"Sorry. No source for this software exists and as such, if you'd like to hire myCorp to engineer some software you can license based on our subject matter expertise, feel free to contact me at 1-888-eat-shit."
He should have known better than to use their hardware though. I turn down my employer's offer to pay part of my broadband bill so I can keep them out of my side projects.
... but the changes of this happening versus the number of times the device saves lives by getting people to actually stop when they are no longer capable of driving is likely to be quite disproportionate.
And that makes a lot of sense until you're the person who just sat down for a couple glasses of wine for dinner and suddenly your kid falls down and cracks their head open. At that point, if your car doesn't start, your kid may die. If your kid dies as a result of that, you're probably either going to sue Toyota for not installing an override, or blow up every Toyota distributor in the area, depending on your present mental stability.
I like the I, Robot approach: The car drives for you until you want to drive. It warns you that you might be doing something unsafe but you can tell it to shut up and disengage. If the insurance companies want to store it in the black box that you disengaged it in case you get into an accident, so be it. They're already doing that shit now.
I have a site online that has a guestbook and that page was flagged a phishing risk by IE7 beta. I wrote the email address that IE gave and that site was cleared in a couple days...Problem was, I was using that guestbook code in 8 other sites, all personal or small biz. This is a feature that might need to be pulled until it can be tested a little more against non-corporate sites.
Instead of waiting for them to ask, tell them that all of the work you've done has been proprietary and that you don't mind doing a simple theoretical project to show your code style. I did that and it got me the job. Later the guy told me that it was that initiative (and the completed code) that convinced him to choose me.
While that's true, Windows has also almost always hidden bullshit configuration from the user and made the basics work, if nothing else.
Let me give you an example: A couple of years ago I installed Mandrake. After the install, I had to get on another computer and look up the tweak that made my mouse and network card work. Once I opened the config files and put in the right info and restarted KDE, everything worked great! Then I rebooted and lost my mouse driver. The tweak was simple so I did it again and didn't reboot. When I wanted my video card to work right, I had to go in and run some 5 or 6 step configuration program. When I wanted to setup a webserver, I had to go in and manually configure stuff in apache. When I wanted to go in and add multiple domains, I had to go back into the config files and modify them some more. After installing the mouse driver a few more times, I just decided to let it sit there and collect dust. It was running my webserver well enough and as long as I didn't touch it, it ran forever. Yay reliability - Boo interface/configuration that made it unnecessarily hard to do what I wanted.
Sometime after that, I installed Windows 2000 server. Installed an old copy of zonealarm plus (no, I don't trust windows (un)security to protect me from unpatched RPC attacks), connected to the internet and ran windows update. I opened IIS and created a couple of web sites. Installed Office and I was done.
Notice the lack of "opened the config file" or "re-installed the mouse driver"? This is what the parent is talking about. It's the 57 random manual configurations you have to do to get things working that pisses people off. The average user will never know that his machine has been compromised and is now a zombie. He WILL notice if he has to go into a term session and run setup and install packages. He doesn't notice when he has to go install something through a browser with a simple msi or exe. He DOES notice when he has to download a package, go to the package installer, select the correct package, find out that he doesn't have the right version of X supporting software, go find THAT package, install it, go back and run the package install and get to the NEXT supporting package, find THAT package, install it, get back to the original package, finish the install, then try and use the program only to find that it's missing something else (yes, I'm talking to YOU openoffice.org). These things add up. As soon as the average power user from windows can install Linux with a few clicks of the mouse and then get in and install a few programs with no hassle, that's when he starts telling his friends about it. People don't like to type and they don't like to read. It's why there's a GUI interface with little pictures and a mouse. Config files are alien territory where mistakes can be made with spelling errors. You're a slashdot user so you understand \dev\null jokes in the documentation. Novices get this about as much as a third grader gets a Dennis Miller joke.
Right now, Linux has the architecture of an enterprise server but the UI/config problems windows solved when it moved from 3.1 to windows 95. You need to build it so an idiot can turn it on and connect to the internet. Remember those iMac commercials from a few years ago? The guy took it out of the box, plugged it in to the wall and connected to the internet. Until you can do that with linux, you're not going to get the average desktop user. It's the same reason windows 95 was so popular. The interface was much nicer, but the real revolution under the covers were windows dialup networking, multi-tasking and the beginnings of plug and play.
