I think there may be a little extra Mercury in the fish supply. All the fish have grown little moustaches and started singing about champions and radios.
It's way worse than that. I just met GWB on the White House lawn. He said the CIA is reporting unusually many sightings of fishy A'rab looking fellas in San Francisco sporting goods stores buying scuba gear. The CIA, FBI and the NSA are now convinced that task-force 'Bluegill' has been infiltrated and that the terrorists infiltrators plan to spike the San Francisco water supply with massive amounts of LSD.
I don't say this is how incomprehensibly strange UI happens at Microsoft. I say these are two ways in which it can happen.
UI idiocy happens in more places than Microsoft's development division. Take for example one of the iterations of the Red Hat setup utility which had this nifty window requiring you to fill out a large form. Unfortunately you needed information from the previous window to complete the form and there was no [ < Back ] button so you had to write it down before proceeding since you couldn't take a screenshot or even print the screen to an ink-jet printer. They fixed it a few minor distro versions later. Until then many was the time you cursed the developers as you restarted the installation process after forgetting about this pitfall and hitting the [ Next > ] button to soon. Examples of UIs in Linux are numerous. Another example of an annoyingly silly UI is the OS.X Finder application......
Well, this is Microsoft you are critiquing. I mean, what have they traditionally aimed for? Functionality? Cross product compliance?
Mediocrity? Not that that is always a bad thing, they do after all own the desktop and a significant portion of the server market, and they got there partly by never scaring their (corporate) customers by taking big design and tecnology risks. They always play it as safe as possible which is why their attempts to do radical innovative things usually end up looking a bit..... um..... unimpressive.
This article is just a very vigorous proof that you're an idiot if you spend any time at all searching for the cheapest gas. We all know that some gas stations don't follow the unspoken price rule where you don't undercut your competitors and they won't undercut you. Some people must feel very smart finding those gas stations. How much gas they waste getting to them might be interesting to compute also. Oh well, as long as it makes you feel good inside.
Strong words...... but there is a grain of truth in them. Price fixing is not the only scam. Apparently some gasstation owners advertise lower prices on gasoline than average and then short change bargain hunters at the pump. The customer thinks he is paying a bargain price for a gallon of gas but in reality the pump only spews out a portion of a gallon and with fuel level indicators in cars being as inaccurate as they are most people don't notice they are getting ripped off. The only thing these guys have to watch out for while they rake in the money is the odd customer who has come to fill their Jerrycans and 'Dept. of weights and measures' inspectors.
Don't worry about American healthcare workers not being able to afford health care, many of them are taking "Medical Holidays" to places in Asia where they can get cheap operations. Yes many years ago that might have been a bit risky, but these days in places like Taiwan, American patients can get first class treatment at 1/10th of the price and it's probably safer than being treated by overworked American medical staff.
While I'm not saying all these overseas healthcare providers are crooks this is still an area where you have to be really careful about who you do business with. While you can get some first class service there have also been numerous cases of people going on these sorts of medical holidays for bargain basement priced plastic surgery or other kinds of treatment and suffering some pretty horrifying consequences. These range from badly botched plastic surgery to people going to places like India to make the forces of the free market work for them in their quest for an organ transplant only to discover to late that the dirt poor ghetto dweller they paid $10.000 for a kidney had Aids and the doctor they paid for the surgery didn't bother to reveal that little deal breaking detail. So if you think you can get medical service overseas for the price of a Big Mac with fries you better think again. Personally I have never understood why people would go bargain hunting when it comes to their health.
In my experience, designers are lazy f***ers. Integration software is useless. Get them to draw up a design and pass it along to the coders where they can deal with integrating it. Then the designer can get on with going back to sleep.
This idea of a design passing between coders and designers frequently and being modified as they go is idealogical claptrap. Get the design done right first time and then have the designer go back to the hole where they came from.
Nice flame troll, not very subtle though. Cooperation always results in a better product than if people each sit in their own corner and only talk when the project is in danger of being derailed. This guy seems to be talking about interaction between (web)designers and (web)developers but planning and design in general, even if we are only talking about the design and structure of the software code it self, is something that is completely missing in a lot of coding projects. I wish I had a penny for every badly planned, badly designed and as a result bug ridden and semi useless block of Java, C#, C and C++ code I have had to rewrite because the original coders didn't take the trouble to apply fundamental software design principles like layer abstraction, code re-use and modularization to their projects.
