Don't underestimate the power of vi and a makefile. They're actually powerful tools. Although I strongly recommend coupling them with version control, bug tracking, unit testing, and in an ideal world continuous integration testing.
I'm 40 myself. I love coding. I had to learn a couple of new languages last year.
But I'm finding now that it's a better use of my time to train the new guys to do the job I was doing last year. More work is getting done. The painful lessons I learned last year, I'm teaching to the new guys this year. So instead of one guy doing that job, there are now four guys doing it, and it's getting done faster, and possibly better, because at least a couple of them are smarter than I am (really, that's a low threshold).
So, genius boy, you got any suggestions for things to counteract a decade of the nation's major industry slowly failing? The old Big 3 have been dying for at least that long, and most of the dying has been done in Michigan, because that's where most of the industry was.
You want her to run the car companies better, even though they're private businesses? Magically pull a new industry that accounts for 10% of the nation's jobs out of thin air?
Obviously, as a conservative you're smarter than everybody else in the room. So please enlighten us about how this should have been handled.
Ripping on a system just because you don't play it isn't very nice man. Chill out. Lots of people are having fun with GURPS, just like they're having fun with D&D. Don't let your ego get hurt just because not everybody likes the same games you do. It's like a Harley rider getting upset because there are people out there riding Hondas. Kind of pointless, because you've got a lot more in common than folks who don't do table top gaming at all.
Man, there's no need to go running down somebody's game. I haven't played D&D in years, and I love GURPS and some other systems a lot more. But folks are playing D&D, having fun and not hurting anybody. Be cool about it. They might not have fun with GURPS either. At least they're playing.
I've bought a lot of PDF only products from Steve Jackson Games. Partially because I was picking up things that were out of print, and partially because for GM-only reference material, PDF documents are easier for me to handle when I'm prepping for a game.
Their e23 store has become a major part of their business, and they have pledged to keep downloads available as long as the company still has its doors open. That's saved my bacon a couple of times, like when the USB stick I kept my books on got fried by a faulty device on the USB Bus.
If you don't mind learning a new system, and you really want to get back to that old-school dungeon crawling feeling that a good D&D game can give you, you might check out their Dungeon Fantasy line of products. It's not for everybody, but there's a pretty big community of people who are getting their rocks off smashing monsters and taking their loot.
I think maybe you've been doing it wrong. Munchkin gets a lot of play around these parts. I know a couple of friends in different gaming groups who make it pretty much a weekly thing. For one group, they don't consider their session finished until they've played at least one game of Munchkin.
To be fair, this team produced an excellent game in Serenity that doesn't really restrict the players or the game masters. My group has been playing this game for a while and we've had an excellent run of it. We've had problems with licensed games in the past (or at least, I have), but we aren't running into any of those problems here. I think that Margaret Weis and Jamie Chambers have worked out a few of the problems that tend to come with licensed games.
It's been a long time since any of their PostgreSQL statements were true. It's a very happy native windows service with a nice installer, and the administrative interface is very easy to use.
Let's try posting current reviews of software, rather than reruns from a year or two ago.
You make a lot of noise in the add about how cool you are, but it seemed to be all sizzle and no steak.
1. List the salary range you're willing to pay. You already know what you're willing to pay. You're gonna ask the developer what they need. Instead of playing this kind of guessing game, cut the bull and say what you're willing to pay. If you have any objections to doing this, pack it up and go home now. If I have to play this kind of game to get in the door, it indicates that there are going to be a lot of other games that I'll have to play once I get the job. Frankly I can get corporate BS games anywhere--I want to work at the place where I don't have to play them.
2. Tell people what's cool about the project and the company. Not empty buzzwords, but real information. If my eyes glaze as soon as I've seen the text, I've just lumped you into the bin with the 50 other employers that I'm not going to consider.
3. Consider your public image. Sourceforge isn't exactly the model of responsiveness or stability. That doesn't make you a "cool" company, it screams at the top of its lungs that there are serious problems. It's going to be very hard to attract people based on your reputation.
Instead of posting a job on your site, start actively recruiting individual developers. Find people who do work that you like. Offer them good projects and insane cash. The type of programmer you're claiming you're after is rare, and it's unlikely that they're just going to casually stroll by your site and see what you have open. You need to make face to face contact, or at minimum via email or the phone. Don't expect them to come to you, because they won't.
For the first two weeks I looked like I went to a knife fight but forgot my knife, partially because my hands aren't very steady. For the last eight years, it's been the closest, smoothest shave I've ever had. The long blade minimizes the opportunities for nicks and I don't think it's ever given me razor burn. You can buy very expensive hollow-ground blades on the internet, or you can go to the local beauty supply store and pick one up for $8, and $10 for a couple of years worth of blades. Fair warning though, it's called a Hair Shaper, because apparently straight razors scare the bejezus out of people.
