonstrate that we are probably not simply biological machines. There is a life force of some sort. A spark. (Soul?) A romantic notion perhaps, but you know it, you can see it in some peoples' eyes, even though you can't explain it. It's in that person who wasn't supposed to recover, but did. It's in the person who made that moving creation. It is probably a key element of what we call love. It's subtle, but it's everywhere, and life depends on it to continue to bother existing, caring, healing, growing, learning.
The truth is that life is far from mere mechanism, and if I had any claim against evolutionary thought (which I happen to love, having taken quite a few classes touching on it), it's that it seems to want to reduce life to mechanism, free of spirit or spark or... life. Creature has so-so eyes, another creature has good eyes, so-so-eyed creature doesn't see predator, good-eyed creature gets to make babies with possibly better eyes (via random change). Mechanism.
And this is what I think the creationists are really offended by. That and the insinuation that evolutionary thought is the be-all end-all.
The scientific method, and evolution, are great, but when you have a hammer, it doesn't mean everything else is a nail. Unless you can theoretically disprove something AND it is repeatable, you can't prove it with the SM. So if a random unexpected and possibly unexplainable event happens that you can't reproduce (and they do happen in this world) such as, an alien happens to take your sister before your very eyes, never to be seen again- you can't prove your story, and you will probably get tossed in jail, even though you are right. So it's no panacea, it is a tool like any other.
Meanwhile, I wish each and every creationist thinker would thoroughly read talkorigins.org... if only to be armed with the facts, first.
I believe that there are things in the world that we can as of yet not perceive, history serves as running commentary on our continuous voyage of real discovery, and we should not naively assume that mystery is becoming extinct in any era.
Pardon0- You must have missed that part where I said Boots in under a minute...
And I have no control over my PC laptop. It is subject to domain policy. The config is enforced on the hour with "ePolicy Orchestrator Agent"... which itself is yet another cpu/mem hog.
I'm in the second group. I spent most of some summers coding for fun in my early teens. I knew I was in a minority, but who can argue with intrinsic motivation?
At college I didn't do too well at engineering calculus (memorizing taylor series and maclaurin series?? WTF is up with that??) and that was a requirement for both physics and CS majors (my first two choices) so I ended up a Psych major with a CS minor.
In the end I enjoyed that decision as I not only loved the "wiring" aspects of the brain but I became much more "well-rounded" than the engineering school grads I knew (hey, I can document with correct grammar!), yet I kept my intrinsic interest in coding. Perhaps I cannot bang out a compiler or a compression algorithm... but I can talk to other objects that do that grunt work;)
I constantly run into people at work in the first group. They came to coding in college, or even later. They are the "get it done" types, and when they go home, the last thing they want to do is sit at a computer. Perhaps they tend to "get it done" faster than I do, but they do not appreciate what "beautiful code" means, and I often have to clean up their messes. The other day I had to explain to someone why the output of one MD5 implementation cannot possibly be different from the output of another MD5 implementation... I didn't even bother to bring up about how MD5 is considered less safe these days, as these people do not read technical blogs in their spare time like I do. I have to butt heads even over such simple decisions as grouping related preferences in the UI together, just because it will take 5 more minutes. I care about users as much as architecture. "Getting it done" is important, but not to the exclusion of all else. I would rather communicate to the client "look, i'm almost done, but I am really into this and I would like to put some extra polish on."
Not so, the first group...
I find that people in the first group are also heavier sticklers about timeliness. I would prefer to arrive late and work late, like your proverbial hacker. These folks are more concerned about keeping up appearances and catching the 8:15 train every day.
I'm still casually looking for a job (or creating my own job...) where I work with some people in the second group, but I keep finding myself surrounded with first-groupers in the corporate world.
It took 10 minutes for my work laptop PC to boot and for me to log in today, before Windows calmed down and I could actually start firing up some work apps. Out of frustration (or because I'm used to my Mac at home) I looked at Task Manager and guess what process single-handedly read 140 megabytes of data, caused 35,000 page faults and read from the hard drive 45,000 times since booting merely 10 minutes sooner?
Fucking McAfee VirusScan.
