Additionally, I believe there's no law prohibiting youngsters from seeing NC-17 movies based on rating alone. If the NC-17 movie contains pornography, of course, then that would be punishable under other laws.
Of course there are plenty of R rated movies that have what could be construed as pornography in them. It is all up to the locale and the judge.
I couldn't find any law requiring enforcement of the rating system (though it looks like the idea has been tossed about), but other laws could easily come into play.
Actually, the constitutionality of hate speech seems to change every few decades. 50 years ago hate-speech was not deemed protected, but recently it was protected http://www.adl.org/99hatecrime/constitutionality.a sp
But it looks like it may have been upheld if the state had worded its statute differently.
The Supreme Court disagreed and struck down the statute. The Court held that because Minnesota had not in fact criminalized all fighting words, the statute isolated certain words based on their content or viewpoint and therefore violated the First Amendment.
So it's hard to tell how it would play out in Texas assuming that the censorship went beyond porn to speech.
... requires that we tolerate even the most distasteful political speech. Talking is not a hate crime. Now, you may disagree with that, but TOUGH SHIT...
That's partially right. Political speech is covered, and religious expression is covered, but if your religion requires you to execute all [insert group of people here] or your political platform insists on the violent overthrow of the government, you'll find that it actually isn't covered.
Likewise, "Talking is not a hate crime" probably fails the test if you assert loudly in public that [insert group of people here] are not actually people, and should be chopped up and used for dogfood.
I'm no neo-NAZI, but I support protection of their speech because
Which is why I said white supremicist, and which illustrates the point, nicely. Check out nazi.org for an interesting read. Nowhere [that I saw, though I did scan lightly] do they advocate violence to anyone or any government. It is only [objectionable] political speech, and should be protected. White supremacy seems to be pretty outspoken in their notions of who is human and who should live (feel free to correct me).
tomorrow it could be DeCSS, or GPG, or Gnutella, or The Right to Read that The Powers That Be want to censor.
You're not keeping up. DeCSS is illegal, last I checked. GPG was illegal for export and is no longer, I think.
Which makes sense. This falls into the notion that localities are free to manage/restrict local access to porn as they see fit - which is how indecency laws seem to go.
Yeah, but the state doesn't keeps the porn in their servers. Big difference.
You don't suppose they pay for bandwidth? Even if they don't, bandwidth is limited so there is a cost associated with "free porn".
And, if today is pornography, tomorrow will be "wrong" ideas, political adversaries, etc, that will be censored.
Which would be like France, I guess (don't quote me on that). Actually there is plenty of text that would probably fall into various anti-hate crime laws that would be up for blocking. Which falls into the same category - you want access to your favorite white supremicist site, pay for it.
(b) A state agency that provides wireless Internet access on state property may not allow access to obscene materials through the use of that wireless access.
That means that the state is required to block obscene materials. The problem is that according to the Supreme Court, adults need to be able to turn the filter off. If it's not feasible to let a grownup turn off the filter, then the requirement seems unconstitutional.
Are you sure? I'm used to the RFC terms, in which "MAY" also means "may not", and only "MUST" means must. The wording of the rest of the bill which states that there will be someone available to help with filtering requests also makes me think that may means may/not.
My legalese is not that great, but it looks like they will only prohibit access to porn, etc, at correctional facilities. They MAY prohibit access at others sites, and will have (it looks like one person) someone to help these other sites implement filters if they want them.
The article as posted certainly seems like flamebait to me. There is no requirement that the state of texas provide net access to anyone. If certain locallities want to implement porn filters, I don't see how that's a bad thing at all. If you want your net porn, go buy it.
Last I checked, my local library doesn't stock hustler - though they do have people mag. Is that also an attack on my 1st amendment rights?
I'm ready to pay a dime/episode of The Daily Show. With commercials. I'll pay a quarter/episode without commercials. Sell me a torrent in a timely fashion.
I can get it illegally now, but I'd much rather pay for it and be able to get it timely, consistently, and in better quality than some of the rips seem to appear.
- Don't try to learn Objective-C by yourself, it's weird syntaxically and many many pitfalls can be avoided by carefully perusing and actually doing the examples for the first few chapters of Ora's Learning Cocoa with Objective-C (http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/learncocoa2/). It's that weird. But it's totally worth it.
