Yes, I know it's possible, but the sort of spec I'm talking about says that 'thou shalt use IEx and no other browser'.
Generally the application architects don't consider it worth the hassle to get ActiveX running under non-MS browsers - it's an unknown quantity, too many unknowns as far as they see it.
While hobby developers have a choice, and developers designing their own products have a choice, professional developers working on contract often do *not* have a choice about the technologies they use.
They can argue the point (as I have done many times about not embedding ActiveX and Java Applets in intranet apps)
However, if the specification says 'use AMCE's ActiveX 3D-chart control' to implement feature X then what's a guy to do? Pitch a case for developing the same functionality using HTML and Javascript alone?
How much extra would that cost and how much longer would it take? How would you justify it?
While the parent comment has some truth in it (the ActiveX legacy) I think it's unfair to a lot of good, professional developers who had no choice other than to use ActiveX because a particular component (a grid, graphing tool, whatever) was actully required in the project specification.
I'm thinking of sites/apps for internal, corporate intranets - not the Internet in general.
What were these guys supposed to do exactly? Resign on a point of principle?
Some people are, however, locked into IE because of the ActiveX component support (typically intranet business applications).
A bad idea to incorporate in-browser ActiveX objects into your app of course, but I'll bet there are still plenty of in-house apps around that do just that.
So, Firefox (great though it is) is not an option for everyone while the ActiveX legacy continues to bite us.
...why not just use a (Windows/Apple/Linux) box with some tacky, crashy 'software studio' suit, and a pathetic, icky-little plastic keyboard?
Well, I love just bashing my old (1999 vintage) 88-note Korg Trinity Pro keyboard/studio at times when *I DO NOT WANT* to look at another stupid fucking, crashing, no-drivers, whatever OS computer.
You just turn on a KORG workstation (or indeed a Roland or a Yamaha or a Kurzweil) and it simply works!
It lets you get on with the job of making music without having to grapple with stupid, half-assed, flakey, software!
Korg (and others) make subperb performance instruments, for those who want to make music, rather than futz around with computers.
So yeah - it is worth the price - if your time is.
If you don't know what it is to be in fits of panic, anxiety and agony before performing on stage, then please don't comment!
Well, the.NET SDK is available for $0 and includes a C# compiler.
You can even get a nice, C# Builder IDE from Borland free of charge for personal use and there are a ton of other free C# and.NET tools and editors out there - just Google.
The MS Visual Toolkit and Platform SDK gives you the command line VC++ compiler, free.
The OpenWatcom C/C++ compiler is an excellent tool and totally free of charge.
Additionally I have Perl, Ruby, PHP and Java, as well as gcc and the GNU tools (Cygwin) on my Windows XP dev box.
Not a bad set of development tools for zip really.
>>a couple weeks ago Santa brought my daughter a pink iPod mini
Got the same thing for my Wife for Christmas.
She absolutely loves it. She's not a gadget freak at all, just into her music, and the iPod (and iTunes) has opened up a whole new world for her to enjoy her music.
She's now looking at her rather tired old HP Brio PC and wanting something with a little Apple logo on it.
She is exactly the demographic that would form a good chunk of the market for this imaginary sub-$500 Mac.
Firstly, iPods (and moreover mini iPods) can be had for less than $300.
Secondly, most people have different priorities when it comes to buying personal computers from the average/. reader and maybe already have a Windows PC, so the price incentive to switch must be a good one.
While all this talk of a $500 Mac may be pure speculation, I'm sure there us a market. It is whether Apple wish to play in this market that is the real question.
Lots of people are new to Apple products because of the iPod. Having seen the iPod and been impressed by it, they are now interested in buying Apple computers, but the entry level price point is a little high.
Modern 3.5" disk assemblies are barely a few ounces (the platters and the spindle). Certainly nowhere near 'pounds of metal'.
I think you'd have to spin these things *way* beyond 10K RPM before they would significantly deform under centripetal loading, and many times that before they would actually 'explode'.
The amount of power used to spin up such a system (and keep it spinning) is almost insignificant if your bearings are sufficently low-friction.
at the increasing capacity of spinning magnetic media when about 20 years ago (I guess when thin-film heads came about), many pundits said that the medium had reached it's physical limits.
Just where to they squeeze these extra bits from on the same size platter?
Stealthily installed RealVNC clients are used as trojans, so it's a fair call, probably.
