What would you propose we do with him then? Allowing him to continue is a very bad option, possibly the worst of all available, and currently the accepted practice in the U.S. is incarceration.
A period of time as a guest of the state might convince him to stop messing around with other peoples' computers. The sodomy is purely gratuitous.
So would you like to explain just how this huge liberal conspiracy made it past a neo-conservative kool-aide-drinking administration and didn't get stomped by the Republican controlled house and senate? I'm thinking that it was either a very weak attempt at sarcasm on your part, or the sky in your world is a different color than it is in mine.
I've gone down this route myself and been very happy. I use Delphi daily, I've written some large VB apps, but wxWidgets was by far the best tool for rapid development for me. Dev-cpp from http://www.bloodshed.net/ was for me the fastest way to get a working C++ compiler up and running, and they have wxWidgets available as an installable module. You can find the latest version on their Community DevPack server.
I'm going to strongly recommend nosing around the Internet for these different games. I've found that only the most progressive and free-thinking of game stores stocks anything outside of the old standbys of D20 and White Wolf.
Sure, I love my free operating systems. But I'm going to take this as confirmation that Microsoft really has started to take security seriously. I can't see a downside to companies producing better software.
It's also worthwhile to acknowledge that Linux has issues. Since it's not a single suite of software but a collection from multiple sources, that's no great wonder. A computer populated with software from many different sources, with most of it developed by unrelated teams, is going to have a hard time competing on the security front with a computer populated by software that came from a single source, with all of the developers working fairly closely. That's why the BSD operating systems show up with fewer security vulnerabilities than Linux in all it's forms.
Besides, the fact that people are actively targeting security problems in UNIX based systems means that people are taking the stuff seriously. That's got to be a good thing.
The number of stations broadcasting anything interesting is so vanishingly low that it's hardly a shock that radio is dying. When the program directors go out of their way to make sure that all the music sounds about the same, and floods me with low quality, low budget ads, I have trouble bothering to turn the radio on. The difference between most radio stations and the weekly advertising that bills itself as my small town newspaper is that one is in print.
Some solutions to rejuvenate radio:
1. Charge more for the advertising and have fewer ads. This will mean that fewer ads are needed and advertisers will be inclined to put a little more effort into making them.
2. Broadcast original content. There's no compelling reason to listen to station X when in the course of an hour they're gonna play the same thing as station Y. Remember radio dramas (okay, most of you reading this have never heard one)? Try covering local bands, or actual live events rather than the promotional radio remote.
3. Make a varied format. If a television station broadcast all talk shows all day, or all sitcoms, or all documentaries, viewers would stay away in droves, or the station would at least fall into a niche market.
4. Replace the "radio talent" with somebody who has actual talent. The bulk of call-in hosts seem to be pretty competent at their job, on a par with or better than their TV equivalents. Radio comics don't seem to be nearly as funny as their TV counterparts.
5. Increase the DJ pay so that it's possible to get and keep some professional announcers. I've known DJs who loved the work, but left for a retail job because the pay was better. Professional announcers don't just happen magically, it takes a lot of work to develop, just like any other field. If there's no way to support yourself without living in your mother's basement you'll be stuck with "new" announcers all the time, and that doesn't do anything to help quality.
I suggest that people should celebrate life and suddenly I'm some kind of sadistic bastard. I don't have a lot of aboriginal blood, but I have to think that the indians living today prefer it to the alternative. I so rarely hear people say "shame my ancestors didn't get wiped out."
Relax, drink a beer, and stop being embarassed that you're alive. I'm glib, yeah. I like being alive. It lets me do cool things that I couldn't do if I weren't. Try it some day. You might like it too.
Before you get all high and mighty about what a prick I am, consider who was in Michigan before the Chippewa. The fossil record indicates that they were only the most recent of the invaders before the Europeans showed up (those bastards, with their steel and blue-water sailing). Other peoples lived here first. No trace of their culture of language survives, only some bones and tools that show that they weren't Chippewa. The lesson? Cultures don't live forever. Yet people are still here, and that's a good thing if you're a person.
Those remaining? They celebrate surviving the relentless hordes of new people displacing them off the land that they in turn displaced somebody else from. And the flood of new and special diseases.
