It never ceases to amaze me when folks (mostly at work) ask me some inane question that can be solved almost instantly by a google search. Easier than walking from their office to mine and asking me what's what.
I generally take the time to demonstrate how easily they can find subsequent answers to these inquiries by themselves by running their owned damned google searches.
Almost invariably the same person shows up a few days later asking another easily googled question. These subsquent inquires are generally met with a response worthy of several flamebait modifications.
Not that the poster's question itself bugged me, just the way it was presented. If he/she would have been less smarmy and/or simply googled the answer then shared it...then there wouldn't be so much suffering (sniff) and misery (whine) in the world. <i>Oh, why, God? Why?</i> [incoherent, inconsolate sobbing].
This is probably the most lucid argument I've read. It's really up to us to find or build open source alternatives to proprietary software. "But X doesn't run on Linux," should be seen as a challenge to (first) get X to run on Linux and develop Y to compete with X. There's a lot of great stuff out there, and there's a lot left to do. But moaning about Microsoft doesn't do much good when you re-up your licensing time and again.
I develop on Windows - its the platform of choice in my industry. However, Linux is making inroads. I'm doing what I can to port stuff over. We've frozen on Windows 2000 and in the iteration after next, I have a Linux port on the books. SQL2K=>PostgreSQL, IIS=>Apache. We're dependent upon a bunch of components, but those can be replaced in time.
There is only one industry standard win32 app I have yet to get running on wine, but that's just a matter of time.
I take far more than a sound-byte 2 seconds to make decisions about someone's credibility or lack thereof. I've read and listened to a lot of sources - with many, several massively spun - about the Election of 2000. I also followed the court cases. Greg Palast is but one, albeit an excellent one, source I read to find out what was going on.
Basically it's 21st century orienteering. Back in high school, I ran orienteering in JROTC. There was a lot of cross-country running in the wilderness, so it was a lot of fun. You had a map, compass, canteen, punch card, and an emergency kit. You had grid coordinates and had to mark the points on the map yourself with your trusty grease pencil.
Then you got to haul ass through the woods looking for your markers. There would be a bunch of markers, each punching a different pattern on your card. Most of the time you didn't have to get every point on the map, but you had to get a certain number of markers (e.g. 10 of 12, 18 of 20, whatever).
You would be surprised how hard it is to find something, in plus/minus ten meters. Plus/minus ten meters is a bigger deal than you may think, and we didn't have fancy schmansy GPS to fool with. (Though I sure would have loved one!) Anyway, even though they were hunter orange and white they don't just jump out at you.
Of course, some where just plain hard to get to - plus you were running against the clock AND other smart folks - most of them military brats, many of them Boy Scouts to boot. (Yeah, I did that too.)
Making sure you know what the crap you're doing with a map is obvious. You're given grid coordinates - you have to plot them quickly, and accurately. It's something you want to do at the outset - you have to choose your path from teh get-go. Then you haul ass.
You don't necessarily want to go to (or pass up) the nearest or fartherest marker. It totally depends on the terrain, weather (we cancelled if weather sucked - light rain was no biggie), and your buddy (on duo runs).
Some points would have folks wandering all over the place looking for it. You could solve it together if it was a pain to find - better for both teams to get it done quick and move to the next point. You punch your cards and go.
Of course, nowadays I'd do the whole thing with PDAs (you'd still have to plot points yourself, input your data into a map) and decide how you're going to run based on the terrain, points, etc.
It could be a hell of a lot of fun. I'd make the marker be a computer - with a wireless link of some sort - preferably with webcams scattered around to entertain the parents and friends who hang around and barbecue to watch the action.
Marker would perform some kind of wireless data exchange between the PDA and the marker. That would update the big board back at the finish line (on the web, whatever) - you might even update the runner with some limited information, but I dunno. It would be discouraging if you knew someone was way ahead, had X number of points, whatever. Also could make someone slack. Keeping the runner in the dark is best.
