Since when was 8oz of coffee anough anyway? I remember when the fast food guys upped the size of a large drink from like 18oz to 32oz, and the regular from what, 8oz to 18oz? 8oz??? What a joke. Same with coffee. 8oz is like a teaser. It's a damn sample. It should be free to hook customers into buying a real cup of coffee. Why does it take these people so freakin long to figure out that what they call a regular or whatever should be the kid size? They should start calling it a puny. 8oz... I mean come on people!
PostMessage puts a message on the queue whereas SendMessage skips the queue and gets handled straight by the application without examination.
PostMessage() always puts the message in the queue. SendMessage() tries to bypass the queue, but that only works when sending to the same thread. If you SendMessage() to a different thread (or process obviously), the message goes in the queue and the function doesn't return until the target thread handles it, so SendMessage() could be called PostMessageWait() or something, but it's historical (in Win16 it really did always make a direct call).
The writer's statement is somewhat incorrect about this. The WM_TIMER message does go through the queue, but windows apps don't generally examine messages at the queue-read level. They just use an API call (GetMessage()) to pop the next message (and ignore its contents), and another API call (DispatchMessage()) to dispatch it to the proper handler function, where all the real work gets done. In the case of WM_TIMER, DispatchMessage() is what decides what function to call (based on the second message parameter). An app could technically block it by making sure the second parameter is a valid timer handler function.
Yeah, he seems to hate everything. He's your classic whiner. Almost anyway... the only difference is that you shut out most whiners after the first sentence, but this guy keeps you hanging on till the end, hoping I guess that he'll say something remotely constructive. He never did, did he? Did I just miss it, or did he really spew pages and pages of whining bitchery without one constructive comment?
I must admit though, I did enjoy reading it just a bit. I can relate to it I think. I'm feeling a but disgruntled myself lately with the whole computer industry. And the problem isn't so much that the industry is messed up (and bad), but more that I feel there isn't a damn thing I can do about it. All I can do (and I'm a programmer) is sit and watch the Bill Gates' of the world force feed us this pile of steaming doo-doo we somehow call an industry. My skills would be equally effective if I took up a career as a hair dresser.
Sometimes I guess a good bitch session can be fun... and he does it well.
I tried to install SAPDB on my windows box a couple weeks ago and it was just... well... really hard. I never could find any decent documentation (pdf's are never decent IMHO), and I gave up after finding no installer or anything that seemed to resemble a registry merge file or anything stating what the default dba password is. I gave up for lack of incentive. I don't actually need it; see below.
I think the problem is that there are other well-known DBMS's out there that are just as cheap (free), open source, and have the needed features, and are also easier to install and better documented. For me it's Postgres on Linux. It does what I need and it's really easy to install and admin and quite well documented. For others it's MySQL for the same reasons I'm sure. Then there's T-bird, I'm sure somebody must be using it:-)
From a development standpoint, I hear the source is a freakin mess. Maybe it's just me but that seems like the status quo for closed software. I remember Mozilla being a big stinky mess when it first popped out of Netscape too. Maybe that's part of the reason they open sourced it; couldn't afford enough programmers to maintain the spaghetti code anymore. And let's not forget how long it took to clean Mozilla up and make it viable again. Hopefully SAP won't be quite as bad.
If they can get a few developers to latch onto it and get the code cleaned up a bit, and get some better documentation, and some better install mechanisms, then I'm sure it could have a chance.
hmm, an api such as 'open()' and 'write()' perhaps?
The poster wasn't suggesting (I don't think... I hope not:-) a raw OS based backup, but rather having the DBMS simply write its backup data to a file somewhere. It obviously is responsible for making sure the backup is consistent (transaction support should easily provide for this), but how the data gets to where it's going shouldn't be known to the DBMS outside of a file name.
I'd also say that in cases where multiple tapes are needed (if not always) to hold the entire backup, you should stage the backup on disk first. What? No room on disk for a couple backups? Shame on you! Disk space is almost free these days.
No, grammer is spelled grammar. It's spelled it. Actually grammer isn't even a word so it naturally has no spelling. I had it right, but I had grammar wrong. I mean I had spelling wrong. The grammar was right but it was spelled wrong. I mean grammar was spelled wrong. Grammar was spelled grammer I mean, which was incorrect. Not that I intend to say that incorrect is spelled grammer, but rather that the spelling of grammar, which was grammer, is incorrect. There's no way out of this, is there?