By the way, the "emualting PostgreSQL features in PHP" part was completely misquoted. I was explaining how MySQL's internal prepare/execute API is rather broken because if you use it you completely miss the query cache, so my suggestion is to turn on prepare/execute emulation in PDO while behind the scenes it will use the faster direct query api calls and thus will also hit the query cache. So this was actually a bit of a MySQL slam which was utterly misquoted. Trying to emulate PostgreSQL things in userspace PHP would be moronic.
I wish the people writing the news summaries here would tone down their appetite for sensationalism. We all like to have a nice friendly anti Microsoft flamewar-deathmatch every once in a while just for fun but headlines like 'PostgreSQL Slammed by PHP Creator' sound like they were written by a member of the British tabloid press. Can't people voice some criticism without getting gutted any more? And, no, I am not new here I'm just getting a little tired of the fanboyism.
But really, the US is a treasure trove of horribly mangled english words.
You have clearly never set foot in London's East End.... Of course the East End way of mangling the english language is more elegant than the American one. The creative logic behind words like 'Bristols' always makes me laugh.
The Jeb Bush 2008 presidential campaign fund has received and gratefully appreciates Apples donation. Brother George will be in touch with you shortly to discuss adequate compensation for your generosity.
and wow, it looks like it's doing much better than it did when i tried it.
CrossOver Office also runs games. I got Half Life 2 running on CrossOver 6.0 Beta 1 for OS.X. After not bothering with Wine and related products in general for over 3 years and it is safe to say they Wine team and their semi-proprietary spinoffs have made progress. Apart from some graphical glitches CrossOver is a lot more stable than I expected a beta product to be and quite fast. Since it is more mature than the OS.X version the Linux version of CrossOver should be superior, but for Linux, Cedega should be better yet since they are the game specialists. Unfortunately they do not seem to be planning to release an end user version of Cedega for OS.X. Instead they have gone with a portability engine named 'Cider' aimed at game manufacturers.
You cant use that popular name. We will give it our own name so that you know that its ours, not yours.
Who says the goddesses Eris and Dysnomia weren't popular in ancient times? I'm sure the goddesses of strife and lawlessness were widely worshipped by ancient Greek and Roman hooligans, rioters, lynch-mobs and criminals in general.
If you're suggesting that programming is no longer as difficult as it was, then this would rather imply, a) programming viable applications is easier now than it was, or b) people are far more intelligent than they were. Neither explanation seems very likely. As far as I can see, programming is still a craft that very few people are capable of doing with any competance.
Basically I agree with that. I would say the programming business is simply dividing into layers that demand varying degrees of competence and computing knowledge. At the low end there are the masses of RAD developers doing relatively simple programming projects in languages like Java, C# or PHP/Perl who often have little basic understanding of computing fundamentals, often they don't even have a grasp of the inner workings of the heavily automized development tools they use and get stranded when confronted by simple tasks like having to port their project from JBuilder to Eclipse. At the high end there are programmers, usually (though not exclusively), people with some sort of computing degree, who have a better understanding of the basics and are able to solve difficult problems and code competently in RAD languages as well as languages like C and C++ where you have to manage your own memory resources. The margin between the two groups is fluid, not a sharp line and quite a few low end developer with ambition evolve into good high end programmers but unfortunately all to many don't.
Well it sure sounds like a product name crafted for the US market. I keep waiting for some USian with a mean sense of humor to suggests the name 'Canyonero' to Ford's marketing people as the name for their next SUV. I bet the thing would stand a good chance of hitting the market before they figured the gag out.
Well I'm not going to justify their business case to you since I don't work for them. However, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say you've got no idea what you are talking about. I'm going to guess you probably do not develop enterprise telecom apps for a living. This is, in fact, what the company my friend works for does (no I'm not going to name them).
Ericsson?
Now if I were to hazard a guess as to why they might use it would be because of Visual Studio. Given that I have had developers describe it as (and I quote) "The best development environment ever," perhaps that's the reason.
