People that genuinely have aspergers also have an extremely hard time getting along in life. It isn't like "ohh i feel anti social today".
Eh.
Like most things, there's a spectrum. One of my little sisters has full-on Asperger's. I have trouble imagining her ever truly living self-sufficiently by herself.
I wouldn't say I have it, but it's easy to see a few bits of it in my personality, like echoes of what she ended up with.
I *really* have ADHD, and one of the cool side benefits of the Concerta I take for it is that it's let me focus enough to notice all the body language I was blind to before.
If you are seeing BSODs almost daily, you either have faulty hardware or some seriously buggy drivers. Honestly folks, XP, and even 2000, BSOD very rarely.
Exactly. I have never seen my XP machine at home BSOD, even when the video card was failing to the point that it was adding random horizontal lines across the display.
At work, I saw 2000 BSOD on several servers when we applied an MS hotfix that conflicted with some sort of secret kernel patch they'd given us a few years previously for those same machines.
I saw 2k bluescreen one other time, when a workstation had a zip drive and the user installed drivers for it from 1997 or so.
Other than that, the only time I've seen it happen is if I make an OS image on one machine and then try and use it on another with different hardware. That's still stupid, but at least I know how to avoid it.
This is in an environment with close to 1000 Windows servers and about 25,000 Windows workstations.
that would be "aren't even using developers who know English".
It depends on if you're using American or British Commonwealth grammar.
American grammar treats corporate entities as a single being ("Microsoft is changing the color of the screen"), Commonwealth countries treat them as a group of people ("Microsoft are changing the colour of the screen").
"Blah blah, back when I got into [scene] it was so much better and more exclusive. Everyone was hardcore and there was none of this watered-down-for-the-mainstream crap."
It works for any subculture or hobby. Usually it comes from people who are too young to realize that there were always superficial aspects to whatever it is they're so concerned with, and that in 5-10 years they're going to wonder why they cared so much.
Re:You mean real 'worthless' admins, right?
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Hack IIS6 Contest
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· Score: 1
Any admin that deserves to keep their job, keeps a pristine image of a locked down server, and can build a machine automatically with about 5 minutes of hands on labor. Put in the ghost boot, set it up, walk away. CIOs, if your folks dont do this, fire them. You should have a pristine image of every important server on your network. Taking the time to load an OS from scratch today is ridiculous
My group is responsible for almost 1000 servers spread across the US. If we were to commit to keeping "pristine images" of all of them around, that is all we would have time to do, and we would still have to hire more staff.
What's the point? I've worked here for two years. Generally speaking one server fails catastrophically maybe once every three months.
We should keep images of all servers around to save a day or two every three months or less frequently?
When most people swing a sword, they're doing basically the same thing with it as they would with a baseball bat or an axe.
Kendo teaches that as you swing the blade, you should pull it in towards you at the same time, so that in addition to the direct kinetic impact forcing the edge through the target, it cuts as well.
You can simulate the difference with a kitchen knife and a cucumber. First, chop directly downwards with the blade. Then, try slicing it but pulling the knife towards you.
IMO this has no application to a lightsaber, however, as there is no mass to the blade, nor are there tiny imperfections in it that would have the same effect as drawing a metal blade across something....to say nothing of the fact that this is all a bunch of crap that doesn't belong on a factual site.
I think the current record is held by anime, though. Divergence Eve took it to a really ridiculous level, so that it made it hard watching just because of that.
You pay a monthly fee for telephone service, even though YOU provide the content of the conversations.
The content of phone conversations has no value to the carrier.
For many types of forum, the things that members post in them are the entirety of the value. Imagine Slashdot without the discussions. Would it be profitable at all?
What about the forums for Eidos Interactive? They are a meeting place for fans of their games, sure. Some of us sometimes also provide unofficial support for one game or another. That is valuable to Eidos because it builds goodwill towards their products and saves them money on support staff.
That having been said, I think getting upset about this is stupid and futile. It's the owner's site, they can do whatever they want with it. If my friends and I go to a bar every day for five years, does that mean the owner owes us something extra? Does it mean that we should have a say if she wants to change it from industrial music to all Van Halen all the time? No, it means we should go somewhere else.
The **only** reason I can see people having a legitimate complaint is with something like GameFAQs, which is just a collection of docs people have written about games and submitted. But you know what? If those people really wanted to have complete control, they should have posted them on their own website.
