Just to be clear, I think that it IS a good idea for somebody to have a rudimentary knowledge of HTML markup.
Regardless, I don't count on anybody having that knowledge. You liken the concept of HTML to the knowledge of the difference between the clutch and the accelerator. If you base your argument on this comparison, you're correct. However, the comparison is erroneous.
The functioning of a car is dependant on the proper use and understanding of the clutch and accelerator. There is no way to operate a car successfully if you don't know how to use them properly.
On the other hand, a Web page can be successfully navigated without the use of the keyboard at all, much less the need to type HTML tags. A "talkback" section can disallow HTML completely. You can function FOREVER on the Web without knowing how to type HTML tags.
The clutch/accelerator analogy is closer to the Back/Forward buttons on a browser window. Not knowing how to use those will stall you fairly quickly on a typical web site, just like the improper use of a clutch will. A more proper analogy for HTML tags to a car would be the wiring behind the dashboard that makes the radio or the spedometer light up. It's not complicated, and a few days spent studying it will familiarize you with how it works, but is completely unnessecary to the proper operation of the car.
Thus, my argument still stands -- why must we force non-mechanics learn the language of mechanics in order to write simple notes on a Web site?
Let me get this straight -- according to you, you have to have some fundamental level of knowledge to use the web, right? And that fundamental level includes marking up text?
Should you have the same level of restrictions for driving a car? A car is a more complicated machine than a computer is -- it deals with electronics, chemical reactions, etc -- plus, it's more dangerous than a computer. Should we require that drivers know how timing chains work? Or do we just drive the damn car and let mechanics deal with the intricacies of the engine?
If you leave your clients stuck with putting <B> tags in a lame TEXTAREA (a process nobody who's used a word processor newer than WordStar 3 is familiar with), your clients will soon become MY clients, because I try to deal with that very issue.
(However, you're right that I should be using <EM> tags... according to spec. However, nobody thinks in terms of EMPHASIS, they think in terms of BOLD. Thus, <B> tags)
Re:You should feel ill
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Rights or consequences? Maybe I'm out of touch, but how can anybody be astonished when they find out they're pregnant, doing the only thing that will make them that way?
You don't want to get pregnant? There's only one way to be sure of that -- don't have sex. There hasn't been a report of a virgin birth for some 2000 years now...
You want to have sex? Pregnancy is a consequence of that action, even if you take steps to avoid it, so you have to be prepared to accept those consequences.
Liken it to this -- I'm playing with a loaded gun and I blow my hand off. Do I have to right to take away YOUR right to own firearms by fighting for gun control because I'm an idiot? No, and somebody else doesn't have the right to deny another's right to life because it's inconvenient.
(I leave out the "what if she's a rape victim", because statistically, those kinds of abortions are negligible -- mostly it's done (in this country at least) as a form of post-coital birth control)
Raising genetically altered mammals for industrial purposes is cool, but growing industrial hemp is a crime.
This is stupid, I'll agree with you. I'm not willing to call it a conspiracy yet, but I'm sure getting suspicious of the cotton industry...
Custom-designing living beings is all good, but ingesting RU486 in the first trimester is murder.
Be careful here, fella. Are you going to hold animals and humans as equals, since they're both "living beings"? In that case, you had better be prepared to support the consumption of babies as a food source as well.
There are two things wrong with your statement. First, you're not killing the animals, you're changing their essence (in the case of genetic manipulation). Whether that's right or wrong can be argued extensively (and probably will be). In the case of RU486, that [innocent baby || wad of meiotic cells that wouldn't fill a coke spoon] is no longer living, but rather becomes a nasty bit of excretion.
Second (and this is my prejudice, I'll admit up front), you're talking about the wanton execution of a human being! I find it pretty sad that we can exist in a world where it's perfectly okay to perform abortions, which (to me) is the same as smothering babies in their crib, and get incensed when a couple of teenagers go through a school with shotguns shooting people -- and then have the audacity to blame it on the guns.
Well, gee, if it's okay to suck up babies with a vacuum cleaner (or quietly smother them with a pill), why not shoot annoying and troublesome people at your school? Seems logical to me...
Actually, XEmacs has an API by which X apps can embed XEmacs as a text editor. That would be fine with me, I'm a Emacs whore...
However, I do NOT want to run an Emacs key-binding tutorial with each client of mine. "No, see, to make the text bold, you have to have the hm--html elisp package, load it in your.emacs file, and the key binding is [ctrl-x, ctrl-w, b]" I don't have that kind of patience...
I'm talking simple, simple stuff. Bold, italic, headlines. Keep the TEXTAREA, add a new one <FORMATTEXT> , or something similar. You get a textarea-like window, but when you type it shows the text in the font that the stylesheet gives it, you can bold or italicize text, etc.
Actually, something a lot like AOLpress would be nice...
However, I deal with this question every freaking day. People don't want to pay me to maintain their sites, they want administration sections. Fine, I can do that -- I actually prefer it, since I'm not hassled with "there's a misspelling on page 3" phone calls [no, I'm not kidding, I get that all the time]
So, these twinks go into their admin pages, I give 'em a text area to type stuff in (and even try to do nice things like "hit enter twice to make a new paragraph"). Then I'm bombarded with complaints -- "You mean I can't use bold/italic/fonts/font sizes?" Well, yes, but you have to type in (admittedly simple) control characters to do so. "Oh, that sounds complicated -- can I type it in Word and use the Save to the Web feature?"