I have no antivirus software or antispyware software running on my G5 at home. Boots in under a minute. Logs in in 5-10 seconds. Sleeps instantly, wakes instantly. Most of all, NEVER "gets in my way". This is the kind of look-and-feel thing that you wouldn't even know you were missing if all you used was Windows.
You can hate your corporate-policy-reinforced PC, or you can love your Mac... for a little bit more cash.
Actually, don't get a Mac, because it will cause you to hate your PC. Best to remain ignorantly blissful. Don't take the red pill.
They should have fired this pulse through a coil. The resulting EM pulse would surely have had some interesting effects, though I wonder what the voltage was (in order to find out the power).
Is there any way to focus an EM pulse so that it only comes out one side of a coil? Would a metal parabolic reflector concentrate the pulse to one side? (I'm guessing "yes", but I'm not sure if some portion of the pulse would simply bleed through the reflector.)
I have to admit that the little evil looking-for-trouble guy in me wants to install something like that in my trunk, facing backwards, charged by a large capacitor... Cop on your tail doing some fundraising? Push a button and kill his engine dead.
Complications to this would include things such as: metal frames and structures being in the way, etc. Plus actual property damage, which isn't cool. It would be cool if you could just disable it...
Not to mention Disaster Area
on
19 million Amps
·
· Score: 1
I think Hotblack Desiato would have laughed, laughed at this figure. "Is that all?";)
That's right... the irony is that the evidence against Microsoft was so overwhelming that the judge couldn't hide his sneer, which caused most of the case to get tossed due to bias. Would you believe?!?!
This mistake is really what's causing us to be condemned to umpteen more years of hegemony.
I actually got a good kick out of ytcracker's free album. It is set to 8-bit-esque melody (which is actually catchy, at times, if you can get past the geekiness of it) and the lyrics are funny. here's a sample:
off "the legend" we finished contra with only one life finished metal gear 2 with only a knife... my rhymes flow, just like my code even though my source is owned by sko (SCO)... I'm a legend everywhere that I go, every distro, every craigslist' home pumpin they fists, yo can't get enough of ytcracker's jams, and they can't get enough of ytcracker's spams... i've been caught slippin like the starwars kid when I'm on ebay snipin a bid catch me on the webcam like Numa Numa see me at the club and i'm rockin puma (?)... then off "n.e.s." up up down down left right left right then B, A, start, the screen goes white it's the cracker, ytcracker, the game genie 8 bits with a 8 inch weenie... and off "view source" (Actually, every lyric in this entire song would have relevance to any person who's ever had any kind of coding gig;) )
I TOTALLY take this all tongue-in-cheek, but I still thought it was pretty funny because of all the in-jokes. Check it out, it's free and you might get a chuckle.... my SQL, knows no equal (lol)
I code in Windows all day at work and just today I had to type in some accented characters and am seriously appalled that the basic Windows method has not changed literally since the PS/2 era in the 80's when I was in high school. The old alt-xxxx-release combo.
That said, there is now an easier way in Windows to do this, but it seems a bit like a hack, because it affects how you type in regular quote characters. Thus I still feel the Apple way is nicer.
See here for details on the methods in both OS'es.
Slashdot Mirror
Like it or not ie is the "standard-defying standard."
If you are taking technical advice from your customers, then perhaps you are in the wrong line of work. Customers don't understand all the implications. You know as well as I do that there are (or will be) a gazillion web-browsing devices out there all running different browsers. For example, my Nokia has a version of Opera on it which works great, and it's really annoying when I hit a site that does browser-checking and locks me out for no real reason other than "they don't like how their site will look on a non-approved browser". I don't really care in that case, I just want the functionality/content. This was the promise of HTML standards to begin with.
Incidentally the charge arrangement I usually do see is a bit different from what you mention- the higher figure usually includes Windows IE compatibility, the numerous problems of which are well-documented. The fact that Microsoft is even referring to that site to fix the next version of IE says a lot.
I might have a bit of a grudge as I was hired to work on a web/DB app that "only works in Windows IE". My boss says "they couldn't include cross-browser testing in the budget" when in my opinion it shouldn't have even been posed as a question to begin with. I'm really tired of that mentality.