Of course, Remote Desktop offers the same level of exposure, but I haven't heard of any exploits that use it (though I'm happy to be informed on this point).
VB is a Rapid Application *development* tool, not a Rapid Application *prototyping* tool.
Of course, many can and do create prototype and throw-away applications using VB, but it is good tool for developing many serious Windows applications.
If the design is right and the code is clean and maintainable, what exactly would be the advantage in recoding it in C++ (assuming execution speed is not an issue and even then, just critical parts can be written in C++ and put in a DLL)?
I have developed app in VB and C++ for years and decide which tool is the best to use at the outset. I have never found it necessary to start out using VB then recode everything in C++.
So, if I were a development manager, why would I pay for the project to be done over again to achieve the same end result?
You can't say MS's office integration doesn't work, or that it merely ticks a box on some notional feature list.
The level integration and interoperability of the Office suite is something that most other software vendors aspire to, but few (if any) have achieved.
It's not an easy thing to acomplish. Which is why MS Office is as popular on the Mac platform as it is on Wintel.
I note that you're the one and only entry on my 'Freaks' list.
Ok. So, what the fuck did I do?
BTW if you throw your iBook across the room and then bitch and moan that it's "flaky", and you act all surprised, then you're an even more stupid fuck than I thought you were.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks.
Yes, I know it's possible, but the sort of spec I'm talking about says that 'thou shalt use IEx and no other browser'.
Generally the application architects don't consider it worth the hassle to get ActiveX running under non-MS browsers - it's an unknown quantity, too many unknowns as far as they see it.
Again you assume that the developer has a choice.
While hobby developers have a choice, and developers designing their own products have a choice, professional developers working on contract often do *not* have a choice about the technologies they use.
They can argue the point (as I have done many times about not embedding ActiveX and Java Applets in intranet apps)
However, if the specification says 'use AMCE's ActiveX 3D-chart control' to implement feature X then what's a guy to do? Pitch a case for developing the same functionality using HTML and Javascript alone?
How much extra would that cost and how much longer would it take? How would you justify it?
While the parent comment has some truth in it (the ActiveX legacy) I think it's unfair to a lot of good, professional developers who had no choice other than to use ActiveX because a particular component (a grid, graphing tool, whatever) was actully required in the project specification.
I'm thinking of sites/apps for internal, corporate intranets - not the Internet in general.
What were these guys supposed to do exactly? Resign on a point of principle?
Get real!
I agree that Firefox is much the better browser.
Some people are, however, locked into IE because of the ActiveX component support (typically intranet business applications).
A bad idea to incorporate in-browser ActiveX objects into your app of course, but I'll bet there are still plenty of in-house apps around that do just that.
So, Firefox (great though it is) is not an option for everyone while the ActiveX legacy continues to bite us.
...why not just use a (Windows/Apple/Linux) box with some tacky, crashy 'software studio' suit, and a pathetic, icky-little plastic keyboard?
Well, I love just bashing my old (1999 vintage) 88-note Korg Trinity Pro keyboard/studio at times when *I DO NOT WANT* to look at another stupid fucking, crashing, no-drivers, whatever OS computer.
You just turn on a KORG workstation (or indeed a Roland or a Yamaha or a Kurzweil) and it simply works!
It lets you get on with the job of making music without having to grapple with stupid, half-assed, flakey, software!
Korg (and others) make subperb performance instruments, for those who want to make music, rather than futz around with computers.
So yeah - it is worth the price - if your time is.
If you don't know what it is to be in fits of panic, anxiety and agony before performing on stage, then please don't comment!
iBod
Only France banned them.
The French are particulary fervant about the separation of religion from the state.
In French schools, the wearing of any religious dress or artifact is banned - no matter what the religion.
Just to address that point...
.NET SDK is available for $0 and includes a C# compiler.
.NET tools and editors out there - just Google.
I guess you mean free (as in beer) dev tools.
Well, the
You can even get a nice, C# Builder IDE from Borland free of charge for personal use and there are a ton of other free C# and
The MS Visual Toolkit and Platform SDK gives you the command line VC++ compiler, free.
The OpenWatcom C/C++ compiler is an excellent tool and totally free of charge.
Additionally I have Perl, Ruby, PHP and Java, as well as gcc and the GNU tools (Cygwin) on my Windows XP dev box.
Not a bad set of development tools for zip really.
Agree about eMac.
;)
I have no idea what posessed Apple to offer the eMac at all. It's an ugly, heavy, out-of-date monster - and still too expensive.