Maybe if I say something like 'time to burn some karma' I won't get modded down for this worthless drivel.
Oooh yay, a backup that may or may not be viable 2 days later when you try to restore from it. Are you serious? You actually trust those things with your data? Sheesh, I wouldn't trust a floppy disk to keep a ring off my coffee table...
I haven't used a floppy drive in several years. Between the seriously low quality of floppy disks and drives these days,, the pathetic storage capacity, and the pathetic speed, they're pretty useless. Bootable CDRoms were the final nail in the floppy coffin. Good ridence, I say. I've removed the floppy drives from both my win2K box and my Linux server and haven't missed them one little bit.
If Bjarn Stroustrup has anything to say about it, it won't happen. I wrote him an email about this a couple years back and he replied that he believes (or believed anyhow) that properties don't belong in C++. Without his support it's unlikely it will become a standard any time soon. Unfortunate:-( I think it's just a case of providing us with as many tools as possible and laying the responsibility of proper use on the developer, which *is* what C++ is all about, right?
What bothers me most about this article (aside from Jef's apparent elitist attitude anyway) is that it makes the bold assumption that customisability and consistency cannon co-exist, and therefore one must be sacrificed in favor of the other. I believe that is absolute garbage.
Jef says:
But what if you say to me, "So what, I like it better my way even if it doesn't work as well." Then, if I give you preferences, I am abdicating my role as a responsible designer.
No, you'd be admitting that your way may not be the best way FOR ME. How arrogant can you be?
Unfortunatly current skinning technology is pretty shoddy IMHO. Every time I try a new skin somewhere, I'm disapointed in some way. Current skinning technology is not customizable! You choose someone elses favorite design and are forced to live with its style. It's like having choose between a sports car in hot pink, and an SUV in green... what if I want a sports car in green?
There needs to be finer grained control. Key bindings and pretty buttons should not be glued together. I may like the default look of a plane MS windows style interface, but I may not like the key bindings and the sounds; those things need to be customizable seperately and easily.
Skinning/theming systems do not *have* to compromise consistency (between user's machines, sure, but I believe that's the users problem), as long as they're done properly. A really good example of how to do it very wrong is Mozilla. Why would I want my web browser to look completely different than any other app on my desktop?? When done this way, it truly does kill consistency.
The basic low level design of X makes it even worse, because skinning does not effectivaly (if at all) cross the desktop boundary; KDE has a theming engine, Gnome has another... For skinning to really be effective, there needs to be a lower level look and feel engine that all desktop systems can be built on top of. This would also greatly reduce the amount of work needed to build a desktop system.
I think it's time in the evolution of UI design to take another big step forward; I think enough is understood about how to build good interfaces that we (the programming community) could design something that is both consistent and customizable, and modular enough to survive the next 20 years of evolution.
I could go on and on of course, about the short-comings of current UI implementations, but I believe that no matter how poorly current systems might be designed, I refuse to agree with anyone who believes that science can negate the need to provide people with customizability, or that customizability is a bad thing. While I agree that many (if not all) current skinning implementations are horrible, I completely disagree with Jef's assertion that skinning/theming is a bad idea in general.
Here in the Seattle area its doing roughly 40F and its bright and sunny. Which is pretty weird for christmas, especially since it's been raining almost non-stop for weeks now.
Yeah, I'd much rather have a white christmas *sigh* but this sure beats cold rain...
If you split sea water, you can do it anywhere sea water is available, not just in the middle east. It is a clean process and can be done using nothing but solar energy. Or wave energy. Or whatever.
So yes, you have to expend energy to get hydrogen. It is in effect simply an energy storage vehicle. But the energy we need to do it is being beamed to us free of charge from good old Mr. Sun. In other words, it's a good way to take advantage of (and solve the problems of) direct solar energy.
It is nothing but a transparent ploy to extend monopoly. I can't believe anyone would fail to see it, or ignore it. It's blatent and it's obvious. And it's predictable. This is precisely the way we've all come to expect MS to behave.
But, I can't find a use for it so far. Maybe if it could make *all* of those 'about' boxes semi-transparent, but there's no way it could know what's an about box and what isn't. Nothing else I tried looks useful in a transparency.