Here I am, typing into a <TEXTAREA> , a widget so abhominably broken, it only understands the barest rudiments of text editing (hit key, print letter), and they're worried about broken or missing <A> tags.
Come on, people... one of the most common uses of the web these days is to post messages on a weblog-type site (like, oh, Slashdot) -- and there isn't a widget that we can use other than the <TEXTAREA> so normal people can type text in, highlight a few words, and hit a BOLD button? They have to learn to use <B> tags? What is this, 1983?
I'll tell you what -- when there is a web browser that is isn't brainsick, then I'll care about the UI implementation of broken <A> tags...
Remember, there's Age (a chronological measurement), there's Experience (a measure of time spent at at task), and there's Life (no proper metric exists).
Experience is sometimes more than "I've set up sendmail a jillion times!" Sometimes, it's more like "Our CFO hates sendmail. Rather than argue with him over the nits, I'll just install qmail."
Life is a great teacher, and life experience is very valuable. I've seen enough hot-shot teenagers who think they know everything turn into twenty-ish people who suddenly realize how little they know.
Similarly for years I had
problems dating because I kept hanging out in places where there are not many Jewish women.
Just out of curiosity, where DO you go to find Jewish women? (I'm not Jewish, I'm just curious) I can't think of a place where Jewish women tend to congregate.
Of course, the synagogue, but are there Jewish bars like there are gay bars or biker bars or redneck bars?
You completely missed the point of the question! Would it have killed you to just TRY to answer his question? I know you were just going for the 'funny' karma points, but who are the idiots who rated you as insightful?
First, I'm at the karma cap. These points do nothing for me. You're an ass to assume I'm a whore.
Second, I DID answer this guy's question. I believe the education-major eggheads call it "unstructured play time". I just called it "goin' outside" -- I wasn't sophisticated enough as a child to know that what I was doing was "unstructured". (Trust a education major to take the fun out of playing).
The question seemed to imply that only an organized game could fulfill the role s/he was looking for. I wanted to make the point that just goofing around was as beneficial (if not more so) as sitting down around a board game with rules and structure -- even if the game presented some arbitrary metric such as "zero-sum", which I interpret as "non-competitive", regardless of the questioner's beliefs.
He had a fairly well defined question, that should have warranted well defined answers. Next time, when he asks, "Gee, what should I do with my kids?" you can post that bullshit.
Must all questions be answered with "Yes" or "No" or "Parker Bros. 'Zero Sum Game Du Jour'"? If so, Slashdot is due to fall apart pretty soon.
I made my point without hitting you over the head, though it seems that some people are so thick as to not make the connection -- and thus assume I'm karma-whoring. Perhaps I should start parenthetically referencing myself for those too dense to read between the lines and see the point. i.e. [you're an idiot -- stop using a computer before you launch missles at China and start WWIII]
If some people found it Insightful, I'm flattered. If some people found it Funny, I'm similarly flattered. One AC's comment doesn't take that away from me.
I don't remember the exact name, but it consisted of me (and usually, though not always, my brother) going outside.
out * side (Noun): The big room on the other side of the machine room door that sometimes has a blue ceiling with white fluffy things and a bright, hot yellow light, and sometimes has a black ceiling with lots of little lights
The game we played consisted mainly of running and jumping, although we occasionally played a variant where we would lie on the grass and look up.
The object of the game usually was to imagine a new way in which we could save the planet from the meteors and asteroids and alien invaders that were falling down around us. We did occassionally alter the parameters to include in our mandate the destruction of all things Plastic (up to and including Star Wars figures that would now be worth approximately 18 jillion dollars).
While zero-sum, the game could actually produce a winner, if the participants could manage to stay outside after dark long enough to catch fireflies before the referee called for dinner. This happened on rare occasions, but it did occur.
There is an extensive equipment list, however. You need the Silver Surfer's surfboard, a Mega-Lox Rocket Pack, a couple of bazookas, wings, the ability to levitate, and a half dozen tanks. In the event that you're too poor to purchase these, cardboard boxes, unused window screens, and oddly shaped sticks may be substituted at no penalty.
Two things to beware of -- there is a danger that the participants will grow up to be creative thinkers who cherish freedom and independance. Do what you can to squash such desires by allowing the participants to watch as much television as possible, where they will be subjected to fads, trends, and groupthink. The other danger is of incidental damage to Evil Doers Everywhere, Galactic Invaders, and the neighbor's fence.
To berate the government when they use this to control what "the people" see on the Internet
Imagine: a government doing something to help poor people get access to the internet.
Imagine! The first government in the history of the world to do something for purely altruistic reasons!
By the way, if you buy that, I've got this bridge...
I don't trust the Brazilian government (or, any government) to run this kind of program. I predict that within a year or so, assuming this program makes significant in-roads, the cheap, non-free-as-in-speech Internet computer will be serving up some kind of prole-feed to the users. Do you think that anti-governement propoganda will make it's way down that subsidized phone line to the end user? Will the news ticker display headlines such as "Brazilian President caught in flagrante delicto with a mule"?
