The ribbon interface on Microsoft Office is merely obnoxious and overly complex, but having it in Open Office would bring obnoxious to a whole new level of horrid. Scrap the ribbon idea, put down the Crack pipe, and we'll all pretend like it never happened.
I'm going to second (or third) Zebra printers. All configuration is done via regular ASCII codes, they are operating system agnostic, and they last a long time (eight years and counting for the ones I use at work).
The fact that the public would benefit from an operating system market where Linux would be allowed to compete on equals grounds is not relevant to the government because there is no single company making money from Linux.
Do Red Hat, Canonical, Mandriva, IBM, and Hewlett Packard ring a bell? All of those commercial companies make money from selling Linux, along with a host of other companies I haven't listed.
And at least up until now, Microsoft doesn't bundle Windows with hardware. The OEM's do, under economic death sentence from Microsoft (though to be fair, the dumb-ass OEM's helped dig their own holes). The DoJ handed Microsoft its abusive monopoly license back when it allowed Microsoft to pay OEM's for refusing to put anything but Windows on PC's after Microsoft anti-trust victory (despite losing all the battles, Microsoft won the war during the DoJ's conviction reward phase).
but C# and Java are very prominent in enterprise development, and are making huge gains.
When discussing languages with coworkers, I've frequently opined that C# is the best thing to have happened to Java in many years. Java had stagnated for a long time without any competitive threat to its domain, which eventually caused me to stop developing in it entirely and focus on C++/Qt.
A couple years ago, I looked into it again out of curiosity, and saw how far it had come since the introduction of a credible competitor (C#). Swing (it's GUI system, for those who aren't familiar with it) had gotten fast, printing turned from a lame dog into a sports car, and the core language had gained features it lacked until they appeared in C#.
As much as I despise Microsoft, the competition has been fantastic for Java.
Communication is indeed important, but its use will depend on the kind of company you work for. If you're going to work for a small to medium size company, you need to be Dilbert. If you're going to work for a large corporation, you need to be Wally.
Interestingly, this opens the door to biological children from homosexuals couple.
This kind of development would remove the one thing women can't do without men. This might lead to a world where women hold all the cards and make all the decision about who gets sex, and when. Oh, wait....
There's really not much I can add to the great advice sopssa gave you, except to agree with him. If you want to learn to actually write software, then there is no substitute for just diving in and doing something. You'll learn as much from your mistakes as from your successes. You'll also learn a lot from reading other people's code.
Think of something small that you want to accomplish, and then create a program to do it.
I agree, but I'd like to know how you plan to punish them.
That is certainly the problem. It's a "who watches the watchers" conundrum. Congress needs to be punished for many misdeeds, but it's Congress that determines what's punishable. It's no secret how they're going to view this.
When I was young, the back of my social security card has a notice: "Not to be used for identification purposes" (or something similar). When I lost my original card and had to get a replacement, the notice was missing. Our government is solely to blame for allowing the private sector to use social security numbers as identifiers. Congress has had an overabundance of time to pass laws criminalizing the use of social security numbers by the private sector. In my opinion, Congress has been criminally negligent in allowing this to continue for this long.
Social security numbers should be used for one, and only one, purpose: to link an individual to social security benefits. Any other use should be a criminal offense.
> While Ogg Theora is royalty free, there are no -known- patent violations.
The exact same argument can be made for the BSD base Apple uses for OSX. It doesn't matter that BSD went through a long copyright case way back when; both because that case was about copyrights rather than patents, and because unknown patent violations can easily have crept into the code base since then. In fact, I can safely go out on a limb and guarantee that every non-trivial piece of software (including everything Apple has) is violating software patents. Software patents are handed out by the USPTO like Bibles are handed out in prison.
Apple's argument that they won't use Theora because of potential patent problems rings completely hollow. I'm not going to speculate on their motives, but the one they gave is nonsense.
> Something that might get more Americans to ride bicycles.
Americans held back on travel to conserve fuel and cut expenses, resulting in a Federal proclamation that the Government was losing too much money, and new distance-based taxes being created. If too many Americans starting riding bicycles instead of driving cars, the Government would start taxing miles ridden on a bicycle to make up for money lost by people not driving a lot. It's a no-win situation for American tax payers.
Hell, even the car insurance business has a guaranteed tax stream, even from drivers who don't own cars. If you ever had car insurance, you must keep it for the rest of your life or face being put on the "high risk" insurance list. This is the list that convicted drunk drivers are on. When you're on this list, your insurance premiums are astronomical. Even if you no longer have a car, and don't drive, you must keep some form of car insurance or be put on the high risk list. In the distant past, I had lost my job just before my car died. Since I wasn't going to be driving a car for the foreseeable future, I called Allstate and told them I wanted to cancel my car insurance for a while. This is when I found out about all this.
