The price is quite reasonable
on
A Taste of Qt 4
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The price is per developer, not per user.
Have you checked the prices on Win32 development tools? $1550 isn't cheap, but it's far from outrageous or out of reach.
If that is out of your budget, you aren't a "smaller development house" -- you haven't even learned to think like a business yet. Products like Qt save development time, which allows lower bids, which means more revenue. If you can't work the numbers, go back to the basement -- your business won't be outgrowing it for quite some time.
There was a time when HP hardware was actually more reliable than even IBM. They were the only provider who had equipment that could be dumped at a radar station in the north, never to be touched except for the guy who tops up the diesel tanks ever few weeks for the generators.
Now?
Lets just say it's been a long, long, long time since I've had any clients mention or ask for modern HP support. Some want updates done to old applications on old hardware, but I haven't seen any of the new HP hardware anywhere.
Couldn't be because they abandoned their old architecture and no one wants to ride the Itanic, could it?
It isn't about "taking out" my frustrations, it's about setting priorities the way I believe they should be set:
Functionality - a given release must provide the specified features. If it does not, the release needs to be delayed rather than cutting features future development depends on.
Reliability - client, server, and batch components must run without crashing. Any errors in the code must be caught and reported via appropriate exceptions.
Correctness - the results produced by the system must be valid. This is far from trivial with multi-threaded distributed systems.
Portability - the system must be designed to allow the replacement of any given technology component with one that provides equivalent functionality. More to the point, no business logic should require changes except for RDBMS stored procedures and/or triggers.
Security - Authentication, Authorization, and Encryption, bolstered by the use of guarded buffer APIs wherever available.
Reports - management makes business decisions using the reports and charts produced by a data processing system. At very least, data extracts to file formats that can be fed to analysis tools must be provided.
Performance - the system must be able to handle a sufficient number of concurrent users to be useful. I target 100 users as a "small" system.
Scalability - the system should be designed to permit both localized and distributed cluster processing.
Automation - the system should be self-maintaining as much as possible. All backups, shutdowns, startups, etc. should be automated, scheduled, and wired to failure reporting services including automated pager alerts.
UI Configurability - once the core functionality is addressed, flexibility and alternative entry/display methods can be added to the UI.
"Prettification" - having taken care of system requirements and functionality, now one can consider adding GUI texture, skinning, audio/video feedback, etc.
As you can see, the GUI is a small, small part of the priorities for a reliable, useful application.
So if someone has done their job as a serious programmer and put in all the time and effort to address the important issues, you can get off your wallet and pay someone for that polish you think is so important. I won't be wasting my time with it.
I have been providing software development services to clients since 1987. I have been programming since 1978-79.
Most projects I've worked on have had known moderate-severe stability and reliability problems with core data processing components. Time and again I've watched budget and resources squandered on pretty GUI enhancements instead of addressing the back end server problems.
Why? Because it's politically advantageous to kiss the butts of user departments with funding budgets rather than worrying about how often the support and development teams have to service pager calls in the wee hours of the morning.
My personal projects are functionality and stability first. I don't give a damn about user interface issues beyond them being able to access the functionality in a fashion I find convenient.
I've spent many years dealing with usability "issues". The vast majority of the issues are the result of letting random user communities dictate how the system interacts, rather than following user interface guideline standards including the now-ancient CUA (Common User Access) from IBM.
I can and do provide perfectly usable systems with reliable, predictable interfaces. They just don't provide all the eye candy and configurability that users think matters more than functionality and stability.
Your other comments on Microsoft weren't incorrect, but I see their impact from a different viewpoint. It's their pushing of crashware that has conditioned users to find it perfectly acceptable for a system to corrupt the entire system, but get bitchy if they can't change the fonts and colors for each and every item in the GUI.
Feh. I don't respect users because they don't respect me. My UI design suggestions are based on years of experience, further bolstered by recommendations and guidelines gleaned from usability studies for high-volume data entry and casual user interface requirements.
If you find them hard to use, it's because you're too focused on being able to do things however you want, whenever you want. That flexibility takes time and adds unnecessary risk to the stability and reliability of the application.