OK, the syntax is a little different, but I don't think it's that hard to get your head around. Instead of someObject.doSomething(param1, param2); [someObject doSomethingWith:param1 andWith:param2];
If you think of ObjC as being like Java, not C++, it will help a lot. 'course there's no GC, which is "the last great pitfall" of all C languages (in my book).
- XCode and VC both have the good things and bad things. I'd say that VC is slightly better because they got more years under the belt that XCode
Wow. xcode is a direct descendent of ProjectBuilder/InterfaceBuilder from the NextStep days - which date back to 1987 or so. So I'd argue with the notion that VB is more mature.
They also got Visual Assist X, which is God-sent (http://www.wholetomato.com/). And only for the build styles, that are so well hidden in XCode, that ought to piss you off (on VC, you just select the configuration and here you go).
As for build styles, I gotta agree with you there. It IS a major pain in the ass. I'm very much hoping that the upcoming rev to xcode makes that easier/more transparent.
I use DNS blocklists for the simple reason that they work, and they work with a lot less CPU time than content analysis filters such as SpamAssassin.
What, you're running your mailserver on an apple II? Seriously, I use my own baysian filter, but I imagine that that SpamAssassin couldn't be too much worse - and the amount of CPU mine takes is totally negligible.
My only experience with an RBL was a bad one, so I won't be using another until someone responsible steps up to the plate. 9-5 weekdays, my ass.
I still don't see the great need for being connected like that all the time.
There isn't. But it is fantastic to have it available anytime and anywhere you want it.
I see wide open, anonymous access for hackers, virus authors and identity thieves. Of course nearly any WiFi access point qualifies for that.
For that you can just go to your local library. Nothing new here - just easier access.
I also see a viable network for distributed RFID readers to access their database back ends to make for greater ease in people tracking. I see web cameras, rather than the more costly dedicated units, all over the place, and the US becoming like the UK.
Do you also see aliens? Seriously, you're just FUDing here.
I see the back end capability for the advertisement boards like in the Minority Report movie.
Specifically: when he walked into a store, he was greeted by name and asked whether or not he like the last thing he purchased. ie: he entered someone's personal property (the store), and the security/customer system identified him. Which is no different than having a guard/service rep at the entrance asking for your id and greeting you, except that it is automated. You don't like it, don't go in the store. It is private property.
All of these things are intrusive and to my mind not good. And I'm by no means a luddite.
All of those things are ONLY in your mind. All that is being offered here is city-wide WIFI. If that make you nervous, GET OUT NOW. There is already city-wide cellphone access. There is nearly Nationwide cellphone access. There is no difference between cellphone access and wifi access in terms of what they can do (allow you to connect to a network and send/receive data).
Get over your luddite self.
I can just see no good coming from this. Granted other than reasonable free Internet connectivity.
And there you've just explained it. The only thing coming from this is reasonable free Internet connectivity. So you have nothing to worry about.
Re:What amazes me most
on
Return of the Mac
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Yeah, if we're counting everyone who ever touched BSD, gcc, emacs, etc, etc, then I'd believe 10K. But never 10K Apple employees - and probably not even 10K Apple+NeXT EngineerHours over the life of the produce from NS 1.0 to OSX 10.3+
Re:What amazes me most
on
Return of the Mac
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
What amazes me most is how short of a time it took for OS X to get put together. Most everyone agrees that the first release was more of a public beta, but even X.0 was an amazingly mature product for something completely new that had been started mere years earlier. I heard a report that as many as 10,000 engineers had worked on OS X at some point in the course of its development years.
I'm sure it didn't hurt to have NextStep to build off of.
Holy crap.
I like to call OSX NextStep 5.0. Of course NS had been around since the mid-late 80's, so OSX didn't exactly spring out of Steve's head in 2000.
10K engineers? Crap, I should think not. What a disaster that would be - kinda like windows (OK, I'm trolling).
Let's see - supposing that NS happened in '85, that's 20 years (holy crap, I'm getting old). To have had 10K different engineers working on it over it's whole lifespan, it'd have to flip 500/year.
Hell, in the NeXT days there weren't a total of 500 engineers. I doubt they ever broke 200.
In short, I guess I'd believe 10K engineer years over the life of the product - maybe - if I saw some more numbers. That 10K different engineers actually worked on it? Naw.
Umm, no one will be lugging a laptop around with them when they are walking along.
