I agree that returns in the middle of a method are not pretty but at least it won't lead to undefined errors.
Since I've been programming C++ mostly, I try to use returns only in the beginning or end of a method. I like to be able to do verification and escape early rather then have lots of indentation.
See the forbes top 50 largest companies in the us. You'll see that verizon is number 13 and att is #27. M$ is number 49. see http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/ 2007/index.html If they want the bandwidth, they'll probably get it. Whether it's a smart move or not for them is another question.
If some of the wireless device manufacturors got together and put together a consortium to bid for the spectrum, I don't see how the big telcos could match the bids. att and verizon are big but not that big. I guess we'll see during the bid...
actually: ignore me, from forbes 500, I see that verizon is 13th with 93b revenue and att is 27th with 63b. The closest techie is M$ with 44b (all 2006 numbers) So, it's not a streach to see this happen...:(
The difference is that the Israeli airline agents interview you one-on-one for an hour or two during the process, which is a lot more reliable than judging someone based on one or two face glimpses.
Wow, if you're being questioned for an hour, then they must think you are a serious threat. What works for me is to say no to almost every question, smile a lot (usually the agents are pretty girls) and be polite. I know why they are there and they know why I'm there so everything goes smoothly. I trust their system to find dangerous people ALOT more then getting strip searched by TSA every time I want to get on a plane.
Power, otoh, has the problem that it's quite hard to store in large quantities. You pretty much have to generate it when it's to be consumed.
I have been wondering about this. If you couple solar cells with hydrogen production, aren't you essentially saving the power to be used in the future? Its the same as storing water as potential energy during the day and then using that potential energy at night. It's not as efficient as immediately using the power from solar/wind/whatever but at least it'll work...
Return statements in the middle of the a function body are usually a good signal of bad code; they make the flow of the code more obscure. However, they usually come hand in hand with a clearer signal: functions that are too long.
You are kidding right? The point of putting the return in the middle of the function is to leave the function as soon as the processing is over. Not to have to set an error flag, break, check the error, break and check the error again. Returns allow proper deinitialization to occur where gotos simply jumps all over the frame and can cause variables to not be initialized or deinitialized properly.
for example: goto foo; int bar = 42; foo: printf("bar = %d", bar);
I think the act of selling options on music would distort the actual value of a track by a little bit while the actual value of the track will be more influenced by its worth to people. The problem I see here though is that's it is impossible to resell the music once bought and the value range is only between 0-99 cents, therefore limiting small fluctuations in price. Maybe they should probably decap the price to allow greater fluctuations in value.
If you can find the good music early on, you get to buy it for cheaper. So it encourages early adopters to find good music before the mob does. And yeah, they should add a tag that says when and how much the user bought the song for... That adds props.
Of course, after a song has peaked, it should start getting cheaper as less people download it.
The problem is that you're disregarding the fact the we can't possibly make enough conventional batteries to fill this kind of demand. Worse still, trying to make this many batteries would be a huge environmental catastrophe. You're not thinking globally, you're thinking locally. This technology will never be able to come close to replacing internal combustion engines.
Umm, that is a good point. However, I'm sure that if people start buying more electric vehicles, the auto makers will start doing more R&D into battery technology and discover better methods for energy storage and distribution. I have been thinking that maybe fuel cells would be a better storage mechinism. Like use solar cells to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, store the hydrogen for later local energy generation and also to refill your car at night. I wonder if thats a more feasible direction to go then all-electric. At least for the house owner.
They say "we want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 10%, so we'll just require car companies to have a fleet average fuel economy that is 10% lower". They completely ignore any kind of cost-benefit analysis, or natural market adjustments and set out to achieve an arbitrary standard. This approach will likely be completely unsuccessful in combatting greenhouse gas emissions, since IC engines and coal power-plants are so important to our economy. Enforcing arbitrary standards on this sector of the economy would likely cause so much hardship that people would never think of the environment again (they wouldn't be able to afford to).