Roughly speaking, it's pretty close to what the first European colonists were celebrating: survival. Don't knock it. I can't think of much more important to celebrate. Yeah I know it's politically incorrect not to sympathize with the poor put upon natives. But I'll be damned if I'll feel any kind of remorse for the fact that I was born here and survived.
Releasing fearless mice into the wild, at least around my house, is going to result mostly in fat cats. None of my cats seem to rely on their prey being afraid of them. Mostly they rely on their prey being slower than them, or at least less attentive.
Could we leave this drug around for the local rabbits? If they stop fearing my cats, I'm pretty sure that there will be a lot fewer rabbits around to eat my garden.
Speaking as a parent and somebody who plays with the blocks himself, I can say that there are situations where the Mega Blocks are a better choice. Lego kits in the last few years have been mostly specialty parts and fewer basic bricks. This means that I'm a lot more restricted in what I can build with a Legos kit. Sadly MegaBlocks seems to be hopping on this trend as well, but last time I purchased blocks I found that a kit contained a lot of basic blocks that were easily recombined into other things.
The loose coupling of MegaBlocks is also useful for somebody like me who likes to idly assemble pieces to make strange buildings and alien monuments. These blocks were shockingly good therapy when I was waiting for my wife to come out of surgery a few years back.
If I have to carry professional liability insurance, I will have to charge some very prodigious rates. These will be rates on a par with what doctors charge. Which means that I'm driving a new Mercedes in the not too distant future.
At least in theory, companies will simply refuse to hire domestic programmers because their rates would be too high. However it's likely that companies could become pretty risk-averse and unwilling to hire foreign programmers, since they will have no recourse when the corporate data is compromised. The discrimination against foreign programmers will become similar to what is faced by foreign doctors currently.
Likewise, because of the increased expense, companies will buy far less software in general, and they will plan our their real needs a lot more carefully.
I can't say if this will be good or bad for programmers in the long run. Attorneys and doctors seem to be prospering and they live under the same burden. It could well be that placing professional liability on programmers and weeding out the pretenders would be good for those that remained. The only question would be which of us would remain?
PostgreSQL was held back for years by documentation that made the user account and security system seem arcane. I finally decided to bite the bullet and install PostgreSQL. It turns out that the security system isn't any more arcane than MySQL, the documentation just made it seem harder.
Personally I like the features of PostgreSQL better, probably because I've been working with databases professionally for roughly ten years. For a lot of situations though MySQL is not only adequate, but an ideal choice because you can usually count on people having access to it.
This is definitely a "hacker release", not for the begginer. There would be some very hillarious results that come from using this recipe. The "sealed container" bit is especially funny.
For those of you who haven't conducted this experiement on their own, fermentation in a sealed vessel tends to result in explosive decompression. Made the mistake of sealing a brewing yeast culture once. When I opened it every wall in my kitchen and one in my family room needed to have very foul smelling yeast cleaned off of them (beer fermentation residue is vile). I did that as soon as I cleaned it off my face.
In truth, someplace like http://www.northernbrewer.com/ is a good place for the beggining brewer. Their kits include the instructions that were left out of this recipe.
The main functionality can be provided by a decent IMAP server and OpenLDAP. Authentication can be provided by a Kerberos server. Mind you, OpenLDAP isn't a lot of fun to implement, but it can be done. Full calendaring support is still missing of course, and that's a big one to overcome. But we're getting a lot closer.
Now we just need OpenLDAP to be a nice drop-in replacement for anything and we're set.
I'm using OpenOffice very successfully in an office that is very strictly MS Office only. Nobody is the wiser, except that my documents tend to look better, be produced faster, and produce very nice PDF files.
How do I get away with this?
First, I always distribute PDF files. In fact my practice of doing this has become so popular that a lot of other people installed PDFCreator so they could do the same thing from Office. As somebody else mentioned Office documents are often incompatible between versions.
Second, if somebody else will need to modify the documents that I create, I make sure to export an Office compatible version. Nobody has ever had a problem using these exported documents.
Most importantly, drink it together. This doesn't work to get everyone together, but it will bring in a lot of them. Creating that bond outside of work will carry over to what you do at work.
As a minor your rights are mighty few, and none of them involve privacy from your parents.
Parents will watch kids like a hawk, electronic tools or no. Don't imagine that you'd be freed from the burden of homework without this tool. You'd just have your parents grilling you every night, instead of grilling the computer.