You may have read more into my comment than was actually there. I don't actually assert that PHP should move, but that if they keep loosing developers they might want to, especially if they see it as hurting the project. I'm not sure how possible that would actually be, since one of the founders and a principal driver of the project is Israeli, and I doubt that he would be willing to move to another country and renounce his citizenship.
Independent of whether Israel is right or wrong in their actions, Jani's feelings on the matter are fairly reasonable. A non-combatant countryman, a fellow serviceman, someone from the same post where he was stationed at one time, was killed by the Israelis. Being torqued off is a pretty reasonable response. By the same right that Israel has to self defense, the Finish military could justify stomping the Israelis. Fortunately cooler heads seem to reign in Finland and Canada. Hopefully they do in China as well, because there's a lot of Chinese in uniform.
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that this entire discussion is entirely off topic. It's also very non-productive. Whether or not Israel/Lebanon is full of bad people who make bad decisions or the chosen people of God who have divine right to this land isn't really relevant to the PHP project.
If you want to fight this fight, go find a Jew or an Arab directly involved in the fight and have it out with them. Privately. Not here. Not in the PHP project mailing list. Jan did the right thing: he had a problem with the people behind the project, so he left. He's not dragging the project down. He's not making a lot of noise over nothing. He's letting the people who don't have a problem get on with doing their thing.
More like nobody wants to acknowledge the gigantic elephant in the middle of that particular room. If the IRC logs are to be believed this is directly related to international politics. PHP and Zend are directly tied to Israel. Jan had very real, very personal reasons for not wanting to be associated with Israelis, so he bolted. Personally I can't blame him. There's a lot of hatred towards Israel right now, and they've gone out of their way to earn it. Most likely, nobody else on the project really wants to step into that mess. The internal developers' mailing list really isn't the place for international politics, and no good will come of discussing it there.
There may be more defections in the future for similar reasons. If that becomes a real problem then it might be a good idea to move the project's home and affiliations to a more neutral country like Canada or Germany, although at the moment I don't think that Canada is full of warm and fuzzy feelings for Israel either.
Linuxtown, that sad raggedy old neighborhood? Anybody got any style at all, any pretensions to being a bad mf(1), done left that dullsville a long time ago. Dudes live down on FreeBSD street treat them Linux boys real nice(1), right before they chown(2) their files and make off with their fortune(6). Walk down on OpenBSD avenue they stick a fork(2) in you, cause their firewall make you go pf(4). kill(2) you soon as look(1) at you, they think you don't belong there.
Could you please point out where in the article or on the web site where this is marked as Alpha? It has a version number of 2.6.2, which is way past the alpha stage. Nothing I could find in the article or on the web site indicated an alpha status. Given the advanced release number and the lack of an alpha indication, I had high hopes of finding a Windows app that worked as well as it does on UNIX. Other ports such as The Gimp, Scribus and OpenOffice have conditioned me to expect such things.
I sincerely hope that the port effort does get some steam behind it and produces something really polished and solid. I don't like Outlook, but I would like some of the features like the calendar. Evolution on Win32 would solve that problem for me. Switching to UNIX isn't an option either, since I'm a windows application developer by day. So a solid, working Evolution port is my best hope.
Here's to hoping that the Evolution team gets a successful port out!
which apparently some people mistake for an X server, huh, how clueless can one be?
When that wrapper executable is named "StartX.exe", which is pretty similar to the X initialization script on my three unix machines, I'm prone to thinking that it's probably an X server. Since no source was provided, and none of the apps appeared to do anything, it was rather difficult to determine what it was. Therefor, much like I would expect firefox.exe to start a web browser instead of a word processor, I assume by the one piece of evidence that I do have that the file will launch an X server. Should I then also assume that evolution-2.6.exe is something different, such as a C++ compiler? If so, that could be the root of my problem, since I had been under the impression that it was a well-respected email client.
I downloaded and installed. Checked the md5 checksums out of a sense of paranoia.
The application that was installed was essentially crap. Once I resolved the path issues, the program started without errors, but even after a couple of hours there's no actual window on my screen from this. I was also thoroughly unimpressed by the fact that it by default wants to start an X server on my windows machine.
My thought here is that the Evolution developers might want to consider bringing an actual experienced Windows developer onto their team. This app does not come anywhere close to demonstrating that open source apps are ready for prime time. It reinforces stereotypes about shoddy software and a lack of understanding about real world business needs.