More likely, it will be a conduit for government propoganda and a shield for the government to hide behind.
You want to help Brazilian citizens get Internet access? Go down to Brazil, open a business and hire people. Teach them to operate a computer, suggest a good brand (local, preferably), help them set it up and give them technical support if they need it.
That's helping somebody -- saying "wow, that Brazilian government is so cool, giving away computers" is NOT helping. It's a coward's way out.
You've got a couple of choices in doing this. The hardware way and the software way. Hardware involves video/audio switchers which are expensive and not really designed to be controlled by touchpads in rooms, tho they could be I suppose. The software is less expensive, but still complicated, since you'd have to be streaming video to each unit. If you're going to a computer, it's easy. If you're going to a TV, it gets harder and more expensive.
The only option I can come up with is a private closed-circuit TV system (similar to the ones hotels have). AFAIK, this requires a special TV if you want to combine internal sources (your personal pr0n collection) and external sources (your Time/Warner cable service).
I suppose you could do it with regular TVs, but now you're talking about a computer at every TV, and that gets expensive and difficult to deal with.
What we need is a Free Software solution for integrating a TV and a computer so that TV manufacturers can add the hardware and use the software for no cost.
Good luck to ya Jason! Someday I shall acquire a titanium powerbook, I shall bask in the glory of your toil. I hope LinuxPPC stays around for a
long time.
Why? That Titanium PB is made for OS X -- try some BSD-lovin, and you'll never go back to the Dark Side of the Source, Linux.
I have to strongly disagree with the notion marketing and management sometimes are to blame as I believe that they are almost always to blame.
...and thus you agree with me. Almost always and sometimes are complementary.
Bad programmer, good programmer, doesn't matter. Sometimes you're faced with a dull and/or stupid project, and you piss around on it, either subconciously or conciously sabatoging it.
There are, of course, some bad programmers out there. And maybe my view is biased because I'm not a bad programmer. But there is certainly a
good supply of bad middle level management out there. This I know.
I'm not denying it. Programmers like to blame management, management likes to blame programmers... it's a sad, tired old story. Sort of a modern day koan.
On your project that you mentioned that took 6 weeks instead of 6 months, buy you got a black mark for it? Was it for completing the job in a timely fashion, or for something else? Could it be because you didn't communicate with your boss about what you were doing?
I got hammered one time because I was working away on something that I was asked to do by a VP in another department. I worked hard and got it finished -- and got nailed for it by MY VP. Internal power games? Maybe. Blind stupid management? Nope. These were smart, talented guys. My VP didn't want me working on stuff for this other VP because things like this screw up the bookkeeping and budgeting -- which, I know, is anathema to nerds, but is a reality and a neccessary evil. You can't run a large corporation, moving thousands of feet in the same general direction, without some kind of standards and guidelines.
Tell you what -- you can trash management when you are in charge of a 150 person department in a fortune 500 company, and know from which you speak. Until then, you're just making gratuitous assertions -- which (logic teaches us) can then be gratuitously denied.
For those of us who code, develop, (or even make graphics) in the workplace, we often do not have the luxury of making our work not suck. The
reasons are threefold:
There is a fourth reason, though wizard programmers tend to pretend that it doesn't exist.
4) Truly amazing procrastination
Hey, I'm not proud of it either -- but it is real and I've seen it in myself and in others. There are some fabulous programmers that I know that will delay starting a project until the last minute possible because they aren't interested in it.
It's an aspect of a prima donna, like a 10-year-old Pac-Man genius (or for you younger guys, swap Mortal Kombat for Pac-Man). Programmers do things that people can barely believe, much less understand, and because of it they are granted more latitude than the guy who sweeps the floor. Floor sweeping is honorable labor, but nobody has any illusion to the difficulty of it. Programming (even simple stuff like whipping up shell scripts for adding users) has an aura of difficulty to it like few other positions.
The poster strikes me as a graphic designer rather than a programmer, which puts him squarely in the "prima donna" category, plus a healthy dollop of pretentiousness.
(Don't get mad at me -- I'm a graphic designer by education and training, a proto-programmer by practice. I can speak with some experience on both sides, and I know a LOT of graphic designers. By their nature, they are, to a man, pretentious in varying degrees -- they must be in order to convice clients that they really DO know that yellow text on a green background is NOT the way to go, regardless of what the client may think)
The end result is that a programmer doesn't like to work on something he finds dull until he's forced into it by the constraints of time. At this point slapdash and haphazzard rule the day. When the project crashes and burns, the time-honored strawmen of "management" and "marketing" are drug out to explain away the poor code or design.
Don't get me wrong -- marketing and management sometimes are to blame (it's another corrollary of programming that M & M tend to think "anything that I don't understand must be easy to do" -- which is patently untrue). But to lug these two boogeymen around in your pocket to wave about whenever DiscoWordWriter fails to perform is to deny the possibility that you, the programmer, didn't do your job.
No job is forever stimulating or even interesting. There are great tracts of desert called Dull-O, Repititious-But-Neccessary, and Being Part Of A Team between you and the end of your career. Sometimes this means manually inserting 200 entries in a database, sometimes filling out time cards, sometimes meeting with marketing and working out a problem with the feature list (without automatically assuming that they're out to get you).