Really? Were they born and raised on the Microsoft campus? My personal experience as a developer tells me the subject of which development environment is best (along with the question of which is the best programming language, compiler, processor etc...) is something nerdy programmers can debate endlessly, with religious zeal and the opinions vary hugely. I have my own preferences, most of them don't include Microsoft products although I do like coding in C# better than coding Java and I have long since give up debating the merits of those preferences.
There was actually a computer repair/sales place in the town where I live that went out of business after being sued by Microsoft.
Apparently, they were including XP Pro for free with their bundles.
Same here, except they were selling Windows XP OEM CDs as if they were Windows XP retail packages and without bothering to sell these OEM CDs along with one of their home brewed PCs like they were supposed to. They didn't go out of business though.
Is there any evidence to suggest that GM crops are bad for humans?
This isn't just about these GM crops being harmful to humans. There is a whole slew of other issues with GM crop chief among whom is genetic contamination aka. cross pollination. This has all sorts of implications ranging from the economic through the social to biological. If your export customer is sensitive about GM crops and your neighbor's GM crops cross pollinate with your non GM crops you can possibly wake up one day and find that Bayer, Monsanto or some other biotech firm just ruined your life by making your crop worthless which is what those American rice farmers found out the hard way. There are also Biological implications with GM crops. Take for example the infamous terminator gene that prevents seeds from germinating after a certain number of generations forcing the farmer to buy new patented GM seed every of year rather than save a portion of the crop for sowing next year as farmers have done for millennia. Now you might argue that this is perfectly acceptable since this sort of genetic rights management technology enables biotech firms to make good their development costs and prevents farmers from 'pirating' patented GM seed. But what if the termination gene enabled crop, say rice for example, starts to cross pollenate with wild or traditional crop strains of rice? Where does that end? The terminator gene isn't supposed to be much of a problem in the wild but scientists have been catastrophically wrong before about the way nature works. Another concern is that cross pollination might actually ruin you if you are a poor traditional farmer and your traditional rice is heavily cross pollinated with terminator gene enabled rice from the fields of the factory farm next door. The result might include reduction in agroecological biodiversity, the extinction of genetically valuable traditional crop strains and even famine among rural populations in third world countries.
...Do you really think people are only selfish *now*? What is this rosy view of the past I find many slashdotters seem to have?
No I don't think people are only selfish *now* and I most certalinly don't have a rosy view of the past but then you would have realized if that if you read my post all the way to the end. To quote my self:
Priorities have changed since the mid 19th century.... [Skipping sarcastic political rant].... Hmmmmmm..... perhaps priorities haven't changed all that much after all?
In the American Civil War, the majority of people in the Confederacy were content with their government and its actions. Should the world community have respected their right to govern their country?
Priorities have changed since the mid 19th century. Today the appropriate question would be: Does your aspiring nation seeking recognition have oil? Valuable minerals perhaps? Because in this day and age that, followed by a favorable exploitation deal with a major US/EU corporation belonging to the right people, is the qualifier for instant recognition by the great powers and thus the international community by default. Otherwise your aspiring nation will be caught indefinitely in 'prevent regional political fragmentation' hell which usually means that you can't buy weapons but the megalomanic dictator keeping the region in order for Washington and its favorite allies can buy them at discounted rates from select US/EU defense contractors. So you see that you are in for an up hill struggle if your aspiring nation can't bring anything of solid business value to the table. This is nothing personal mind you, just a solid mix of market driven economics and realpolitik. The Confederate misfortune was that cotton simply wasn't valuable enough a resource to risk pissing off the Northern states by supporting the rebels who into the bargain supported slavery which was rapidly becoming an international abomination at the time which was another barrier to anybody contemplating supporting them. Hmmmmmm..... perhaps priorites haven't changed all that much after all?
I've had bad experiances with CrossOver Office in the past. If you can get it to work as well as BootCamp I'd be very interested as all the rebooting is a little tedious.
I have been doing a little googling and apparently Half Life 2 works quite well under CrossOver Mac apart from a few teething troubles, i.e. expect it to core once in a while (quite a long while judging from experiences with the latest CrossOver Mac builds) and the graphics have to be toned down a little but that is to be expected from in a Beta product. Anyway, I bought a CrossOver Mac pre-order license and will be trying this out tonight. I have zero patience for BootCamp and since I'm no game junky I don't mind dropping some eyecandy and performance if I get to skip the #@"$=%$(/ rebooting.