And, it's buggy, or apparently so. After about 10 seconds' thought, I think it's Windows that's buggy. Big surprise there. The Windows console window won't do transparency at all, and sometimes it even draws incorrectly when it's behind a transparent window. It doesn't work with Media Player; in transparency mode, the movie window goes black, and sometimes bringing it out of transparency mode doesn't fix it. Quake3 won't show transparent. Ultima Online flickers badly and slows waaaay down in transparency. Hmmm, DirectX/OpenGL interfering perhaps? Buggy video drivers? So typical.
Wouldn't it be cool if it could make all the menus fade in and out? *rolls eyes*
I agree that $300 is a bit much... But I like to see at least 60fps. 20-30 is just painful for me. And what that means is that I need to get about 80-90 in Quake3 on the good side to keep the FPS from dropping below 60 in more complex/crowded areas.
Right now I get that with my GeForce2 running at 800x600 with full quality graphics. I'd love to be running it at 1024x768 or higher, so while I don't have any desire to see 200 FPS, the ability of the card (and overall machine) to achieve that just translates into higher resolutions and better quality at frame rates I consider good.
You can save alot more than ten bucks if you just install it on all your PC's without telling MS about it.
Does anybody actually pay the extra lisencing fee when they install on more than one household PC?
Besides, if you consider Redhat as a price baseline, and considering the difference in functionality, XP is worth what, about $3.00? That means you can install it on 30 PC's before you get your money's worth.
What I'd like to know is whether these batteries will have a so-called memory.
Well, obviously not in the same sense that a conventional battery has a memory, perhaps not at all. But efficiency degredation could cause a similar effect, causing the cell to consume more fuel per KW and I suppose producing more waste heat. But is wouldn't be caused by partial discharge, it would just happen with normal use. If it even happens. Or if it happens to a high enough degree to be noticable before it's time to replace the cell for other reasons.
If these fuel-cell batteries are small, don't have a memory, last longer AND have much faster charging times, then I think they will eventually replace Li-Ion batteries.
How about 'instant' recharge time? Or almost. Recharging consists of adding more fuel. I can recharge a lighter in about 30 seconds, and that's if I'm being lazy:-) These things shouldn't be much different.
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Since when was 8oz of coffee anough anyway? I remember when the fast food guys upped the size of a large drink from like 18oz to 32oz, and the regular from what, 8oz to 18oz? 8oz??? What a joke. Same with coffee. 8oz is like a teaser. It's a damn sample. It should be free to hook customers into buying a real cup of coffee. Why does it take these people so freakin long to figure out that what they call a regular or whatever should be the kid size? They should start calling it a puny. 8oz... I mean come on people!
PostMessage() always puts the message in the queue. SendMessage() tries to bypass the queue, but that only works when sending to the same thread. If you SendMessage() to a different thread (or process obviously), the message goes in the queue and the function doesn't return until the target thread handles it, so SendMessage() could be called PostMessageWait() or something, but it's historical (in Win16 it really did always make a direct call).
The writer's statement is somewhat incorrect about this. The WM_TIMER message does go through the queue, but windows apps don't generally examine messages at the queue-read level. They just use an API call (GetMessage()) to pop the next message (and ignore its contents), and another API call (DispatchMessage()) to dispatch it to the proper handler function, where all the real work gets done. In the case of WM_TIMER, DispatchMessage() is what decides what function to call (based on the second message parameter). An app could technically block it by making sure the second parameter is a valid timer handler function.
Yeah, he seems to hate everything. He's your classic whiner. Almost anyway... the only difference is that you shut out most whiners after the first sentence, but this guy keeps you hanging on till the end, hoping I guess that he'll say something remotely constructive. He never did, did he? Did I just miss it, or did he really spew pages and pages of whining bitchery without one constructive comment?
I must admit though, I did enjoy reading it just a bit. I can relate to it I think. I'm feeling a but disgruntled myself lately with the whole computer industry. And the problem isn't so much that the industry is messed up (and bad), but more that I feel there isn't a damn thing I can do about it. All I can do (and I'm a programmer)
is sit and watch the Bill Gates' of the world force feed us this pile of steaming doo-doo we somehow call an industry. My skills would be equally effective if I took up a career as a hair dresser.
Sometimes I guess a good bitch session can be fun... and he does it well.