I do. And what's more, there is a computer where I just left, and there's another where I'm going.
A lot of people carry a cell phone.
And that is exactly the crappy little device that is as powerful as yesteryear's computer, and in a few years will be as powerful as my laptop.
Thus the market share isn't decreasing in size and *a* "device" might be obsolete but the technology will not.
The technology used to support crappy little devices will ALWAYS become obsolete, as those devices ALWAYS become more powerful.
The technology used to support todays desktops will also become obsolete - but it won't matter, as it does the job it was designed to do. What's more, next year's cellphones will be powerful enough to run that exact same obsolete technology. In short: the userbase growth curve if you design for todays desktop gets better over time, as that tech moves to smaller and smaller devices. The userbase curve for crap-tech is terrible. The user experience isn't as good, so folks don't bother adding it to new devices (desktops or small devices).
Because nobody gives a shit about you (vanishingly small marketshare) and your crappy little (soon to be obsolete) device.
Here's the deal: computers keep getting more powerful, more ubiquitous, and smaller. Many of us remember when they were only (or less) powerful than your crappy little device is now.
We see a trend: Coding for crappy little devices is pointless because in 3-5 years, they will be obsolete and powerful devices will have taken their place.
I'd go for 5*current salary for the 5th week, 6*current for the 6th week, etc. Make it all clear up front.
You said that 2 tech folks left after you joined, and that you're pretty much working alone. That means they've been getting some amount of tech work done for 1/3rd what it was costing them before those other 2 left.
That's great advice! Though I might have gone even higher:
(though Time vs. Money:
* In-house vs. Outside development
* Creating a new system vs. Adapting existing system (which may cost) was great)
Any technical information won't matter to them at all. They're gonna be fresh out of school, and all those choices will be made for them by either: the business they get hired into, which has all this stuff more or less in place already; or the tech folks at the startup they go to, whose job it is to make these decisions.
Teach them how to write specs. Teach them how to talk to programmers (tell them what they need, want, would like, and make each clear). Teach them how to listen to programmers (ask about pros/cons, options, costs).
Explain to them that they get to choose a ship date, or a feature set, but not both.
For the business folks, design and process is WAY more important than ANY amount of coding information. Frankly, it should have been emphasised more back when I was in CompSci - but that was the late 80's, and I hope (and doubt) that it has changed.
Its also extremely unbalanced, Alliance out numbers Horde 2:1. Fighting pre-battlegrounds is normally zerg'ed by the alliance.
I don't understand why anyone would play [horde] on PvP servers. The game is about content until battlegrounds is delivered - then you'll have all the PvP you could want.
Will be interesting to see how they keep alliance players happy when they cap 200 players per Battlegrounds.
I'm very curious to see how this will play out (so to speak). I'm glad I'm playing horde.
Also, with all the servers broken up to about 20K players per server, you will not get to play with all friends. Thats a real shame.
You have more than 20K friends?
They are starting server transfers presently, and I HOPE they open it up entirely in the not too distant future.
I'd say there is enough annoyances and oversight by Blizzard, it might take 1-2 years to address all issues.
Having played in the beta, it is AMAZING the progress they make when they're not busy fixing server crashes. I expect a lot of changes to roll quickly once they get "the last of the stability" issues resolved.
You people who have been suggesting XML have no idea what the deficiencies of XML are.
Please enumerate them. I recommend something like <ol> <li>first</li> <li>second</li> <li>t hird</li> </ol>
Remember, there are some tiny programs that need to access files in/etc/. Do you want to inflate the size of these programs by 10x just to read a simple conf file?
It's a shlib. It's in memory already. Get over it.
Or do you want some dependency on an XML library in order to run basic system services?
Yup. Just like libc (or whatever they call it these days), libposix, etc.
These files all look different because they are built to do different things. What is so difficult about this concept? We have JPEGs and GIFs and PNGs and all kinds of formats for images. We have TXT and SXW and HTML and PDF and PS and DocBook and DVI and Tex and what else for generating text. Why? They all serve different purposes.
And all those image formats get us what, exactly? Wouldn't it be far more convenient to standardize on one? If you had listed a vector format, I may have said 2, but all those are just different ways of representing M bits of color and N bits of alpha for X by Y pixels and Z frames. I don't care about what compression is used - just flag the format and be done with it. In fact, I think that's a perfect example of arbitary, meaningless, and bad choice.