Back to the subject at hand. If we do anything that saves us tax money, our various Governments will find some other taxes to make up the difference.
I use MythTV exclusively for my TV viewing, and I don't even strip out the commercials. Every now and then, there is a good or interesting commercial that I want to see. I do, however, skip through the commercials quickly. It takes my eye a tiny fraction of a second to tell me that I just skipped over something that might be interesting, so I'll go back and check it out. So instead of sitting through an intolerable five minutes of commercials every ten minutes, I sit through about four seconds of commercial material every ten minutes while I fast forward to the continuation of the show I'm watching.
On a related subject, Hulu is starting to become intolerable as well. When I first started using Hulu several months ago, the average commercial length was about 15 seconds every 15-20 minutes. Now it's 30 seconds every 10-15 minutes. Pretty soon, Hulu is going to be just as bad as broadcast and cable TV. The greed has begun.
> Funny, we've been a customer of Microsoft's for 20 years and have yet to experience this "raping" you speak of.
Everything is fine if you're in lock-step with Microsoft's business plans. But try getting out from underneath Microsoft's thumb, and you'll start to understand.
There are many reasons for programmer's block, but here are some things that help me:
1) Get up and walk around.
2) Do something else for a while. My mind is always wandering, providing unexpected answers at unexpected times. Focusing on a completely unrelated task frequently refreshes my ability to think about the original problem, and also frequently causes at least part of the solution to spontaneously present itself.
3) Focus on one small, trivial aspect of one problem. This could be writing just one function that you know will be needed at some point. This will move your project forward, and will eventually get you past your mental block. I find this happening when I have to deal with features that aren't fun to write or think about, but that are crucial to the project. The culprit is usually impatience.
John Carmack is still in charge of development, so it seems likely that OpenGL will continue to be used. The game engines id makes are largely portable, and have good Linux support already, so there's no reason to discontinue the Linux ports.
> Yeah, the real message is that you just don't hand you collection of illegal images over to anyone if you don't want them found.
There's a secondary message in this story, and it doesn't apply just to computers. If you're going to use a piece of equipment for illegal activities, you'd better be able to maintain that equipment yourself. Every time someone else gets access to that equipment, you run the risk of getting caught.
>...[while] the [S]upreme [C]ourt is a judicial body, ruling over a court case.
The U.S. Supreme Court's function is to interpret the U.S. Constitution, not to hear general court cases. The appeal of court cases that involve novel interpretations of the Constitution, and that haven't already been adequately addressed by the Court, may be reviewed by the Court at its sole discretion.
> Apparently, the tech report should have benchmarked their web server before putting this article up.
It's probably more bandwidth related than computer related. When the County first put our sex offender registry online, we had a measly T1 which got saturated by the community within minutes of the local news stations carrying the announcement. Our (low-power at the time) Linux web server registered 0.00 0.00 0.00 loads most of time time. If it wasn't for the server logs expanding rapidly, I wouldn't have thought anything was happening.
> I think it's true that average end user really does come to fear the PC, and, in my experience, their local IT geek by association.
Yes, and for good reason.
> [Average end users] don't care about OpenOffice, or Foxit Reader, or Notepad++
They start to care when the latter are presented as solutions to the former. When users vocalize the reasons they fear the PC, and are presented with Free (or just free) software that reduces or eliminates those reasons, they become a lot more receptive to the alternatives.
Users at my workplace loath Adobe Reader because it causes their already overburdened PC to go even slower while that pig of a program loads. Out of over 600 employees, only two or three do anything more with PDF files than just read them. When informed that Foxit Reader will let them view their PDF files without slowing down their PC, their interest in piqued. When they actually experience the dramatic performance improvement, they are sold.
Users also complain ferociously when Internet Explorer kills Windows or fails to render the department's banking website. The first thing I do is install Firefox, and have them try again. Not only has Firefox worked better in every single case, the users are stunned when I tell them that if Firefox does manage to crash, it won't take the rest of their work with it, unlike Internet Explorer. Another easy sell.
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The ribbon interface on Microsoft Office is merely obnoxious and overly complex, but having it in Open Office would bring obnoxious to a whole new level of horrid. Scrap the ribbon idea, put down the Crack pipe, and we'll all pretend like it never happened.
It's a matter of opinion, as I see GTK and Windows looking ugly and clunky, and Qt/KDE looking beautiful and polished.