I tried to install SAPDB on my windows box a couple weeks ago and it was just... well... really hard. I never could find any decent documentation (pdf's are never decent IMHO), and I gave up after finding no installer or anything that seemed to resemble a registry merge file or anything stating what the default dba password is. I gave up for lack of incentive. I don't actually need it; see below.
:-)
I think the problem is that there are other well-known DBMS's out there that are just as cheap (free), open source, and have the needed features, and are also easier to install and better documented. For me it's Postgres on Linux. It does what I need and it's really easy to install and admin and quite well documented. For others it's MySQL for the same reasons I'm sure. Then there's T-bird, I'm sure somebody must be using it
From a development standpoint, I hear the source is a freakin mess. Maybe it's just me but that seems like the status quo for closed software. I remember Mozilla being a big stinky mess when it first popped out of Netscape too. Maybe that's part of the reason they open sourced it; couldn't afford enough programmers to maintain the spaghetti code anymore. And let's not forget how long it took to clean Mozilla up and make it viable again. Hopefully SAP won't be quite as bad.
If they can get a few developers to latch onto it and get the code cleaned up a bit, and get some better documentation, and some better install mechanisms, then I'm sure it could have a chance.
hmm, an api such as 'open()' and 'write()' perhaps?
:-) a raw OS based backup, but rather having the DBMS simply write its backup data to a file somewhere. It obviously is responsible for making sure the backup is consistent (transaction support should easily provide for this), but how the data gets to where it's going shouldn't be known to the DBMS outside of a file name.
The poster wasn't suggesting (I don't think... I hope not
I'd also say that in cases where multiple tapes are needed (if not always) to hold the entire backup, you should stage the backup on disk first. What? No room on disk for a couple backups? Shame on you! Disk space is almost free these days.
No, grammer is spelled grammar. It's spelled it. Actually grammer isn't even a word so it naturally has no spelling. I had it right, but I had grammar wrong. I mean I had spelling wrong. The grammar was right but it was spelled wrong. I mean grammar was spelled wrong. Grammar was spelled grammer I mean, which was incorrect. Not that I intend to say that incorrect is spelled grammer, but rather that the spelling of grammar, which was grammer, is incorrect. There's no way out of this, is there?
Maybe if I say something like 'time to burn some karma' I won't get modded down for this worthless drivel.
It's not it's not its, its it's, it's it's not its, it's it's.
If you're going to be a grammer Nazi Nazi, at least get it right right.
Oh God, I'm confusing myself myself. Easy to do, I know...
There was a problem with dates or something in the year 2000?
Oooh yay, a backup that may or may not be viable 2 days later when you try to restore from it. Are you serious? You actually trust those things with your data? Sheesh, I wouldn't trust a floppy disk to keep a ring off my coffee table...
I haven't used a floppy drive in several years. Between the seriously low quality of floppy disks and drives these days,, the pathetic storage capacity, and the pathetic speed, they're pretty useless. Bootable CDRoms were the final nail in the floppy coffin. Good ridence, I say. I've removed the floppy drives from both my win2K box and my Linux server and haven't missed them one little bit.
If Bjarn Stroustrup has anything to say about it, it won't happen. I wrote him an email about this a couple years back and he replied that he believes (or believed anyhow) that properties don't belong in C++. Without his support it's unlikely it will become a standard any time soon. Unfortunate :-( I think it's just a case of providing us with as many tools as possible and laying the responsibility of proper use on the developer, which *is* what C++ is all about, right?
Jef says:
No, you'd be admitting that your way may not be the best way FOR ME. How arrogant can you be?
Unfortunatly current skinning technology is pretty shoddy IMHO. Every time I try a new skin somewhere, I'm disapointed in some way. Current skinning technology is not customizable! You choose someone elses favorite design and are forced to live with its style. It's like having choose between a sports car in hot pink, and an SUV in green... what if I want a sports car in green?
There needs to be finer grained control. Key bindings and pretty buttons should not be glued together. I may like the default look of a plane MS windows style interface, but I may not like the key bindings and the sounds; those things need to be customizable seperately and easily.
Skinning/theming systems do not *have* to compromise consistency (between user's machines, sure, but I believe that's the users problem), as long as they're done properly. A really good example of how to do it very wrong is Mozilla. Why would I want my web browser to look completely different than any other app on my desktop?? When done this way, it truly does kill consistency.