Also, in case of some kind of emergency, you would at least be able to tell the last place/time somebody was. You could also call people back if something was up (like when the USAF decided to start practice bombing a coupla miles away from where they'd been informed we were staging an air-rescue field exercise).
You could use video clips for the journalism web site, for your JROTC squadron, battalion, whatever. Photo-finish.
As a geeky challenge, you could even have the data you're beamed by the markers comprise some kind of message or whatever. A quick and dirty method of doing this could be to have each marker contain all data sets you need to capture.
So say you get to marker 1 - the marker knows who you are (key exchange), that it's the first marker you've gone to, etc. So it sends you part 1. So on for each marker. You want to keep the all the data with each marker. That way, if a marker loses connectivity or fails then you can go to plan B - scan a bar code, punch a card, otherwise prove you were there.
A punch card and physical map would be a good backup in case your PDA gets fragged on the journey anyway. Something always happens - so nobody can complain it's "not fair" that their PDA failed or whatever - stuff happens, sometimes for good or ill. It's just a fun, healhty contest - whiners and lamers need not attend.
I'm sure fellow geeks could come up with far more clever stuff - if you think of any, post away.:)
Nope. Nobody was "kicked off the list" because of the felon list. In fact, when the USCCR held hearings on the 2000 Florida elections, they couldnt find a single eligible voter that was kept from voting because they were incorrectly identified as a felon (and believe me- the Democrat majority in the commission looked VERY hard).
No, you're wrong. Greg Palast did extensive research into what happened. Don't buy the party line from Fox News, CNN, and others who completely whitewashed what happened in Florida.
Now that Diebold has a lock on voting systems, expect more fraud and even less media acknowledgement of it.
One more reason to emigrate to Canada and open up my fragging cafe.
aw, crap - jump to conclusions audio : (
on
Does C# Measure Up?
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· Score: 1
Talk about irony - sorry I shoulda better known better to link straight to the friggin' files...which are all nice and warbly when you save them.
20 min of googling for replacements to no avail
well, 10 min of googling, 1 second of pre-ordering TTT:Special Edition, and 9:59 of wandering off into something totally unrelated, then absently realizing I was in the middle of submitting a post.
SharpDevelop - #develop - GPL .NET IDE
on
Does C# Measure Up?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I do a lot of ASP3.0/SQL2k and some utility development on Win32, taking a stab at.NET. It would be nice to move over to Mono.
Anyway, I've done a bit of poking around and ran across SharpDevelop - AKA #develop. It's open source a la GPL and looks a lot like Visual Studio, and compiles C# and VB.NET; has C# => VB.NET code conversion; does projects or files; has syntaxing for the whole MS shebang. It's a.97 - this build was released Friday 9/12/2K3, officially in beta, and you can get the binaries here, go snag the source here, and get the MS.NET1.1SDK here.
SharpWT - AKA #WT is a.NET port of Java SWT on both Windows/.NET and Linux/Mono platforms. So...you can develop your.NET apps to run on both Win32 and Linux with pretty much the same GUI. Neat, eh?
Anyway, intrepid Windows Developer, if you can pry yourself away from the MSDN Library for a few minutes, you might find there's something to this Mono business.
Slippery slope my ass, this is a sheer cliff. Powers like these will always be abused, whatever the political party. That's why the US Constitution is framed the way it is - with a separation of powers that restricts one branch of goverment, or even two branches in collusion, from doing crap like this.
Just because I happen to share a lot of MP3's doesn't mean that people actually download them...think about it.
Sure, OK. But you *are* sharing them. If you're a streetside peddler of pirated CDs it doesn't matter if you've sold zero of your 1000 CD inventory. You've still committed piracy and have offered pirated goods for sale. That's plenty to get busted and/or sued for. Only difference of sharing files online is no cash trade, no physical trade. But with the DCMA it doesn't really matter anyway.
