Note, I'm not talking about stuff like RIA, or instances of what might be referred to a "gold plating", I'm talking about when you have three paragraphs of text and have to get through a gigantic flash animation to get there.
The reality of life is that the internet has moved on quite a bit from the old plain old text days, and they're not coming back.
Some people don't like that, but it's the truth. AJAX isn't going anywhere.
Generally speaking, Developers have very little to do with what your referring to. Wrapping basic information in 300 MB of images and stupid glitzy effects is a marketing thing.
Silverlight is very good, and they're still putting new features into it.
However the reality of the world is that what with Apple refusing point blank to put anything like it onto iOS and the current fetish with making everything run on mobiles even where it doesn't make sense, we're going to be stuck with what HTML 5 can provide for the immediate future. The reality of course is that what HTML 5 is capable of isn't really all that much more than what HTML 4 could do, even if the browser in question fully supports it, so it's really rather pointless.
I'm fairly certain the only way you can get a criminal charge without distributing for profit is pre-release which is not only a criminal charge, but a felony.
That video went massively viral all over the web, all over the radio, all over all sorts of places which would never even consider playing something like that normally. It's not because the song is great or her singing is great because it's fairly obvious that neither is true, the song is vacuous and her singing isn't even close to good enough to overcome that.
The fact that this happened indicates that there's something else going on. It could be wanting to share the sheer awfulness with others, but even that's not quite enough to explain it. I would suggest that a relatively large portion of "we" enjoys disliking the girl because I honestly can't think of any logical explanation for why so many people watched it, shared it, played it, or otherwise talked about it. Musicians with talent don't get that kind of experience, nor do the prefab pop princesses like Spears. People love to hate this girl, an awful lot of them. She can make a lot of money out of that if she's got the strength of self identity to survive it, but she could also destroy herself. I hope she can survive it and makes a buck personally.
It's meant to imply that there was a straight forward exchange involved in the process. Normally the record industry doesn't engage in that sort of exchange, so it was worth pointing out.
Whatever the sins of the music cartels, Rebecca Black is not among them. Her parents paid cash money to a record label who was offering a service to make a music video. This is a perfectly acceptable thing for a music label to do, it's diversifying their market, and vanity projects have always been profitable if the people with the vanity have enough cash.
The problem has occured because society has a dirty little secret. Yes we like to see the underdog triumph, but we also really really like to watch people who care a lot fail. This girl has a dream to become a singer and the drive to try and the cash to fund her start, she also has absolutely no ability or talent whatsoever. There's something delicious about watching someone who cares that much fail so utterly and so we watch, and so she gets a record deal and money.
Hopefully for her sake she understand that this is the case and has the mental strength to milk it for everything it's worth without ending up destroying herself, and hopefully for our sake that milking doesn't take very long./p.
The problem is that "fixing things" involves money, which essentially means either higher taxes or going broke. We've tried the whole going broke thing and it's not working, but no one has the balls to raise taxes either.
The US Constitution puts international treaty at the same level of importance as itself, both of which far outweigh US law or the human shaped blobs of mucous who make it. You might disagree with the UN and wish we weren't a member, you might argue we have to obligation under treaty to act on UN resolutions(I haven't read the treaty I don't know), but at least as far as any obligations spelled out in a treaty ratified by the US congress, the UN does outrank congress.
He didn't open it, but he sure as hell was the first to start shipping people there to be tortured. The base itself has been around for decades, but it wasn't used like that at least to the best of my knowledge.
Free speech zones are definitely pure Dubya.
I wasn't, and I sure as hell wasn't for going in and giving a bunch of opium growers guns so we wouldn't have to get our hands too dirty.
He wasn't like that once upon a time, that campaign saddened me. In 2000 he had dignity, I probably would have voted for him over Gore, but in 2008 he sold it all for a shot at the whitehouse.