I've finally got a PC powerful enough to play modern PC games: a MacBook:) . First game I installed on it was Half-Life 2 as it was never, ever going to get ported to OS X and that has to be the most unpleastant installation and purchasing experiance I've ever had - but the game was great!
Just curious... did you boot into XP with BootCamp or use CrossOver Office? CodeWeavers claim to support Half Life 2 and I have been wondering how well it works but haven't gotten around to installing it yet.
What a cruel thing to say!! Am I really the only one who develops using VIM? Sure, I also use Eclipse, Xcode and the likes but the combination of VIM, Make, Bash, Cscope and &Co. is by no means a flop as a development environment as far as I am concerned. I'd go mad weeding through large sized source trees without Cscope.
So now I scanned the text of the first link -- no second post! Is Slashdot empty?
Nah, its just that hell just froze over and pigs flew this morning. As a consequence the topic of copyrights wore thin and became boring so all the slasdotters went off to CowboyNeals place to oooh and aaaah over the Windows Vista Release candidate. Afterwards they plan to set up the worlds first Windows Vista user's fan club.
Slashdot Mirror
It's way worse than that. I just met GWB on the White House lawn. He said the CIA is reporting unusually many sightings of fishy A'rab looking fellas in San Francisco sporting goods stores buying scuba gear. The CIA, FBI and the NSA are now convinced that task-force 'Bluegill' has been infiltrated and that the terrorists infiltrators plan to spike the San Francisco water supply with massive amounts of LSD.
UI idiocy happens in more places than Microsoft's development division. Take for example one of the iterations of the Red Hat setup utility which had this nifty window requiring you to fill out a large form. Unfortunately you needed information from the previous window to complete the form and there was no [ < Back ] button so you had to write it down before proceeding since you couldn't take a screenshot or even print the screen to an ink-jet printer. They fixed it a few minor distro versions later. Until then many was the time you cursed the developers as you restarted the installation process after forgetting about this pitfall and hitting the [ Next > ] button to soon. Examples of UIs in Linux are numerous. Another example of an annoyingly silly UI is the OS.X Finder application......
Mediocrity? Not that that is always a bad thing, they do after all own the desktop and a significant portion of the server market, and they got there partly by never scaring their (corporate) customers by taking big design and tecnology risks. They always play it as safe as possible which is why their attempts to do radical innovative things usually end up looking a bit..... um..... unimpressive.
Strong words...... but there is a grain of truth in them. Price fixing is not the only scam. Apparently some gasstation owners advertise lower prices on gasoline than average and then short change bargain hunters at the pump. The customer thinks he is paying a bargain price for a gallon of gas but in reality the pump only spews out a portion of a gallon and with fuel level indicators in cars being as inaccurate as they are most people don't notice they are getting ripped off. The only thing these guys have to watch out for while they rake in the money is the odd customer who has come to fill their Jerrycans and 'Dept. of weights and measures' inspectors.
Don't worry about American healthcare workers not being able to afford health care, many of them are taking "Medical Holidays" to places in Asia where they can get cheap operations. Yes many years ago that might have been a bit risky, but these days in places like Taiwan, American patients can get first class treatment at 1/10th of the price and it's probably safer than being treated by overworked American medical staff.
While I'm not saying all these overseas healthcare providers are crooks this is still an area where you have to be really careful about who you do business with. While you can get some first class service there have also been numerous cases of people going on these sorts of medical holidays for bargain basement priced plastic surgery or other kinds of treatment and suffering some pretty horrifying consequences. These range from badly botched plastic surgery to people going to places like India to make the forces of the free market work for them in their quest for an organ transplant only to discover to late that the dirt poor ghetto dweller they paid $10.000 for a kidney had Aids and the doctor they paid for the surgery didn't bother to reveal that little deal breaking detail. So if you think you can get medical service overseas for the price of a Big Mac with fries you better think again. Personally I have never understood why people would go bargain hunting when it comes to their health.
