That's It. I'm going to start using ecryption. I used to think, oh well, who cares, nothing important is in my email, but I feel like everyone should now be encrypting email just to show them that we really don't want them snooping around. We gave them freedom and trusted them. Now they are taking that trust away.
I guess my problem is with the career schools that are churning out.Net developers who couldn't code to save their life. They teach them how to drag and drop controls, write loops, conditionals, functions, and maybe the basics of creating a class, and that's it. Then these people think they are programmers. They know how to code a little bit, but don't really understand completely what's going on. For an example of what i'm talking about, take a look at this course on.net and tell me if you think it would turn anybody into a good programmer, or if it's even worthy of handing out a ".NET Certified Developer Certificate".
Why does this even matter. Most computers don't even ship with a floppy drive anymore. I think it's nice that they can make a cut down version that small, but who will ever use it?
What they should do, is at least comes up with a dialog, with all the usually properties that one would change. You wouldn't have to change them if you wanted to, but you could, and they'd all be in one place. Instead of having to remember which ones to change, I could just change the most common ones, which almost always need to be changed. I know you're right, You can write bad code in any language, and the IDE can't really do much to stop you. But if they're going to insist on making tools that pretend that it's possible for people who don't know how to code, to write code, then they could at least hold their hand a little bit more, and get them to write at least acceptable code.
The only problem that I have with.Net, and mostly just VS.Net, is that it tries to do everything for you, by holding your hand, and letting you drag and drop to do everything. But, then, it doesn't hold your hand enough, and every text box ends up with a name like textbox1, or something like that. So, instead you have to remember each of the properties that you have to change for each control so that variables are named correctly, and all the proper default values are filled in. Then if all someone knows how to do is drag and drop, which is a good portion of.Net programmers, then they have no idea what to do when something goes wrong. I think that.Net is a great platform, which is very powerful when you write the code yourself. But I think that Microsoft trying to turn programming into something that anybody can do is a big mistake. Programming robust,reliable, scalable systems requires knowledge that not everybody has. I say, leave the programming up to the people that know how, and keep everyone else far, far away.
I agree completely. Everytime my computer tries to think it's smarter than me, it ends up making it harder to use. This happens with autocorrect too. Often it will correct something, and make it impossible (or at least very hard) to put it back to what I actually wanted. In windows XP, it's impossible to find most of the settings I want since they messed up the control panel, and now many options aren't even there. Hiding things from the user isn't the way to make computers easier to use.
I think they should just kill StarOffice. Open up OpenOffice, and just use that. More people would use it, more people would improve it, and it would just be better in the long run. Does StarOffice even offer anything that OpenOffice doesn't? Couldn't they just sell you OpenOffice support, instead of trying to make 2 of the same product.
As nice as it is to think that we have an AIDS cure, and that we don't have to worry about it anymore. But I think that rushing it through a FDA approval, without exploring its full consequences could be a little dangerous. If this drug was passed, and everybody who took it got rid of their AIDS, but developed some other condition which killed them in a year, then we'd all look a little stupid, and the drug company would probably be under a lot of scrutiny.
Another thing though, is this drug patented, or will this be cheaply available for everyone who needs it, especially AIDS ravaged countried in Africa.
Your telling me that Google, the no pictures, text only site is causing more bandwidth usage than the bittorrent sites. Ok, maybe we should blame Google because they help the users find all the content they are downloading. Seems to me that google should get money back for creating such a low bandwidth site, in comparison to the other search giants.
In this case what Verizon has to realize is that all their networks become useless if there is no content on them. It's a symbiotic relationship. Google needs the networks, and the networks need Google. I don't see why one would want to impose any kind of restrictions on the other.
I know people who work for RIM. If you think that RIM got to where it was without using the patent system, then you are badly mistaken. RIM holds many patents, and offers bonuses to employees who come up with ideas that they eventually patent.
I think it's the opposite, with trackball, you just refrain from touching the ball, and you can still push buttons without moving the pointer. With a mouse, I find it very hard to push the mouse buttons without moving the pointer.
Trackballs are the way to go. I don't know why we ever chose a mouse over a trackball. They are much easier, as you don't have to move your hand/arm all over the place. Only your fingers and thumb move. Since switching to a trackball, I have much less problems with wrist pain. Also, I find that trackballs are more accurate, and work greate for PC gaming, because you don't have to lift and reposition it every few seconds.