If you look at this Thottbot entry it appears to be from some other game.
They do say that one sign of MMORPG addiction is if you get far too emotionally involved in the ups and downs of the game.
Hey, good luck. I program on Windows all day at work and have a Powerbook at home and it's a fantastic machine. If you're unfamiliar with OS X, you might consider the purchase of a reference oriented towards Windows users, to get you thinking the Apple way.
Just as an FYI: WoW and all the Unreals not only exist on Macs but came out right around the time the PC versions did. It's especially interesting that you mentioned WoW as Blizzard has always been a staunch Mac supporter going all the way back to Warcraft I. I also am under the impression that Rome:TW is on its way. In the meantime, C&C:G works quite nicely.
::gasp!:: Try THAT with a windows machine ;)
Sure, we might not get ALL the games as Mac gamers but I'm fine with "the best of the best" as that's all I have time for, really.
See my other post in this forum "Confession: I am a gamer AND a Mac user".
I have a PC I use for testing (unfortunately it's not new enough for games) but the Mac does all the "heavy lifting" AND the game-playing (and the tv watching, the dvd watching and ripping, the HDTV recording, the music library, etc. etc.) AND it gets to sit in the DMZ of my router, handling any and all incoming requests
The irony with that is that what I seem to find more frustrating when I play with PC-gamer friends is not the fact that they're playing games that I don't have (which is, sure, there, but not predominant), it's that their voice chat software (of all things) does often not have a Mac version. (!) So I've just gotten really good at typing messages while moving and shooting. ;)
Here are just a few of the popular games that I've been able to play with PC-using friends while they were still popular:
World of Warcraft
Warcraft III
Starcraft
Call of Duty
Medal of Honor (plus expansions)
Battlefield 1942 (admittedly late, but still heavily played), especially with the Desert Combat mod
C&C:Generals
Homeworld 2
All the Dooms and Quakes (except Doom 3, a little late on that one...)
Neverwinter Nights (and expansions... monks rule!)
And guess what. That's about all I have had time for. I have to admit that I SERIOUSLY consider a "Windows gaming machine" every time Valve's stuff keeps *not* coming out for Mac, but Windows is absolutely awful. Plus, I have a job, and a life outside the computer. And a while back, I discovered that a little exercise really helps you in a lot of little ways, even if it takes a little time to get it in (and at 33 and coding for a living in a sedentary job, you really have to fight off the gut with tooth and nail). So basically, the thin Mac game market is going to hurt the 15-22 year old pimply inactive males who have plenty of time to kill. I'd say it's no huge loss, but in fact it is, as I was once a member of that demographic myself, and those guys will make purchases in the future...
I hope the situation improves, as they say "any good competition helps everyone".
I think the most promising thick-client app development model is the Model-View-Controller paradigm, as seen in such well-designed app frameworks as Cocoa for OS X, and of course Ruby on Rails, and although I see Skunkworks improving the "typical" drudgery of web-app dev, I would wonder what it provides in the way of code management when it comes time to test your controller without worrying about how the view renders it or the model stores it.
And I know this is a personal preference and all, but... Python's significant whitespace? Yuck... I hope you don't copy/paste much, you might forget a tab somewhere (not to mention, copying from webpages is an adventure in itself...) To me this is like drinking cider instead of beer. Why would anyone consider such a thing worthwhile? Just to avoid some begin/ends or curly braces?
Python does have a more complete library but I am pretty sure Ruby and friends are catching up (and of course, no real word on Parrot yet...) Ruby also just seems to do the whole object-oriented thing nicer (abbreviated getter/setters, everything is an object, no self-referential hacks or whatever...)
FYI- I replied to your anonymous reply to me. Forgot one bit.
::grumble:: priests ::grumble::, as the victims are in the news all the time. Homosexuality, meanwhile, is a victimless crime. Figure out the difference. Who the hell is harmed by two people wanting to sign away the rest of their lives to be with someone (who happens to be the same sex)? Hell, I'm hetero and even I can't come around to that yet, more power to them. As long as it's a loving relationship. I am no judge and neither should you be.