The text formats you list server 3-4 purposes, but there are 8 listed. Yup, I think it'd be nice to reduce that list, too.
Choice is good!
No. As others have pointed out: arbitrary choice is bad. Meaningful choice is good. The OSS world has far too much arbitrary choice in it.
Wouldn't it be great if it were an XML file with a link to it's validator, and the tool you opened it with was an editor that understood XML files and validators?
*... You can't assume XML-based tools available everywhere.
Name a platform that doens't have 'em, and I'll name one that I don't care about.
I'm not going to link a 2MB XML library into my 1KB daemon. If you tell me I have to, I will put my config someplace else.
It's a shared library. It's in memory already. May as well use it.
I'm not going to put a 2MB XML library on my 8MB flash card. XML makes absolutely no sense for a mission-critical config.
I just don't understand those statements.
* The config files are way too complex NOW, even without XML. Everybody invents pointless file formats... Automation, simplicity, and guaranteed correctness are GOOD things.
Pretty easy to argue that XML would simplify things in terms of having only one file format. As for "correctness" - yeah, XML validation would save a lot of headaches.
* If you absolutely need a complex config, use a shell script that sets environment variables. Many distros (BSD, gentoo again) also use configs that are shell scripts. I.e. the config is just a script that sets some variables. If you want, you can add some code in the script to do calculations or have other logic. This is very nice and flexible. And you don't have to write a new parser, you can assume/bin/sh and basic Unix tools are present.
Yeah, evaluating variables in shell scripts never introduced security problems, parsing errors, etc. and "you can assume/bin/sh... are present" conflicts pretty strongly with "you can't assume XML tools are present" - since XML tools are more ubiquitous than/bin/sh.
* Merging updates:...(Imagine what a nightmare XML would be for merging, by the way). You as an admin should know how to merge the configs, and the machine should make it as simple as possible.
I'm having a hard time trying to imagine merging XML being any harder than any other format....And please, no XML!
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Additionally, I believe there's no law prohibiting youngsters from seeing NC-17 movies based on rating alone. If the NC-17 movie contains pornography, of course, then that would be punishable under other laws.
Of course there are plenty of R rated movies that have what could be construed as pornography in them. It is all up to the locale and the judge.
I couldn't find any law requiring enforcement of the rating system (though it looks like the idea has been tossed about), but other laws could easily come into play.
Who the fuck votes for this guy?
/boggle
Yeah, this is flamebait, trolling, whatever. The number of bad ideas this guy supports is mind boggling.
Thanks for that clarification. This is disappointing to me, but they're still supplying more than you'd get if they supplied nothing.
Actually, the constitutionality of hate speech seems to change every few decades. 50 years ago hate-speech was not deemed protected, but recently it was protecteda sp
http://www.adl.org/99hatecrime/constitutionality.
But it looks like it may have been upheld if the state had worded its statute differently.
The Supreme Court disagreed and struck down the statute. The Court held that because Minnesota had not in fact criminalized all fighting words, the statute isolated certain words based on their content or viewpoint and therefore violated the First Amendment.
So it's hard to tell how it would play out in Texas assuming that the censorship went beyond porn to speech.
... requires that we tolerate even the most distasteful political speech. Talking is not a hate crime. Now, you may disagree with that, but TOUGH SHIT...
That's partially right. Political speech is covered, and religious expression is covered, but if your religion requires you to execute all [insert group of people here] or your political platform insists on the violent overthrow of the government, you'll find that it actually isn't covered.
Likewise, "Talking is not a hate crime" probably fails the test if you assert loudly in public that [insert group of people here] are not actually people, and should be chopped up and used for dogfood.
I'm no neo-NAZI, but I support protection of their speech because
Which is why I said white supremicist, and which illustrates the point, nicely. Check out nazi.org for an interesting read. Nowhere [that I saw, though I did scan lightly] do they advocate violence to anyone or any government. It is only [objectionable] political speech, and should be protected. White supremacy seems to be pretty outspoken in their notions of who is human and who should live (feel free to correct me).
tomorrow it could be DeCSS, or GPG, or Gnutella, or The Right to Read that The Powers That Be want to censor.
You're not keeping up. DeCSS is illegal, last I checked. GPG was illegal for export and is no longer, I think.
Which makes sense. This falls into the notion that localities are free to manage/restrict local access to porn as they see fit - which is how indecency laws seem to go.