Huge opportunities will abound in the gaming industry as tools are released that lets the global community mod their favorite games. Storytelling will come to dominate games at every turn, as graphics, physics engines, and audio approach reality.
Mods are cool, but they generally fail to tell a compelling, cinematic story.
- Mod teams can't afford professional voice actors, so until voice synthesis technology advances a few light years that will heavily detract from the immersion.
- Mod teams don't have 8-16 hours a day to work on the content, unless they're living at their parents' house without a job. So either it will take many years to make a professional quality game, or the end product will suffer because the team doesn't have enough training or maturity.
- Mod teams who make total conversions are (at least in my experience) incredibly hardcore dorks (and I say that as an incredibly hardcore dork), so if they make a story-based game it's the kind of thing that appeals to the very limited hardcore dork fanbase of whatever they're basing it on.
- Mod teams generally end up with a handful of people doing a variety of tasks that they're not specialized in, e.g. one person comes up with the basic premise, most of the script, and the basic character designs. Then they freak out and refuse to accept constructive criticism that would make it better, and you end up with a Star Wars prequel.
- Most mod teams come up with grand ideas, get = ~10% finished, and realize they'll never be able to complete the project, then the "beta" sits on their site for years.
There are some really, really cool mods I've seen for a variety of games, particularly the ships people have put into Homeworld. But that is trivial compared to making an entirely new game using that engine.
I have yet to see a single-player mod that I thought was as compelling as, say, the original Soul Reaver. This does not surprise me, given that it took ~30 people three years working overtime to make Soul Reaver, and that was on the Playstation with its primitive 3D graphics.
I see the strength of mods as building on an existing game, like adding ships to Homeworld, or weapons and maps to UT. Making an entirely new game even with an existing engine as the base is a lot of work. That's why people get paid to do it for a living. This difficulty is only going to increase as the presentation quality goes up with new consoles and computer hardware.
Maybe in 50 years there will be the Playstation 14 equivalent of Adventure Construction Set from the early 80s, where you say "ok, AI, I want a game that has a hot chick in a metal bikini as the anti-hero main character, now make it!" But not in the near future.
Disclaimer: some exceptions apply, B5 I've Found Her, there are always going to be anomalies, etc etc.
Ahh. I knew the movie was missing a big end fight scene. By the British guy, do you mean the guy that played Robert the Bruce in Braveheart? I thought it would have made more sense if he were merely the brains behind it all, and couldn't fight.
Well, part of the unexpositioned (um, is that a word?) backstory is that that was the guy who invented the Gun Kata. But yeah, I thought it was a bit of a stretch that he would pose a threat to Christian Bale of the extreme exercise plan.
There's a LOT of cool stuff like that in the commentary tracks on the DVD.
Say, what's this whole Ultraviolet thing?
It's a vampire movie, and that's all I know. I'm picturing something like Underworld set in the near future.
You know, where he and his partner were supposed to fight for like twenty minutes but it was over in twenty seconds.
He wasn't supposed to fight with his partner for very long, because his partner wasn't nearly as good.
He *was* supposed to have a massive fight with the chubby British guy, which is what they didn't have the budget for, but I thought it turned out pretty well anyway. Apparently the fight they had planned is going to show up in Ultraviolet.
And then the abrupt credits rolling right afterwards. Its as if they just lost all their budget right there.
There was at least five minutes more movie after that fight...
Anyway, the movie did have a low budget. It shows in places, but it's still awesome.
Oh, I'm not saying that militaristic scientists get all the girls =). I think we agree more than you realize.
The people who develop weapons are a tool themselves. My point is that they're a tool that gets used and rewarded in small or large ways by the people in power, who *are* aggressive.
So my hypothetical cycle is:
1) Aggressive people get into power. 2) Several groups like this conflict with each other. 3) Those who do not fight, or cannot fight, are slain, or leave the area and are no longer a part of this particular genetic equation. 4) The people in power find someone smart to invent a stronger sword or a thicker castle wall that helps them win the war, usually involving giving the researchers trinkets of some kind. 5) The people in power take the conquered for their own and spread their aggressive DNA into the future. 6) Repeat.
Using Excel as the base already is locking your app into a very restricted place that it can run. You're essentially limiting it to machines that have that same version of Excel.