The basic low level design of X makes it even worse, because skinning does not effectivaly (if at all) cross the desktop boundary; KDE has a theming engine, Gnome has another... For skinning to really be effective, there needs to be a lower level look and feel engine that all desktop systems can be built on top of. This would also greatly reduce the amount of work needed to build a desktop system.
I think it's time in the evolution of UI design to take another big step forward; I think enough is understood about how to build good interfaces that we (the programming community) could design something that is both consistent and customizable, and modular enough to survive the next 20 years of evolution.
I could go on and on of course, about the short-comings of current UI implementations, but I believe that no matter how poorly current systems might be designed, I refuse to agree with anyone who believes that science can negate the need to provide people with customizability, or that customizability is a bad thing. While I agree that many (if not all) current skinning implementations are horrible, I completely disagree with Jef's assertion that skinning/theming is a bad idea in general.
i'm sure it's all very interesting, but i wouldn't know...
404 - File not found
Well, since we're trading weather forecasts :-)
Here in the Seattle area its doing roughly 40F and its bright and sunny. Which is pretty weird for christmas, especially since it's been raining almost non-stop for weeks now.
Yeah, I'd much rather have a white christmas *sigh* but this sure beats cold rain...
Merry Chistmas
Well, if I believed in the notion of an anti-christ, I'm pretty sure BillG would be right up at the top of my list of anti-christ candidates.
Or maybe he's the devil himself. That would make Balmer the anti-christ I guess.
But that would mean Linus must be Jesus. OK, that's just getting too corny for me.
:-)
If you split sea water, you can do it anywhere sea water is available, not just in the middle east. It is a clean process and can be done using nothing but solar energy. Or wave energy. Or whatever.
So yes, you have to expend energy to get hydrogen. It is in effect simply an energy storage vehicle. But the energy we need to do it is being beamed to us free of charge from good old Mr. Sun. In other words, it's a good way to take advantage of (and solve the problems of) direct solar energy.
It is nothing but a transparent ploy to extend monopoly. I can't believe anyone would fail to see it, or ignore it. It's blatent and it's obvious. And it's predictable. This is precisely the way we've all come to expect MS to behave.
Well, it is nifty, I'll give it that.
But, I can't find a use for it so far. Maybe if it could make *all* of those 'about' boxes semi-transparent, but there's no way it could know what's an about box and what isn't. Nothing else I tried looks useful in a transparency.
And, it's buggy, or apparently so. After about 10 seconds' thought, I think it's Windows that's buggy. Big surprise there. The Windows console window won't do transparency at all, and sometimes it even draws incorrectly when it's behind a transparent window. It doesn't work with Media Player; in transparency mode, the movie window goes black, and sometimes bringing it out of transparency mode doesn't fix it. Quake3 won't show transparent. Ultima Online flickers badly and slows waaaay down in transparency. Hmmm, DirectX/OpenGL interfering perhaps? Buggy video drivers? So typical.
Wouldn't it be cool if it could make all the menus fade in and out? *rolls eyes*
I agree that $300 is a bit much... But I like to see at least 60fps. 20-30 is just painful for me. And what that means is that I need to get about 80-90 in Quake3 on the good side to keep the FPS from dropping below 60 in more complex/crowded areas.
Right now I get that with my GeForce2 running at 800x600 with full quality graphics. I'd love to be running it at 1024x768 or higher, so while I don't have any desire to see 200 FPS, the ability of the card (and overall machine) to achieve that just translates into higher resolutions and better quality at frame rates I consider good.
Just my 2-cents worth...
prices on the GeForce3 should start dropping soon :-)
Somebody let me know when a top end GF3 drops below $200...
You can save alot more than ten bucks if you just install it on all your PC's without telling MS about it.
Does anybody actually pay the extra lisencing fee when they install on more than one household PC?
Besides, if you consider Redhat as a price baseline, and considering the difference in functionality, XP is worth what, about $3.00? That means you can install it on 30 PC's before you get your money's worth.
but can it parse sendmail.cf?
Well, if looking at it wrong includes looking at it like a serious piece of software, then it's already true.
Hell, I don't remember having Windows crash when I *wasn't* looking at it... Maybe just a coincidence tho...
Huh?? A crystal is *not* a molecule. Did you smoke your lunch or something?
Same goes to the goofy moderators.