That said, the RIAA can lick my nads. I have a shitty library of 80s music I painstakingly ripped from my fewscore scratch-repaired 80's metal, 60-s-80's rock, classical, and soundtrack CDs. It's about the only music I listen to aside from Thistle & Shamrock on NPR and the occassional "something different" on XM Radio.
And no, I don't share crap or participate in P2P - I'm selfish that way. My precious bandwidth is mine...all mine...
Uh, okay...how is this flamebait? Someone's gonna start a flame war over...what exactly? Whether Fox execs are or are not morons? Sheesh, what a waste of a moderation point.
Yeah, I've watched some of those - mainly some TV episode stuff to fill in the blanks I missed during the regular season, but I also had a few full-length movies in DivX that I also have on DVD. The quality is not even close.
Sure most movies *looks great* as DivX, but the sound quality sucks ass. The DVD, however, looks fantastic and sounds flawless. Now, nobody expects a DivX to sound flawless, but c'mon - I'd like to hear the friggin' dialogue, soundtrack, and special effects. Sound on 99% of DivX rips is muffled and distorted, even if it is in sync. And at 700-odd MB per flick, why waste the bandwidth d/l'ing?
Yeah, there are gonna be folks who say "people said the same thing about mp3s" but an mp3 album isn't going to be 700mb a track. Freed up a coupla gigs of HDD space lickety split.
Fox execs are morons - it's a great show that didn't get a chance to bloom. Crappy time spot, totally out of sequence airing. Glad to see it kicking ass in the UK. But damn those Amazon customers! I want my DVD collection now!
Right on, excellent point. The product was *just* released and at the rate the project is progressing, I expect that in a few weeks they'll be burning their own discs. At $50 a pop, it's a pretty cool & affordable project. A poster below points out that B & W was given up in the Nixon administration; however, I'm sure there's a colour one in the works.
Screw Universal and the rest of the RIAA members: unless they're indie buy used CDs and send the artist $2, go to a concert. Musicians don't make dick from CD sales - all production, promotion, legal, administrative, and other costs are charged against the artist. Once *all* of that is cleared, then they get paid a sliver of what's left over after their producer, manager, and entertainment lawyer snack.
As an added injury, only in the music industry do artists not retain copyright to their works. Many musicians are now discovering piece-for-hire, you don't retain the copyright to your works.
Concerts: this is where artists make their money, their bread and butter - it's certainly not from CD sales. They go on tour, license t-shirts, ball caps, posters, whatever. Make a chunk of concessions, etc. And now the music industry wants a piece of concerts too.
Screw 'em. Screw them in both ears - buy indie. If there's non-indie tunes you dig on, visit your local CD Warehouse or hit eBay and buy albums used - then send the artist a couple of bucks.
Bullcrap. The shift of jobs overseas is hardly a good thing, whether you call it "free trade" or some pseudo-Darwinistic economic evolution. You want good examples of what these corps do overseas?
Look at Nike. Indonesian factory workers - mostly girls - work under conditions and hours typical of late 19th century American garment factories. Environmental destruction runs rampant.
Take a look at Coca Cola's operations in South America - their hiring of death squads for "security" and assassination of labor organizers.
Remember Union Carbide?
This "free trade" business has led to US corporations moving offshore to the Caymans and elsewhere so they can avoid paying corporate income taxes. Taxes that you, me, and Joe Sixpack get burdened with - even as we move down the economic ladder.
Fortunately I still have my job - and yes, for a while it looked like my work was going to be outsourced to India. But the folks working in New Delhi don't understand the ins and outs of our operations or the systems we integrate with: I do. As a "knowledge transfer" - forget it, won't happen.
Folks seem to have this silly notion that what's good for the corporate economy is good for the citizens. That ain't necessarily so, nor do I think that "cheaper is better" is necessarily good for the corporations either, not in the long run. If the middle class continues to shrink who the crap is going to buy the stuff produced by cheap labor?
They mean two million jobs outsourced to Asia. C'mon, telemarketing jobs have long been outsourced to Asia (most notably India) a lot faster and for longer than IT jobs are going there now.