Is it okay to say "homosexuality is good because animals do it" but not "pedophilia is good because animals do it"?
Apples, meet oranges. Pedophilia is a crime with definite victims, victims who end up needing counseling and carry a lot of pain. I live in Boston, so I know all about those
OK, so perhaps I unwittingly built a straw-man.
;)
So what are your non-religious reasons for being against that? Allow me to deconstruct every other possible argument against it in a single post:
1) It seems "wrong".
Do you ever remember when sex, period, seemed wrong? Like, before you started fantasizing? The first time someone told me about sex, I was fairly grossed-out. Why the hell would someone do THAT? Funny what some happy endorphins primed with didn't-ask-to-have-them fantasies will do for a person's opinion on exchanging bodily fluids, though. I do loves me some women... But this effect never bothered to make me think same-sex wasn't gross. I still think it is... but then again, I know I wasn't primed to like it, so who the hell am I to judge?
2) It is not procreative.
Hmmm, seems like few sex acts actually are...
3) It is a choice made by perverts.
Oh, how I love this one. Funny, I never remembered choosing to like sticking it in girls, so perhaps some small percentage of us also didn't choose to like sticking it in the same sex? Hmmm?
4) "Unnatural" aka, appeal to an incomplete understanding of evolution.
Evolution would appear to prefer those who actually bother to procreate, eh? Makes sense, right? Guess what. Game theory predicts that even though homosexuality might not be good for the individual, it might be good for the species. In fact, my personal belief is that homosexuality is a "short-term biological cost" of a long-term gain in... sexual dimorphism! (I have a degree in psych, so I know a little bit about this.) That's right, the possible side effect of having two very distinct sexes that are very hot for each other and thus have lots of babies (a huge resource drain, by the way...), is that occasionally, a few are born so hot to trot that they scrimmage instead of compete, so to speak
And that's a wrap. I challenge anyone to shoot me down, as I have taken this topic up as a pet peeve of mine, even though I am quite firmly in the heterosexual camp.
People who have these sorts of arguments never seem to have very nice pets. ;) Regardless of what a crusty old book written by some long-dead people has to say about our relationship to the animal kingdom, simple observation of non-humans would reveal the following obvious truths:
;)
;) )
;) /former-altar-boy-now-lapsed-catholic
1) Animals seem to love
2) Animals seem to miss
3) Animals play, animals cry, animals laugh
4) Animals have saved humans on countless occasions without being "ordered" to
5) Animals pair-bond, or what we refer to as "marry". 90% of all bird species are monogamous, which is quite astonishing considering they supposedly descended from the dinosaurs!
6) And last but certainly not least, animals engage in all sorts of sexual behaviors, not all of which produce offspring. If you enjoy oral sex, as probably 95% of your human brethren do, you're enjoying without procreating. And most of the time it's done in the context of a loving relationship. I suppose hell is a small price to pay.
I don't think that spiritual development (which I also believe in) is somehow mutually exclusive or incongruous with "everything our evolving beings have learned along the way so far while they were still animal-like and not spiritually-aware". To me this is like saying that since we've built up the skyscraper to the great view on the 300th floor, we might as well remove floors 1-100 since we've gone "beyond" those and don't need them anymore. Everything has ALWAYS built on what came before, but has never totally eclipsed it. Cars did not completely replace horse-drawn carriages, calculators did not replace understanding math. Corporations did not replace mom-and-pop stores, and money did not completely replace bartering. Computers did not replace, well, everything (as some of us geeks would have preferred
So basically, go fly a kite, open your eyes and stop listening to dogma for a minute and THINK FOR YOURSELF, as we're not as different from the animals as some ancient power-grabbing pontificators who had no extensive experience with animals (or science for that matter) would indicate.
On a somewhat unrelated note, Jesus never dictated any sort of religious hierarchy. In fact, I'm pretty sure he was all about tearing those down. Otherwise "The System" wouldn't have been so interested in getting rid of him. And here we are again, with a religious hierarchy trying to dictate its views to us within the sheeps' clothing of the Republican party. Where's Jesus when you need him to f*** some sh** up?