Of course, it's a lot more fun (and easier) to blame somebody else. Hell Scott Adams makes a pretty nice living satairizing Pin The Blame On Management.
For example, to use your example of a poorly designed web site that your boss demanded that you build, going to your boss and saying "This sucks" (or the equivalent) is tantemount to saying "your dick's pretty small". You present a preliminary design as requested as well as a few options, either built from scratch or examples of other, similar sites that you like. Now, instead of questioning the size of his member, you're acknowledging his superiority (in the org chart, if not in reality) by asking his opinion and advice. Will he take it? Maybe, maybe not. If not, you at least know that this is a Turd Project, and thus fast-track it out of your life. If he does realize that there are better options, you have just bronzed that turd. Either way, your boss sees you as a valued employee and person rather than an automaton who spits out code/graphics.
That's part of working on large projects. I'd rather have a mediocre programmer that works with a team and turns out 10 decent projects a year (that can be polished and perfected by better coders) than a wizard who turns out 1 brilliant but completely unmaintainable project who wont work with anybody.
If nothing else, they [The Clinton administration] grasped the
business implications of the Net and Web, and decided to do nothing to impede the new global economy they envisioned and benefited from politically.
Do you think the homeless guy on the street is worried more about entertainment or
his next meal? Boredom or freezing that night? How about those people in the earthquake in El Salvador right now? Boredom? Or, a more mundane
example, the secretary working on a contact list for the marketing division of your favorite corporation?
No, but that homeless guy is begging for money so he can buy a bottle of Ripple. That's entertainment -- or, actually, entertainment's cousin, "escapism".
I submit that most forms of entertainment are really escapism. Escapism from a domineering family, a troubled childhood, a boring job, a pointless suburban existance... the list is endless.
An example that's closer to your grandparents than you, but still enlightening: even in the midst of the Depression in America, people were going to the movies in droves. No accident, either, that this period of time is also considered the "Golden Age" of filmmaking. When people are standing in lines to get a hunk of bread, they're still able to come up with a nickel to go watch the picture show -- if only to forget the drab life which surrounds them.
Re:This might stimulate nerds and developers
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and POW! You've got the religion!
Currently, programmers are about as far removed from the computers they work on as a chimpanzee is from a spider monkey. An end user is an armadillo.
People DON'T think in terms of files and folders -- that's a hold over from filing cabinets where it is the only method to wrangle and organize physical documents. People think in terms of tasks and projects.
If you're working on a project and you remember something you did 2 years ago that you can re-use (or at least build from), you don't say, "It's in that tape we backed up to in the 'Projects for Harold' folder". You say "Didn't we do something similar for Harold a few years ago? Something to do with sand and apricots, I think"
You pull up Harold's info, look through the list of projects done for him, and find one described as "Peachs and Beaches" -- bingo, you've found it.
I don't view that as an advantage. I like the fact that I can get half a dozen good toolkits for X11. And the X11 architecture is good enough to
actually make all that stuff work reasonably well together. Companies like Apple or Microsoft don't even try.
... and this is why you're just now getting anti-aliased fonts in X. And why half of your programs will support it, and half won't.
It's an engineering trade-off. You get flexibility and freedom, you lose concurrency with the state-of-the-art.
(when I state-of-the-art, I mean things like Quicktime/RealPlayer/IE 5.5 not loadable kernel modules)
(plus, odds are such an innovation would come from the ranks of Linux hackers anyway. So
it wouldn't really be turning our backs on Linux, it would be an evolution of OS technology; I suspect Linus himself would be championing such
an OS).
Huh? What makes you say that? Based on the massive and incredible innovation going on now in GNU/Linux?
If you ignore the under-the-hood changes that the kernel hackers have been working on that make the Linux kernel so nice and fast (which may or may not be innovative -- I'm not enough of a propellerhead to know), the past 9 or so years of GNU/Linux development has been catchup to the current state of Unix in general (here I'm thinking Solaris, HP/UX, IRIX).
Netatalk and Samba are great, but what are they? Reverse engineering of protocols ages old.
Gnome? KDE? Very nice toolkits for building apps -- almost as good as Openstep, which is what -- 9 years old itself? And not nearly as easy to learn and use as Hypercard (15 years old now?)
StarOffice, Applix -- WYSIWYG document editing is 1984 technology, man. The Gimp? Photoshop, late '80s.
Apache? Well, now you're talking -- the Free Software/Open Source poster child sets the standard for fast, reliable web serving -- but Linux hackers didn't make Apache. Apache hackers did. For Unix in general, not Linux.
Linux is great, no doubt -- though I'm a BSD guy myself -- but it's not innovative, but derivative. That's not a slam -- MS got to where it is today by being a company that excels in making derivative products. It's hard to be innovative when you're still trying to get the basics down (remember Malda on "Geeks in Space" gushing over antialiased fonts in X? Crikey, it's been around for YEARS on the Mac...)
Your primary argument (i.e., Linux will always be around) is absolutely true. My difference in opinion is that Linux hackers will be the cauldron from which will spring the Next Big Thing.
(Please notice that I do not think that collaborative programming, "Open Source programming", is the fault nor a bad thing. The method by which Linux is derived is not the issue, just the fact that Linux is still in the catch-up phase)
Re:This might stimulate nerds and developers
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Good point -- didn't think about being able to use the "Find" function of an OS.