Yeah, but the state doesn't keeps the porn in their servers. Big difference.
You don't suppose they pay for bandwidth? Even if they don't, bandwidth is limited so there is a cost associated with "free porn".
And, if today is pornography, tomorrow will be "wrong" ideas, political adversaries, etc, that will be censored.
Which would be like France, I guess (don't quote me on that). Actually there is plenty of text that would probably fall into various anti-hate crime laws that would be up for blocking. Which falls into the same category - you want access to your favorite white supremicist site, pay for it.
(b) A state agency that provides wireless Internet access on state property may not allow access to obscene materials through the use of that wireless access.
That means that the state is required to block obscene materials. The problem is that according to the Supreme Court, adults need to be able to turn the filter off. If it's not feasible to let a grownup turn off the filter, then the requirement seems unconstitutional.
Are you sure? I'm used to the RFC terms, in which "MAY" also means "may not", and only "MUST" means must. The wording of the rest of the bill which states that there will be someone available to help with filtering requests also makes me think that may means may/not.
IANAL - are you?
My legalese is not that great, but it looks like they will only prohibit access to porn, etc, at correctional facilities. They MAY prohibit access at others sites, and will have (it looks like one person) someone to help these other sites implement filters if they want them.
The article as posted certainly seems like flamebait to me. There is no requirement that the state of texas provide net access to anyone. If certain locallities want to implement porn filters, I don't see how that's a bad thing at all. If you want your net porn, go buy it.
Last I checked, my local library doesn't stock hustler - though they do have people mag. Is that also an attack on my 1st amendment rights?
In the meantime, they're burning cash.
I wish someone would throw money at me...
I'm ready to pay a dime/episode of The Daily Show. With commercials. I'll pay a quarter/episode without commercials. Sell me a torrent in a timely fashion.
I can get it illegally now, but I'd much rather pay for it and be able to get it timely, consistently, and in better quality than some of the rips seem to appear.
- Don't try to learn Objective-C by yourself, it's weird syntaxically and many many pitfalls can be avoided by carefully perusing and actually doing the examples for the first few chapters of Ora's Learning Cocoa with Objective-C (http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/learncocoa2/). It's that weird. But it's totally worth it.
OK, the syntax is a little different, but I don't think it's that hard to get your head around. Instead of
someObject.doSomething(param1, param2);
[someObject doSomethingWith:param1 andWith:param2];
If you think of ObjC as being like Java, not C++, it will help a lot. 'course there's no GC, which is "the last great pitfall" of all C languages (in my book).
- XCode and VC both have the good things and bad things. I'd say that VC is slightly better because they got more years under the belt that XCode
Wow. xcode is a direct descendent of ProjectBuilder/InterfaceBuilder from the NextStep days - which date back to 1987 or so. So I'd argue with the notion that VB is more mature.
They also got Visual Assist X, which is God-sent (http://www.wholetomato.com/). And only for the build styles, that are so well hidden in XCode, that ought to piss you off (on VC, you just select the configuration and here you go).
As for build styles, I gotta agree with you there. It IS a major pain in the ass. I'm very much hoping that the upcoming rev to xcode makes that easier/more transparent.
I use DNS blocklists for the simple reason that they work, and they work with a lot less CPU time than content analysis filters such as SpamAssassin.
What, you're running your mailserver on an apple II? Seriously, I use my own baysian filter, but I imagine that that SpamAssassin couldn't be too much worse - and the amount of CPU mine takes is totally negligible.
My only experience with an RBL was a bad one, so I won't be using another until someone responsible steps up to the plate. 9-5 weekdays, my ass.
I still don't see the great need for being connected like that all the time.
There isn't. But it is fantastic to have it available anytime and anywhere you want it.
I see wide open, anonymous access for hackers, virus authors and identity thieves. Of course nearly any WiFi access point qualifies for that.
For that you can just go to your local library. Nothing new here - just easier access.
I also see a viable network for distributed RFID readers to access their database back ends to make for greater ease in people tracking. I see web cameras, rather than the more costly dedicated units, all over the place, and the US becoming like the UK.
Do you also see aliens? Seriously, you're just FUDing here.
I see the back end capability for the advertisement boards like in the Minority Report movie.