Ruby on Rails has some easy-to-use AJAX features mixed in for good measure. And Ruby as a language is pretty nifty.
Scalable Vector Graphics, whenever most browsers get around to supporting it (the spec is kind of complex/full-featured), will enable another round of cool stuff. Especially when you consider the XML can be slurped in the background using AJAX
Now if the browsers would only fix/clean up the mouse and keyboard event model (jscript/ecmascript abstraction layers only help so much) and finish CSS2 support, we REALLY might get some interesting things going... At that point you could have your drawing app and eat xml, too...
How does this compare with (setting aside marketshare for a minute here) Apple's implementation of compositing various 2D and 3D technologies onto the same screen in the latest OS, performance/efficiency-wise? (Not a graphics guru...)
That's the short answer.
Here's a better reason why not to.
How Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson Blew the Microsoft Trial
Basically, the evidence biased him so much that he couldn't keep his mouth shut, which caused the case to get irreparably damaged. How's that for irony?
Whatever your love or hate for Microsoft tech, my main peeve is this: With a certified monopoly at the helm, there is NO WAY for us to measure what cool things MIGHT have gotten developed had this 900 lb. gorilla not put a choke-hold on my beloved industry. Opportunity cost...
Actually, Crystal Quest dates from the late 80's. In fact, it was the very first color Mac game, on the Mac II, in 1987. Yay, Casady & Greene.
I know because baby, I WAS THERE!! (that game was great. and I've used macs since 12/84...)
Top 5 Resource Hogs in each resource category, 10 minutes after booting
Showing processes from all users
CPU Time
taskmgr.exe 43s
mcshield.exe 39s
IEXPLORE.EXE 16s
svchost.exe 13s
explorer.exe 12s
Mem Usage
sqlservr.exe 56.4M (yup, it's a database server, alright... and it eats RAM for breakfast... AND lunch...)
inetinfo.exe 31M
mcshield.exe 25.8M
blackd.exe 25.2M (Granted, "blackd.exe is the intrusion detection system of the BlackICE computer protection firewall"...) Hmmm.
svchost.exe 23.5M
VM Size
sqlservr.exe 28.9M
mcshield.exe 22.4M
IEXPLORE.EXE 22.4M
svchost.exe 15.9M
explorer.exe 14.1M
Page Faults
mcshield.exe 52,400
tsmjbbd.exe 32,028
svchost.exe 22,153
iPodService.exe 18,790 (whoa)
sqlservr.exe 14,935
I/O Reads
services.exe 38,032
mcshield.exe 29,325
winlogon.exe 27,169
csrss.exe 17,454
UpdaterUI.exe 13,901
I/O Read (Bytes)
mcshield.exe 146,334,118 (that's 146 megs, 146 million bytes!)
svchost.exe 28,979,182
tsmjbbd.exe 8,643,108
IEXPLORE.EXE 7,492,844
blackd.exe 4,996,131
I/O Writes
services.exe 38,651
blackd.exe 33,804
tsmjbbd.exe 5,716
svchost.exe 5,239
winlogon.exe 4,662
I/O Write (Bytes)
tsmjbbd.exe 125,997,316 (125 megs of backup writes? At boot?
svchost.exe 11,617,200
services.exe 5,468,445
System 3,460,292
IEXPLORE.EXE 3,002,950
Now, ok. I know which processes these all are, being a geeky coder and voracious googler by trade and all, so let's take em one at a time by christian name.
Blablablah. Actually, yes. ;)
::cough:: half life 2 ::cough::, but there's plenty of content out there. Plenty of content, that is, unless you don't have a life, and all your time is spent playing new games...
my Dock is actually pretty full of games right now. The Desert Combat mod for BF1942, and WoW currently rock my socks. C&C Generals, Splinter Cell, AA, Call of Duty... It's not ideal
1) Not as cheap when looking just at price, but I bet it's way lower in maintenance time, which is also a cost, unless your time is worth nothing
2) I don't know where you gather it's not quite as fast, has the mips-per-dollar figure fallen that behind with apples?