However, how is this better than a dedicated web app for HR flacks?
Find your favorite non-computer-literate person and see if they even KNOW that there's a "Find Files and Folders" in their Start menu? (I'm assuming a Windows-centric office here)
Like I said, I think it's cool and potentially useful, but probably not as useful for non-nerds
Re:A real world use for this
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I've never been thrilled with the performance of storing LOBs in any kind of DB -- Oracle, PostgreSQL, or MySQL. The plain-old filesystem tends to do it better and faster. I usually store the path to an object in the DB instead.
That being said, I have used the LOB stoage in Postgres to implement a versioning system for in-house work (and it worked well enough to prove to me that it's do-able, but not well enough to actually use). The concept is sound, but the implementation needs some work.
However, using a DB's LOB is a helluva lot better than using CVS for binary objects. CVS seems afflicted with unseemly memory bloat when checking in/out large binary objects...
Slashdot Mirror
Just to be clear, I think that it IS a good idea for somebody to have a rudimentary knowledge of HTML markup.
Regardless, I don't count on anybody having that knowledge. You liken the concept of HTML to the knowledge of the difference between the clutch and the accelerator. If you base your argument on this comparison, you're correct. However, the comparison is erroneous.
The functioning of a car is dependant on the proper use and understanding of the clutch and accelerator. There is no way to operate a car successfully if you don't know how to use them properly.
On the other hand, a Web page can be successfully navigated without the use of the keyboard at all, much less the need to type HTML tags. A "talkback" section can disallow HTML completely. You can function FOREVER on the Web without knowing how to type HTML tags.
The clutch/accelerator analogy is closer to the Back/Forward buttons on a browser window. Not knowing how to use those will stall you fairly quickly on a typical web site, just like the improper use of a clutch will. A more proper analogy for HTML tags to a car would be the wiring behind the dashboard that makes the radio or the spedometer light up. It's not complicated, and a few days spent studying it will familiarize you with how it works, but is completely unnessecary to the proper operation of the car.
Thus, my argument still stands -- why must we force non-mechanics learn the language of mechanics in order to write simple notes on a Web site?
Let me get this straight -- according to you, you have to have some fundamental level of knowledge to use the web, right? And that fundamental level includes marking up text?
Should you have the same level of restrictions for driving a car? A car is a more complicated machine than a computer is -- it deals with electronics, chemical reactions, etc -- plus, it's more dangerous than a computer. Should we require that drivers know how timing chains work? Or do we just drive the damn car and let mechanics deal with the intricacies of the engine?
If you leave your clients stuck with putting <B> tags in a lame TEXTAREA (a process nobody who's used a word processor newer than WordStar 3 is familiar with), your clients will soon become MY clients, because I try to deal with that very issue.
(However, you're right that I should be using <EM> tags... according to spec. However, nobody thinks in terms of EMPHASIS, they think in terms of BOLD. Thus, <B> tags)
Rights or consequences? Maybe I'm out of touch, but how can anybody be astonished when they find out they're pregnant, doing the only thing that will make them that way?
You don't want to get pregnant? There's only one way to be sure of that -- don't have sex. There hasn't been a report of a virgin birth for some 2000 years now...
You want to have sex? Pregnancy is a consequence of that action, even if you take steps to avoid it, so you have to be prepared to accept those consequences.
Liken it to this -- I'm playing with a loaded gun and I blow my hand off. Do I have to right to take away YOUR right to own firearms by fighting for gun control because I'm an idiot? No, and somebody else doesn't have the right to deny another's right to life because it's inconvenient.
(I leave out the "what if she's a rape victim", because statistically, those kinds of abortions are negligible -- mostly it's done (in this country at least) as a form of post-coital birth control)
This is stupid, I'll agree with you. I'm not willing to call it a conspiracy yet, but I'm sure getting suspicious of the cotton industry...
Be careful here, fella. Are you going to hold animals and humans as equals, since they're both "living beings"? In that case, you had better be prepared to support the consumption of babies as a food source as well.
There are two things wrong with your statement. First, you're not killing the animals, you're changing their essence (in the case of genetic manipulation). Whether that's right or wrong can be argued extensively (and probably will be). In the case of RU486, that [innocent baby || wad of meiotic cells that wouldn't fill a coke spoon] is no longer living, but rather becomes a nasty bit of excretion.
Second (and this is my prejudice, I'll admit up front), you're talking about the wanton execution of a human being! I find it pretty sad that we can exist in a world where it's perfectly okay to perform abortions, which (to me) is the same as smothering babies in their crib, and get incensed when a couple of teenagers go through a school with shotguns shooting people -- and then have the audacity to blame it on the guns.
Well, gee, if it's okay to suck up babies with a vacuum cleaner (or quietly smother them with a pill), why not shoot annoying and troublesome people at your school? Seems logical to me...
Actually, XEmacs has an API by which X apps can embed XEmacs as a text editor. That would be fine with me, I'm a Emacs whore...
However, I do NOT want to run an Emacs key-binding tutorial with each client of mine. "No, see, to make the text bold, you have to have the hm--html elisp package, load it in your .emacs file, and the key binding is [ctrl-x, ctrl-w, b]" I don't have that kind of patience...