Texas might be one of the largest but, in large part due to crappy educational policies like the ones Bush put in, it's also one of the stupidest, no real achievement there. As for winning the presidency, Gore had the charisma of wood in 2000, he still does, but at least he cares about something now, and Kerry was a pretty horrid candidate. Bush deserves about as much credit for any of those things as Obama will if he manages to sneak past a victory next year against the batch of mouth breathers and lunatics the Republicans look to be working with.
Shutting down a war isn't like flipping a switch, there are consequences, both for the coalition and also for the people over there. The government has a responsibility to its citizens and to the local people to try and get out cleanly. We made a mess and got into wars that should not have been fought, but that doesn't mean that leaving the mess for the locals to clean up is the right thing for them or for us.
As for gitmo, gitmo will never close simply because there is literally no where to send any of the people in it. They may not have hated the west before they went in, but they sure as hell do now, they can't be released into the US, they can't go back home, and no one else will take them.
George Bush made a whole lot of messes when he was in office, the economy, the wars, the lack of conditions on the bailouts, deregulation, tax breaks for the rich, the whole system is screwed beyond belief. I have many issues with Obama, and I won't disagree that he's largely been too much about negotiation and not enough about selling his dream to the American people, but he was also never ever going to achieve half of what was expected of him even if he'd had the votes in congress(which he didn't and definitely doesn't now). He might be a spineless jellyfish letting the tea party loonies destroy the country, but he was never going to pull those off.
Debian isn't massive-scale. It might have a lot of users, but the amount of code which is purely debian is actually fairly small. Coding Symbian would mean maintaining the entire OS, and perhaps more importantly it would mean making the entire OS not suck which Nokia couldn't do with millions of dollars.
You misunderstand the GPL. People who modify GPL software don't have any obligation whatsoever to return any changes or fixes the make to you. They only have an obligation to provide the source code to people who they distribute the binaries to and to not restrict those people from further distributing that source.
If they don't give you the binaries and the people they do give the binaries to don't want to give them source to you, you're SOL.
Whatever you or I may think about Microsoft, even if every single conspiracy theory ever claimed about Microsoft was only the tip of the iceberg they'd safely be in the top 10% of companies ethics wise. For a company at number 36 in the fortune 500 they're positively saintly.
Hell the fact that to the best of my knowledge Microsoft haven't ever killed anyone puts them fairly high up the list. Microsoft have played some serious hard ball with their competitors and often times with their customers, but this is a field with some real bastards in it.
The problem with MS Access apps is that they don't scale well and they're a bugger to make changes to. If the apps your dealing with don't require much in the way of changes and don't need to have a dynamic data set shared among multiple users then it's probably a waste of time to rewrite them.
On the other hand if you're getting requests to update them all the time, or are trying to shoe horn them into the role of a properly distributed web application then it's probably worth rewriting them.
Essentially if it ain't broke don't fix it, but if it is broke fix it properly.
Another thing to contemplate is that from my understanding from various Microsoft sales reps(we're working on an implementation but I haven't actually got my hands on the full version of the software yet), the new Enterprise Sharepoint allows you to import access databases and essentially convert them into internal MS SQL applications.
I think to change them you still have to deal with coding up the access db, but it does, at least in theory, allow you to get around the issues with scalability, data sharing, backup and DR. It's not cheap, but depending on how much they're paying for the rewrite(either in terms of raw cash or other projects which have to wait for resources) and what your problem is it might be worth looking at.
I hate IE and don't use it unless I have no choice.
I am on the other hand a web developer and the fact that Microsoft is finally supporting standards is a fairly big deal. It may not be better or faster or more extensible than the competition, but the fact that the browser which will come pre-installed on most people's machines is not a gigantic pile of suck is something I'm actually quite happy about.
Most people simply aren't going to shop around for web browsers, and personally I'll be a happy man when I no longer have to go through and make significant changes to standards compliant code to make it work properly in IE.
I'll agree with you that there's not a significant change in the core functionality of Microsoft Word(though there's still some rather nice changes in 2010) Word processors serve a relatively simple purpose for most of their users and are fairly well worked out. There's some better navigation and the integrations with things like Sharepoint are improved but not much else.