The review also talks about incorporating VB.NET and COM objects. Holy crap. So now you need at least two runtime environments (Excel +.NET), and probably some DLLs as well.
This is a recipe for disaster. I have seen the results of this kind of mentality at the corporation I work for.
VB5 and 6 apps that depend on a whole box full of shareware controls, even though VB already had almost the same ones built in.
I went to the source repository to modify one of those apps, and discovered that it was impossible because no one had kept a record of the registration codes for those controls, and I couldn't even get it to compile.
This is basically what is going to happen to anything like the mega Excel app described in the review. Someone is going to spend six months building it, then five departments are going to decide it's critical to their business work. 2-3 years later, it's going to break when IT deploys Excel 2007, and it's going to have to be reverse-engineered because the developer left the company, then re-written.
A worse scenario (which I have also seen) would be that some random office worker in Tucson picks up this book and decides they're a "professional Excel developer." They write an app. Their department of thirty people becomes completely dependent on it. The "developer" leaves the company. A year later the app breaks, either because Excel was upgraded or there is a bug that wasn't evident at the time. Now that department calls IT in San Diego because they can't do their work. IT either has to reverse engineer the whole thing, fix it or rewrite it, or the department is fucked over until they find an alternative.
If you're the kind of person that likes to tinker with cars, "ricing"* a civic is fun.
I'm sure it would be. I drive a Civic =P.
My point is that you're taking something that's designed for a specific purpose and trying to make it do something else. It's certainly *possible*, but you're putting in a lot of extra effort to get less than optimal results.
If I were going to trick out a car for racing, I'd start with something that was designed for going fast, like an old Porsche 944 that you can get for less than the cost of a recent Civic and as stock outperforms a riced Civic. That way, I could spend the same amount of time and end up with something *much* better.
Similarly, if I'm going to write an app, I'll use *at least* VB.NET, rather than start with Excel, bolt on a bunch of extra bits, and hide the rest.
Again, I can't see what starting with Excel buys me:
- Formulas? All of that stuff is dead simple in an actual programming language. - GUI? Again, VB.NET makes that easy. Probably even easier than mutating Excel's interface. - Built-in file format? I sure wouldn't trust XLS for an app I was writing. It's a piece of cake to at least make a blank Access DB and then write a VB.NET app that talks to that.
Using Excel also means that every time your app loads, it fires up however many megabytes Excel consumes now in addition to everything else you're doing.
Last I checked, Excel was a spreadsheet, not an ETL tool. Excel is a great tool for data entry, because so many people know how to use it without retraining. You don't even need to use a vb form to get data.
I could be wrong, but I think that that's exactly what a spreadsheet was *not* intended for.
I suppose I should qualify my original statement and say that spreadsheet apps are supposed to import data (or have it entered, if you're talking about a really basic case), then have functions run on that data to produce new data, and maybe graph it out.
People tend to use it as a database-lite kind of thing (I am guilty of this myself), but in an actual corporation I think this is dangerous to the point of stupidity. Information that can cost or save millions of dollars belongs in a real database, on a real server, not in an XLS file sitting on someone's c: drive.
Hygiene was certainly an important factor. But animals don't develop that on its own. Humans needed it because they started clustering together into large groups, which meant that if everybody in the city used the river as a sewer, it was enough to make it unhealthy to drink.
So why did we cluster into villages? To pool resources certainly, but also for mutual protection from other groups of humans. Castle walls and other heavy construction weren't invented to keep out wandering bears.
Even now we are mostly driven by instinct and emotional reactions. If you or I were a monkey living peacefully in the rainforest, we'd have pretty much everything that those things tell us we want: food, a place to live, and one or more mates. Maybe if we got really hungry and couldn't find what we usually ate, we'd sharpen a stick to get some grubs out of the ground.
There's no incentive for an animal in that situation to start using its brain and invent more advanced tools, society, or hygiene.
It isn't until a threat is introduced that those animals would set the wheels of invention in motion. If there is a, I don't know, tiger infestation in the rainforest and the tigers are eating your friends, then you get together and come up with a club or stone knife to fight back with.
Now you're back at equilibrium WRT invention. You've got all the things you wanted before, and in addition you can protect yourself from dangerous animals.