I'm talking simple, simple stuff. Bold, italic, headlines. Keep the TEXTAREA, add a new one <FORMATTEXT> , or something similar. You get a textarea-like window, but when you type it shows the text in the font that the stylesheet gives it, you can bold or italicize text, etc.
Actually, something a lot like AOLpress would be nice...
I wish I could be that way...
However, I deal with this question every freaking day. People don't want to pay me to maintain their sites, they want administration sections. Fine, I can do that -- I actually prefer it, since I'm not hassled with "there's a misspelling on page 3" phone calls [no, I'm not kidding, I get that all the time]
So, these twinks go into their admin pages, I give 'em a text area to type stuff in (and even try to do nice things like "hit enter twice to make a new paragraph"). Then I'm bombarded with complaints -- "You mean I can't use bold/italic/fonts/font sizes?" Well, yes, but you have to type in (admittedly simple) control characters to do so. "Oh, that sounds complicated -- can I type it in Word and use the Save to the Web feature?"
Ye gods and little fishes...
Here I am, typing into a <TEXTAREA> , a widget so abhominably broken, it only understands the barest rudiments of text editing (hit key, print letter), and they're worried about broken or missing <A> tags.
Come on, people... one of the most common uses of the web these days is to post messages on a weblog-type site (like, oh, Slashdot) -- and there isn't a widget that we can use other than the <TEXTAREA> so normal people can type text in, highlight a few words, and hit a BOLD button? They have to learn to use <B> tags? What is this, 1983?
I'll tell you what -- when there is a web browser that is isn't brainsick, then I'll care about the UI implementation of broken <A> tags...
Remember, there's Age (a chronological measurement), there's Experience (a measure of time spent at at task), and there's Life (no proper metric exists).
Experience is sometimes more than "I've set up sendmail a jillion times!" Sometimes, it's more like "Our CFO hates sendmail. Rather than argue with him over the nits, I'll just install qmail."
Life is a great teacher, and life experience is very valuable. I've seen enough hot-shot teenagers who think they know everything turn into twenty-ish people who suddenly realize how little they know.
Just out of curiosity, where DO you go to find Jewish women? (I'm not Jewish, I'm just curious) I can't think of a place where Jewish women tend to congregate.
Of course, the synagogue, but are there Jewish bars like there are gay bars or biker bars or redneck bars?
Wow, did you ever miss the point...
First, I'm at the karma cap. These points do nothing for me. You're an ass to assume I'm a whore.
Second, I DID answer this guy's question. I believe the education-major eggheads call it "unstructured play time". I just called it "goin' outside" -- I wasn't sophisticated enough as a child to know that what I was doing was "unstructured". (Trust a education major to take the fun out of playing).
The question seemed to imply that only an organized game could fulfill the role s/he was looking for. I wanted to make the point that just goofing around was as beneficial (if not more so) as sitting down around a board game with rules and structure -- even if the game presented some arbitrary metric such as "zero-sum", which I interpret as "non-competitive", regardless of the questioner's beliefs.
Must all questions be answered with "Yes" or "No" or "Parker Bros. 'Zero Sum Game Du Jour'"? If so, Slashdot is due to fall apart pretty soon.
I made my point without hitting you over the head, though it seems that some people are so thick as to not make the connection -- and thus assume I'm karma-whoring. Perhaps I should start parenthetically referencing myself for those too dense to read between the lines and see the point. i.e. [you're an idiot -- stop using a computer before you launch missles at China and start WWIII]
If some people found it Insightful, I'm flattered. If some people found it Funny, I'm similarly flattered. One AC's comment doesn't take that away from me.
I don't remember the exact name, but it consisted of me (and usually, though not always, my brother) going outside.
The game we played consisted mainly of running and jumping, although we occasionally played a variant where we would lie on the grass and look up.
The object of the game usually was to imagine a new way in which we could save the planet from the meteors and asteroids and alien invaders that were falling down around us. We did occassionally alter the parameters to include in our mandate the destruction of all things Plastic (up to and including Star Wars figures that would now be worth approximately 18 jillion dollars).
While zero-sum, the game could actually produce a winner, if the participants could manage to stay outside after dark long enough to catch fireflies before the referee called for dinner. This happened on rare occasions, but it did occur.
There is an extensive equipment list, however. You need the Silver Surfer's surfboard, a Mega-Lox Rocket Pack, a couple of bazookas, wings, the ability to levitate, and a half dozen tanks. In the event that you're too poor to purchase these, cardboard boxes, unused window screens, and oddly shaped sticks may be substituted at no penalty.
Two things to beware of -- there is a danger that the participants will grow up to be creative thinkers who cherish freedom and independance. Do what you can to squash such desires by allowing the participants to watch as much television as possible, where they will be subjected to fads, trends, and groupthink. The other danger is of incidental damage to Evil Doers Everywhere, Galactic Invaders, and the neighbor's fence.
To berate the government when they use this to control what "the people" see on the Internet
Imagine! The first government in the history of the world to do something for purely altruistic reasons!
By the way, if you buy that, I've got this bridge...
I don't trust the Brazilian government (or, any government) to run this kind of program. I predict that within a year or so, assuming this program makes significant in-roads, the cheap, non-free-as-in-speech Internet computer will be serving up some kind of prole-feed to the users. Do you think that anti-governement propoganda will make it's way down that subsidized phone line to the end user? Will the news ticker display headlines such as "Brazilian President caught in flagrante delicto with a mule"?