Functionality first. User nitpicking can be dealt with by someone with the time and/or budget to do so.
You just won't let go of the fact that you don't matter to projects like most of the ones I would consider open sourcing.
It is not a spurious argument, it is the heart of the matter. Many, if not most, open source programs are someone's hobby, exposed to the world.
The user interface is rarely the interesting part of the project, if it has one at all. It's boring, repetitive, mindless work to code a GUI -- nothing more than adding a bunch of alternate hooks to call the same functions the basic interface provides, but in a way someone else prefers to use.
Get over yourself and your demanding user viewpoint. Hobby programming is where I go to escape the nagging and clueless users with no budget. I deal with them for day to day business, providing the very functional GUIs you demand.
On my project on my time for my needs, your demands as a user just don't matter in the slightest. Your demands are the irritation I escape to return to the freedom of programming for fun, not profit.
Not at all -- I'd done enough GUI programming for a living that I find it boring beyond sanity.
I code a minimalist interface to make things usable, and that's the end of it. I've no interest in eye candy or bells and whistles -- I'm a programmer, not a graphics artist or audio engineer.
A project is pointless if it doesn't have, and care about, and audience.
An "audience" only matters if one is performing.
There is no reason a project cannot exist in and of itself for no other purpose than to be a fun hobby. If it becomes boring, it might even be abandoned without completion.
The code is still there if it's important enough for someone else to pick up the development and carry it to the next level. If no one is willing to go to that effort, the project must be meeting it's minimal functional requirements, or no one is using it.
I'm sure it's a shock to the non-programmer community, but that is exactly what happens to internal, proprietary business projects as well. If no department wants the changes badly enough to fund the effort, no new development is done on the project. It lives on with bandages, glue, and pager support to handle known issues.
What makes you think most of us give a damn about Gates?
The whole open source movement initially started in response to proprietary systems from IBM, DEC, HP, and others. Sun had only released their first machines, and PCs were still on the first releases of DOS.
Back then, Microsoft was actually viewed as the upstart taking on IBM and the other big companies. It wasn't until much later that people realized that once they got big enough, Bill & co. were just as profit driven, selfish, and expensive to deal with as the previous crop of providers.
Microsoft is just more adept at playing the politics to extend their time on top, but eventually they'll just be a "regular" player like IBM or any other service/hardware supplier.
Thank you -- someone gets my point. The issues being flagged are programmer culture, not open source.
Open source is nothing more than a licensing philosophy that enables others to continue to improve code that's "good enough" for one's own needs.
If you find it "self destructive" for me to worry about my own requirements for software I work on instead of your requirements, so be it. I'm not destroying anything of my self, nor am I failing to meet my own needs. I just see no reason I should worry about your requirements for what I do as a hobby!!!
Who the hell do people think they are to make demands on my personal recreation time? That's 90% of open source -- people programming for fun.
There are plenty of applications which exhibit all the flaws mentioned by the paper -- I don't disagree with any of the summary points.
Most of those applications are in-house proprietary business applications, not open source. The author is complaining about a general problem with the politics and pride of software development, not open source methodology or products.
If someone chooses to develop a tool or product that meets their personal needs, and offers it up for others to use or extend, they aren't typically getting paid for it.
If you don't like it, extend it, fix it, or hire someone to do so. Don't dump your personal application requirements on community members who are just trying to share what they have.
You want professional UI designs? Hire some developers to fix your favourite open source project, or fund the existing project development team. My idea of a professional UI is basic, plain, and functional -- no skinning, no beeps, no video, no candy.
Nothing pisses me off more than someone who demands the world for free, then bitches and whines because they can't have it without putting in an effort.
If you are sitting at 95% or more of the computer-equipped desks in North America, neither audio nor video have squat to do with your job. Stop confusing your hobbies and habits at work with what the vast majority of business machines are meant for.
The vast majority of North America does not need DRM on the desktop, and the remainder doesn't want it.
The very idea that businesses and ISPs are going to have to spend millions of dollars on upgrades and infrastructure regression testing so that Microsoft can field a properly DRM-enabled media player is obscene.