Excel however has improved rather significantly. Powerpivot is pretty damned cool for instance(it's not part of the default install, but it is free).
The new UI isn't necessarily Windows 8, they never say it is. What it is is Windows Phone 8 and probably Windows Tablet 8. The current interface of Windows 7 is excellent, but the paradigm is all wrong for touch screens.
The recycle bin is a perfect metaphor for how it's supposed to be used. You toss stuff in it and periodically empty it. If you realize you've toss something before it gets emptied you can get it back. If you empty it immediately it serves no purpose and if you never empty it, just like a real recycle bin it will overflow and mess up your room. Delete stuff and empty it after a few days to give yourself time to regret your deletions and if you want to bypass it shift + delete will do so.
THE RECYCLE BIN IS NOT A VERSION CONTROL SYSTEM!!!!!!
In my support days, nothing pissed me off more than people who tried to replicate the version control using partial deletion. You can get any number of systems for any number of types of files which will give you what you're actually looking for(the ability to go back to an old version of a file at any time) which will actually work and with little to no cost.
There's also another important part of the ruling. Indemnifying the ISP means that you can sue them if they get you disconnected unfairly. Let me reiterate, if they abuse this and get you disconnected unfairly, You can sue them.
Do you really think the MPAA is going to find disconnect notices so attractive if they have to pay for the investigation and the mess they make.
Taking a literary classic like Lord of the Rings and flipping the fundamental truths of the story to make a point, unless it's done really really badly, is at the very least an easy sell for parody. Parody doesn't have to be funny, and the simple fact of how uncomfortable this book would make certain LotR fans would probably make the case for parody on its own.
Parody may not have been this author's intent, but a halfway decent lawyer would almost certainly be able to convince a judge that it was. Ordinarily that might not matter as most people can't afford a halfway decent lawyer, but the profile on this case were it eventuate would be high enough that a halfway decent lawyer would probably materialize.
Slashdot Mirror
Note, I'm not talking about stuff like RIA, or instances of what might be referred to a "gold plating", I'm talking about when you have three paragraphs of text and have to get through a gigantic flash animation to get there.
The reality of life is that the internet has moved on quite a bit from the old plain old text days, and they're not coming back.
Some people don't like that, but it's the truth. AJAX isn't going anywhere.
Generally speaking, Developers have very little to do with what your referring to. Wrapping basic information in 300 MB of images and stupid glitzy effects is a marketing thing.
Silverlight is very good, and they're still putting new features into it.
However the reality of the world is that what with Apple refusing point blank to put anything like it onto iOS and the current fetish with making everything run on mobiles even where it doesn't make sense, we're going to be stuck with what HTML 5 can provide for the immediate future. The reality of course is that what HTML 5 is capable of isn't really all that much more than what HTML 4 could do, even if the browser in question fully supports it, so it's really rather pointless.
I'm fairly certain the only way you can get a criminal charge without distributing for profit is pre-release which is not only a criminal charge, but a felony.
That video went massively viral all over the web, all over the radio, all over all sorts of places which would never even consider playing something like that normally. It's not because the song is great or her singing is great because it's fairly obvious that neither is true, the song is vacuous and her singing isn't even close to good enough to overcome that.
The fact that this happened indicates that there's something else going on. It could be wanting to share the sheer awfulness with others, but even that's not quite enough to explain it. I would suggest that a relatively large portion of "we" enjoys disliking the girl because I honestly can't think of any logical explanation for why so many people watched it, shared it, played it, or otherwise talked about it. Musicians with talent don't get that kind of experience, nor do the prefab pop princesses like Spears. People love to hate this girl, an awful lot of them. She can make a lot of money out of that if she's got the strength of self identity to survive it, but she could also destroy herself. I hope she can survive it and makes a buck personally.
It's meant to imply that there was a straight forward exchange involved in the process. Normally the record industry doesn't engage in that sort of exchange, so it was worth pointing out.