If Linux could make it as easy as install-connect-done, you'd see people starting to put their friends and family onto it. They don't recommend it to their family now because it makes family reunions into one big tech support call.
Yeah, but comments still cause you to have to go back and re-read old code which is the same as having to open another resource which goes back to my original point that you don't want to have to do that.
More than a book, what the developer really needs is an IDE that he can TAG with tips he creates himself for various situations. As an example, let's say you're using javascript and do a lot of for loops through arrays. You happen across something that tells you that a best practice is to turn the length of the array into a variable before you loop through it so you don't have to access the length on every itteration. It would be cool to be able to "tag" the expression "for (" so that your helpful tip will appear in a line above or below the text edit window that reminds you to do THAT instead of doing "for(i=0;i
Then someone could create a web service with all of these tips that people vote on (like when the tag appears, you can say "yes this was helpful" or "no, don't show me this again" and the best practices will rise to the top.
The problem with the idea of a best practices book is that it's just one more thing I have to pick up while I'm doing my job. I need something that will happen intelligently and INLINE with my workflow, yet unobtrusively enough that it doesn't get in my way if I DON'T want to use it (like if that for loop is looping through something where the array length might change in the middle of my loop).
Can someone work up something like THAT (that I can use in Visual Studio AND Editplus?)
But will it *forgive* us? Or will it get wasted at the next family reunion and talk about how we were an alcoholic before it crumbles into a vodka induced refrain of "Oh Danny Boy" before pissing on itself and wandering off into the woods?
You know how the planet is. You can only nuke it a few times it just doesn't care anymore.
Why not just do what corporate America does and lock the machines down administratively and then make all of the applications web based? Google just paired documents and spreadsheets in a browser. Keep nothing on the machine except a browser and gimp for those aspiring designers:)
Sure, the ingenious kid will swap out the hard drive or hack root/registry/whatever, but that's pretty much expected. If they're worried about hardware hacking, just include those recalled Sony batteries and put in a secret heat sink that stops working if they open the box:)
I bet if I put on a pimp hat and read it while drinking a glass of Courvoisier, I could make it "The Even Smoother Immortal Smooth Solution of the Three Space Dimensional Navier-Stokes System".
You could have stopped at "Dr. Who Makes a Guiness" and I would have been delighted. It's Friday and I think the Dr. making me a guiness sounds just perfect.:)
sh*t dude...that's where WIFI came from. They just hacked the alient technology and put it into the Airport. That's how Mac comes with Alien mothership connection support STANDARD. It's just an undocumented feature:)
This will probably lose Google money in the long run. I tend to regard any website that asks me to complete a survey for no reason as a scam. If they base it on people buying things, they're going to find themselves forced into a payment processing business so they can ensure that they get paid when these websites get paid. While THAT might be an interesting concept for them, they'd probably just as soon buy Ebay to get paypal for that, otherwise they're going to be putting themselves in direct competition with PayPal.
Yeah, it might work for today, but Spam is only going to get worse and there's a point where traditional models won't scale. If you can get something that does the same job in fewer cycles, that implies you can scale up higher using fewer resources. Also, the methodology they're talking about here is growing organically. This probably means that it'll evolve organically, making it better with each generation. Spam fighters can't stop innovating because the spammers aren't going to.
It would help to know which version of VB you're talking about, but let me try and help you out.
If he's talking about VBscript (asp or script com type stuff), it's a useful, but deprecated technology. ASP can be very powerful, but unless you want to by Chilisoft, it's hard to go cross platform on it. That means buying/leasing a windows server. The upside is that it has a great connection to SQL server (ADODB) and easily instantiates com objects on a windows server. PHP is a viable alternative that's cross platform and easily connects to the same database servers as ASP. It's free and that's always good. It's just not as forgiving. As a side note, avoid client side vbscript. It's fine for internal intranet environments where you're guaranteed all IE browsers, but if you have to LEARN that or javascript, go with javascript. It's going to be easier to use in the long run, more powerful and vbscript (on the client) is not crossbrowser in the least.
If he's talking about VB 6, you'll have the same problems with cross platform environments as asp, but moreso unless you can get an exe or dll to run on whatever platform you want to port to. The upside is that it's easy to make com objects, the downside is that it's apartment threaded so you might end up with some scaling problems down the line. You can do a lot of the same things with java as you can with com, but I think there are still negative performance impacts, especially in a windows environment.