If this technology is so critical to the music and movie industries, let them pay for the impact. Not us -- and make no mistake those rollout expenses are passed on to you by every vendor, store, or supplier that is forced to pay for features that add nothing to the bottom line.
Re:WinFS WILL be in the next version, just no netw
on
Microsoft Clips Longhorn
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I don't see a compelling reason for the existance of this "upgrade" other than to feed the M$ coffers and lock in a steady revenue stream for them. The main features seem to be:
A media player I'd rather remove than use, whose main new feature seems to be ensuring I don't use any other media player when buying music online. What precisely does this application have to do with operating system features?
A DRM system for ensuring that I can't access media files without permission. Funny, but as I recall the main information on the business systems was data, not music and videos. Yet another feature that has no benefit to the operating system, just the M$ revenue stream.
An upgraded file system whose features sound like they almost catch up with the first release of the AS400 from IBM. I had hopes for this one, but the more I've read the more convinced I am it's main purpose is to break every existing file sharing technology that doesn't pay royalties to M$. Not one report on performance or usability benefits to justify the pain and expense of upgrading everything else to support the M$ revenue stream.
Actually maybe there is one new, useful feature. Or did Microsoft stop trying to catch up to the 15-20 year old idea of having multiple shared-library/DLL versions on the same system?
Excuse me, but an officer who doesn't realize it's immoral and wrong to post or email the video of someone's suicide?
What kind of degenerate excuse for a human being needs training to know better? Someone with such a complete lack of empathy or common sense is allowed to carry a gun and a badge?
Just when you think the American "justice" system couldn't get any worse...
"Object and inheritance management" is only an issue for those who don't bother to analyze the problem and architect a solution. Slapping together code without understanding the problem is not "prototyping" -- it's wasting time.
Prototypes are for understanding the application requirements, not for "scripting." If you compare prototyping tools to production applications, you are completely and thoroughly missing the point for their existance.
At the quoted speeds, it would take over 10 hours of non-stop burning to back up a 120G of data.
You could do selective backups with this device, but not actual servers. I seriously doubt the drive would last very long even if it was only expected to do a weekend image with weekday deltas.
It sounds great for backing up large data files that don't change very often, but I don't deal with many of those. People keep wanting to change the database, website, and developer tree files all the time for some reason.
I do wish they'd been consistent in using left-right syntax, as that would have made things a lot cleaner for Java and a lot of other integration as well.
I suspect the reason it wasn't done that way is to allow the DNS server to search by the most distinguishing key first. Remember when a lot of these protocols were created, most computers were huge machines with less power than your typical Palm Pilot.
Only the TLD and the primary domain are registered -- your own DNS server handles the subdomains. There is absolutely no reason you cannot set up a domain so that both
http://dodge.com/viper
and
http://viper.dodge.com/
reference the same page content.
In fact, many sites like IBM's already do this.
Any confusion below the TLD and domain name are purely the fault of the domain's webspace management.
If you are using any *nix platform with an email client of any kind, you have an additional layer of virus protection that Windows users don't.
You aren't root.
You can't install anything to corrupt the system, including the virus. The worst you can do is damage the code the user has access to.
Why in the world do you think most *nix third-party products require a seperate admin id for configuring the system, and often root access to install upgrades? To protect the system from corruption.
In order to spread a *nix virus, you either need to count on the users running on intentionally damaged systems, or count on them running just the right distro with no changes other than those delivered by the vendor/packager.
You'll find the same level of protection in other mature systems, like OpenVMS, the various mainframe operating systems, AS400, etc.
Windows big problem is it still carries too much of it's DOS-thunker heritage for it's own good. No matter how much glue and bodge Microsoft has done to try to fix the problem, they can't get around the fact that far too much of their existing code base demands the equivalent to root access just to run.
I was absolutely apalled to find that the only way I could get any of my neice's edugames installed was to give her admin access. The idea that a child needs admin access to play an alphabet game is just insane from a security perspective, yet it's the case with far too many products. Even "new" games from some of these companies demand that access -- they aren't "fixing" the problem, they're ignoring it.
I don't think SCOX and it's executives are heading anywhere but jail for a multi-year fraud. The only thing baffling me anymore is that the big bad American government which is so willing to send the troops overseas doesn't have enough 'nads to reign in a lunatic like Darl and his cohorts.