It's not until various groups of people start competing and fighting with each other that there is a reason to keep inventing, because humans are constantly outdoing each other in terms of ways to inflict harm on their enemies.
The humans that were better at that survived, and the ones that weren't didn't. Which brings us back to my original post.
Do I like this idea? Not really. I already knew the human race was flawed, but thinking it over a few weeks ago made me think of something else: extraterrestrial civiliations.
I liked to think that if there were any, they would be peaceful, or at least neutral. But I can't see any way for docile races to evolve into advanced societies.
So now I think about the silence of the radio spectrum in our galaxy, and it makes me wonder if Drake's equation needs a 100% for the variable that describes the probability of advanced civiliations destroying themselves./karma bonus removed for being offtopic.
That's kind of depressing... why didn't they require that every final report had to mention applications that could improve life in underdeveloped areas or something?
We are evolved from predators. Weapons research is what allowed us to become what we are today.
I don't think it's at all surprising that most of us tend to put things in terms of potential military uses. The primates who survived to become the ancient people who survived to became us were the ones who conquered and subjugated. Evolution selected their DNA sequences to be the ones that constructed your brain and mine.
The problem there is Access is part of Office Pro, Excel comes with basic Office.
Ah, I was not aware of that. In our environment, every desktop has the suite that includes Access.
Excel as part of an overall app can be quite powerful. Data stored in some more stable backend, excel to do the caculations, output elsewhere.
Right. That's what Excel is for - importing data and transforming it. It's not designed to be the source of data itself.
Part of my confusion about the premise for this book is (like I said) what it's supposed to buy you. All of the form crap is easily handled with VB.NET, which you can get for super cheap. I got my copy for free during an MS promotion. If someone is a decent enough programmer to come up with something that makes Excel look like a whole other app, they can at least handle VB, and not have to deal with not only bugs in their own code, but bugs and security issues they inherit by using Excel as a runtime environment.
Excel is a fantastically powerful, flexible tool, and also has a portability advantage when working with people who have Office installed, but not Perl or Python (i.e. pretty much everyone). The fact that people here don't know how to do anything more complicated than adding column A to column B doesn't change that.
I'll give you that. You can do some cool stuff with Excel.
But why use it as essentially an application runtime when you could be using.NET, or Java, or C/C++?
If the advantage is supposed to be that it gives you a basis for storing data, my response would be that spreadsheets are not databases (as much as office workers like to pretend they are), and trusting production data to an XLS or CSV file is unwise.
The idea of developing "professional" application in Excel seems to me like ricing out a base model Civic and pretending it's a real race car. You can do it, and the Civic will go pretty fast, but why not get an actual sports car instead of putting a ton of time and effort into working around the limitations that come from starting with a family vehicle?
Years ago I worked at an internal corporate help desk, and I saw way too many people spending way too much time doing wack-ass shit in Excel when they could have used Access and done it all with a single SELECT statement.
This is even more extreme: developers tying themselves to what is not only a proprietary platform, but one that will almost certainly break their app as soon as MS releases the next version.
Guess this is not dissimilar to the Japanese use of the (supposed) 'r' sound, which is meant to be more like a cross between a western 'l' and western 'r'.
The Japanese "r" sound is more like that of other languages than English is. Latin, German, etc., all have the same or very similar rolled-r.
As usual, English is the broken, odd one out. But Japanese is there to commiserate with it since they share the hard "j" sound that almost everyone else pronounces like a "y."
After all, why would you expect to be able to tell the difference between a male and female chat participant in the first place?
It isn't sexist to realize that because of our culture as well as genetic factors, there are generally speaking differences in the way women and men communicate.
I doubt it could ever be reduced to an equation, and it's certainly not foolproof. I know girls that IM and email in a way that reminds me of guys and vice-versa. This is especially true if the guy has a personality with aspects Western culture considers effeminate, or if the girl has has a more traditionally masculine personality.
I also doubt that current technology could really replicate that in terms of creating a chatbot that could incorporate those sometimes subtle differences effectively.
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People that genuinely have aspergers also have an extremely hard time getting along in life. It isn't like "ohh i feel anti social today".
Eh.
Like most things, there's a spectrum. One of my little sisters has full-on Asperger's. I have trouble imagining her ever truly living self-sufficiently by herself.