Trust me on this. We don't have such cool electronic tools for monitoring our kids' performance, so we do it the old fashioned way: ask them.
Something that's important to look at is who will support this application down the road. Funding at universities can be dicey, and this thing may have to be supported by inhouse flunkies. What can they reasonably support?
This doesn't necessarily mean that it needs to be in access because the inhouse flunkies only know access. If you could write a C++ front end that was stable and reliable, with an easy-to-maintain connection to a backend that they can support, that might be a better solution.
That said, some great recommendations have already been made. SQL-Server on the backend, if there's already someone maintaining one, would be ideal. I actually don't recommend putting an Access front end on things though, because a user with a little bit of knowledge can do a lot of damage.
Security is important and all, but the choice between security and usability isn't an absolute. The greatest security for my web site would be to burn it onto a CD and chroot the server to that CD. That's not practical though when I'm using the website to demonstrate and sell content management systems. So I need to compromise my security a bit to allow the server and the CGI programs that it spawns to write to certain files or directories. It's less secure than my burned-on-a-cd option, but fits my needs better.
You'd be suprised. It's hard just to get the word out, because the world is full of free software products. You need something to get their attention first.
I have seen that some manufacturers are changing the market that they're after. In the 1980s, Mitsubishi and JVC were the top names in VCRs, and they cost a lot of money. When I looked for a VCR four years ago, I was happy to find that a Mitsubishi VCR was now very inexpensive. When I played a tape in it, I understood why it was inexpensive. So I hopped over to the hi-fi shop, tried out the expensive Sony deck, and found that just like 15 years ago, the expensive deck was a lot nicer.
The good news is that my nice new Sony deck, which had a better picture than my old but very good Mitsubishi, was still almost half the price of the old Mitsubishi from 15 years ago.
Some documentation on how to manage system updates with cvsup would be helpful. I used OpenBSD for 2 years before I figured it out (after starting to use FreeBSD for another project).
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What would you propose we do with him then? Allowing him to continue is a very bad option, possibly the worst of all available, and currently the accepted practice in the U.S. is incarceration.
A period of time as a guest of the state might convince him to stop messing around with other peoples' computers. The sodomy is purely gratuitous.
So would you like to explain just how this huge liberal conspiracy made it past a neo-conservative kool-aide-drinking administration and didn't get stomped by the Republican controlled house and senate? I'm thinking that it was either a very weak attempt at sarcasm on your part, or the sky in your world is a different color than it is in mine.
I've gone down this route myself and been very happy. I use Delphi daily, I've written some large VB apps, but wxWidgets was by far the best tool for rapid development for me. Dev-cpp from http://www.bloodshed.net/ was for me the fastest way to get a working C++ compiler up and running, and they have wxWidgets available as an installable module. You can find the latest version on their Community DevPack server.
The difference? One of these events is a lot more likely to involve beer. Sadly, neither are likely to date very much.
I'm going to strongly recommend nosing around the Internet for these different games. I've found that only the most progressive and free-thinking of game stores stocks anything outside of the old standbys of D20 and White Wolf.
Have a look at http://www.chaosium.com/ and http://www.anvilwerks.com/ for some excellent examples.
Sure, I love my free operating systems. But I'm going to take this as confirmation that Microsoft really has started to take security seriously. I can't see a downside to companies producing better software.
It's also worthwhile to acknowledge that Linux has issues. Since it's not a single suite of software but a collection from multiple sources, that's no great wonder. A computer populated with software from many different sources, with most of it developed by unrelated teams, is going to have a hard time competing on the security front with a computer populated by software that came from a single source, with all of the developers working fairly closely. That's why the BSD operating systems show up with fewer security vulnerabilities than Linux in all it's forms.
Besides, the fact that people are actively targeting security problems in UNIX based systems means that people are taking the stuff seriously. That's got to be a good thing.
The number of stations broadcasting anything interesting is so vanishingly low that it's hardly a shock that radio is dying. When the program directors go out of their way to make sure that all the music sounds about the same, and floods me with low quality, low budget ads, I have trouble bothering to turn the radio on. The difference between most radio stations and the weekly advertising that bills itself as my small town newspaper is that one is in print.
Some solutions to rejuvenate radio:
1. Charge more for the advertising and have fewer ads. This will mean that fewer ads are needed and advertisers will be inclined to put a little more effort into making them.