Nice flame troll, not very subtle though. Cooperation always results in a better product than if people each sit in their own corner and only talk when the project is in danger of being derailed. This guy seems to be talking about interaction between (web)designers and (web)developers but planning and design in general, even if we are only talking about the design and structure of the software code it self, is something that is completely missing in a lot of coding projects. I wish I had a penny for every badly planned, badly designed and as a result bug ridden and semi useless block of Java, C#, C and C++ code I have had to rewrite because the original coders didn't take the trouble to apply fundamental software design principles like layer abstraction, code re-use and modularization to their projects.
Wow, they actually managed to kill the product before it hit the market. Nobody will buy this.
I wish the people writing the news summaries here would tone down their appetite for sensationalism. We all like to have a nice friendly anti Microsoft flamewar-deathmatch every once in a while just for fun but headlines like 'PostgreSQL Slammed by PHP Creator' sound like they were written by a member of the British tabloid press. Can't people voice some criticism without getting gutted any more? And, no, I am not new here I'm just getting a little tired of the fanboyism.
PHP (along with MySQL, VB and Access) should be sealed in concrete and dumped at sea.
If you can fit Perl and Lotus Notes in there I'll pay for the extra cement.
You have clearly never set foot in London's East End.... Of course the East End way of mangling the english language is more elegant than the American one. The creative logic behind words like 'Bristols' always makes me laugh.
There... fixed that for ya.
CrossOver Office also runs games. I got Half Life 2 running on CrossOver 6.0 Beta 1 for OS.X. After not bothering with Wine and related products in general for over 3 years and it is safe to say they Wine team and their semi-proprietary spinoffs have made progress. Apart from some graphical glitches CrossOver is a lot more stable than I expected a beta product to be and quite fast. Since it is more mature than the OS.X version the Linux version of CrossOver should be superior, but for Linux, Cedega should be better yet since they are the game specialists. Unfortunately they do not seem to be planning to release an end user version of Cedega for OS.X. Instead they have gone with a portability engine named 'Cider' aimed at game manufacturers.
Who says the goddesses Eris and Dysnomia weren't popular in ancient times? I'm sure the goddesses of strife and lawlessness were widely worshipped by ancient Greek and Roman hooligans, rioters, lynch-mobs and criminals in general.
Basically I agree with that. I would say the programming business is simply dividing into layers that demand varying degrees of competence and computing knowledge. At the low end there are the masses of RAD developers doing relatively simple programming projects in languages like Java, C# or PHP/Perl who often have little basic understanding of computing fundamentals, often they don't even have a grasp of the inner workings of the heavily automized development tools they use and get stranded when confronted by simple tasks like having to port their project from JBuilder to Eclipse. At the high end there are programmers, usually (though not exclusively), people with some sort of computing degree, who have a better understanding of the basics and are able to solve difficult problems and code competently in RAD languages as well as languages like C and C++ where you have to manage your own memory resources. The margin between the two groups is fluid, not a sharp line and quite a few low end developer with ambition evolve into good high end programmers but unfortunately all to many don't.
...Canon EOS DIGITAL REBEL...
Well it sure sounds like a product name crafted for the US market. I keep waiting for some USian with a mean sense of humor to suggests the name 'Canyonero' to Ford's marketing people as the name for their next SUV. I bet the thing would stand a good chance of hitting the market before they figured the gag out.
Ericsson?
Really? Were they born and raised on the Microsoft campus? My personal experience as a developer tells me the subject of which development environment is best (along with the question of which is the best programming language, compiler, processor etc...) is something nerdy programmers can debate endlessly, with religious zeal and the opinions vary hugely. I have my own preferences, most of them don't include Microsoft products although I do like coding in C# better than coding Java and I have long since give up debating the merits of those preferences.
There was actually a computer repair/sales place in the town where I live that went out of business after being sued by Microsoft.
Apparently, they were including XP Pro for free with their bundles.
Same here, except they were selling Windows XP OEM CDs as if they were Windows XP retail packages and without bothering to sell these OEM CDs along with one of their home brewed PCs like they were supposed to. They didn't go out of business though.
Is there any evidence to suggest that GM crops are bad for humans?