Specifically: when he walked into a store, he was greeted by name and asked whether or not he like the last thing he purchased. ie: he entered someone's personal property (the store), and the security/customer system identified him. Which is no different than having a guard/service rep at the entrance asking for your id and greeting you, except that it is automated. You don't like it, don't go in the store. It is private property.
All of these things are intrusive and to my mind not good. And I'm by no means a luddite.
All of those things are ONLY in your mind. All that is being offered here is city-wide WIFI. If that make you nervous, GET OUT NOW. There is already city-wide cellphone access. There is nearly Nationwide cellphone access. There is no difference between cellphone access and wifi access in terms of what they can do (allow you to connect to a network and send/receive data).
Get over your luddite self.
I can just see no good coming from this. Granted other than reasonable free Internet connectivity.
And there you've just explained it. The only thing coming from this is reasonable free Internet connectivity. So you have nothing to worry about.
But not before MacOS or NeXTStep.
Yeah, if we're counting everyone who ever touched BSD, gcc, emacs, etc, etc, then I'd believe 10K. But never 10K Apple employees - and probably not even 10K Apple+NeXT EngineerHours over the life of the produce from NS 1.0 to OSX 10.3+
What amazes me most is how short of a time it took for OS X to get put together. Most everyone agrees that the first release was more of a public beta, but even X.0 was an amazingly mature product for something completely new that had been started mere years earlier. I heard a report that as many as 10,000 engineers had worked on OS X at some point in the course of its development years.
I'm sure it didn't hurt to have NextStep to build off of.
Holy crap.
I like to call OSX NextStep 5.0. Of course NS had been around since the mid-late 80's, so OSX didn't exactly spring out of Steve's head in 2000.
10K engineers? Crap, I should think not. What a disaster that would be - kinda like windows (OK, I'm trolling).
Let's see - supposing that NS happened in '85, that's 20 years (holy crap, I'm getting old). To have had 10K different engineers working on it over it's whole lifespan, it'd have to flip 500/year.
Hell, in the NeXT days there weren't a total of 500 engineers. I doubt they ever broke 200.
In short, I guess I'd believe 10K engineer years over the life of the product - maybe - if I saw some more numbers. That 10K different engineers actually worked on it? Naw.
Umm, no one will be lugging a laptop around with them when they are walking along.
I do. And what's more, there is a computer where I just left, and there's another where I'm going.
A lot of people carry a cell phone.
And that is exactly the crappy little device that is as powerful as yesteryear's computer, and in a few years will be as powerful as my laptop.
Thus the market share isn't decreasing in size and *a* "device" might be obsolete but the technology will not.
The technology used to support crappy little devices will ALWAYS become obsolete, as those devices ALWAYS become more powerful.
The technology used to support todays desktops will also become obsolete - but it won't matter, as it does the job it was designed to do. What's more, next year's cellphones will be powerful enough to run that exact same obsolete technology.
In short: the userbase growth curve if you design for todays desktop gets better over time, as that tech moves to smaller and smaller devices. The userbase curve for crap-tech is terrible. The user experience isn't as good, so folks don't bother adding it to new devices (desktops or small devices).
Why can't some others do it too?
Because nobody gives a shit about you (vanishingly small marketshare) and your crappy little (soon to be obsolete) device.
Here's the deal: computers keep getting more powerful, more ubiquitous, and smaller. Many of us remember when they were only (or less) powerful than your crappy little device is now.
We see a trend:
Coding for crappy little devices is pointless because in 3-5 years, they will be obsolete and powerful devices will have taken their place.
Good answer, but a bit generous.
I'd go for 5*current salary for the 5th week, 6*current for the 6th week, etc. Make it all clear up front.
You said that 2 tech folks left after you joined, and that you're pretty much working alone. That means they've been getting some amount of tech work done for 1/3rd what it was costing them before those other 2 left.
That's great advice! Though I might have gone even higher:
(though
Time vs. Money:
* In-house vs. Outside development
* Creating a new system vs. Adapting existing system (which may cost)
was great)
Any technical information won't matter to them at all. They're gonna be fresh out of school, and all those choices will be made for them by either: the business they get hired into, which has all this stuff more or less in place already; or the tech folks at the startup they go to, whose job it is to make these decisions.
Teach them how to write specs.
Teach them how to talk to programmers (tell them what they need, want, would like, and make each clear).
Teach them how to listen to programmers (ask about pros/cons, options, costs).