2. Broadcast original content. There's no compelling reason to listen to station X when in the course of an hour they're gonna play the same thing as station Y. Remember radio dramas (okay, most of you reading this have never heard one)? Try covering local bands, or actual live events rather than the promotional radio remote.
3. Make a varied format. If a television station broadcast all talk shows all day, or all sitcoms, or all documentaries, viewers would stay away in droves, or the station would at least fall into a niche market.
4. Replace the "radio talent" with somebody who has actual talent. The bulk of call-in hosts seem to be pretty competent at their job, on a par with or better than their TV equivalents. Radio comics don't seem to be nearly as funny as their TV counterparts.
5. Increase the DJ pay so that it's possible to get and keep some professional announcers. I've known DJs who loved the work, but left for a retail job because the pay was better. Professional announcers don't just happen magically, it takes a lot of work to develop, just like any other field. If there's no way to support yourself without living in your mother's basement you'll be stuck with "new" announcers all the time, and that doesn't do anything to help quality.
I suggest that people should celebrate life and suddenly I'm some kind of sadistic bastard. I don't have a lot of aboriginal blood, but I have to think that the indians living today prefer it to the alternative. I so rarely hear people say "shame my ancestors didn't get wiped out."
Relax, drink a beer, and stop being embarassed that you're alive. I'm glib, yeah. I like being alive. It lets me do cool things that I couldn't do if I weren't. Try it some day. You might like it too.
Before you get all high and mighty about what a prick I am, consider who was in Michigan before the Chippewa. The fossil record indicates that they were only the most recent of the invaders before the Europeans showed up (those bastards, with their steel and blue-water sailing). Other peoples lived here first. No trace of their culture of language survives, only some bones and tools that show that they weren't Chippewa. The lesson? Cultures don't live forever. Yet people are still here, and that's a good thing if you're a person.
Clay Dowling
Notorious prick
Damn right! Eff the man!
Give me the Wild Turkey.
Those remaining? They celebrate surviving the relentless hordes of new people displacing them off the land that they in turn displaced somebody else from. And the flood of new and special diseases.
Roughly speaking, it's pretty close to what the first European colonists were celebrating: survival. Don't knock it. I can't think of much more important to celebrate. Yeah I know it's politically incorrect not to sympathize with the poor put upon natives. But I'll be damned if I'll feel any kind of remorse for the fact that I was born here and survived.
Releasing fearless mice into the wild, at least around my house, is going to result mostly in fat cats. None of my cats seem to rely on their prey being afraid of them. Mostly they rely on their prey being slower than them, or at least less attentive. Could we leave this drug around for the local rabbits? If they stop fearing my cats, I'm pretty sure that there will be a lot fewer rabbits around to eat my garden.
Speaking as a parent and somebody who plays with the blocks himself, I can say that there are situations where the Mega Blocks are a better choice. Lego kits in the last few years have been mostly specialty parts and fewer basic bricks. This means that I'm a lot more restricted in what I can build with a Legos kit. Sadly MegaBlocks seems to be hopping on this trend as well, but last time I purchased blocks I found that a kit contained a lot of basic blocks that were easily recombined into other things.
The loose coupling of MegaBlocks is also useful for somebody like me who likes to idly assemble pieces to make strange buildings and alien monuments. These blocks were shockingly good therapy when I was waiting for my wife to come out of surgery a few years back.
If I have to carry professional liability insurance, I will have to charge some very prodigious rates. These will be rates on a par with what doctors charge. Which means that I'm driving a new Mercedes in the not too distant future.
At least in theory, companies will simply refuse to hire domestic programmers because their rates would be too high. However it's likely that companies could become pretty risk-averse and unwilling to hire foreign programmers, since they will have no recourse when the corporate data is compromised. The discrimination against foreign programmers will become similar to what is faced by foreign doctors currently.
Likewise, because of the increased expense, companies will buy far less software in general, and they will plan our their real needs a lot more carefully.
I can't say if this will be good or bad for programmers in the long run. Attorneys and doctors seem to be prospering and they live under the same burden. It could well be that placing professional liability on programmers and weeding out the pretenders would be good for those that remained. The only question would be which of us would remain?
PostgreSQL was held back for years by documentation that made the user account and security system seem arcane. I finally decided to bite the bullet and install PostgreSQL. It turns out that the security system isn't any more arcane than MySQL, the documentation just made it seem harder.