This isn't just about these GM crops being harmful to humans. There is a whole slew of other issues with GM crop chief among whom is genetic contamination aka. cross pollination. This has all sorts of implications ranging from the economic through the social to biological. If your export customer is sensitive about GM crops and your neighbor's GM crops cross pollinate with your non GM crops you can possibly wake up one day and find that Bayer, Monsanto or some other biotech firm just ruined your life by making your crop worthless which is what those American rice farmers found out the hard way. There are also Biological implications with GM crops. Take for example the infamous terminator gene that prevents seeds from germinating after a certain number of generations forcing the farmer to buy new patented GM seed every of year rather than save a portion of the crop for sowing next year as farmers have done for millennia. Now you might argue that this is perfectly acceptable since this sort of genetic rights management technology enables biotech firms to make good their development costs and prevents farmers from 'pirating' patented GM seed. But what if the termination gene enabled crop, say rice for example, starts to cross pollenate with wild or traditional crop strains of rice? Where does that end? The terminator gene isn't supposed to be much of a problem in the wild but scientists have been catastrophically wrong before about the way nature works. Another concern is that cross pollination might actually ruin you if you are a poor traditional farmer and your traditional rice is heavily cross pollinated with terminator gene enabled rice from the fields of the factory farm next door. The result might include reduction in agroecological biodiversity, the extinction of genetically valuable traditional crop strains and even famine among rural populations in third world countries.
No I don't think people are only selfish *now* and I most certalinly don't have a rosy view of the past but then you would have realized if that if you read my post all the way to the end. To quote my self:
Did that clear things up for you?
In the American Civil War, the majority of people in the Confederacy were content with their government and its actions. Should the world community have respected their right to govern their country?
Priorities have changed since the mid 19th century. Today the appropriate question would be: Does your aspiring nation seeking recognition have oil? Valuable minerals perhaps? Because in this day and age that, followed by a favorable exploitation deal with a major US/EU corporation belonging to the right people, is the qualifier for instant recognition by the great powers and thus the international community by default. Otherwise your aspiring nation will be caught indefinitely in 'prevent regional political fragmentation' hell which usually means that you can't buy weapons but the megalomanic dictator keeping the region in order for Washington and its favorite allies can buy them at discounted rates from select US/EU defense contractors. So you see that you are in for an up hill struggle if your aspiring nation can't bring anything of solid business value to the table. This is nothing personal mind you, just a solid mix of market driven economics and realpolitik. The Confederate misfortune was that cotton simply wasn't valuable enough a resource to risk pissing off the Northern states by supporting the rebels who into the bargain supported slavery which was rapidly becoming an international abomination at the time which was another barrier to anybody contemplating supporting them. Hmmmmmm..... perhaps priorites haven't changed all that much after all?
I've had bad experiances with CrossOver Office in the past. If you can get it to work as well as BootCamp I'd be very interested as all the rebooting is a little tedious.
I have been doing a little googling and apparently Half Life 2 works quite well under CrossOver Mac apart from a few teething troubles, i.e. expect it to core once in a while (quite a long while judging from experiences with the latest CrossOver Mac builds) and the graphics have to be toned down a little but that is to be expected from in a Beta product. Anyway, I bought a CrossOver Mac pre-order license and will be trying this out tonight. I have zero patience for BootCamp and since I'm no game junky I don't mind dropping some eyecandy and performance if I get to skip the #@"$=%$(/ rebooting.
Just curious... did you boot into XP with BootCamp or use CrossOver Office? CodeWeavers claim to support Half Life 2 and I have been wondering how well it works but haven't gotten around to installing it yet.
I really gotta write up "definition debate" so I can just link to it.
#define PC_V_GC_DEBATE "/dev/flamewar"
There you go...
What a cruel thing to say!! Am I really the only one who develops using VIM? Sure, I also use Eclipse, Xcode and the likes but the combination of VIM, Make, Bash, Cscope and &Co. is by no means a flop as a development environment as far as I am concerned. I'd go mad weeding through large sized source trees without Cscope.
So now I scanned the text of the first link -- no second post! Is Slashdot empty?
Nah, its just that hell just froze over and pigs flew this morning. As a consequence the topic of copyrights wore thin and became boring so all the slasdotters went off to CowboyNeals place to oooh and aaaah over the Windows Vista Release candidate. Afterwards they plan to set up the worlds first Windows Vista user's fan club.