More likely, it will be a conduit for government propoganda and a shield for the government to hide behind.
You want to help Brazilian citizens get Internet access? Go down to Brazil, open a business and hire people. Teach them to operate a computer, suggest a good brand (local, preferably), help them set it up and give them technical support if they need it.
That's helping somebody -- saying "wow, that Brazilian government is so cool, giving away computers" is NOT helping. It's a coward's way out.
You've got a couple of choices in doing this. The hardware way and the software way. Hardware involves video/audio switchers which are expensive and not really designed to be controlled by touchpads in rooms, tho they could be I suppose. The software is less expensive, but still complicated, since you'd have to be streaming video to each unit. If you're going to a computer, it's easy. If you're going to a TV, it gets harder and more expensive.
The only option I can come up with is a private closed-circuit TV system (similar to the ones hotels have). AFAIK, this requires a special TV if you want to combine internal sources (your personal pr0n collection) and external sources (your Time/Warner cable service).
I suppose you could do it with regular TVs, but now you're talking about a computer at every TV, and that gets expensive and difficult to deal with.
What we need is a Free Software solution for integrating a TV and a computer so that TV manufacturers can add the hardware and use the software for no cost.
ü or Ü
that's:
ü or ÜTaco hath said:
Why? That Titanium PB is made for OS X -- try some BSD-lovin, and you'll never go back to the Dark Side of the Source, Linux.
(gentlemen, start your flamethrowers!)
...and thus you agree with me. Almost always and sometimes are complementary.
Bad programmer, good programmer, doesn't matter. Sometimes you're faced with a dull and/or stupid project, and you piss around on it, either subconciously or conciously sabatoging it.
I'm not denying it. Programmers like to blame management, management likes to blame programmers... it's a sad, tired old story. Sort of a modern day koan.
On your project that you mentioned that took 6 weeks instead of 6 months, buy you got a black mark for it? Was it for completing the job in a timely fashion, or for something else? Could it be because you didn't communicate with your boss about what you were doing?
I got hammered one time because I was working away on something that I was asked to do by a VP in another department. I worked hard and got it finished -- and got nailed for it by MY VP. Internal power games? Maybe. Blind stupid management? Nope. These were smart, talented guys. My VP didn't want me working on stuff for this other VP because things like this screw up the bookkeeping and budgeting -- which, I know, is anathema to nerds, but is a reality and a neccessary evil. You can't run a large corporation, moving thousands of feet in the same general direction, without some kind of standards and guidelines.
Tell you what -- you can trash management when you are in charge of a 150 person department in a fortune 500 company, and know from which you speak. Until then, you're just making gratuitous assertions -- which (logic teaches us) can then be gratuitously denied.
There is a fourth reason, though wizard programmers tend to pretend that it doesn't exist.
4) Truly amazing procrastination
Hey, I'm not proud of it either -- but it is real and I've seen it in myself and in others. There are some fabulous programmers that I know that will delay starting a project until the last minute possible because they aren't interested in it.
It's an aspect of a prima donna, like a 10-year-old Pac-Man genius (or for you younger guys, swap Mortal Kombat for Pac-Man). Programmers do things that people can barely believe, much less understand, and because of it they are granted more latitude than the guy who sweeps the floor. Floor sweeping is honorable labor, but nobody has any illusion to the difficulty of it. Programming (even simple stuff like whipping up shell scripts for adding users) has an aura of difficulty to it like few other positions.
The poster strikes me as a graphic designer rather than a programmer, which puts him squarely in the "prima donna" category, plus a healthy dollop of pretentiousness.
(Don't get mad at me -- I'm a graphic designer by education and training, a proto-programmer by practice. I can speak with some experience on both sides, and I know a LOT of graphic designers. By their nature, they are, to a man, pretentious in varying degrees -- they must be in order to convice clients that they really DO know that yellow text on a green background is NOT the way to go, regardless of what the client may think)
The end result is that a programmer doesn't like to work on something he finds dull until he's forced into it by the constraints of time. At this point slapdash and haphazzard rule the day. When the project crashes and burns, the time-honored strawmen of "management" and "marketing" are drug out to explain away the poor code or design.
Don't get me wrong -- marketing and management sometimes are to blame (it's another corrollary of programming that M & M tend to think "anything that I don't understand must be easy to do" -- which is patently untrue). But to lug these two boogeymen around in your pocket to wave about whenever DiscoWordWriter fails to perform is to deny the possibility that you, the programmer, didn't do your job.
No job is forever stimulating or even interesting. There are great tracts of desert called Dull-O, Repititious-But-Neccessary, and Being Part Of A Team between you and the end of your career. Sometimes this means manually inserting 200 entries in a database, sometimes filling out time cards, sometimes meeting with marketing and working out a problem with the feature list (without automatically assuming that they're out to get you).
Of course, it's a lot more fun (and easier) to blame somebody else. Hell Scott Adams makes a pretty nice living satairizing Pin The Blame On Management.