My recommendation: the Evolution team mothballs this port until they can use an interface toolkit that looks native, and they understand the issues surrounding Windows application deployment. Evolution is a good solid application on Linux, but the Windows port was sorely disappointing.
Look, it's likely that the Chinese really are out to get us. Infiltration through industrial means is a common, time honored practice. Any good patriot would be happy to do a little service for his government, especially if there isn't a lot of chance of getting caught. A modified wifi driver would be pretty easy to insert, say one that would transmit key data when it received a certain signal, and otherwise remained inert.
Realistically, what kind of deterrent do you have to rape in prison? You can put the guy in jail. Except that he's already there, so I don't see a lot of deterent power when the best you've got is "things stay the same".
It would also require the victim testifying against a fellow inmate. I haven't been in prison myself, but from the guys I've talked to who have been inside, that's a pretty good way to sign your own death sentence.
You seem pretty exercised about this issue. Do you have some proposed remedy that will work in the real world? "Do everything they can" isn't a solution, it's a plea. What are real solutions that will work? Taking funding into account, because the cost of the justice system is very high, and increasing taxes to pay for these services is a very hard thing to do. The state legislature put into the position of funding to make prisons safer and more comfortable, or funding health care for the indigent, isn't likely to side with the prisoners and neither is their electorate.
I'm not trying to belittle you here. If you're this concerned, it's likely that you are aware of some remedy that will at least start to help. What have you got to offer?
Try to put yourself in the shoes of someone convicted of a crime. You were falsely accused, or you bought a bunch of marijuana or you did not know you were breaking one of the millions of laws no one really knows about.
On what grounds are you making the rash assumption that I'm not familiar with the defendent's side of the U.S. justice system? I can tell you from direct personal experience that it's no fun to get caught up in it.
I don't think that you'll find any court including sodomy as part of the sentencing. It's just a fact of life in U.S. prisons, much like the fact that he's going to get beat up. Here's a hint: he's locked up with a lot of bad people, so we can expect bad things will happen to him there. Nobody got to prison by being well behaved.
You seem to have some notion that there's something the justice system should do to treat this person as special while he's in prison. He's special, just like everyone else. Which is why the state would be good enough to afford him meals, a roof over his head, and something resembling health care in exchange for keeping him off the street and prevent him from causing more trouble for people who haven't been convicted of crimes.
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Don't underestimate the power of vi and a makefile. They're actually powerful tools. Although I strongly recommend coupling them with version control, bug tracking, unit testing, and in an ideal world continuous integration testing.
Selling firewalls that block the Big Brother connection.
I'm 40 myself. I love coding. I had to learn a couple of new languages last year. But I'm finding now that it's a better use of my time to train the new guys to do the job I was doing last year. More work is getting done. The painful lessons I learned last year, I'm teaching to the new guys this year. So instead of one guy doing that job, there are now four guys doing it, and it's getting done faster, and possibly better, because at least a couple of them are smarter than I am (really, that's a low threshold).
So, genius boy, you got any suggestions for things to counteract a decade of the nation's major industry slowly failing? The old Big 3 have been dying for at least that long, and most of the dying has been done in Michigan, because that's where most of the industry was. You want her to run the car companies better, even though they're private businesses? Magically pull a new industry that accounts for 10% of the nation's jobs out of thin air? Obviously, as a conservative you're smarter than everybody else in the room. So please enlighten us about how this should have been handled.
Ripping on a system just because you don't play it isn't very nice man. Chill out. Lots of people are having fun with GURPS, just like they're having fun with D&D. Don't let your ego get hurt just because not everybody likes the same games you do. It's like a Harley rider getting upset because there are people out there riding Hondas. Kind of pointless, because you've got a lot more in common than folks who don't do table top gaming at all.
Man, there's no need to go running down somebody's game. I haven't played D&D in years, and I love GURPS and some other systems a lot more. But folks are playing D&D, having fun and not hurting anybody. Be cool about it. They might not have fun with GURPS either. At least they're playing.
I've bought a lot of PDF only products from Steve Jackson Games. Partially because I was picking up things that were out of print, and partially because for GM-only reference material, PDF documents are easier for me to handle when I'm prepping for a game.
Their e23 store has become a major part of their business, and they have pledged to keep downloads available as long as the company still has its doors open. That's saved my bacon a couple of times, like when the USB stick I kept my books on got fried by a faulty device on the USB Bus.
If you don't mind learning a new system, and you really want to get back to that old-school dungeon crawling feeling that a good D&D game can give you, you might check out their Dungeon Fantasy line of products. It's not for everybody, but there's a pretty big community of people who are getting their rocks off smashing monsters and taking their loot.