I feel not the slightest bit of guilt or pity for telemarketing companies and as for the jobs - that's two million people who won't have to endure the most grueling non-labor 'office' job in existence.
Slashdot Mirror
lol. *exactly*
lol - i'll have to remember that rule
It never ceases to amaze me when folks (mostly at work) ask me some inane question that can be solved almost instantly by a google search. Easier than walking from their office to mine and asking me what's what.
I generally take the time to demonstrate how easily they can find subsequent answers to these inquiries by themselves by running their owned damned google searches.
Almost invariably the same person shows up a few days later asking another easily googled question. These subsquent inquires are generally met with a response worthy of several flamebait modifications.
Not that the poster's question itself bugged me, just the way it was presented. If he/she would have been less smarmy and/or simply googled the answer then shared it...then there wouldn't be so much suffering (sniff) and misery (whine) in the world. <i>Oh, why, God? Why?</i> [incoherent, inconsolate sobbing].
troll?
Navigate to google.com.
Copy and paste Machinima into the search window.
Search.
Read.
machinima
I develop on Windows - its the platform of choice in my industry. However, Linux is making inroads. I'm doing what I can to port stuff over. We've frozen on Windows 2000 and in the iteration after next, I have a Linux port on the books. SQL2K=>PostgreSQL, IIS=>Apache. We're dependent upon a bunch of components, but those can be replaced in time.
There is only one industry standard win32 app I have yet to get running on wine, but that's just a matter of time.
I take far more than a sound-byte 2 seconds to make decisions about someone's credibility or lack thereof. I've read and listened to a lot of sources - with many, several massively spun - about the Election of 2000. I also followed the court cases. Greg Palast is but one, albeit an excellent one, source I read to find out what was going on.
Then you got to haul ass through the woods looking for your markers. There would be a bunch of markers, each punching a different pattern on your card. Most of the time you didn't have to get every point on the map, but you had to get a certain number of markers (e.g. 10 of 12, 18 of 20, whatever).
You would be surprised how hard it is to find something, in plus/minus ten meters. Plus/minus ten meters is a bigger deal than you may think, and we didn't have fancy schmansy GPS to fool with. (Though I sure would have loved one!) Anyway, even though they were hunter orange and white they don't just jump out at you.
Of course, some where just plain hard to get to - plus you were running against the clock AND other smart folks - most of them military brats, many of them Boy Scouts to boot. (Yeah, I did that too.)
Making sure you know what the crap you're doing with a map is obvious. You're given grid coordinates - you have to plot them quickly, and accurately. It's something you want to do at the outset - you have to choose your path from teh get-go. Then you haul ass.
You don't necessarily want to go to (or pass up) the nearest or fartherest marker. It totally depends on the terrain, weather (we cancelled if weather sucked - light rain was no biggie), and your buddy (on duo runs).
Some points would have folks wandering all over the place looking for it. You could solve it together if it was a pain to find - better for both teams to get it done quick and move to the next point. You punch your cards and go.
Of course, nowadays I'd do the whole thing with PDAs (you'd still have to plot points yourself, input your data into a map) and decide how you're going to run based on the terrain, points, etc.
It could be a hell of a lot of fun. I'd make the marker be a computer - with a wireless link of some sort - preferably with webcams scattered around to entertain the parents and friends who hang around and barbecue to watch the action.
Marker would perform some kind of wireless data exchange between the PDA and the marker. That would update the big board back at the finish line (on the web, whatever) - you might even update the runner with some limited information, but I dunno. It would be discouraging if you knew someone was way ahead, had X number of points, whatever. Also could make someone slack. Keeping the runner in the dark is best.
Also, in case of some kind of emergency, you would at least be able to tell the last place/time somebody was. You could also call people back if something was up (like when the USAF decided to start practice bombing a coupla miles away from where they'd been informed we were staging an air-rescue field exercise).