For example, to use your example of a poorly designed web site that your boss demanded that you build, going to your boss and saying "This sucks" (or the equivalent) is tantemount to saying "your dick's pretty small". You present a preliminary design as requested as well as a few options, either built from scratch or examples of other, similar sites that you like. Now, instead of questioning the size of his member, you're acknowledging his superiority (in the org chart, if not in reality) by asking his opinion and advice. Will he take it? Maybe, maybe not. If not, you at least know that this is a Turd Project, and thus fast-track it out of your life. If he does realize that there are better options, you have just bronzed that turd. Either way, your boss sees you as a valued employee and person rather than an automaton who spits out code/graphics.
That's part of working on large projects. I'd rather have a mediocre programmer that works with a team and turns out 10 decent projects a year (that can be polished and perfected by better coders) than a wizard who turns out 1 brilliant but completely unmaintainable project who wont work with anybody.
They seemed to be grasping more than implications 'round the West Wing
"You mean I can get pictures of Britney Spears nekkid? That there Inter-web-thingy is great!"
... so kernel hackers may be seeing some patch submissions from "nokia.com" addresses in the near future.
No, but that homeless guy is begging for money so he can buy a bottle of Ripple. That's entertainment -- or, actually, entertainment's cousin, "escapism".
I submit that most forms of entertainment are really escapism. Escapism from a domineering family, a troubled childhood, a boring job, a pointless suburban existance... the list is endless.
An example that's closer to your grandparents than you, but still enlightening: even in the midst of the Depression in America, people were going to the movies in droves. No accident, either, that this period of time is also considered the "Golden Age" of filmmaking. When people are standing in lines to get a hunk of bread, they're still able to come up with a nickel to go watch the picture show -- if only to forget the drab life which surrounds them.
and POW! You've got the religion!
Currently, programmers are about as far removed from the computers they work on as a chimpanzee is from a spider monkey. An end user is an armadillo.
People DON'T think in terms of files and folders -- that's a hold over from filing cabinets where it is the only method to wrangle and organize physical documents. People think in terms of tasks and projects.
If you're working on a project and you remember something you did 2 years ago that you can re-use (or at least build from), you don't say, "It's in that tape we backed up to in the 'Projects for Harold' folder". You say "Didn't we do something similar for Harold a few years ago? Something to do with sand and apricots, I think"
You pull up Harold's info, look through the list of projects done for him, and find one described as "Peachs and Beaches" -- bingo, you've found it.
... and this is why you're just now getting anti-aliased fonts in X. And why half of your programs will support it, and half won't.
It's an engineering trade-off. You get flexibility and freedom, you lose concurrency with the state-of-the-art.
(when I state-of-the-art, I mean things like Quicktime/RealPlayer/IE 5.5 not loadable kernel modules)
Huh? What makes you say that? Based on the massive and incredible innovation going on now in GNU/Linux?
If you ignore the under-the-hood changes that the kernel hackers have been working on that make the Linux kernel so nice and fast (which may or may not be innovative -- I'm not enough of a propellerhead to know), the past 9 or so years of GNU/Linux development has been catchup to the current state of Unix in general (here I'm thinking Solaris, HP/UX, IRIX).
Netatalk and Samba are great, but what are they? Reverse engineering of protocols ages old.
Gnome? KDE? Very nice toolkits for building apps -- almost as good as Openstep, which is what -- 9 years old itself? And not nearly as easy to learn and use as Hypercard (15 years old now?)
StarOffice, Applix -- WYSIWYG document editing is 1984 technology, man. The Gimp? Photoshop, late '80s.
Apache? Well, now you're talking -- the Free Software/Open Source poster child sets the standard for fast, reliable web serving -- but Linux hackers didn't make Apache. Apache hackers did. For Unix in general, not Linux.
Linux is great, no doubt -- though I'm a BSD guy myself -- but it's not innovative, but derivative. That's not a slam -- MS got to where it is today by being a company that excels in making derivative products. It's hard to be innovative when you're still trying to get the basics down (remember Malda on "Geeks in Space" gushing over antialiased fonts in X? Crikey, it's been around for YEARS on the Mac...)
Your primary argument (i.e., Linux will always be around) is absolutely true. My difference in opinion is that Linux hackers will be the cauldron from which will spring the Next Big Thing.
(Please notice that I do not think that collaborative programming, "Open Source programming", is the fault nor a bad thing. The method by which Linux is derived is not the issue, just the fact that Linux is still in the catch-up phase)
Good point -- didn't think about being able to use the "Find" function of an OS.
However, how is this better than a dedicated web app for HR flacks?
Find your favorite non-computer-literate person and see if they even KNOW that there's a "Find Files and Folders" in their Start menu? (I'm assuming a Windows-centric office here)
Like I said, I think it's cool and potentially useful, but probably not as useful for non-nerds
I've never been thrilled with the performance of storing LOBs in any kind of DB -- Oracle, PostgreSQL, or MySQL. The plain-old filesystem tends to do it better and faster. I usually store the path to an object in the DB instead.
That being said, I have used the LOB stoage in Postgres to implement a versioning system for in-house work (and it worked well enough to prove to me that it's do-able, but not well enough to actually use). The concept is sound, but the implementation needs some work.
However, using a DB's LOB is a helluva lot better than using CVS for binary objects. CVS seems afflicted with unseemly memory bloat when checking in/out large binary objects...