Guess it's a lot easier to blow billions on overseas troop movements and "liberations" than it is to have the justice department simply make a phone call and put an end to a fraud that is hurting the entire computing industry outside Microsoft.
The US pharmacorps spend many times on advertising what they do for R&D. Once upon a time that was not the case, but they sure don't spend anywhere near the percentage on R&D that they used to.
C'mon, every "geek" I know has seen the vast majority of those movies, even just to check out the F/X. It's not 15/25, it's more like 22/25 for F/X heavy top-grossers.
10 (Forrest Gump), 20 (Home Alone) and 24 (How the Grinch Stole Christmas) are the only ones that weren't F/X fests for their time. Even "Forrest Gump" had some excellant (but subtle) F/X, such as the award scene with the president.
Having planned, coordinated, and implemented the rollout of Oracle 6, Oracle 7, Sybase 10, Sybase 11, Sybase 12, Sybase SQL Anywhere, Postgres, and DB/2 UDB 5 through 8, on Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, Linux, WinNT, Win2K, and Netware platforms, I think I might be qualified to judge Firebird as an easy client caching installation.
Client caching means Win32 90% of the time, OS/X on two machines to date, and the rest various *nix workstations. Closest I've been to BSD for servers was SunOS -- only dev databases aren't on SMP hardware.
While Postgres is the better database, installing Firebird/Interbase is a much easier task for the average user. That makes it a terrific little cross-platform client-caching database, such as letting the spreadsheet users slice at the data with an ODBC driver without killing the primary database server.
For the same reasons, it's a handy tool for writing small standalone database apps without locking in to a Win32 codebase (e.g. MS Access.)
I'd say it even has potential to serve the same kind of markets that the "light" servers like Sybase SQL Anywhere serve.
Interesting. Now it is "trolling" to think a show is a piece of crap that should have been axed ages ago.
Ah well, what can you expect in the US but censorship to go with their arcane security laws.
Re:Say it Ain't so!
on
WB Cancels Angel
·
· Score: 0, Interesting
"Sorely missed?"
I thought they'd axed it a year or two ago. It's one of the most childishly mismanaged excuses for a series I've ever seen. Angel doesn't require that you just accept a world of weird rules, it requires that you completely stop thinking or remembering anything about previous episodes, or face the inevitable fact that there is no coherency to the storyline or characters.
It's the perfect show for UPN to pick up -- it fits right in with their usual selection of over-managed garbage. Remember, these are the people who've even managed to alienate the Star Trek fans!
The problem is one corp has been allowed to hold an entire industry in turmoil, manipulate the stock market, threaten the corporate world, and not one segment of the so-called American legal system has put a leash on them.
By dropping prior claims and initiating new ones, SCO is just showing (again) that they have no valid claims. Isn't it time that Darl and his supporting team of lunatics were locked up?
Or is there some perverse American "right" to run around accusing and threatening an entire industry without fear of reprisal, provided you just stop making the accusations before you're forced to prove they're true?
Tired of this crap. I was tired of it almost a year ago. More than anything, I just am stunned that they haven't been yanked short by an order to stop making accusations and laying charges until they prove at least one point!!!
Slashdot Mirror
The price is per developer, not per user.
Have you checked the prices on Win32 development tools? $1550 isn't cheap, but it's far from outrageous or out of reach.
If that is out of your budget, you aren't a "smaller development house" -- you haven't even learned to think like a business yet. Products like Qt save development time, which allows lower bids, which means more revenue. If you can't work the numbers, go back to the basement -- your business won't be outgrowing it for quite some time.
Agreed.
There was a time when HP hardware was actually more reliable than even IBM. They were the only provider who had equipment that could be dumped at a radar station in the north, never to be touched except for the guy who tops up the diesel tanks ever few weeks for the generators.
Now?
Lets just say it's been a long, long, long time since I've had any clients mention or ask for modern HP support. Some want updates done to old applications on old hardware, but I haven't seen any of the new HP hardware anywhere.
Couldn't be because they abandoned their old architecture and no one wants to ride the Itanic, could it?