Whatever the sins of the music cartels, Rebecca Black is not among them. Her parents paid cash money to a record label who was offering a service to make a music video. This is a perfectly acceptable thing for a music label to do, it's diversifying their market, and vanity projects have always been profitable if the people with the vanity have enough cash.
The problem has occured because society has a dirty little secret. Yes we like to see the underdog triumph, but we also really really like to watch people who care a lot fail. This girl has a dream to become a singer and the drive to try and the cash to fund her start, she also has absolutely no ability or talent whatsoever. There's something delicious about watching someone who cares that much fail so utterly and so we watch, and so she gets a record deal and money.
Hopefully for her sake she understand that this is the case and has the mental strength to milk it for everything it's worth without ending up destroying herself, and hopefully for our sake that milking doesn't take very long./p.
The problem is that "fixing things" involves money, which essentially means either higher taxes or going broke. We've tried the whole going broke thing and it's not working, but no one has the balls to raise taxes either.
The US Constitution puts international treaty at the same level of importance as itself, both of which far outweigh US law or the human shaped blobs of mucous who make it. You might disagree with the UN and wish we weren't a member, you might argue we have to obligation under treaty to act on UN resolutions(I haven't read the treaty I don't know), but at least as far as any obligations spelled out in a treaty ratified by the US congress, the UN does outrank congress.
He didn't open it, but he sure as hell was the first to start shipping people there to be tortured. The base itself has been around for decades, but it wasn't used like that at least to the best of my knowledge.
Free speech zones are definitely pure Dubya.
I wasn't, and I sure as hell wasn't for going in and giving a bunch of opium growers guns so we wouldn't have to get our hands too dirty.
He wasn't like that once upon a time, that campaign saddened me. In 2000 he had dignity, I probably would have voted for him over Gore, but in 2008 he sold it all for a shot at the whitehouse.
Texas might be one of the largest but, in large part due to crappy educational policies like the ones Bush put in, it's also one of the stupidest, no real achievement there. As for winning the presidency, Gore had the charisma of wood in 2000, he still does, but at least he cares about something now, and Kerry was a pretty horrid candidate. Bush deserves about as much credit for any of those things as Obama will if he manages to sneak past a victory next year against the batch of mouth breathers and lunatics the Republicans look to be working with.
Shutting down a war isn't like flipping a switch, there are consequences, both for the coalition and also for the people over there. The government has a responsibility to its citizens and to the local people to try and get out cleanly. We made a mess and got into wars that should not have been fought, but that doesn't mean that leaving the mess for the locals to clean up is the right thing for them or for us.
As for gitmo, gitmo will never close simply because there is literally no where to send any of the people in it. They may not have hated the west before they went in, but they sure as hell do now, they can't be released into the US, they can't go back home, and no one else will take them.
George Bush made a whole lot of messes when he was in office, the economy, the wars, the lack of conditions on the bailouts, deregulation, tax breaks for the rich, the whole system is screwed beyond belief. I have many issues with Obama, and I won't disagree that he's largely been too much about negotiation and not enough about selling his dream to the American people, but he was also never ever going to achieve half of what was expected of him even if he'd had the votes in congress(which he didn't and definitely doesn't now). He might be a spineless jellyfish letting the tea party loonies destroy the country, but he was never going to pull those off.
Debian isn't massive-scale. It might have a lot of users, but the amount of code which is purely debian is actually fairly small. Coding Symbian would mean maintaining the entire OS, and perhaps more importantly it would mean making the entire OS not suck which Nokia couldn't do with millions of dollars.
You misunderstand the GPL. People who modify GPL software don't have any obligation whatsoever to return any changes or fixes the make to you. They only have an obligation to provide the source code to people who they distribute the binaries to and to not restrict those people from further distributing that source.
If they don't give you the binaries and the people they do give the binaries to don't want to give them source to you, you're SOL.
And clearly you need to get a grip.
Whatever you or I may think about Microsoft, even if every single conspiracy theory ever claimed about Microsoft was only the tip of the iceberg they'd safely be in the top 10% of companies ethics wise. For a company at number 36 in the fortune 500 they're positively saintly.