Explain to them that they get to choose a ship date, or a feature set, but not both.
For the business folks, design and process is WAY more important than ANY amount of coding information. Frankly, it should have been emphasised more back when I was in CompSci - but that was the late 80's, and I hope (and doubt) that it has changed.
Its also extremely unbalanced, Alliance out numbers Horde 2:1. Fighting pre-battlegrounds is normally zerg'ed by the alliance.
I don't understand why anyone would play [horde] on PvP servers. The game is about content until battlegrounds is delivered - then you'll have all the PvP you could want.
Will be interesting to see how they keep alliance players happy when they cap 200 players per Battlegrounds.
I'm very curious to see how this will play out (so to speak). I'm glad I'm playing horde.
Also, with all the servers broken up to about 20K players per server, you will not get to play with all friends. Thats a real shame.
You have more than 20K friends?
They are starting server transfers presently, and I HOPE they open it up entirely in the not too distant future.
I'd say there is enough annoyances and oversight by Blizzard, it might take 1-2 years to address all issues.
Having played in the beta, it is AMAZING the progress they make when they're not busy fixing server crashes. I expect a lot of changes to roll quickly once they get "the last of the stability" issues resolved.
You people who have been suggesting XML have no idea what the deficiencies of XML are.
t hird</li>
/etc/. Do you want to inflate the size of these programs by 10x just to read a simple conf file?
Please enumerate them. I recommend something like
<ol>
<li>first</li>
<li>second</li>
<li>
</ol>
Remember, there are some tiny programs that need to access files in
It's a shlib. It's in memory already. Get over it.
Or do you want some dependency on an XML library in order to run basic system services?
Yup. Just like libc (or whatever they call it these days), libposix, etc.
These files all look different because they are built to do different things. What is so difficult about this concept? We have JPEGs and GIFs and PNGs and all kinds of formats for images. We have TXT and SXW and HTML and PDF and PS and DocBook and DVI and Tex and what else for generating text. Why? They all serve different purposes.
And all those image formats get us what, exactly? Wouldn't it be far more convenient to standardize on one? If you had listed a vector format, I may have said 2, but all those are just different ways of representing M bits of color and N bits of alpha for X by Y pixels and Z frames. I don't care about what compression is used - just flag the format and be done with it. In fact, I think that's a perfect example of arbitary, meaningless, and bad choice.
The text formats you list server 3-4 purposes, but there are 8 listed. Yup, I think it'd be nice to reduce that list, too.
Choice is good!
No. As others have pointed out: arbitrary choice is bad. Meaningful choice is good. The OSS world has far too much arbitrary choice in it.
Wouldn't it be great if it were an XML file with a link to it's validator, and the tool you opened it with was an editor that understood XML files and validators?
Options: done.
Validation: done.
Naw, too easy.
* ... You can't assume XML-based tools available everywhere.
/bin/sh and basic Unix tools are present.
/bin/sh ... are present" conflicts pretty strongly with "you can't assume XML tools are present" - since XML tools are more ubiquitous than /bin/sh.
...(Imagine what a nightmare XML would be for merging, by the way). You as an admin should know how to merge the configs, and the machine should make it as simple as possible.
...And please, no XML!
Name a platform that doens't have 'em, and I'll name one that I don't care about.
I'm not going to link a 2MB XML library into my 1KB daemon. If you tell me I have to, I will put my config someplace else.
It's a shared library. It's in memory already. May as well use it.
I'm not going to put a 2MB XML library on my 8MB flash card. XML makes absolutely no sense for a mission-critical config.
I just don't understand those statements.
* The config files are way too complex NOW, even without XML. Everybody invents pointless file formats... Automation, simplicity, and guaranteed correctness are GOOD things.
Pretty easy to argue that XML would simplify things in terms of having only one file format. As for "correctness" - yeah, XML validation would save a lot of headaches.
* If you absolutely need a complex config, use a shell script that sets environment variables. Many distros (BSD, gentoo again) also use configs that are shell scripts. I.e. the config is just a script that sets some variables. If you want, you can add some code in the script to do calculations or have other logic. This is very nice and flexible. And you don't have to write a new parser, you can assume
Yeah, evaluating variables in shell scripts never introduced security problems, parsing errors, etc. and "you can assume
* Merging updates:
I'm having a hard time trying to imagine merging XML being any harder than any other format.
I wonder what XML ever did to you...