It isn't about "taking out" my frustrations, it's about setting priorities the way I believe they should be set:
As you can see, the GUI is a small, small part of the priorities for a reliable, useful application.
So if someone has done their job as a serious programmer and put in all the time and effort to address the important issues, you can get off your wallet and pay someone for that polish you think is so important. I won't be wasting my time with it.
I have been providing software development services to clients since 1987. I have been programming since 1978-79.
Most projects I've worked on have had known moderate-severe stability and reliability problems with core data processing components. Time and again I've watched budget and resources squandered on pretty GUI enhancements instead of addressing the back end server problems.
Why? Because it's politically advantageous to kiss the butts of user departments with funding budgets rather than worrying about how often the support and development teams have to service pager calls in the wee hours of the morning.
My personal projects are functionality and stability first. I don't give a damn about user interface issues beyond them being able to access the functionality in a fashion I find convenient.
I've spent many years dealing with usability "issues". The vast majority of the issues are the result of letting random user communities dictate how the system interacts, rather than following user interface guideline standards including the now-ancient CUA (Common User Access) from IBM.
I can and do provide perfectly usable systems with reliable, predictable interfaces. They just don't provide all the eye candy and configurability that users think matters more than functionality and stability.
Your other comments on Microsoft weren't incorrect, but I see their impact from a different viewpoint. It's their pushing of crashware that has conditioned users to find it perfectly acceptable for a system to corrupt the entire system, but get bitchy if they can't change the fonts and colors for each and every item in the GUI.
Feh. I don't respect users because they don't respect me. My UI design suggestions are based on years of experience, further bolstered by recommendations and guidelines gleaned from usability studies for high-volume data entry and casual user interface requirements.
If you find them hard to use, it's because you're too focused on being able to do things however you want, whenever you want. That flexibility takes time and adds unnecessary risk to the stability and reliability of the application.
Functionality first. User nitpicking can be dealt with by someone with the time and/or budget to do so.
You just won't let go of the fact that you don't matter to projects like most of the ones I would consider open sourcing.
It is not a spurious argument, it is the heart of the matter. Many, if not most, open source programs are someone's hobby, exposed to the world.
The user interface is rarely the interesting part of the project, if it has one at all. It's boring, repetitive, mindless work to code a GUI -- nothing more than adding a bunch of alternate hooks to call the same functions the basic interface provides, but in a way someone else prefers to use.
Get over yourself and your demanding user viewpoint. Hobby programming is where I go to escape the nagging and clueless users with no budget. I deal with them for day to day business, providing the very functional GUIs you demand.
On my project on my time for my needs, your demands as a user just don't matter in the slightest. Your demands are the irritation I escape to return to the freedom of programming for fun, not profit.
Not at all -- I'd done enough GUI programming for a living that I find it boring beyond sanity.
I code a minimalist interface to make things usable, and that's the end of it. I've no interest in eye candy or bells and whistles -- I'm a programmer, not a graphics artist or audio engineer.
An "audience" only matters if one is performing.
There is no reason a project cannot exist in and of itself for no other purpose than to be a fun hobby. If it becomes boring, it might even be abandoned without completion.
The code is still there if it's important enough for someone else to pick up the development and carry it to the next level. If no one is willing to go to that effort, the project must be meeting it's minimal functional requirements, or no one is using it.
I'm sure it's a shock to the non-programmer community, but that is exactly what happens to internal, proprietary business projects as well. If no department wants the changes badly enough to fund the effort, no new development is done on the project. It lives on with bandages, glue, and pager support to handle known issues.
What makes you think most of us give a damn about Gates?
The whole open source movement initially started in response to proprietary systems from IBM, DEC, HP, and others. Sun had only released their first machines, and PCs were still on the first releases of DOS.
Back then, Microsoft was actually viewed as the upstart taking on IBM and the other big companies. It wasn't until much later that people realized that once they got big enough, Bill & co. were just as profit driven, selfish, and expensive to deal with as the previous crop of providers.
Microsoft is just more adept at playing the politics to extend their time on top, but eventually they'll just be a "regular" player like IBM or any other service/hardware supplier.