A much better approach would be to sum up the costs associated with greenhouse gas emissions (or pollution in general) and charge that cost back to emitters (and use the money gathered to mitigate the effects of the pollution as much as possible). That would decrease pollution, and repair the damage done by it. More importantly, people who feel that they need to emit would still be able to do so (so long as they could afford it).
A problem with your arguments is the cost of greenhouse gases is not immediate. It takes about 20-30 years for the CO2 we generate today to reach a point in the atmosphere where it starts absorbing sunlight and generating heat. If we don't do anything today, our costs will be significately higher in the future. (Like worst dought in the farmlands, possibily rising waters, stronger hurricanes, etc.)
So how do we factor in future cost into taxes and regulation today? I say we need to follow what the scientists are telling us and force regulations which will bring down CO2 emission to pre-1990 levels or lower. Of course the oil companies hate that because they won't be able to sell as much oil in the short term (even though they'll be able to sell it for longer, remember peak oil?) and auto companies hate it because they won;t be able to charge a premium selling huge SUVs based on the fear generated by their ads ("Your family will be safer in this gigantic SUV"). But we NEED to force these regulations through, otherwise, you can kiss you kids future goodbye, just like our parents thought that the atomic bomb was going to kill us all.
(It might be too late to stop a runaway global warming already considering the rate of melting in the Arctic and Artantica but we have to try at least.)
So why not call it Dell support for the RHEL stack? I thought you had bought support straight from RH.
This is not a flame, it's actually pretty amazing that you can buy support of RHEL straight from Dell and illustrates the better points of a OSS stack. Even if RH makes some technical or management mistakes, you still have alternatives for stack support.
For large heavy use production sites, you'll probably want to pay for the standard or enterprise version of MS SQL. But for most uses, including the all important developer work, you can just use sql 2005 express for free. IIS &.Net are no additional cost.
Maybe you can get away with developing for free on the express stack, but as soon as you need to start scaling because your app does get popular, you have to start paying the MS tax AND you have limited access to the code when scaling problems start happening. IANAE but i imagine that if you have the expectation of building a large site, you would stay away from the MS stack as far as possible just to retain as much flexibility as possible in the long term.
The only time this is a real problem is if you're trying to do something that isnt possible on Windows, but thats pretty rare. Just like most people dont require modification to the JVM to create a framework on the java stack, the vast majority of people dont need to be able to modify windows, or.net to be able to go outside the norm there.
Umm, that's true. I guess that most engineers will understand the MS stack. Warts and all. However, I like being able to go outside the box. But me and other people here aren't like other users. Otherwise we wouldn't be here.
I'm not saying that its the same, its just different. There are costs on both sides. For alot of mainstream business apps, the windows stack is fast and productive for many corporate shops, as you just follow the recipe. Dont have to choose between Struts, Struts Shale, JSF, Tapestry, a templating language, or raw JSP+Servlets. This is both good and bad. If what you need can fit within the mainstream practices (which applies to a very large percentage of the people out there), then its very straightforward.
Ummm, seems like a lot of shops are jumping on the RoR or Django bandwagons because it's more productive then.Net. I mean.Netv3 is going to get features to try to copy ruby but I have my doubts as to if it's good enough. time will tell. I just would trust MS enough to allow them to dictate the direction and future of my company. Just see what they did to all of their VB developers as soon as they latched onto.Net. (VB.net doesn't count. You can't port directly from VB6 to VB.net and the concepts are 100% different.)
It's not possible to replace most of the IC engines in place with today with alternative technologies available today.
Correct, however, we have to start somewhere. I'd rather be positive and "act locally, think globally" then give up and say, "oh there's nothing I can do". I can't buy an electric car car due to the price of batteries but I hope that Think's business comes to SF soon ( http://blogs.business2.com/greenwombat/2007/02/new _think_buy_t.html ) so it will be possible. I think that Americans will need to do a mind adjustment in order to tackle CO2 emission properly. Think about eliminating all Coal and gas burning power plant and think about using hybrid/all-electric cars for commuting. Rent a gas powered car for those weekend getaways. That's the way we'll minimize the impact of global warming and probably save our kids future past 2050.