If he's talking about VB.net and is sold on the windows platform, I'd steer him toward c#. Though the object models are very similar, C# has a far superior garbage collection module in "using". VB.net has "with", but it doesn't clean up after itself like using. VB.net is also pretty useless if you're trying to re-use your prior vb or vbscript knowledge. Because of the way the object model was changed to make it more strongly typed (option explicit is always on) and...well it's object oriented (unlike vbscript with the notable exception of things like ADO and calling activeX com components). VB.net is not going to provide any more comfort to the VB6 or asp.net programmer than any other language. Might as well start out with c#, get the benefits there and also have a very similar syntax as java, javascript (typeless though it is), or c++. If you love the curly brace, you'll love c#. Java is also a viable choice in this market, though once again, it's going to suffer if you're using a windows server.
As mentioned before, you can use mono on your.net code to make it cross platform so vb.net or c# ARE cross platform to a degree. Ultimately it depends on what your boss is trying to get out of the application and what platform he/she is pushing on you.
"These creatures can climb sheer surfaces thanks to the intermolecular forces exerted by millions of tiny hairs their feet, called setae."
That, and a pole with some fishing wire. If you watch the video, there isn't anything that suggests that the guy is doing anything but pulling it up the glass with his fishing pole.
I say teach them with the IDE, so when they get in the real world and need to hack a way around a design limitation or integrate with a data provider that they can't bind a control to, they have to call someone like me who does.:)
document.getElementById("indeed").parentNode.remov eChild(document.getElementById("indeed"));
It's hard to believe anyone would use mercury in a thermometer, but people were sticking those things in their mouths for years. I remember using one when I was a kid and breaking it to see what it would look like in my hand. (yes, it's a miracle I survived my childhood).
Slashdot Mirror
FDISK.
"Sorry. No source for this software exists and as such, if you'd like to hire myCorp to engineer some software you can license based on our subject matter expertise, feel free to contact me at 1-888-eat-shit."
He should have known better than to use their hardware though. I turn down my employer's offer to pay part of my broadband bill so I can keep them out of my side projects.
... but the changes of this happening versus the number of times the device saves lives by getting people to actually stop when they are no longer capable of driving is likely to be quite disproportionate.And that makes a lot of sense until you're the person who just sat down for a couple glasses of wine for dinner and suddenly your kid falls down and cracks their head open. At that point, if your car doesn't start, your kid may die. If your kid dies as a result of that, you're probably either going to sue Toyota for not installing an override, or blow up every Toyota distributor in the area, depending on your present mental stability.
I like the I, Robot approach: The car drives for you until you want to drive. It warns you that you might be doing something unsafe but you can tell it to shut up and disengage. If the insurance companies want to store it in the black box that you disengaged it in case you get into an accident, so be it. They're already doing that shit now.
AWESOME!!!! Now I can find all the people in my graduating class who got into porn!
I have a site online that has a guestbook and that page was flagged a phishing risk by IE7 beta. I wrote the email address that IE gave and that site was cleared in a couple days...Problem was, I was using that guestbook code in 8 other sites, all personal or small biz. This is a feature that might need to be pulled until it can be tested a little more against non-corporate sites.
phone privacy is to email privacy as marriage is to civil union.
Instead of waiting for them to ask, tell them that all of the work you've done has been proprietary and that you don't mind doing a simple theoretical project to show your code style. I did that and it got me the job. Later the guy told me that it was that initiative (and the completed code) that convinced him to choose me.
Good luck.
Weeee! Now they can be sued for being a monopoly!
Once you reach the top, the way to go is down (to the anti-trust court).
While that's true, Windows has also almost always hidden bullshit configuration from the user and made the basics work, if nothing else.
Let me give you an example: A couple of years ago I installed Mandrake. After the install, I had to get on another computer and look up the tweak that made my mouse and network card work. Once I opened the config files and put in the right info and restarted KDE, everything worked great! Then I rebooted and lost my mouse driver. The tweak was simple so I did it again and didn't reboot. When I wanted my video card to work right, I had to go in and run some 5 or 6 step configuration program. When I wanted to setup a webserver, I had to go in and manually configure stuff in apache. When I wanted to go in and add multiple domains, I had to go back into the config files and modify them some more. After installing the mouse driver a few more times, I just decided to let it sit there and collect dust. It was running my webserver well enough and as long as I didn't touch it, it ran forever. Yay reliability - Boo interface/configuration that made it unnecessarily hard to do what I wanted.