Thank you -- someone gets my point. The issues being flagged are programmer culture, not open source.
Open source is nothing more than a licensing philosophy that enables others to continue to improve code that's "good enough" for one's own needs.
If you find it "self destructive" for me to worry about my own requirements for software I work on instead of your requirements, so be it. I'm not destroying anything of my self, nor am I failing to meet my own needs. I just see no reason I should worry about your requirements for what I do as a hobby!!!
Who the hell do people think they are to make demands on my personal recreation time? That's 90% of open source -- people programming for fun.
There are plenty of applications which exhibit all the flaws mentioned by the paper -- I don't disagree with any of the summary points.
Most of those applications are in-house proprietary business applications, not open source. The author is complaining about a general problem with the politics and pride of software development, not open source methodology or products.
If someone chooses to develop a tool or product that meets their personal needs, and offers it up for others to use or extend, they aren't typically getting paid for it.
If you don't like it, extend it, fix it, or hire someone to do so. Don't dump your personal application requirements on community members who are just trying to share what they have.
You want professional UI designs? Hire some developers to fix your favourite open source project, or fund the existing project development team. My idea of a professional UI is basic, plain, and functional -- no skinning, no beeps, no video, no candy.
Nothing pisses me off more than someone who demands the world for free, then bitches and whines because they can't have it without putting in an effort.
If you are sitting at 95% or more of the computer-equipped desks in North America, neither audio nor video have squat to do with your job. Stop confusing your hobbies and habits at work with what the vast majority of business machines are meant for.
The vast majority of North America does not need DRM on the desktop, and the remainder doesn't want it.
The very idea that businesses and ISPs are going to have to spend millions of dollars on upgrades and infrastructure regression testing so that Microsoft can field a properly DRM-enabled media player is obscene.
If this technology is so critical to the music and movie industries, let them pay for the impact. Not us -- and make no mistake those rollout expenses are passed on to you by every vendor, store, or supplier that is forced to pay for features that add nothing to the bottom line.
I don't see a compelling reason for the existance of this "upgrade" other than to feed the M$ coffers and lock in a steady revenue stream for them. The main features seem to be:
Actually maybe there is one new, useful feature. Or did Microsoft stop trying to catch up to the 15-20 year old idea of having multiple shared-library/DLL versions on the same system?
Excuse me, but an officer who doesn't realize it's immoral and wrong to post or email the video of someone's suicide?
What kind of degenerate excuse for a human being needs training to know better? Someone with such a complete lack of empathy or common sense is allowed to carry a gun and a badge?
Just when you think the American "justice" system couldn't get any worse...
"Object and inheritance management" is only an issue for those who don't bother to analyze the problem and architect a solution. Slapping together code without understanding the problem is not "prototyping" -- it's wasting time.
Prototypes are for understanding the application requirements, not for "scripting." If you compare prototyping tools to production applications, you are completely and thoroughly missing the point for their existance.
At the quoted speeds, it would take over 10 hours of non-stop burning to back up a 120G of data.
You could do selective backups with this device, but not actual servers. I seriously doubt the drive would last very long even if it was only expected to do a weekend image with weekday deltas.
It sounds great for backing up large data files that don't change very often, but I don't deal with many of those. People keep wanting to change the database, website, and developer tree files all the time for some reason.
I do wish they'd been consistent in using left-right syntax, as that would have made things a lot cleaner for Java and a lot of other integration as well.
I suspect the reason it wasn't done that way is to allow the DNS server to search by the most distinguishing key first. Remember when a lot of these protocols were created, most computers were huge machines with less power than your typical Palm Pilot.
Only the TLD and the primary domain are registered -- your own DNS server handles the subdomains. There is absolutely no reason you cannot set up a domain so that both
and reference the same page content.In fact, many sites like IBM's already do this.
Any confusion below the TLD and domain name are purely the fault of the domain's webspace management.
If you are using any *nix platform with an email client of any kind, you have an additional layer of virus protection that Windows users don't.
You aren't root.
You can't install anything to corrupt the system, including the virus. The worst you can do is damage the code the user has access to.
Why in the world do you think most *nix third-party products require a seperate admin id for configuring the system, and often root access to install upgrades? To protect the system from corruption.