If it means making the government force the car companies to adjust production and fighting back against the oil company lobbyists, then lets do it. I don't think they'll change unless we make them change.
Fuck bush and his subservience to big oil and big autos. As companies, I hope they fail for letting down the American public for so long. Go Toyota and Tesla for forward thinking!
It probably explains the big shift to GNOME in the major distros, as well as the focus on GNOME in nearly all the new mobile Linux initiatives.
I have to respectfully disagree. As the person responsible for building my previous company's GUI for an embedded medical device, I had to make the decision of choosing GTK+ + pango vs. qt. I ultimately went with qt, filled out the POs for the (expensive??) licenses and started developing. And boy, did it turn out to be the Right Decision(TM). Qtopia3 and then really Qtopia4 were the perfect development tools for us. Its infrastructure saved my butt many, many times and by managing the memory by overriding new, I had a complete Qt system running on a 250Mhz arm processor with 32MB of ram. For a couple thousand USD/developer, they give really, really good support and point out bugs in your code or provide patches very quickly. You don't have to spend too long pulling out your hair in despair when there is a problem.
I think that if we had more people on the GUI development side or a gnome guru, we might have gone for gtkmm (the C++ bindings for gtk+). Since I didn't have either, going with Qt was the right choice.
Two notes: 1) No mobile device uses kde or gnome currently. Currently they are too high level to be useful. Everyone uses gtk or qt. 2) If you compare the number of mobile device makers on gtkmm and trolltech's websites, they are about even. There's always the tradeoff of paying for good support vs. trying to support yourself. I guess if you are a major distro, it's probably more economical to base your development around gnome in the expectations of developing proprietary apps. But i think that just runs counter to the whole idea of FOSS distros. btw, there's nothing in trolltech's OSS license that says you can't support your own branch of Qt. (if fact the gpl forbids it) They have a policy however of not accepting outside patches for legal reasons it is a bit unfortunate.
What mattered to upper management was support. The fact that, we've only ever opened like 3 support calls doesn't matter to upper management. They still wanted (and want) to see a support contract somewhere. And they don't mind paying a reasonable fee for it. And it's good to support vendors like Red Hat and IBM, who support OSS.
Question for you: Did you ever evaluate 3rd parties that supported the RHEL stack? Why did you choose to go with them as opposed to RHEL?
On the MS stack, there is a prescriptive recipe for everything. Best practices are all up on MSDN, with some great samples and advanced guidance from the Patterns & Practices group.
On the Java side, things are much more complicated. You have at least 5 reasonable frameworks to choose from for your web UI stack. You have several to choose from on the DB interaction, even if you do ORM. Even transaction management isnt simple, and there are choices there too. Then there's the whole, should we do Tomcat and roll everything ourselves or use JBoss/Commercial container.
True, you have to select which stack you want to work with and stick to that community. If you think about it, MS maintains ONE vertical stack and it is very, very tall and different from most the other webserving stacks out there. Lets see: Windows+IIS+MSSQL+.Net. each piece of that stack requires the MS tax and if you do what to do something that is unorthodox, you are own your own unless you have an inside to MS and can convince engineers there to pay attention to your problem.
If you are working with a LAMP+java stack, then 1) you don't have to pay the tax for most of the components 2) If there is a problem/bug, you can fix it or better yet, hire a contractor to fix it for you and 3) if your stack is popular, you will have a sizable community to get support from. Sure, it's not as pretty and well documented as MS's stack but at least it's more flexible.
If MS wants their stack to survive, they'll probably have to stop charging money for the lower levels soon just to compete. Probably with have to open source the windows layer too.
Just like the fabled electric car, they're depending on technological advances that have not yet occurred and may never occur to make this dream a reality.
Heh, my dad drives an all-electric Honda rav4 to work every day. It's not a dream. It exists today. I hope to buy an electric vehicle in 2 years when Think or Tesla works out the correct leasing program.
and your kidding me, do you really need a source for air masses of different temp. driving weather conditions? christ, watch the god damn news tonight and the weather man will explain it for you as he talks about cold fronts moving in and causing rain.
and does that seem like normal weather to you now? In the middle of summer!!!