Hell the fact that to the best of my knowledge Microsoft haven't ever killed anyone puts them fairly high up the list. Microsoft have played some serious hard ball with their competitors and often times with their customers, but this is a field with some real bastards in it.
Well it really sort of depends on the apps.
The problem with MS Access apps is that they don't scale well and they're a bugger to make changes to. If the apps your dealing with don't require much in the way of changes and don't need to have a dynamic data set shared among multiple users then it's probably a waste of time to rewrite them.
On the other hand if you're getting requests to update them all the time, or are trying to shoe horn them into the role of a properly distributed web application then it's probably worth rewriting them.
Essentially if it ain't broke don't fix it, but if it is broke fix it properly.
Another thing to contemplate is that from my understanding from various Microsoft sales reps(we're working on an implementation but I haven't actually got my hands on the full version of the software yet), the new Enterprise Sharepoint allows you to import access databases and essentially convert them into internal MS SQL applications.
I think to change them you still have to deal with coding up the access db, but it does, at least in theory, allow you to get around the issues with scalability, data sharing, backup and DR. It's not cheap, but depending on how much they're paying for the rewrite(either in terms of raw cash or other projects which have to wait for resources) and what your problem is it might be worth looking at.
I hate IE and don't use it unless I have no choice.
I am on the other hand a web developer and the fact that Microsoft is finally supporting standards is a fairly big deal. It may not be better or faster or more extensible than the competition, but the fact that the browser which will come pre-installed on most people's machines is not a gigantic pile of suck is something I'm actually quite happy about.
Most people simply aren't going to shop around for web browsers, and personally I'll be a happy man when I no longer have to go through and make significant changes to standards compliant code to make it work properly in IE.
Sometimes when working ona project we make changes that later on don't end up working out so well and we decide we want to roll back to a later date.
That's version control.
I'll agree with you that there's not a significant change in the core functionality of Microsoft Word(though there's still some rather nice changes in 2010) Word processors serve a relatively simple purpose for most of their users and are fairly well worked out. There's some better navigation and the integrations with things like Sharepoint are improved but not much else.
Excel however has improved rather significantly. Powerpivot is pretty damned cool for instance(it's not part of the default install, but it is free).
The new UI isn't necessarily Windows 8, they never say it is. What it is is Windows Phone 8 and probably Windows Tablet 8. The current interface of Windows 7 is excellent, but the paradigm is all wrong for touch screens.
The recycle bin is a perfect metaphor for how it's supposed to be used. You toss stuff in it and periodically empty it. If you realize you've toss something before it gets emptied you can get it back. If you empty it immediately it serves no purpose and if you never empty it, just like a real recycle bin it will overflow and mess up your room. Delete stuff and empty it after a few days to give yourself time to regret your deletions and if you want to bypass it shift + delete will do so.
THE RECYCLE BIN IS NOT A VERSION CONTROL SYSTEM!!!!!!
In my support days, nothing pissed me off more than people who tried to replicate the version control using partial deletion. You can get any number of systems for any number of types of files which will give you what you're actually looking for(the ability to go back to an old version of a file at any time) which will actually work and with little to no cost.
There's also another important part of the ruling. Indemnifying the ISP means that you can sue them if they get you disconnected unfairly. Let me reiterate, if they abuse this and get you disconnected unfairly, You can sue them.
Do you really think the MPAA is going to find disconnect notices so attractive if they have to pay for the investigation and the mess they make.
Taking a literary classic like Lord of the Rings and flipping the fundamental truths of the story to make a point, unless it's done really really badly, is at the very least an easy sell for parody. Parody doesn't have to be funny, and the simple fact of how uncomfortable this book would make certain LotR fans would probably make the case for parody on its own.
Parody may not have been this author's intent, but a halfway decent lawyer would almost certainly be able to convince a judge that it was. Ordinarily that might not matter as most people can't afford a halfway decent lawyer, but the profile on this case were it eventuate would be high enough that a halfway decent lawyer would probably materialize.