I think maybe you've been doing it wrong. Munchkin gets a lot of play around these parts. I know a couple of friends in different gaming groups who make it pretty much a weekly thing. For one group, they don't consider their session finished until they've played at least one game of Munchkin.
To be fair, this team produced an excellent game in Serenity that doesn't really restrict the players or the game masters. My group has been playing this game for a while and we've had an excellent run of it. We've had problems with licensed games in the past (or at least, I have), but we aren't running into any of those problems here. I think that Margaret Weis and Jamie Chambers have worked out a few of the problems that tend to come with licensed games.
It's been a long time since any of their PostgreSQL statements were true. It's a very happy native windows service with a nice installer, and the administrative interface is very easy to use. Let's try posting current reviews of software, rather than reruns from a year or two ago.
You make a lot of noise in the add about how cool you are, but it seemed to be all sizzle and no steak.
1. List the salary range you're willing to pay. You already know what you're willing to pay. You're gonna ask the developer what they need. Instead of playing this kind of guessing game, cut the bull and say what you're willing to pay. If you have any objections to doing this, pack it up and go home now. If I have to play this kind of game to get in the door, it indicates that there are going to be a lot of other games that I'll have to play once I get the job. Frankly I can get corporate BS games anywhere--I want to work at the place where I don't have to play them.
2. Tell people what's cool about the project and the company. Not empty buzzwords, but real information. If my eyes glaze as soon as I've seen the text, I've just lumped you into the bin with the 50 other employers that I'm not going to consider.
3. Consider your public image. Sourceforge isn't exactly the model of responsiveness or stability. That doesn't make you a "cool" company, it screams at the top of its lungs that there are serious problems. It's going to be very hard to attract people based on your reputation.
Instead of posting a job on your site, start actively recruiting individual developers. Find people who do work that you like. Offer them good projects and insane cash. The type of programmer you're claiming you're after is rare, and it's unlikely that they're just going to casually stroll by your site and see what you have open. You need to make face to face contact, or at minimum via email or the phone. Don't expect them to come to you, because they won't.
For the first two weeks I looked like I went to a knife fight but forgot my knife, partially because my hands aren't very steady. For the last eight years, it's been the closest, smoothest shave I've ever had. The long blade minimizes the opportunities for nicks and I don't think it's ever given me razor burn. You can buy very expensive hollow-ground blades on the internet, or you can go to the local beauty supply store and pick one up for $8, and $10 for a couple of years worth of blades. Fair warning though, it's called a Hair Shaper, because apparently straight razors scare the bejezus out of people.
You may have read more into my comment than was actually there. I don't actually assert that PHP should move, but that if they keep loosing developers they might want to, especially if they see it as hurting the project. I'm not sure how possible that would actually be, since one of the founders and a principal driver of the project is Israeli, and I doubt that he would be willing to move to another country and renounce his citizenship.
Independent of whether Israel is right or wrong in their actions, Jani's feelings on the matter are fairly reasonable. A non-combatant countryman, a fellow serviceman, someone from the same post where he was stationed at one time, was killed by the Israelis. Being torqued off is a pretty reasonable response. By the same right that Israel has to self defense, the Finish military could justify stomping the Israelis. Fortunately cooler heads seem to reign in Finland and Canada. Hopefully they do in China as well, because there's a lot of Chinese in uniform.
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that this entire discussion is entirely off topic. It's also very non-productive. Whether or not Israel/Lebanon is full of bad people who make bad decisions or the chosen people of God who have divine right to this land isn't really relevant to the PHP project.
If you want to fight this fight, go find a Jew or an Arab directly involved in the fight and have it out with them. Privately. Not here. Not in the PHP project mailing list. Jan did the right thing: he had a problem with the people behind the project, so he left. He's not dragging the project down. He's not making a lot of noise over nothing. He's letting the people who don't have a problem get on with doing their thing.
More like nobody wants to acknowledge the gigantic elephant in the middle of that particular room. If the IRC logs are to be believed this is directly related to international politics. PHP and Zend are directly tied to Israel. Jan had very real, very personal reasons for not wanting to be associated with Israelis, so he bolted. Personally I can't blame him. There's a lot of hatred towards Israel right now, and they've gone out of their way to earn it. Most likely, nobody else on the project really wants to step into that mess. The internal developers' mailing list really isn't the place for international politics, and no good will come of discussing it there.
There may be more defections in the future for similar reasons. If that becomes a real problem then it might be a good idea to move the project's home and affiliations to a more neutral country like Canada or Germany, although at the moment I don't think that Canada is full of warm and fuzzy feelings for Israel either.