Face it, local and global weather patterns are changing DRAMATICALLY and have been since the 1970s. If you want to stick your head in the sand, fine, thats your business. But for the rest of us who would rather not see sea levels raise, increased drought in farmlands and in population areas, and more damage caused by hurricanes, we need to act now. We need to stop burning coal and gas and start using clean renewable power like wind,solar,geothermal and tide power.
You and bush should hang out in New Orleans and see what this next hurricane season brings... Fucking losers... Ben
Well, apple did try to push the games-on-iPod direction for awhile. That was slightly successful but the iPod simply doesn't have the horsepower to run a decent game. And I guess that people just didn't see the iPod as a useful gaming system.
Maybe it'll work better for the iPhone. And it'll be great to see game ideas that use multiple input (two fingers on the screen at a time) Can you say super-wack-a-mole?
I think it is a pretty good use of kde. Maybe a bit too simplistic but it does make good use of kde3's icons and color palette and theme. I think they are trying to make it look TOO much like windows actually.
hum, i hope it succeeds, (or at least fails for a good reason) ben
Smiling, at its most basic form, is a signal that something is not a danger, and acts as a tool for bonding. This has intrinsic value for business, and it's why people also sometimes smile while conducting business in person.
I wish that verizon, att and the other large cellphone companies in the US would learn this. It amazes me that my nokia 3100 (from israel/europe) has a accessible menu for smilies but all these new fangled cell phones only have symbols and nothing else. In fact, verizon's firmware is soooo bad, I'm probably going to dump their service if I can't reflash the phone to alltel's firmware and activate it on verizon. The list of missing features and options is longer then my arm...
Slashdot Mirror
I agree that returns in the middle of a method are not pretty but at least it won't lead to undefined errors.
Since I've been programming C++ mostly, I try to use returns only in the beginning or end of a method. I like to be able to do verification and escape early rather then have lots of indentation.
cheers
ben
See the forbes top 50 largest companies in the us. You'll see that verizon is number 13 and att is #27. M$ is number 49./ 2007/index.html
see http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500
If they want the bandwidth, they'll probably get it. Whether it's a smart move or not for them is another question.
cheers
Ben
If some of the wireless device manufacturors got together and put together a consortium to bid for the spectrum, I don't see how the big telcos could match the bids.
:(
att and verizon are big but not that big. I guess we'll see during the bid...
actually: ignore me, from forbes 500, I see that verizon is 13th with 93b revenue and att is 27th with 63b. The closest techie is M$ with 44b (all 2006 numbers)
So, it's not a streach to see this happen...
Ben
The difference is that the Israeli airline agents interview you one-on-one for an hour or two during the process, which is a lot more reliable than judging someone based on one or two face glimpses.
Wow, if you're being questioned for an hour, then they must think you are a serious threat.
What works for me is to say no to almost every question, smile a lot (usually the agents are pretty girls) and be polite. I know why they are there and they know why I'm there so everything goes smoothly. I trust their system to find dangerous people ALOT more then getting strip searched by TSA every time I want to get on a plane.
Ben
Power, otoh, has the problem that it's quite hard to store in large quantities. You pretty much have to generate it when it's to be consumed.
I have been wondering about this. If you couple solar cells with hydrogen production, aren't you essentially saving the power to be used in the future? Its the same as storing water as potential energy during the day and then using that potential energy at night. It's not as efficient as immediately using the power from solar/wind/whatever but at least it'll work...
Ben
Return statements in the middle of the a function body are usually a good signal of bad code; they make the flow of the code more obscure. However, they usually come hand in hand with a clearer signal: functions that are too long.
You are kidding right? The point of putting the return in the middle of the function is to leave the function as soon as the processing is over. Not to have to set an error flag, break, check the error, break and check the error again. Returns allow proper deinitialization to occur where gotos simply jumps all over the frame and can cause variables to not be initialized or deinitialized properly.
for example:
goto foo;
int bar = 42;
foo:
printf("bar = %d", bar);
whats the value of bar?