Personally I like the features of PostgreSQL better, probably because I've been working with databases professionally for roughly ten years. For a lot of situations though MySQL is not only adequate, but an ideal choice because you can usually count on people having access to it.
This is definitely a "hacker release", not for the begginer. There would be some very hillarious results that come from using this recipe. The "sealed container" bit is especially funny.
For those of you who haven't conducted this experiement on their own, fermentation in a sealed vessel tends to result in explosive decompression. Made the mistake of sealing a brewing yeast culture once. When I opened it every wall in my kitchen and one in my family room needed to have very foul smelling yeast cleaned off of them (beer fermentation residue is vile). I did that as soon as I cleaned it off my face.
In truth, someplace like http://www.northernbrewer.com/ is a good place for the beggining brewer. Their kits include the instructions that were left out of this recipe.
It's fairly simple to get rid of the problem.
s o
1. Download ftp://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/3.7/i386/cd37.i
2. Burn the image to a CD
3. Load into your primary CD drive on the infected PC.
4. Reboot
5. Follow the instructions on the screen
The main functionality can be provided by a decent IMAP server and OpenLDAP. Authentication can be provided by a Kerberos server. Mind you, OpenLDAP isn't a lot of fun to implement, but it can be done. Full calendaring support is still missing of course, and that's a big one to overcome. But we're getting a lot closer. Now we just need OpenLDAP to be a nice drop-in replacement for anything and we're set.
I'm using OpenOffice very successfully in an office that is very strictly MS Office only. Nobody is the wiser, except that my documents tend to look better, be produced faster, and produce very nice PDF files.
How do I get away with this?
First, I always distribute PDF files. In fact my practice of doing this has become so popular that a lot of other people installed PDFCreator so they could do the same thing from Office. As somebody else mentioned Office documents are often incompatible between versions.
Second, if somebody else will need to modify the documents that I create, I make sure to export an Office compatible version. Nobody has ever had a problem using these exported documents.
Most importantly, drink it together. This doesn't work to get everyone together, but it will bring in a lot of them. Creating that bond outside of work will carry over to what you do at work.
As a minor your rights are mighty few, and none of them involve privacy from your parents.
Parents will watch kids like a hawk, electronic tools or no. Don't imagine that you'd be freed from the burden of homework without this tool. You'd just have your parents grilling you every night, instead of grilling the computer.
Trust me on this. We don't have such cool electronic tools for monitoring our kids' performance, so we do it the old fashioned way: ask them.
Something that's important to look at is who will support this application down the road. Funding at universities can be dicey, and this thing may have to be supported by inhouse flunkies. What can they reasonably support? This doesn't necessarily mean that it needs to be in access because the inhouse flunkies only know access. If you could write a C++ front end that was stable and reliable, with an easy-to-maintain connection to a backend that they can support, that might be a better solution. That said, some great recommendations have already been made. SQL-Server on the backend, if there's already someone maintaining one, would be ideal. I actually don't recommend putting an Access front end on things though, because a user with a little bit of knowledge can do a lot of damage.
Security is important and all, but the choice between security and usability isn't an absolute. The greatest security for my web site would be to burn it onto a CD and chroot the server to that CD. That's not practical though when I'm using the website to demonstrate and sell content management systems. So I need to compromise my security a bit to allow the server and the CGI programs that it spawns to write to certain files or directories. It's less secure than my burned-on-a-cd option, but fits my needs better.
You'd be suprised. It's hard just to get the word out, because the world is full of free software products. You need something to get their attention first.
I have seen that some manufacturers are changing the market that they're after. In the 1980s, Mitsubishi and JVC were the top names in VCRs, and they cost a lot of money. When I looked for a VCR four years ago, I was happy to find that a Mitsubishi VCR was now very inexpensive. When I played a tape in it, I understood why it was inexpensive. So I hopped over to the hi-fi shop, tried out the expensive Sony deck, and found that just like 15 years ago, the expensive deck was a lot nicer. The good news is that my nice new Sony deck, which had a better picture than my old but very good Mitsubishi, was still almost half the price of the old Mitsubishi from 15 years ago.
Some documentation on how to manage system updates with cvsup would be helpful. I used OpenBSD for 2 years before I figured it out (after starting to use FreeBSD for another project).