I wouldn't say I have it, but it's easy to see a few bits of it in my personality, like echoes of what she ended up with.
I *really* have ADHD, and one of the cool side benefits of the Concerta I take for it is that it's let me focus enough to notice all the body language I was blind to before.
I was saying that it's stupid that *Windows* can't handle being moved across different hardware =P.
I have apps running on my machine that don't start automatically. If the system reboots, they won't be running.
Also, I don't have my machine set to automatically log on, so I would be looking at a logon prompt if it had bounced.
That would make sense, except I don't see XP reboot like that either.
If you are seeing BSODs almost daily, you either have faulty hardware or some seriously buggy drivers. Honestly folks, XP, and even 2000, BSOD very rarely.
Exactly. I have never seen my XP machine at home BSOD, even when the video card was failing to the point that it was adding random horizontal lines across the display.
At work, I saw 2000 BSOD on several servers when we applied an MS hotfix that conflicted with some sort of secret kernel patch they'd given us a few years previously for those same machines.
I saw 2k bluescreen one other time, when a workstation had a zip drive and the user installed drivers for it from 1997 or so.
Other than that, the only time I've seen it happen is if I make an OS image on one machine and then try and use it on another with different hardware. That's still stupid, but at least I know how to avoid it.
This is in an environment with close to 1000 Windows servers and about 25,000 Windows workstations.
that would be "aren't even using developers who know English".
It depends on if you're using American or British Commonwealth grammar.
American grammar treats corporate entities as a single being ("Microsoft is changing the color of the screen"), Commonwealth countries treat them as a group of people ("Microsoft are changing the colour of the screen").
"Blah blah, back when I got into [scene] it was so much better and more exclusive. Everyone was hardcore and there was none of this watered-down-for-the-mainstream crap."
It works for any subculture or hobby. Usually it comes from people who are too young to realize that there were always superficial aspects to whatever it is they're so concerned with, and that in 5-10 years they're going to wonder why they cared so much.
Any admin that deserves to keep their job, keeps a pristine image of a locked down server, and can build a machine automatically with about 5 minutes of hands on labor. Put in the ghost boot, set it up, walk away. CIOs, if your folks dont do this, fire them. You should have a pristine image of every important server on your network. Taking the time to load an OS from scratch today is ridiculous
My group is responsible for almost 1000 servers spread across the US. If we were to commit to keeping "pristine images" of all of them around, that is all we would have time to do, and we would still have to hire more staff.
What's the point? I've worked here for two years. Generally speaking one server fails catastrophically maybe once every three months.
We should keep images of all servers around to save a day or two every three months or less frequently?
No, he's right.
...to say nothing of the fact that this is all a bunch of crap that doesn't belong on a factual site.
When most people swing a sword, they're doing basically the same thing with it as they would with a baseball bat or an axe.
Kendo teaches that as you swing the blade, you should pull it in towards you at the same time, so that in addition to the direct kinetic impact forcing the edge through the target, it cuts as well.
You can simulate the difference with a kitchen knife and a cucumber. First, chop directly downwards with the blade. Then, try slicing it but pulling the knife towards you.
IMO this has no application to a lightsaber, however, as there is no mass to the blade, nor are there tiny imperfections in it that would have the same effect as drawing a metal blade across something.
I think the current record is held by anime, though. Divergence Eve took it to a really ridiculous level, so that it made it hard watching just because of that.
Yeah, a little on the "OMG, who replaced Japan's fresh-ground coffee with new Folger's Mercury-Soaked Amphetamine Crystals again?" side of breast sizes.
You pay a monthly fee for telephone service, even though YOU provide the content of the conversations.
The content of phone conversations has no value to the carrier.
For many types of forum, the things that members post in them are the entirety of the value. Imagine Slashdot without the discussions. Would it be profitable at all?
What about the forums for Eidos Interactive? They are a meeting place for fans of their games, sure. Some of us sometimes also provide unofficial support for one game or another. That is valuable to Eidos because it builds goodwill towards their products and saves them money on support staff.
That having been said, I think getting upset about this is stupid and futile. It's the owner's site, they can do whatever they want with it. If my friends and I go to a bar every day for five years, does that mean the owner owes us something extra? Does it mean that we should have a say if she wants to change it from industrial music to all Van Halen all the time? No, it means we should go somewhere else.