Ben
cool!!
thanks, now I can finally choose the best FSs for my next system.
Oh wait, I'm getting lazier, ok I'll just use ext3 for everything...
ben
But yeah, either way, reflections would be bad news, just perhaps not quite as bad as you suggest. :)
Why don't you try it out and tell us. Assuming you can see the keyboard afterwards.... hahah
ben
wow that's really interesting. Do you have a link to point out the best FS for the task required?
ben
I think the act of selling options on music would distort the actual value of a track by a little bit while the actual value of the track will be more influenced by its worth to people. The problem I see here though is that's it is impossible to resell the music once bought and the value range is only between 0-99 cents, therefore limiting small fluctuations in price. Maybe they should probably decap the price to allow greater fluctuations in value.
Ben
Actually, it's the right idea.
If you can find the good music early on, you get to buy it for cheaper. So it encourages early adopters to find good music before the mob does. And yeah, they should add a tag that says when and how much the user bought the song for... That adds props.
Of course, after a song has peaked, it should start getting cheaper as less people download it.
cheers
ben
I liked it when the ogl reference was "my little red book". :)
ben
If opengl's selection and feedback features are not used anymore, then how does the programmer implement object selection in modern gl? Magic?
Ben
The problem is that you're disregarding the fact the we can't possibly make enough conventional batteries to fill this kind of demand. Worse still, trying to make this many batteries would be a huge environmental catastrophe. You're not thinking globally, you're thinking locally. This technology will never be able to come close to replacing internal combustion engines.
Umm, that is a good point. However, I'm sure that if people start buying more electric vehicles, the auto makers will start doing more R&D into battery technology and discover better methods for energy storage and distribution. I have been thinking that maybe fuel cells would be a better storage mechinism. Like use solar cells to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, store the hydrogen for later local energy generation and also to refill your car at night. I wonder if thats a more feasible direction to go then all-electric. At least for the house owner.
They say "we want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 10%, so we'll just require car companies to have a fleet average fuel economy that is 10% lower". They completely ignore any kind of cost-benefit analysis, or natural market adjustments and set out to achieve an arbitrary standard. This approach will likely be completely unsuccessful in combatting greenhouse gas emissions, since IC engines and coal power-plants are so important to our economy. Enforcing arbitrary standards on this sector of the economy would likely cause so much hardship that people would never think of the environment again (they wouldn't be able to afford to).
A much better approach would be to sum up the costs associated with greenhouse gas emissions (or pollution in general) and charge that cost back to emitters (and use the money gathered to mitigate the effects of the pollution as much as possible). That would decrease pollution, and repair the damage done by it. More importantly, people who feel that they need to emit would still be able to do so (so long as they could afford it).
A problem with your arguments is the cost of greenhouse gases is not immediate. It takes about 20-30 years for the CO2 we generate today to reach a point in the atmosphere where it starts absorbing sunlight and generating heat. If we don't do anything today, our costs will be significately higher in the future. (Like worst dought in the farmlands, possibily rising waters, stronger hurricanes, etc.)
So how do we factor in future cost into taxes and regulation today? I say we need to follow what the scientists are telling us and force regulations which will bring down CO2 emission to pre-1990 levels or lower. Of course the oil companies hate that because they won't be able to sell as much oil in the short term (even though they'll be able to sell it for longer, remember peak oil?) and auto companies hate it because they won;t be able to charge a premium selling huge SUVs based on the fear generated by their ads ("Your family will be safer in this gigantic SUV"). But we NEED to force these regulations through, otherwise, you can kiss you kids future goodbye, just like our parents thought that the atomic bomb was going to kill us all.
(It might be too late to stop a runaway global warming already considering the rate of melting in the Arctic and Artantica but we have to try at least.)
ben
So why not call it Dell support for the RHEL stack?
I thought you had bought support straight from RH.