Sometime after that, I installed Windows 2000 server. Installed an old copy of zonealarm plus (no, I don't trust windows (un)security to protect me from unpatched RPC attacks), connected to the internet and ran windows update. I opened IIS and created a couple of web sites. Installed Office and I was done.
Notice the lack of "opened the config file" or "re-installed the mouse driver"? This is what the parent is talking about. It's the 57 random manual configurations you have to do to get things working that pisses people off. The average user will never know that his machine has been compromised and is now a zombie. He WILL notice if he has to go into a term session and run setup and install packages. He doesn't notice when he has to go install something through a browser with a simple msi or exe. He DOES notice when he has to download a package, go to the package installer, select the correct package, find out that he doesn't have the right version of X supporting software, go find THAT package, install it, go back and run the package install and get to the NEXT supporting package, find THAT package, install it, get back to the original package, finish the install, then try and use the program only to find that it's missing something else (yes, I'm talking to YOU openoffice.org). These things add up. As soon as the average power user from windows can install Linux with a few clicks of the mouse and then get in and install a few programs with no hassle, that's when he starts telling his friends about it. People don't like to type and they don't like to read. It's why there's a GUI interface with little pictures and a mouse. Config files are alien territory where mistakes can be made with spelling errors. You're a slashdot user so you understand \dev\null jokes in the documentation. Novices get this about as much as a third grader gets a Dennis Miller joke.
Right now, Linux has the architecture of an enterprise server but the UI/config problems windows solved when it moved from 3.1 to windows 95. You need to build it so an idiot can turn it on and connect to the internet. Remember those iMac commercials from a few years ago? The guy took it out of the box, plugged it in to the wall and connected to the internet. Until you can do that with linux, you're not going to get the average desktop user. It's the same reason windows 95 was so popular. The interface was much nicer, but the real revolution under the covers were windows dialup networking, multi-tasking and the beginnings of plug and play.
If Linux could make it as easy as install-connect-done, you'd see people starting to put their friends and family onto it. They don't recommend it to their family now because it makes family reunions into one big tech support call.
No thanks buddy...I've heard there's this Snowcrash virus going around and I don't want anyone penetrating my...uhhh...deep structures.
Yeah, but comments still cause you to have to go back and re-read old code which is the same as having to open another resource which goes back to my original point that you don't want to have to do that.
More than a book, what the developer really needs is an IDE that he can TAG with tips he creates himself for various situations. As an example, let's say you're using javascript and do a lot of for loops through arrays. You happen across something that tells you that a best practice is to turn the length of the array into a variable before you loop through it so you don't have to access the length on every itteration. It would be cool to be able to "tag" the expression "for (" so that your helpful tip will appear in a line above or below the text edit window that reminds you to do THAT instead of doing "for(i=0;i
Then someone could create a web service with all of these tips that people vote on (like when the tag appears, you can say "yes this was helpful" or "no, don't show me this again" and the best practices will rise to the top.
The problem with the idea of a best practices book is that it's just one more thing I have to pick up while I'm doing my job. I need something that will happen intelligently and INLINE with my workflow, yet unobtrusively enough that it doesn't get in my way if I DON'T want to use it (like if that for loop is looping through something where the array length might change in the middle of my loop).
Can someone work up something like THAT (that I can use in Visual Studio AND Editplus?)
But will it *forgive* us? Or will it get wasted at the next family reunion and talk about how we were an alcoholic before it crumbles into a vodka induced refrain of "Oh Danny Boy" before pissing on itself and wandering off into the woods?
You know how the planet is. You can only nuke it a few times it just doesn't care anymore.
make it easier to clone my hard drive?
Why not just do what corporate America does and lock the machines down administratively and then make all of the applications web based? Google just paired documents and spreadsheets in a browser. Keep nothing on the machine except a browser and gimp for those aspiring designers :)
:)
Sure, the ingenious kid will swap out the hard drive or hack root/registry/whatever, but that's pretty much expected. If they're worried about hardware hacking, just include those recalled Sony batteries and put in a secret heat sink that stops working if they open the box
I bet if I put on a pimp hat and read it while drinking a glass of Courvoisier, I could make it "The Even Smoother Immortal Smooth Solution of the Three Space Dimensional Navier-Stokes System".
Don't player hate, player appreciate baby.