Games have gotten much more complicated over the years. Not long ago, anybody could make a game that was on par with the best. Then, It became too hard to make your own game, the best you could do was make mods to existing games. Now, games are so complicated that only people who want to spend tons of time can even learn how to make the mods. Now with the PS3, games will be so complicated, that not even the developers will be able to make them.
Yes, but imagine being an employer, and for every job posting you put up, you get 10,000 resumes, and only 5% even come close to fitting what you asked for. Now you have to weed through all those resumes, and find the good ones, without throwing away the good ones. If everyone who applied for the job was actually qualified for the job, then it would be a lot easier to hire the right person.
Exactly It works with things like mp3s because everyone has the same songs. You can't do that for things like word documents, digital photos, or anything else you are actually creating yourself. If you are the only one or one of few with the document, then it's not very likely that anybody other than you is going to be generating the metadata.
I think that for personal use, Metadata is a lost cause. Unless you can find someway for the computer to figure out the metadata on it's own (as in CDDB for mp3 tags), Then files that people create aren't going to have very good or any metadata. I think a much better approach is just to keep your stuff organized, but making a good tree of folders. Type of document, project, date, lots of other things can be used to make these folders. Then I find that it's easy to find the stuff you need. You can even use symlinks if you want to put something in 2 folders.
But look at any other industry. The cost of figuring out how to build the car is much of the cost you pay for one. You only have to figure out how to build the first one. Same goes for a lot of other things that require knowledge to build. If you only consider the costs of the production of the product, and not the work that goes into figuring out how to produce it, then everything ends up looking like it should cost much less than it does.
I think that what they are saying, is that although we don't like patent trolls, they are necessary to show us just how bad the patent system really is. It's kind of like saying drunk drivers are good for teaching us how unsafe our cars really are.
Well, according to statistics Canada, 18.5% of people in Ottawa take public transit. 22.4% in Toronto, 21.7% in Montreal, 11.5% in Vancouver. Although the percentages are a lot lower in smaller cities, the 4 cities I named make up about a third of the Canadian population as a whole. Public transit can work for a large percentage of the community. These numbers are for 2001, and percentages have gone up since. Public transit may not scale perfectly, but it scales a lot better than everybody owning their own car.
64 Ticket Costs Only $60. That's under 94 cents a ticket. You quoted $1.75 for a BART Ticket. That's a 47% savings. Since when is a 47% savings not much of a discount? I don't really think you have done a good comparison of the costs. BART = $60 a month, SFMuni costs $45 a month, and San Mateo costs $48 a month, = $153 a month. Plus, you can use the SFMuni pass on the BART depending on which stations you get on at. So you may not even have to buy all those passes.
Your kids sports are way too complicated. Just play for a local league where there isn't any travelling involved, its much easier on your kids. Grocery shopping can be done without a car. Either you pick up small loads which can be carried in a back pack, or you could get them delivered by the grocery store, which usually only costs around $5. As for doctors appointments, for healthy people maybe maxing out at 3 per year, is that really worth owning a car?
Ottawa has a transit way which is a road that only the buses can use. It's amazing. Really helps to speed things up. I think the major reason people have such a bad view of buses is because they all stick them on the same roads as the cars, making them slow. When they give the busses their own roads, kind of like the trains having their own tracks, things can move quite quickly.
So, obviously, none of your transit system offer monthly passes. At 9.50 a day, that's $285 a month. I don't know of any public transit system that charges that high of a rate for a monthly pass. It's usually under $100 for most transit systems. A quick look at the BART website shows that you can get deals if you don't buy your tickets one at a time. Plus it's a little more convenient to not have to buy a ticket every time you need one. Also, your 36 minutes in the car that you are driving is 36 minutes in which you can do nothing but drive. If you spend 98 minutes on the bus/train each day, then there's other things you can be doing with your time that you spend commuting. You could even to work, and see if you can bill for the time since you are actually working. Does it really matter that you aren't physically in your office. Plus according to the AAA, driving a car on average costs between $5500-$7000 a year. So maybe you're on the lower end of the average, but I don't think your numbers are that accurate.