Linuxtown, that sad raggedy old neighborhood? Anybody got any style at all, any pretensions to being a bad mf(1), done left that dullsville a long time ago. Dudes live down on FreeBSD street treat them Linux boys real nice(1), right before they chown(2) their files and make off with their fortune(6). Walk down on OpenBSD avenue they stick a fork(2) in you, cause their firewall make you go pf(4). kill(2) you soon as look(1) at you, they think you don't belong there.
Hmm, that definition pretty much described the whole vi/emacs thing pretty well. All those backward vi-using heretics out there just don't get it.
Could you please point out where in the article or on the web site where this is marked as Alpha? It has a version number of 2.6.2, which is way past the alpha stage. Nothing I could find in the article or on the web site indicated an alpha status. Given the advanced release number and the lack of an alpha indication, I had high hopes of finding a Windows app that worked as well as it does on UNIX. Other ports such as The Gimp, Scribus and OpenOffice have conditioned me to expect such things.
I sincerely hope that the port effort does get some steam behind it and produces something really polished and solid. I don't like Outlook, but I would like some of the features like the calendar. Evolution on Win32 would solve that problem for me. Switching to UNIX isn't an option either, since I'm a windows application developer by day. So a solid, working Evolution port is my best hope.
Here's to hoping that the Evolution team gets a successful port out!
When that wrapper executable is named "StartX.exe", which is pretty similar to the X initialization script on my three unix machines, I'm prone to thinking that it's probably an X server. Since no source was provided, and none of the apps appeared to do anything, it was rather difficult to determine what it was. Therefor, much like I would expect firefox.exe to start a web browser instead of a word processor, I assume by the one piece of evidence that I do have that the file will launch an X server. Should I then also assume that evolution-2.6.exe is something different, such as a C++ compiler? If so, that could be the root of my problem, since I had been under the impression that it was a well-respected email client.
I downloaded and installed. Checked the md5 checksums out of a sense of paranoia. The application that was installed was essentially crap. Once I resolved the path issues, the program started without errors, but even after a couple of hours there's no actual window on my screen from this. I was also thoroughly unimpressed by the fact that it by default wants to start an X server on my windows machine. My thought here is that the Evolution developers might want to consider bringing an actual experienced Windows developer onto their team. This app does not come anywhere close to demonstrating that open source apps are ready for prime time. It reinforces stereotypes about shoddy software and a lack of understanding about real world business needs. My recommendation: the Evolution team mothballs this port until they can use an interface toolkit that looks native, and they understand the issues surrounding Windows application deployment. Evolution is a good solid application on Linux, but the Windows port was sorely disappointing.
Look, it's likely that the Chinese really are out to get us. Infiltration through industrial means is a common, time honored practice. Any good patriot would be happy to do a little service for his government, especially if there isn't a lot of chance of getting caught. A modified wifi driver would be pretty easy to insert, say one that would transmit key data when it received a certain signal, and otherwise remained inert.
Realistically, what kind of deterrent do you have to rape in prison? You can put the guy in jail. Except that he's already there, so I don't see a lot of deterent power when the best you've got is "things stay the same". It would also require the victim testifying against a fellow inmate. I haven't been in prison myself, but from the guys I've talked to who have been inside, that's a pretty good way to sign your own death sentence.
You seem pretty exercised about this issue. Do you have some proposed remedy that will work in the real world? "Do everything they can" isn't a solution, it's a plea. What are real solutions that will work? Taking funding into account, because the cost of the justice system is very high, and increasing taxes to pay for these services is a very hard thing to do. The state legislature put into the position of funding to make prisons safer and more comfortable, or funding health care for the indigent, isn't likely to side with the prisoners and neither is their electorate.
I'm not trying to belittle you here. If you're this concerned, it's likely that you are aware of some remedy that will at least start to help. What have you got to offer?
On what grounds are you making the rash assumption that I'm not familiar with the defendent's side of the U.S. justice system? I can tell you from direct personal experience that it's no fun to get caught up in it.
I don't think that you'll find any court including sodomy as part of the sentencing. It's just a fact of life in U.S. prisons, much like the fact that he's going to get beat up. Here's a hint: he's locked up with a lot of bad people, so we can expect bad things will happen to him there. Nobody got to prison by being well behaved.
You seem to have some notion that there's something the justice system should do to treat this person as special while he's in prison. He's special, just like everyone else. Which is why the state would be good enough to afford him meals, a roof over his head, and something resembling health care in exchange for keeping him off the street and prevent him from causing more trouble for people who haven't been convicted of crimes.