Maybe Apple had a big stock of 17" CRT tubes to use up somewhere
Who the hell would switch to an eMac when the new flat iMacs are available for not much more (unless buying in very large quantities)?
>>a couple weeks ago Santa brought my daughter a pink iPod mini
Got the same thing for my Wife for Christmas.
She absolutely loves it. She's not a gadget freak at all, just into her music, and the iPod (and iTunes) has opened up a whole new world for her to enjoy her music.
She's now looking at her rather tired old HP Brio PC and wanting something with a little Apple logo on it.
She is exactly the demographic that would form a good chunk of the market for this imaginary sub-$500 Mac.
Firstly, iPods (and moreover mini iPods) can be had for less than $300.
/. reader and maybe already have a Windows PC, so the price incentive to switch must be a good one.
Secondly, most people have different priorities when it comes to buying personal computers from the average
While all this talk of a $500 Mac may be pure speculation, I'm sure there us a market. It is whether Apple wish to play in this market that is the real question.
Lots of people are new to Apple products because of the iPod. Having seen the iPod and been impressed by it, they are now interested in buying Apple computers, but the entry level price point is a little high.
There's your market.
I wonder that too, but remember BUBBLE MEMORY: http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/b/bubble_memory.html
Wow! Funny guy!
My point was that I respect the engineers who have taken this particular technology beyond what was the accepted theoretical limit some years ago.
I have a pretty good understanding of how magnetic media works (down to the physics) but am still impressed by these developments.
Modern 3.5" disk assemblies are barely a few ounces (the platters and the spindle). Certainly nowhere near 'pounds of metal'.
I think you'd have to spin these things *way* beyond 10K RPM before they would significantly deform under centripetal loading, and many times that before they would actually 'explode'.
The amount of power used to spin up such a system (and keep it spinning) is almost insignificant if your bearings are sufficently low-friction.
Do you suppose it's some people's desire to pull down every piece of available information in the world onto their own hard disk?
Is this some kind of new obsession - just because it's becomming almost technically feasible?
at the increasing capacity of spinning magnetic media when about 20 years ago (I guess when thin-film heads came about), many pundits said that the medium had reached it's physical limits.
Just where to they squeeze these extra bits from on the same size platter?
Stealthily installed RealVNC clients are used as trojans, so it's a fair call, probably.
Of course, Remote Desktop offers the same level of exposure, but I haven't heard of any exploits that use it (though I'm happy to be informed on this point).
VB is a Rapid Application *development* tool, not a Rapid Application *prototyping* tool.
Of course, many can and do create prototype and throw-away applications using VB, but it is good tool for developing many serious Windows applications.
If the design is right and the code is clean and maintainable, what exactly would be the advantage in recoding it in C++ (assuming execution speed is not an issue and even then, just critical parts can be written in C++ and put in a DLL)?
I have developed app in VB and C++ for years and decide which tool is the best to use at the outset. I have never found it necessary to start out using VB then recode everything in C++.
So, if I were a development manager, why would I pay for the project to be done over again to achieve the same end result?
Well, perhaps holding 'unpopular' opinions makes you feel your are different and special.
Oh come on now!
You can't say MS's office integration doesn't work, or that it merely ticks a box on some notional feature list.
The level integration and interoperability of the Office suite is something that most other software vendors aspire to, but few (if any) have achieved.
It's not an easy thing to acomplish. Which is why MS Office is as popular on the Mac platform as it is on Wintel.
You're forgetting the power needed to manufacture the LCD screen (and obtain and process all the raw materials that go to make it).
Absolutely right!
God knows how your post was modded 'Troll'.
If you're serious about your photographs then the best way to view them is a high-resolution prints using quality inks/dyes on quality paper.
These things are gimmick and a waste of power and materials IMO.
>> IEFBR14 is your friend - the 2 byte killer app for MVS
After the patch (adding the XOR 15,15 instruction), it was a huge, bloated 4-byte app.
I wasn't saying Windows itself was bloated.
Some of the most popular Windows software is hugely bloated however (errm... Office, Photoshop, Adobe* - you know).
Hey! Hello BigBird3d!
I note that you're the one and only entry on my 'Freaks' list.
Ok. So, what the fuck did I do?
BTW if you throw your iBook across the room and then bitch and moan that it's "flaky", and you act all surprised, then you're an even more stupid fuck than I thought you were.
Yours sincerely
iBod