In order to spread a *nix virus, you either need to count on the users running on intentionally damaged systems, or count on them running just the right distro with no changes other than those delivered by the vendor/packager.
You'll find the same level of protection in other mature systems, like OpenVMS, the various mainframe operating systems, AS400, etc.
Windows big problem is it still carries too much of it's DOS-thunker heritage for it's own good. No matter how much glue and bodge Microsoft has done to try to fix the problem, they can't get around the fact that far too much of their existing code base demands the equivalent to root access just to run.
I was absolutely apalled to find that the only way I could get any of my neice's edugames installed was to give her admin access. The idea that a child needs admin access to play an alphabet game is just insane from a security perspective, yet it's the case with far too many products. Even "new" games from some of these companies demand that access -- they aren't "fixing" the problem, they're ignoring it.
I don't think SCOX and it's executives are heading anywhere but jail for a multi-year fraud. The only thing baffling me anymore is that the big bad American government which is so willing to send the troops overseas doesn't have enough 'nads to reign in a lunatic like Darl and his cohorts.
Guess it's a lot easier to blow billions on overseas troop movements and "liberations" than it is to have the justice department simply make a phone call and put an end to a fraud that is hurting the entire computing industry outside Microsoft.
The US pharmacorps spend many times on advertising what they do for R&D. Once upon a time that was not the case, but they sure don't spend anywhere near the percentage on R&D that they used to.
C'mon, every "geek" I know has seen the vast majority of those movies, even just to check out the F/X. It's not 15/25, it's more like 22/25 for F/X heavy top-grossers.
10 (Forrest Gump), 20 (Home Alone) and 24 (How the Grinch Stole Christmas) are the only ones that weren't F/X fests for their time. Even "Forrest Gump" had some excellant (but subtle) F/X, such as the award scene with the president.
Having planned, coordinated, and implemented the rollout of Oracle 6, Oracle 7, Sybase 10, Sybase 11, Sybase 12, Sybase SQL Anywhere, Postgres, and DB/2 UDB 5 through 8, on Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, Linux, WinNT, Win2K, and Netware platforms, I think I might be qualified to judge Firebird as an easy client caching installation.
Client caching means Win32 90% of the time, OS/X on two machines to date, and the rest various *nix workstations. Closest I've been to BSD for servers was SunOS -- only dev databases aren't on SMP hardware.
While Postgres is the better database, installing Firebird/Interbase is a much easier task for the average user. That makes it a terrific little cross-platform client-caching database, such as letting the spreadsheet users slice at the data with an ODBC driver without killing the primary database server. For the same reasons, it's a handy tool for writing small standalone database apps without locking in to a Win32 codebase (e.g. MS Access.) I'd say it even has potential to serve the same kind of markets that the "light" servers like Sybase SQL Anywhere serve.
Interesting. Now it is "trolling" to think a show is a piece of crap that should have been axed ages ago. Ah well, what can you expect in the US but censorship to go with their arcane security laws.
"Sorely missed?"
I thought they'd axed it a year or two ago. It's one of the most childishly mismanaged excuses for a series I've ever seen. Angel doesn't require that you just accept a world of weird rules, it requires that you completely stop thinking or remembering anything about previous episodes, or face the inevitable fact that there is no coherency to the storyline or characters.
It's the perfect show for UPN to pick up -- it fits right in with their usual selection of over-managed garbage. Remember, these are the people who've even managed to alienate the Star Trek fans!
The problem is one corp has been allowed to hold an entire industry in turmoil, manipulate the stock market, threaten the corporate world, and not one segment of the so-called American legal system has put a leash on them.
By dropping prior claims and initiating new ones, SCO is just showing (again) that they have no valid claims. Isn't it time that Darl and his supporting team of lunatics were locked up?
Or is there some perverse American "right" to run around accusing and threatening an entire industry without fear of reprisal, provided you just stop making the accusations before you're forced to prove they're true?
Tired of this crap. I was tired of it almost a year ago. More than anything, I just am stunned that they haven't been yanked short by an order to stop making accusations and laying charges until they prove at least one point!!!