You could use video clips for the journalism web site, for your JROTC squadron, battalion, whatever. Photo-finish.
As a geeky challenge, you could even have the data you're beamed by the markers comprise some kind of message or whatever. A quick and dirty method of doing this could be to have each marker contain all data sets you need to capture.
So say you get to marker 1 - the marker knows who you are (key exchange), that it's the first marker you've gone to, etc. So it sends you part 1. So on for each marker. You want to keep the all the data with each marker. That way, if a marker loses connectivity or fails then you can go to plan B - scan a bar code, punch a card, otherwise prove you were there.
A punch card and physical map would be a good backup in case your PDA gets fragged on the journey anyway. Something always happens - so nobody can complain it's "not fair" that their PDA failed or whatever - stuff happens, sometimes for good or ill. It's just a fun, healhty contest - whiners and lamers need not attend.
I'm sure fellow geeks could come up with far more clever stuff - if you think of any, post away. :)
No, you're wrong. Greg Palast did extensive research into what happened. Don't buy the party line from Fox News, CNN, and others who completely whitewashed what happened in Florida.
Now that Diebold has a lock on voting systems, expect more fraud and even less media acknowledgement of it.
One more reason to emigrate to Canada and open up my fragging cafe.
20 min of googling for replacements to no avail
well, 10 min of googling, 1 second of pre-ordering TTT:Special Edition, and 9:59 of wandering off into something totally unrelated, then absently realizing I was in the middle of submitting a post.
I do a lot of ASP3.0/SQL2k and some utility development on Win32, taking a stab at .NET. It would be nice to move over to Mono.
Anyway, I've done a bit of poking around and ran across SharpDevelop - AKA #develop . It's open source a la GPL and looks a lot like Visual Studio, and compiles C# and VB.NET; has C# => VB.NET code conversion; does projects or files; has syntaxing for the whole MS shebang. It's a .97 - this build was released Friday 9/12/2K3, officially in beta, and you can get the binaries here, go snag the source here, and get the MS.NET1.1SDK here.
To those folks who hiss and moan about the whole GNOME/.NET/Mono thing, take a gander at the rationale before playing jump to conclusions (mp3).
SharpWT - AKA #WT is a .NET port of Java SWT on both Windows/.NET and Linux/Mono platforms. So...you can develop your .NET apps to run on both Win32 and Linux with pretty much the same GUI. Neat, eh?
Anyway, intrepid Windows Developer, if you can pry yourself away from the MSDN Library for a few minutes, you might find there's something to this Mono business.
Slippery slope my ass, this is a sheer cliff. Powers like these will always be abused, whatever the political party. That's why the US Constitution is framed the way it is - with a separation of powers that restricts one branch of goverment, or even two branches in collusion, from doing crap like this.
perhaps 50 cent is a dentist?
maybe you wouldn't consider his work 'Art' with a capital A, but i think he qualifies for the moniker
Sure, OK. But you *are* sharing them. If you're a streetside peddler of pirated CDs it doesn't matter if you've sold zero of your 1000 CD inventory. You've still committed piracy and have offered pirated goods for sale. That's plenty to get busted and/or sued for. Only difference of sharing files online is no cash trade, no physical trade. But with the DCMA it doesn't really matter anyway.
That said, the RIAA can lick my nads. I have a shitty library of 80s music I painstakingly ripped from my fewscore scratch-repaired 80's metal, 60-s-80's rock, classical, and soundtrack CDs. It's about the only music I listen to aside from Thistle & Shamrock on NPR and the occassional "something different" on XM Radio.
And no, I don't share crap or participate in P2P - I'm selfish that way. My precious bandwidth is mine...all mine...
My precious...
Uh, okay...how is this flamebait? Someone's gonna start a flame war over...what exactly? Whether Fox execs are or are not morons? Sheesh, what a waste of a moderation point.