I'm going to second (or third) Zebra printers. All configuration is done via regular ASCII codes, they are operating system agnostic, and they last a long time (eight years and counting for the ones I use at work).
The fact that the public would benefit from an operating system market where Linux would be allowed to compete on equals grounds is not relevant to the government because there is no single company making money from Linux.
Do Red Hat, Canonical, Mandriva, IBM, and Hewlett Packard ring a bell? All of those commercial companies make money from selling Linux, along with a host of other companies I haven't listed.
And at least up until now, Microsoft doesn't bundle Windows with hardware. The OEM's do, under economic death sentence from Microsoft (though to be fair, the dumb-ass OEM's helped dig their own holes). The DoJ handed Microsoft its abusive monopoly license back when it allowed Microsoft to pay OEM's for refusing to put anything but Windows on PC's after Microsoft anti-trust victory (despite losing all the battles, Microsoft won the war during the DoJ's conviction reward phase).
but C# and Java are very prominent in enterprise development, and are making huge gains.
When discussing languages with coworkers, I've frequently opined that C# is the best thing to have happened to Java in many years. Java had stagnated for a long time without any competitive threat to its domain, which eventually caused me to stop developing in it entirely and focus on C++/Qt.
A couple years ago, I looked into it again out of curiosity, and saw how far it had come since the introduction of a credible competitor (C#). Swing (it's GUI system, for those who aren't familiar with it) had gotten fast, printing turned from a lame dog into a sports car, and the core language had gained features it lacked until they appeared in C#.
As much as I despise Microsoft, the competition has been fantastic for Java.
Communication is indeed important, but its use will depend on the kind of company you work for. If you're going to work for a small to medium size company, you need to be Dilbert. If you're going to work for a large corporation, you need to be Wally.
Interestingly, this opens the door to biological children from homosexuals couple.
This kind of development would remove the one thing women can't do without men. This might lead to a world where women hold all the cards and make all the decision about who gets sex, and when. Oh, wait....
There's really not much I can add to the great advice sopssa gave you, except to agree with him. If you want to learn to actually write software, then there is no substitute for just diving in and doing something. You'll learn as much from your mistakes as from your successes. You'll also learn a lot from reading other people's code.
Think of something small that you want to accomplish, and then create a program to do it.
I agree, but I'd like to know how you plan to punish them.
That is certainly the problem. It's a "who watches the watchers" conundrum. Congress needs to be punished for many misdeeds, but it's Congress that determines what's punishable. It's no secret how they're going to view this.
When I was young, the back of my social security card has a notice: "Not to be used for identification purposes" (or something similar). When I lost my original card and had to get a replacement, the notice was missing. Our government is solely to blame for allowing the private sector to use social security numbers as identifiers. Congress has had an overabundance of time to pass laws criminalizing the use of social security numbers by the private sector. In my opinion, Congress has been criminally negligent in allowing this to continue for this long.
Social security numbers should be used for one, and only one, purpose: to link an individual to social security benefits. Any other use should be a criminal offense.
> The main issue with Qt was that, up until recently, it was licensed under the LGPL....
Slight correction: until recently, it was licensed under the GPL; but is now licensed under the LGPL.
> While Ogg Theora is royalty free, there are no -known- patent violations.
The exact same argument can be made for the BSD base Apple uses for OSX. It doesn't matter that BSD went through a long copyright case way back when; both because that case was about copyrights rather than patents, and because unknown patent violations can easily have crept into the code base since then. In fact, I can safely go out on a limb and guarantee that every non-trivial piece of software (including everything Apple has) is violating software patents. Software patents are handed out by the USPTO like Bibles are handed out in prison.
Apple's argument that they won't use Theora because of potential patent problems rings completely hollow. I'm not going to speculate on their motives, but the one they gave is nonsense.
> Something that might get more Americans to ride bicycles.
Americans held back on travel to conserve fuel and cut expenses, resulting in a Federal proclamation that the Government was losing too much money, and new distance-based taxes being created. If too many Americans starting riding bicycles instead of driving cars, the Government would start taxing miles ridden on a bicycle to make up for money lost by people not driving a lot. It's a no-win situation for American tax payers.
Hell, even the car insurance business has a guaranteed tax stream, even from drivers who don't own cars. If you ever had car insurance, you must keep it for the rest of your life or face being put on the "high risk" insurance list. This is the list that convicted drunk drivers are on. When you're on this list, your insurance premiums are astronomical. Even if you no longer have a car, and don't drive, you must keep some form of car insurance or be put on the high risk list. In the distant past, I had lost my job just before my car died. Since I wasn't going to be driving a car for the foreseeable future, I called Allstate and told them I wanted to cancel my car insurance for a while. This is when I found out about all this.