The **only** reason I can see people having a legitimate complaint is with something like GameFAQs, which is just a collection of docs people have written about games and submitted. But you know what? If those people really wanted to have complete control, they should have posted them on their own website.
Huge opportunities will abound in the gaming industry as tools are released that lets the global community mod their favorite games. Storytelling will come to dominate games at every turn, as graphics, physics engines, and audio approach reality.
Mods are cool, but they generally fail to tell a compelling, cinematic story.
- Mod teams can't afford professional voice actors, so until voice synthesis technology advances a few light years that will heavily detract from the immersion.
- Mod teams don't have 8-16 hours a day to work on the content, unless they're living at their parents' house without a job. So either it will take many years to make a professional quality game, or the end product will suffer because the team doesn't have enough training or maturity.
- Mod teams who make total conversions are (at least in my experience) incredibly hardcore dorks (and I say that as an incredibly hardcore dork), so if they make a story-based game it's the kind of thing that appeals to the very limited hardcore dork fanbase of whatever they're basing it on.
- Mod teams generally end up with a handful of people doing a variety of tasks that they're not specialized in, e.g. one person comes up with the basic premise, most of the script, and the basic character designs. Then they freak out and refuse to accept constructive criticism that would make it better, and you end up with a Star Wars prequel.
- Most mod teams come up with grand ideas, get = ~10% finished, and realize they'll never be able to complete the project, then the "beta" sits on their site for years.
There are some really, really cool mods I've seen for a variety of games, particularly the ships people have put into Homeworld. But that is trivial compared to making an entirely new game using that engine.
I have yet to see a single-player mod that I thought was as compelling as, say, the original Soul Reaver. This does not surprise me, given that it took ~30 people three years working overtime to make Soul Reaver, and that was on the Playstation with its primitive 3D graphics.
I see the strength of mods as building on an existing game, like adding ships to Homeworld, or weapons and maps to UT. Making an entirely new game even with an existing engine as the base is a lot of work. That's why people get paid to do it for a living. This difficulty is only going to increase as the presentation quality goes up with new consoles and computer hardware.
Maybe in 50 years there will be the Playstation 14 equivalent of Adventure Construction Set from the early 80s, where you say "ok, AI, I want a game that has a hot chick in a metal bikini as the anti-hero main character, now make it!" But not in the near future.
Disclaimer: some exceptions apply, B5 I've Found Her, there are always going to be anomalies, etc etc.
Ahh. I knew the movie was missing a big end fight scene. By the British guy, do you mean the guy that played Robert the Bruce in Braveheart? I thought it would have made more sense if he were merely the brains behind it all, and couldn't fight.
Well, part of the unexpositioned (um, is that a word?) backstory is that that was the guy who invented the Gun Kata. But yeah, I thought it was a bit of a stretch that he would pose a threat to Christian Bale of the extreme exercise plan.
There's a LOT of cool stuff like that in the commentary tracks on the DVD.
Say, what's this whole Ultraviolet thing?
It's a vampire movie, and that's all I know. I'm picturing something like Underworld set in the near future.
You know, where he and his partner were supposed to fight for like twenty minutes but it was over in twenty seconds.
He wasn't supposed to fight with his partner for very long, because his partner wasn't nearly as good.
He *was* supposed to have a massive fight with the chubby British guy, which is what they didn't have the budget for, but I thought it turned out pretty well anyway. Apparently the fight they had planned is going to show up in Ultraviolet.
And then the abrupt credits rolling right afterwards. Its as if they just lost all their budget right there.
There was at least five minutes more movie after that fight...
Anyway, the movie did have a low budget. It shows in places, but it's still awesome.
Oh, I'm not saying that militaristic scientists get all the girls =). I think we agree more than you realize.
The people who develop weapons are a tool themselves. My point is that they're a tool that gets used and rewarded in small or large ways by the people in power, who *are* aggressive.
So my hypothetical cycle is:
1) Aggressive people get into power.
2) Several groups like this conflict with each other.
3) Those who do not fight, or cannot fight, are slain, or leave the area and are no longer a part of this particular genetic equation.
4) The people in power find someone smart to invent a stronger sword or a thicker castle wall that helps them win the war, usually involving giving the researchers trinkets of some kind.
5) The people in power take the conquered for their own and spread their aggressive DNA into the future.