3) When it comes to apps, and especially games, as far as sheer quantity goes, I'd say Windows > Mac > *nix. Quality-wise, I'd say Mac > Windows with *nix varying widely (when you can't even standardize on a single windowing metaphor and widget set, how can a UI judgment be made?)
I came late to this party but...
As Jon Stewart said in regards to vitriolic political debate, "please stop hurting each other."
Here's my belief. Take it or leave it.
There is a God. Or at least, something that was there "first". Call it "God". God made the universe, including its physical laws, and God created the first spark of life, maybe even the first cell (until we can create life in a lab, and I'm not ruling it out... I'm going to attribute it to God.). God did NOT create everything at once in static fashion, but the physical laws allow life to flourish on the surfaces of certain planets... by evolution, and the force of life itself, which strives towards... something mysterious.
A cursory survey of medicine would demonstrate that we are probably not simply biological machines. There is a life force of some sort. A spark. (Soul?) A romantic notion perhaps, but you know it, you can see it in some peoples' eyes, even though you can't explain it. It's in that person who wasn't supposed to recover, but did. It's in the person who made that moving creation. It is probably a key element of what we call love. It's subtle, but it's everywhere, and life depends on it to continue to bother existing, caring, healing, growing, learning.
The truth is that life is far from mere mechanism, and if I had any claim against evolutionary thought (which I happen to love, having taken quite a few classes touching on it), it's that it seems to want to reduce life to mechanism, free of spirit or spark or... life. Creature has so-so eyes, another creature has good eyes, so-so-eyed creature doesn't see predator, good-eyed creature gets to make babies with possibly better eyes (via random change). Mechanism.
And this is what I think the creationists are really offended by. That and the insinuation that evolutionary thought is the be-all end-all.
The scientific method, and evolution, are great, but when you have a hammer, it doesn't mean everything else is a nail. Unless you can theoretically disprove something AND it is repeatable, you can't prove it with the SM. So if a random unexpected and possibly unexplainable event happens that you can't reproduce (and they do happen in this world) such as, an alien happens to take your sister before your very eyes, never to be seen again- you can't prove your story, and you will probably get tossed in jail, even though you are right. So it's no panacea, it is a tool like any other.
Meanwhile, I wish each and every creationist thinker would thoroughly read talkorigins.org... if only to be armed with the facts, first.
I believe that there are things in the world that we can as of yet not perceive, history serves as running commentary on our continuous voyage of real discovery, and we should not naively assume that mystery is becoming extinct in any era.
Pardon0- You must have missed that part where I said Boots in under a minute...
And I have no control over my PC laptop. It is subject to domain policy. The config is enforced on the hour with "ePolicy Orchestrator Agent"... which itself is yet another cpu/mem hog.
I'm in the second group. I spent most of some summers coding for fun in my early teens. I knew I was in a minority, but who can argue with intrinsic motivation?
;)
At college I didn't do too well at engineering calculus (memorizing taylor series and maclaurin series?? WTF is up with that??) and that was a requirement for both physics and CS majors (my first two choices) so I ended up a Psych major with a CS minor.
In the end I enjoyed that decision as I not only loved the "wiring" aspects of the brain but I became much more "well-rounded" than the engineering school grads I knew (hey, I can document with correct grammar!), yet I kept my intrinsic interest in coding. Perhaps I cannot bang out a compiler or a compression algorithm... but I can talk to other objects that do that grunt work
I constantly run into people at work in the first group. They came to coding in college, or even later. They are the "get it done" types, and when they go home, the last thing they want to do is sit at a computer. Perhaps they tend to "get it done" faster than I do, but they do not appreciate what "beautiful code" means, and I often have to clean up their messes. The other day I had to explain to someone why the output of one MD5 implementation cannot possibly be different from the output of another MD5 implementation... I didn't even bother to bring up about how MD5 is considered less safe these days, as these people do not read technical blogs in their spare time like I do. I have to butt heads even over such simple decisions as grouping related preferences in the UI together, just because it will take 5 more minutes. I care about users as much as architecture. "Getting it done" is important, but not to the exclusion of all else. I would rather communicate to the client "look, i'm almost done, but I am really into this and I would like to put some extra polish on."