A bit OT, but hey:
Yeah, I've watched some of those - mainly some TV episode stuff to fill in the blanks I missed during the regular season, but I also had a few full-length movies in DivX that I also have on DVD. The quality is not even close.
Sure most movies *looks great* as DivX, but the sound quality sucks ass. The DVD, however, looks fantastic and sounds flawless. Now, nobody expects a DivX to sound flawless, but c'mon - I'd like to hear the friggin' dialogue, soundtrack, and special effects. Sound on 99% of DivX rips is muffled and distorted, even if it is in sync. And at 700-odd MB per flick, why waste the bandwidth d/l'ing?
Yeah, there are gonna be folks who say "people said the same thing about mp3s" but an mp3 album isn't going to be 700mb a track. Freed up a coupla gigs of HDD space lickety split.
Fox execs are morons - it's a great show that didn't get a chance to bloom. Crappy time spot, totally out of sequence airing. Glad to see it kicking ass in the UK. But damn those Amazon customers! I want my DVD collection now!
lol - someone mod the parent up
So how can we use elephants to define hard disk space? If the base pairs of elephant DNA were expressed in megabytes...
Right on, excellent point. The product was *just* released and at the rate the project is progressing, I expect that in a few weeks they'll be burning their own discs. At $50 a pop, it's a pretty cool & affordable project. A poster below points out that B & W was given up in the Nixon administration; however, I'm sure there's a colour one in the works.
Screw Universal and the rest of the RIAA members: unless they're indie buy used CDs and send the artist $2, go to a concert. Musicians don't make dick from CD sales - all production, promotion, legal, administrative, and other costs are charged against the artist. Once *all* of that is cleared, then they get paid a sliver of what's left over after their producer, manager, and entertainment lawyer snack. As an added injury, only in the music industry do artists not retain copyright to their works. Many musicians are now discovering piece-for-hire, you don't retain the copyright to your works. Concerts: this is where artists make their money, their bread and butter - it's certainly not from CD sales. They go on tour, license t-shirts, ball caps, posters, whatever. Make a chunk of concessions, etc. And now the music industry wants a piece of concerts too. Screw 'em. Screw them in both ears - buy indie. If there's non-indie tunes you dig on, visit your local CD Warehouse or hit eBay and buy albums used - then send the artist a couple of bucks.
I was suggesting that perhaps the Iranians would do the same for us.
Bullcrap. The shift of jobs overseas is hardly a good thing, whether you call it "free trade" or some pseudo-Darwinistic economic evolution. You want good examples of what these corps do overseas?
Look at Nike. Indonesian factory workers - mostly girls - work under conditions and hours typical of late 19th century American garment factories. Environmental destruction runs rampant.
Take a look at Coca Cola's operations in South America - their hiring of death squads for "security" and assassination of labor organizers.
Remember Union Carbide?
This "free trade" business has led to US corporations moving offshore to the Caymans and elsewhere so they can avoid paying corporate income taxes. Taxes that you, me, and Joe Sixpack get burdened with - even as we move down the economic ladder.
Fortunately I still have my job - and yes, for a while it looked like my work was going to be outsourced to India. But the folks working in New Delhi don't understand the ins and outs of our operations or the systems we integrate with: I do. As a "knowledge transfer" - forget it, won't happen.
Folks seem to have this silly notion that what's good for the corporate economy is good for the citizens. That ain't necessarily so, nor do I think that "cheaper is better" is necessarily good for the corporations either, not in the long run. If the middle class continues to shrink who the crap is going to buy the stuff produced by cheap labor?
Great, maybe they'll do the same for Americans so we can surf away from the prying eyes of *our* government.
They mean two million jobs outsourced to Asia. C'mon, telemarketing jobs have long been outsourced to Asia (most notably India) a lot faster and for longer than IT jobs are going there now. I feel not the slightest bit of guilt or pity for telemarketing companies and as for the jobs - that's two million people who won't have to endure the most grueling non-labor 'office' job in existence.
This has gotten waaaaay outta hand.