This is not a flame, it's actually pretty amazing that you can buy support of RHEL straight from Dell and illustrates the better points of a OSS stack. Even if RH makes some technical or management mistakes, you still have alternatives for stack support.
cheers
ben
For large heavy use production sites, you'll probably want to pay for the standard or enterprise version of MS SQL. But for most uses, including the all important developer work, you can just use sql 2005 express for free. IIS &
Which are limited either technically or legally:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Visual_Stu
http://blogs.msdn.com/danielfe/archive/2007/05/31
Maybe you can get away with developing for free on the express stack, but as soon as you need to start scaling because your app does get popular, you have to start paying the MS tax AND you have limited access to the code when scaling problems start happening. IANAE but i imagine that if you have the expectation of building a large site, you would stay away from the MS stack as far as possible just to retain as much flexibility as possible in the long term.
The only time this is a real problem is if you're trying to do something that isnt possible on Windows, but thats pretty rare. Just like most people dont require modification to the JVM to create a framework on the java stack, the vast majority of people dont need to be able to modify windows, or
Umm, that's true. I guess that most engineers will understand the MS stack. Warts and all. However, I like being able to go outside the box. But me and other people here aren't like other users. Otherwise we wouldn't be here.
I'm not saying that its the same, its just different. There are costs on both sides. For alot of mainstream business apps, the windows stack is fast and productive for many corporate shops, as you just follow the recipe. Dont have to choose between Struts, Struts Shale, JSF, Tapestry, a templating language, or raw JSP+Servlets. This is both good and bad. If what you need can fit within the mainstream practices (which applies to a very large percentage of the people out there), then its very straightforward.
Ummm, seems like a lot of shops are jumping on the RoR or Django bandwagons because it's more productive then
cheers
ben
It's not possible to replace most of the IC engines in place with today with alternative technologies available today.
w _think_buy_t.html ) so it will be possible. I think that Americans will need to do a mind adjustment in order to tackle CO2 emission properly. Think about eliminating all Coal and gas burning power plant and think about using hybrid/all-electric cars for commuting. Rent a gas powered car for those weekend getaways. That's the way we'll minimize the impact of global warming and probably save our kids future past 2050.
Correct, however, we have to start somewhere. I'd rather be positive and "act locally, think globally" then give up and say, "oh there's nothing I can do". I can't buy an electric car car due to the price of batteries but I hope that Think's business comes to SF soon ( http://blogs.business2.com/greenwombat/2007/02/ne
If it means making the government force the car companies to adjust production and fighting back against the oil company lobbyists, then lets do it. I don't think they'll change unless we make them change.
Fuck bush and his subservience to big oil and big autos. As companies, I hope they fail for letting down the American public for so long. Go Toyota and Tesla for forward thinking!
cheers
Ben
It probably explains the big shift to GNOME in the major distros, as well as the focus on GNOME in nearly all the new mobile Linux initiatives.
I have to respectfully disagree. As the person responsible for building my previous company's GUI for an embedded medical device, I had to make the decision of choosing GTK+ + pango vs. qt. I ultimately went with qt, filled out the POs for the (expensive??) licenses and started developing. And boy, did it turn out to be the Right Decision(TM). Qtopia3 and then really Qtopia4 were the perfect development tools for us. Its infrastructure saved my butt many, many times and by managing the memory by overriding new, I had a complete Qt system running on a 250Mhz arm processor with 32MB of ram. For a couple thousand USD/developer, they give really, really good support and point out bugs in your code or provide patches very quickly. You don't have to spend too long pulling out your hair in despair when there is a problem.
I think that if we had more people on the GUI development side or a gnome guru, we might have gone for gtkmm (the C++ bindings for gtk+). Since I didn't have either, going with Qt was the right choice.
Two notes:
1) No mobile device uses kde or gnome currently. Currently they are too high level to be useful. Everyone uses gtk or qt.
2) If you compare the number of mobile device makers on gtkmm and trolltech's websites, they are about even. There's always the tradeoff of paying for good support vs. trying to support yourself. I guess if you are a major distro, it's probably more economical to base your development around gnome in the expectations of developing proprietary apps. But i think that just runs counter to the whole idea of FOSS distros. btw, there's nothing in trolltech's OSS license that says you can't support your own branch of Qt. (if fact the gpl forbids it) They have a policy however of not accepting outside patches for legal reasons it is a bit unfortunate.