6) Repeat.
I forgot one other thing.
.NET), and probably some DLLs as well.
Using Excel as the base already is locking your app into a very restricted place that it can run. You're essentially limiting it to machines that have that same version of Excel.
The review also talks about incorporating VB.NET and COM objects. Holy crap. So now you need at least two runtime environments (Excel +
This is a recipe for disaster. I have seen the results of this kind of mentality at the corporation I work for.
VB5 and 6 apps that depend on a whole box full of shareware controls, even though VB already had almost the same ones built in.
I went to the source repository to modify one of those apps, and discovered that it was impossible because no one had kept a record of the registration codes for those controls, and I couldn't even get it to compile.
This is basically what is going to happen to anything like the mega Excel app described in the review. Someone is going to spend six months building it, then five departments are going to decide it's critical to their business work. 2-3 years later, it's going to break when IT deploys Excel 2007, and it's going to have to be reverse-engineered because the developer left the company, then re-written.
A worse scenario (which I have also seen) would be that some random office worker in Tucson picks up this book and decides they're a "professional Excel developer." They write an app. Their department of thirty people becomes completely dependent on it. The "developer" leaves the company. A year later the app breaks, either because Excel was upgraded or there is a bug that wasn't evident at the time. Now that department calls IT in San Diego because they can't do their work. IT either has to reverse engineer the whole thing, fix it or rewrite it, or the department is fucked over until they find an alternative.
If you're the kind of person that likes to tinker with cars, "ricing"* a civic is fun.
I'm sure it would be. I drive a Civic =P.
My point is that you're taking something that's designed for a specific purpose and trying to make it do something else. It's certainly *possible*, but you're putting in a lot of extra effort to get less than optimal results.
If I were going to trick out a car for racing, I'd start with something that was designed for going fast, like an old Porsche 944 that you can get for less than the cost of a recent Civic and as stock outperforms a riced Civic. That way, I could spend the same amount of time and end up with something *much* better.
Similarly, if I'm going to write an app, I'll use *at least* VB.NET, rather than start with Excel, bolt on a bunch of extra bits, and hide the rest.
Again, I can't see what starting with Excel buys me:
- Formulas? All of that stuff is dead simple in an actual programming language.
- GUI? Again, VB.NET makes that easy. Probably even easier than mutating Excel's interface.
- Built-in file format? I sure wouldn't trust XLS for an app I was writing. It's a piece of cake to at least make a blank Access DB and then write a VB.NET app that talks to that.
Using Excel also means that every time your app loads, it fires up however many megabytes Excel consumes now in addition to everything else you're doing.
Last I checked, Excel was a spreadsheet, not an ETL tool. Excel is a great tool for data entry, because so many people know how to use it without retraining. You don't even need to use a vb form to get data.
I could be wrong, but I think that that's exactly what a spreadsheet was *not* intended for.
I suppose I should qualify my original statement and say that spreadsheet apps are supposed to import data (or have it entered, if you're talking about a really basic case), then have functions run on that data to produce new data, and maybe graph it out.
People tend to use it as a database-lite kind of thing (I am guilty of this myself), but in an actual corporation I think this is dangerous to the point of stupidity. Information that can cost or save millions of dollars belongs in a real database, on a real server, not in an XLS file sitting on someone's c: drive.
I disagree, politely of course.
/karma bonus removed for being offtopic.
Hygiene was certainly an important factor. But animals don't develop that on its own. Humans needed it because they started clustering together into large groups, which meant that if everybody in the city used the river as a sewer, it was enough to make it unhealthy to drink.
So why did we cluster into villages? To pool resources certainly, but also for mutual protection from other groups of humans. Castle walls and other heavy construction weren't invented to keep out wandering bears.
Even now we are mostly driven by instinct and emotional reactions. If you or I were a monkey living peacefully in the rainforest, we'd have pretty much everything that those things tell us we want: food, a place to live, and one or more mates. Maybe if we got really hungry and couldn't find what we usually ate, we'd sharpen a stick to get some grubs out of the ground.
There's no incentive for an animal in that situation to start using its brain and invent more advanced tools, society, or hygiene.
It isn't until a threat is introduced that those animals would set the wheels of invention in motion. If there is a, I don't know, tiger infestation in the rainforest and the tigers are eating your friends, then you get together and come up with a club or stone knife to fight back with.