As long as Firefox is the only (of the big two) browser that renders the new slashdot comment section correctly, I'll be using it for that ;)
"Ever seen the results of an uncontained turbine failure on a jet engine? Just make it 100 times smaller 10 times faster and in your pocket."
This gives a whole new spin to the advice ol' grandad gave when he told me to "wear a helmet".
You could have stopped at "Dr. Who Makes a Guiness" and I would have been delighted. It's Friday and I think the Dr. making me a guiness sounds just perfect. :)
sh*t dude...that's where WIFI came from. They just hacked the alient technology and put it into the Airport. That's how Mac comes with Alien mothership connection support STANDARD. It's just an undocumented feature :)
This will probably lose Google money in the long run. I tend to regard any website that asks me to complete a survey for no reason as a scam. If they base it on people buying things, they're going to find themselves forced into a payment processing business so they can ensure that they get paid when these websites get paid. While THAT might be an interesting concept for them, they'd probably just as soon buy Ebay to get paypal for that, otherwise they're going to be putting themselves in direct competition with PayPal.
Yeah, it might work for today, but Spam is only going to get worse and there's a point where traditional models won't scale. If you can get something that does the same job in fewer cycles, that implies you can scale up higher using fewer resources. Also, the methodology they're talking about here is growing organically. This probably means that it'll evolve organically, making it better with each generation. Spam fighters can't stop innovating because the spammers aren't going to.
It would help to know which version of VB you're talking about, but let me try and help you out.
...well it's object oriented (unlike vbscript with the notable exception of things like ADO and calling activeX com components). VB.net is not going to provide any more comfort to the VB6 or asp.net programmer than any other language. Might as well start out with c#, get the benefits there and also have a very similar syntax as java, javascript (typeless though it is), or c++. If you love the curly brace, you'll love c#.
.net code to make it cross platform so vb.net or c# ARE cross platform to a degree. Ultimately it depends on what your boss is trying to get out of the application and what platform he/she is pushing on you.
If he's talking about VBscript (asp or script com type stuff), it's a useful, but deprecated technology. ASP can be very powerful, but unless you want to by Chilisoft, it's hard to go cross platform on it. That means buying/leasing a windows server. The upside is that it has a great connection to SQL server (ADODB) and easily instantiates com objects on a windows server. PHP is a viable alternative that's cross platform and easily connects to the same database servers as ASP. It's free and that's always good. It's just not as forgiving. As a side note, avoid client side vbscript. It's fine for internal intranet environments where you're guaranteed all IE browsers, but if you have to LEARN that or javascript, go with javascript. It's going to be easier to use in the long run, more powerful and vbscript (on the client) is not crossbrowser in the least.
If he's talking about VB 6, you'll have the same problems with cross platform environments as asp, but moreso unless you can get an exe or dll to run on whatever platform you want to port to. The upside is that it's easy to make com objects, the downside is that it's apartment threaded so you might end up with some scaling problems down the line. You can do a lot of the same things with java as you can with com, but I think there are still negative performance impacts, especially in a windows environment.
If he's talking about VB.net and is sold on the windows platform, I'd steer him toward c#. Though the object models are very similar, C# has a far superior garbage collection module in "using". VB.net has "with", but it doesn't clean up after itself like using. VB.net is also pretty useless if you're trying to re-use your prior vb or vbscript knowledge. Because of the way the object model was changed to make it more strongly typed (option explicit is always on) and
Java is also a viable choice in this market, though once again, it's going to suffer if you're using a windows server.
As mentioned before, you can use mono on your
Hope this helps.
"These creatures can climb sheer surfaces thanks to the intermolecular forces exerted by millions of tiny hairs their feet, called setae."
That, and a pole with some fishing wire. If you watch the video, there isn't anything that suggests that the guy is doing anything but pulling it up the glass with his fishing pole.
I say teach them with the IDE, so when they get in the real world and need to hack a way around a design limitation or integrate with a data provider that they can't bind a control to, they have to call someone like me who does. :)
document.getElementById("indeed").parentNode.remov eChild(document.getElementById("indeed"));
It's hard to believe anyone would use mercury in a thermometer, but people were sticking those things in their mouths for years. I remember using one when I was a kid and breaking it to see what it would look like in my hand. (yes, it's a miracle I survived my childhood).
For that matter, though there's lead in CRT's and mercury and cadmium in boards and switches. It wouldn't be a real surprise for someone to put something ELSE toxic in this stuff.