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That's It. I'm going to start using ecryption. I used to think, oh well, who cares, nothing important is in my email, but I feel like everyone should now be encrypting email just to show them that we really don't want them snooping around. We gave them freedom and trusted them. Now they are taking that trust away.
There's nothing wrong with the drag-and-drop, but the fact that people learn how, and all of a sudden think they are programmers.
I guess my problem is with the career schools that are churning out .Net developers who couldn't code to save their life. They teach them how to drag and drop controls, write loops, conditionals, functions, and maybe the basics of creating a class, and that's it. Then these people think they are programmers. They know how to code a little bit, but don't really understand completely what's going on. For an example of what i'm talking about, take a look at this course on .net and tell me if you think it would turn anybody into a good programmer, or if it's even worthy of handing out a ".NET Certified Developer Certificate".
Why does this even matter. Most computers don't even ship with a floppy drive anymore. I think it's nice that they can make a cut down version that small, but who will ever use it?
What they should do, is at least comes up with a dialog, with all the usually properties that one would change. You wouldn't have to change them if you wanted to, but you could, and they'd all be in one place. Instead of having to remember which ones to change, I could just change the most common ones, which almost always need to be changed. I know you're right, You can write bad code in any language, and the IDE can't really do much to stop you. But if they're going to insist on making tools that pretend that it's possible for people who don't know how to code, to write code, then they could at least hold their hand a little bit more, and get them to write at least acceptable code.
The only problem that I have with .Net, and mostly just VS.Net, is that it tries to do everything for you, by holding your hand, and letting you drag and drop to do everything. But, then, it doesn't hold your hand enough, and every text box ends up with a name like textbox1, or something like that. So, instead you have to remember each of the properties that you have to change for each control so that variables are named correctly, and all the proper default values are filled in. Then if all someone knows how to do is drag and drop, which is a good portion of .Net programmers, then they have no idea what to do when something goes wrong. I think that .Net is a great platform, which is very powerful when you write the code yourself. But I think that Microsoft trying to turn programming into something that anybody can do is a big mistake. Programming robust,reliable, scalable systems requires knowledge that not everybody has. I say, leave the programming up to the people that know how, and keep everyone else far, far away.
I agree completely. Everytime my computer tries to think it's smarter than me, it ends up making it harder to use. This happens with autocorrect too. Often it will correct something, and make it impossible (or at least very hard) to put it back to what I actually wanted. In windows XP, it's impossible to find most of the settings I want since they messed up the control panel, and now many options aren't even there. Hiding things from the user isn't the way to make computers easier to use.
I think they should just kill StarOffice. Open up OpenOffice, and just use that. More people would use it, more people would improve it, and it would just be better in the long run. Does StarOffice even offer anything that OpenOffice doesn't? Couldn't they just sell you OpenOffice support, instead of trying to make 2 of the same product.
As nice as it is to think that we have an AIDS cure, and that we don't have to worry about it anymore. But I think that rushing it through a FDA approval, without exploring its full consequences could be a little dangerous. If this drug was passed, and everybody who took it got rid of their AIDS, but developed some other condition which killed them in a year, then we'd all look a little stupid, and the drug company would probably be under a lot of scrutiny.
Another thing though, is this drug patented, or will this be cheaply available for everyone who needs it, especially AIDS ravaged countried in Africa.
Your telling me that Google, the no pictures, text only site is causing more bandwidth usage than the bittorrent sites. Ok, maybe we should blame Google because they help the users find all the content they are downloading. Seems to me that google should get money back for creating such a low bandwidth site, in comparison to the other search giants.
In this case what Verizon has to realize is that all their networks become useless if there is no content on them. It's a symbiotic relationship. Google needs the networks, and the networks need Google. I don't see why one would want to impose any kind of restrictions on the other.
I know people who work for RIM. If you think that RIM got to where it was without using the patent system, then you are badly mistaken. RIM holds many patents, and offers bonuses to employees who come up with ideas that they eventually patent.
I think it's the opposite, with trackball, you just refrain from touching the ball, and you can still push buttons without moving the pointer. With a mouse, I find it very hard to push the mouse buttons without moving the pointer.
Trackballs are the way to go. I don't know why we ever chose a mouse over a trackball. They are much easier, as you don't have to move your hand/arm all over the place. Only your fingers and thumb move. Since switching to a trackball, I have much less problems with wrist pain. Also, I find that trackballs are more accurate, and work greate for PC gaming, because you don't have to lift and reposition it every few seconds.