Now you're back at equilibrium WRT invention. You've got all the things you wanted before, and in addition you can protect yourself from dangerous animals.
It's not until various groups of people start competing and fighting with each other that there is a reason to keep inventing, because humans are constantly outdoing each other in terms of ways to inflict harm on their enemies.
The humans that were better at that survived, and the ones that weren't didn't. Which brings us back to my original post.
Do I like this idea? Not really. I already knew the human race was flawed, but thinking it over a few weeks ago made me think of something else: extraterrestrial civiliations.
I liked to think that if there were any, they would be peaceful, or at least neutral. But I can't see any way for docile races to evolve into advanced societies.
So now I think about the silence of the radio spectrum in our galaxy, and it makes me wonder if Drake's equation needs a 100% for the variable that describes the probability of advanced civiliations destroying themselves.
That's kind of depressing... why didn't they require that every final report had to mention applications that could improve life in underdeveloped areas or something?
We are evolved from predators. Weapons research is what allowed us to become what we are today.
I don't think it's at all surprising that most of us tend to put things in terms of potential military uses. The primates who survived to become the ancient people who survived to became us were the ones who conquered and subjugated. Evolution selected their DNA sequences to be the ones that constructed your brain and mine.
The problem there is Access is part of Office Pro, Excel comes with basic Office.
Ah, I was not aware of that. In our environment, every desktop has the suite that includes Access.
Excel as part of an overall app can be quite powerful. Data stored in some more stable backend, excel to do the caculations, output elsewhere.
Right. That's what Excel is for - importing data and transforming it. It's not designed to be the source of data itself.
Part of my confusion about the premise for this book is (like I said) what it's supposed to buy you. All of the form crap is easily handled with VB.NET, which you can get for super cheap. I got my copy for free during an MS promotion. If someone is a decent enough programmer to come up with something that makes Excel look like a whole other app, they can at least handle VB, and not have to deal with not only bugs in their own code, but bugs and security issues they inherit by using Excel as a runtime environment.
Excel is a fantastically powerful, flexible tool, and also has a portability advantage when working with people who have Office installed, but not Perl or Python (i.e. pretty much everyone). The fact that people here don't know how to do anything more complicated than adding column A to column B doesn't change that.
.NET, or Java, or C/C++?
I'll give you that. You can do some cool stuff with Excel.
But why use it as essentially an application runtime when you could be using
If the advantage is supposed to be that it gives you a basis for storing data, my response would be that spreadsheets are not databases (as much as office workers like to pretend they are), and trusting production data to an XLS or CSV file is unwise.
The idea of developing "professional" application in Excel seems to me like ricing out a base model Civic and pretending it's a real race car. You can do it, and the Civic will go pretty fast, but why not get an actual sports car instead of putting a ton of time and effort into working around the limitations that come from starting with a family vehicle?
Years ago I worked at an internal corporate help desk, and I saw way too many people spending way too much time doing wack-ass shit in Excel when they could have used Access and done it all with a single SELECT statement.
This is even more extreme: developers tying themselves to what is not only a proprietary platform, but one that will almost certainly break their app as soon as MS releases the next version.
Let me guess. Every time you start it up, it plays a scratchy mp3 of your girlfriend saying "I believe in you!"?
Guess this is not dissimilar to the Japanese use of the (supposed) 'r' sound, which is meant to be more like a cross between a western 'l' and western 'r'.
The Japanese "r" sound is more like that of other languages than English is. Latin, German, etc., all have the same or very similar rolled-r.
As usual, English is the broken, odd one out. But Japanese is there to commiserate with it since they share the hard "j" sound that almost everyone else pronounces like a "y."
After all, why would you expect to be able to tell the difference between a male and female chat participant in the first place?
It isn't sexist to realize that because of our culture as well as genetic factors, there are generally speaking differences in the way women and men communicate.
I doubt it could ever be reduced to an equation, and it's certainly not foolproof. I know girls that IM and email in a way that reminds me of guys and vice-versa. This is especially true if the guy has a personality with aspects Western culture considers effeminate, or if the girl has has a more traditionally masculine personality.
I also doubt that current technology could really replicate that in terms of creating a chatbot that could incorporate those sometimes subtle differences effectively.