Back to the subject at hand. If we do anything that saves us tax money, our various Governments will find some other taxes to make up the difference.
I use MythTV exclusively for my TV viewing, and I don't even strip out the commercials. Every now and then, there is a good or interesting commercial that I want to see. I do, however, skip through the commercials quickly. It takes my eye a tiny fraction of a second to tell me that I just skipped over something that might be interesting, so I'll go back and check it out. So instead of sitting through an intolerable five minutes of commercials every ten minutes, I sit through about four seconds of commercial material every ten minutes while I fast forward to the continuation of the show I'm watching.
On a related subject, Hulu is starting to become intolerable as well. When I first started using Hulu several months ago, the average commercial length was about 15 seconds every 15-20 minutes. Now it's 30 seconds every 10-15 minutes. Pretty soon, Hulu is going to be just as bad as broadcast and cable TV. The greed has begun.
> Funny, we've been a customer of Microsoft's for 20 years and have yet to experience this "raping" you speak of.
Everything is fine if you're in lock-step with Microsoft's business plans. But try getting out from underneath Microsoft's thumb, and you'll start to understand.
There are many reasons for programmer's block, but here are some things that help me:
1) Get up and walk around.
2) Do something else for a while. My mind is always wandering, providing unexpected answers at unexpected times. Focusing on a completely unrelated task frequently refreshes my ability to think about the original problem, and also frequently causes at least part of the solution to spontaneously present itself.
3) Focus on one small, trivial aspect of one problem. This could be writing just one function that you know will be needed at some point. This will move your project forward, and will eventually get you past your mental block. I find this happening when I have to deal with features that aren't fun to write or think about, but that are crucial to the project. The culprit is usually impatience.
I think the "bargain basement" reference was to the value of the information contained on the hard drive, not the hardware itself.
John Carmack is still in charge of development, so it seems likely that OpenGL will continue to be used. The game engines id makes are largely portable, and have good Linux support already, so there's no reason to discontinue the Linux ports.
well certainly Iran is a theocracy
with fake elections
and president selected and ruled by the Ayatollah.
Fixed that for you. You're welcome.
> Instead of explicit.bing.com it should have been bada.bing.com
Or shark.chandler.bing.com
> Yeah, the real message is that you just don't hand you collection of illegal images over to anyone if you don't want them found.
There's a secondary message in this story, and it doesn't apply just to computers. If you're going to use a piece of equipment for illegal activities, you'd better be able to maintain that equipment yourself. Every time someone else gets access to that equipment, you run the risk of getting caught.
> ...[while] the [S]upreme [C]ourt is a judicial body, ruling over a court case.
The U.S. Supreme Court's function is to interpret the U.S. Constitution, not to hear general court cases. The appeal of court cases that involve novel interpretations of the Constitution, and that haven't already been adequately addressed by the Court, may be reviewed by the Court at its sole discretion.
> Apparently, the tech report should have benchmarked their web server before putting this article up.
It's probably more bandwidth related than computer related. When the County first put our sex offender registry online, we had a measly T1 which got saturated by the community within minutes of the local news stations carrying the announcement. Our (low-power at the time) Linux web server registered 0.00 0.00 0.00 loads most of time time. If it wasn't for the server logs expanding rapidly, I wouldn't have thought anything was happening.
> 'Bing is not google' abbreviation seems particularly weird.
But at least it's honest.
I imagine a conversation going something like, "I know Google. Google is a friend of mine. You, BING, are no Google."
> I think it's true that average end user really does come to fear the PC, and, in my experience, their local IT geek by association.
Yes, and for good reason.
> [Average end users] don't care about OpenOffice, or Foxit Reader, or Notepad++
They start to care when the latter are presented as solutions to the former. When users vocalize the reasons they fear the PC, and are presented with Free (or just free) software that reduces or eliminates those reasons, they become a lot more receptive to the alternatives.
Users at my workplace loath Adobe Reader because it causes their already overburdened PC to go even slower while that pig of a program loads. Out of over 600 employees, only two or three do anything more with PDF files than just read them. When informed that Foxit Reader will let them view their PDF files without slowing down their PC, their interest in piqued. When they actually experience the dramatic performance improvement, they are sold.
Users also complain ferociously when Internet Explorer kills Windows or fails to render the department's banking website. The first thing I do is install Firefox, and have them try again. Not only has Firefox worked better in every single case, the users are stunned when I tell them that if Firefox does manage to crash, it won't take the rest of their work with it, unlike Internet Explorer. Another easy sell.