Not so, the first group...
I find that people in the first group are also heavier sticklers about timeliness. I would prefer to arrive late and work late, like your proverbial hacker. These folks are more concerned about keeping up appearances and catching the 8:15 train every day.
I'm still casually looking for a job (or creating my own job...) where I work with some people in the second group, but I keep finding myself surrounded with first-groupers in the corporate world.
It took 10 minutes for my work laptop PC to boot and for me to log in today, before Windows calmed down and I could actually start firing up some work apps. Out of frustration (or because I'm used to my Mac at home) I looked at Task Manager and guess what process single-handedly read 140 megabytes of data, caused 35,000 page faults and read from the hard drive 45,000 times since booting merely 10 minutes sooner?
Fucking McAfee VirusScan.
I have no antivirus software or antispyware software running on my G5 at home. Boots in under a minute. Logs in in 5-10 seconds. Sleeps instantly, wakes instantly. Most of all, NEVER "gets in my way". This is the kind of look-and-feel thing that you wouldn't even know you were missing if all you used was Windows.
You can hate your corporate-policy-reinforced PC, or you can love your Mac... for a little bit more cash.
Actually, don't get a Mac, because it will cause you to hate your PC. Best to remain ignorantly blissful. Don't take the red pill.
They should have fired this pulse through a coil. The resulting EM pulse would surely have had some interesting effects, though I wonder what the voltage was (in order to find out the power).
Is there any way to focus an EM pulse so that it only comes out one side of a coil? Would a metal parabolic reflector concentrate the pulse to one side? (I'm guessing "yes", but I'm not sure if some portion of the pulse would simply bleed through the reflector.)
I have to admit that the little evil looking-for-trouble guy in me wants to install something like that in my trunk, facing backwards, charged by a large capacitor... Cop on your tail doing some fundraising? Push a button and kill his engine dead.
Complications to this would include things such as: metal frames and structures being in the way, etc. Plus actual property damage, which isn't cool. It would be cool if you could just disable it...
I think Hotblack Desiato would have laughed, laughed at this figure. "Is that all?" ;)
Read this.
Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson Blew It
That's right... the irony is that the evidence against Microsoft was so overwhelming that the judge couldn't hide his sneer, which caused most of the case to get tossed due to bias. Would you believe?!?!
This mistake is really what's causing us to be condemned to umpteen more years of hegemony.
I actually got a good kick out of ytcracker's free album. It is set to 8-bit-esque melody (which is actually catchy, at times, if you can get past the geekiness of it) and the lyrics are funny. here's a sample:
... ... ... ... ... ;) )
...
off "the legend"
we finished contra with only one life
finished metal gear 2 with only a knife
my rhymes flow, just like my code
even though my source is owned by sko (SCO)
I'm a legend everywhere that I go, every distro, every craigslist' home pumpin they fists, yo
can't get enough of ytcracker's jams, and they can't get enough of ytcracker's spams
i've been caught slippin like the starwars kid
when I'm on ebay snipin a bid
catch me on the webcam like Numa Numa
see me at the club and i'm rockin puma (?)
then off "n.e.s."
up up down down left right left right
then B, A, start, the screen goes white
it's the cracker, ytcracker, the game genie
8 bits with a 8 inch weenie
and off "view source"
(Actually, every lyric in this entire song would have relevance to any person who's ever had any kind of coding gig
I TOTALLY take this all tongue-in-cheek, but I still thought it was pretty funny because of all the in-jokes. Check it out, it's free and you might get a chuckle.
my SQL, knows no equal (lol)
I code in Windows all day at work and just today I had to type in some accented characters and am seriously appalled that the basic Windows method has not changed literally since the PS/2 era in the 80's when I was in high school. The old alt-xxxx-release combo.
That said, there is now an easier way in Windows to do this, but it seems a bit like a hack, because it affects how you type in regular quote characters. Thus I still feel the Apple way is nicer.
See here for details on the methods in both OS'es.