Games have gotten much more complicated over the years. Not long ago, anybody could make a game that was on par with the best. Then, It became too hard to make your own game, the best you could do was make mods to existing games. Now, games are so complicated that only people who want to spend tons of time can even learn how to make the mods. Now with the PS3, games will be so complicated, that not even the developers will be able to make them.
Yes, but imagine being an employer, and for every job posting you put up, you get 10,000 resumes, and only 5% even come close to fitting what you asked for. Now you have to weed through all those resumes, and find the good ones, without throwing away the good ones. If everyone who applied for the job was actually qualified for the job, then it would be a lot easier to hire the right person.
Exactly It works with things like mp3s because everyone has the same songs. You can't do that for things like word documents, digital photos, or anything else you are actually creating yourself. If you are the only one or one of few with the document, then it's not very likely that anybody other than you is going to be generating the metadata.
I think that for personal use, Metadata is a lost cause. Unless you can find someway for the computer to figure out the metadata on it's own (as in CDDB for mp3 tags), Then files that people create aren't going to have very good or any metadata. I think a much better approach is just to keep your stuff organized, but making a good tree of folders. Type of document, project, date, lots of other things can be used to make these folders. Then I find that it's easy to find the stuff you need. You can even use symlinks if you want to put something in 2 folders.
But look at any other industry. The cost of figuring out how to build the car is much of the cost you pay for one. You only have to figure out how to build the first one. Same goes for a lot of other things that require knowledge to build. If you only consider the costs of the production of the product, and not the work that goes into figuring out how to produce it, then everything ends up looking like it should cost much less than it does.
I think that what they are saying, is that although we don't like patent trolls, they are necessary to show us just how bad the patent system really is. It's kind of like saying drunk drivers are good for teaching us how unsafe our cars really are.
Well, according to statistics Canada, 18.5% of people in Ottawa take public transit. 22.4% in Toronto, 21.7% in Montreal, 11.5% in Vancouver. Although the percentages are a lot lower in smaller cities, the 4 cities I named make up about a third of the Canadian population as a whole. Public transit can work for a large percentage of the community. These numbers are for 2001, and percentages have gone up since. Public transit may not scale perfectly, but it scales a lot better than everybody owning their own car.
64 Ticket Costs Only $60. That's under 94 cents a ticket. You quoted $1.75 for a BART Ticket. That's a 47% savings. Since when is a 47% savings not much of a discount? I don't really think you have done a good comparison of the costs. BART = $60 a month, SFMuni costs $45 a month, and San Mateo costs $48 a month, = $153 a month. Plus, you can use the SFMuni pass on the BART depending on which stations you get on at. So you may not even have to buy all those passes.
Your kids sports are way too complicated. Just play for a local league where there isn't any travelling involved, its much easier on your kids. Grocery shopping can be done without a car. Either you pick up small loads which can be carried in a back pack, or you could get them delivered by the grocery store, which usually only costs around $5. As for doctors appointments, for healthy people maybe maxing out at 3 per year, is that really worth owning a car?
Ottawa has a transit way which is a road that only the buses can use. It's amazing. Really helps to speed things up. I think the major reason people have such a bad view of buses is because they all stick them on the same roads as the cars, making them slow. When they give the busses their own roads, kind of like the trains having their own tracks, things can move quite quickly.
So, obviously, none of your transit system offer monthly passes. At 9.50 a day, that's $285 a month. I don't know of any public transit system that charges that high of a rate for a monthly pass. It's usually under $100 for most transit systems. A quick look at the BART website shows that you can get deals if you don't buy your tickets one at a time. Plus it's a little more convenient to not have to buy a ticket every time you need one. Also, your 36 minutes in the car that you are driving is 36 minutes in which you can do nothing but drive. If you spend 98 minutes on the bus/train each day, then there's other things you can be doing with your time that you spend commuting. You could even to work, and see if you can bill for the time since you are actually working. Does it really matter that you aren't physically in your office. Plus according to the AAA, driving a car on average costs between $5500-$7000 a year. So maybe you're on the lower end of the average, but I don't think your numbers are that accurate.