Cheers
Ben
What mattered to upper management was support. The fact that, we've only ever opened like 3 support calls doesn't matter to upper management. They still wanted (and want) to see a support contract somewhere. And they don't mind paying a reasonable fee for it. And it's good to support vendors like Red Hat and IBM, who support OSS.
Question for you: Did you ever evaluate 3rd parties that supported the RHEL stack? Why did you choose to go with them as opposed to RHEL?
cheers
Ben
On the MS stack, there is a prescriptive recipe for everything. Best practices are all up on MSDN, with some great samples and advanced guidance from the Patterns & Practices group.
On the Java side, things are much more complicated. You have at least 5 reasonable frameworks to choose from for your web UI stack. You have several to choose from on the DB interaction, even if you do ORM. Even transaction management isnt simple, and there are choices there too. Then there's the whole, should we do Tomcat and roll everything ourselves or use JBoss/Commercial container.
True, you have to select which stack you want to work with and stick to that community. If you think about it, MS maintains ONE vertical stack and it is very, very tall and different from most the other webserving stacks out there. Lets see: Windows+IIS+MSSQL+.Net. each piece of that stack requires the MS tax and if you do what to do something that is unorthodox, you are own your own unless you have an inside to MS and can convince engineers there to pay attention to your problem.
If you are working with a LAMP+java stack, then 1) you don't have to pay the tax for most of the components 2) If there is a problem/bug, you can fix it or better yet, hire a contractor to fix it for you and 3) if your stack is popular, you will have a sizable community to get support from. Sure, it's not as pretty and well documented as MS's stack but at least it's more flexible.
If MS wants their stack to survive, they'll probably have to stop charging money for the lower levels soon just to compete. Probably with have to open source the windows layer too.
cheers
ben
Just like the fabled electric car, they're depending on technological advances that have not yet occurred and may never occur to make this dream a reality.
Heh, my dad drives an all-electric Honda rav4 to work every day. It's not a dream. It exists today.
I hope to buy an electric vehicle in 2 years when Think or Tesla works out the correct leasing program.
Cheers
Ben
and your kidding me, do you really need a source for air masses of different temp. driving weather conditions? christ, watch the god damn news tonight and the weather man will explain it for you as he talks about cold fronts moving in and causing rain.
and does that seem like normal weather to you now? In the middle of summer!!!
Face it, local and global weather patterns are changing DRAMATICALLY and have been since the 1970s. If you want to stick your head in the sand, fine, thats your business. But for the rest of us who would rather not see sea levels raise, increased drought in farmlands and in population areas, and more damage caused by hurricanes, we need to act now. We need to stop burning coal and gas and start using clean renewable power like wind,solar,geothermal and tide power.
You and bush should hang out in New Orleans and see what this next hurricane season brings... Fucking losers...
Ben
Well, apple did try to push the games-on-iPod direction for awhile. That was slightly successful but the iPod simply doesn't have the horsepower to run a decent game. And I guess that people just didn't see the iPod as a useful gaming system.
Maybe it'll work better for the iPhone. And it'll be great to see game ideas that use multiple input (two fingers on the screen at a time) Can you say super-wack-a-mole?
cheers
Ben
I think it is a pretty good use of kde.
Maybe a bit too simplistic but it does make good use of kde3's icons and color palette and theme.
I think they are trying to make it look TOO much like windows actually.
hum, i hope it succeeds, (or at least fails for a good reason)
ben
Smiling, at its most basic form, is a signal that something is not a danger, and acts as a tool for bonding. This has intrinsic value for business, and it's why people also sometimes smile while conducting business in person.
I wish that verizon, att and the other large cellphone companies in the US would learn this. It amazes me that my nokia 3100 (from israel/europe) has a accessible menu for smilies but all these new fangled cell phones only have symbols and nothing else. In fact, verizon's firmware is soooo bad, I'm probably going to dump their service if I can't reflash the phone to alltel's firmware and activate it on verizon. The list of missing features and options is longer then my arm...