For starters, you just asked about a VB based syntax on/., you will recieve for the most part nothing but FUD and miss information and the pundits launch into tirades about how VB.Net is a toy compared to C# (which are both the same CLR language), Java, Ruby, PHP, Perl, and some whack job will likely even recommend Python.
Next up. Right tool for the job. If you're interested in embedded applications, coding on linux, or high performance apps, going.Net is not going to be your tool of choice.
I think you're right there, though I'd go a bit further with saying what you shouldn't use.NET for. The main problem with VB.NET is that using a layout manager GUI with some code for only the important bits isn't really teaching you much. VB is a RAD language - it's not really a programming language. Asking whether VB is a good *Beginner*'s language is like asking whether designing a simple bridge is a good practice for beginning engineering. Sure it might help for construction engineering but it'll only slightly increase a small subset of the skills needed for say chemical engineering.
Anyway, for someone who wants to be a designer or a scripter, or being able to program for personal use, without wanting to get a job as a serious programmer then perhaps VB would be a good beginners language. If they want to be a serious programmer then they're going to need to learn enough C to get knowledge of memory management, touch on a bit of assembly to get knowledge of how computers read instructions and how they actually work, learn a pure OO language, probably pure Java would be best (at least it's the most "safe"), and learn SQL to get knowledge of database management. Then they may need to go into some specialisations, perhaps OpenGL/DirectX if they want 3D graphics work, or an ASP scripting language (OK maybe VBScript) or PHP if they want to design a web frontend. Learning VB wont exactly help you in an actual job though.
When I posted there was a score of +4 with an interesting mod and an insightful mod. When the great grandparent posted someone had since added a funny mod. Since the grandparent posted two people have added overrated mods. You haven't figured out that moderations can change yet, and that someone labelled it funny only after I made my post?
*sigh* For the mods who don't get the joke, the site linked is satire. Surely the poll at the side saying "Should Mac/Linux/Windows users intermarry?" might have tweaked a few neurons.
Somehow I doubt that the submitter would see it that way, seeing how only America says "Candy" and as they also say "Cell phone" as opposed to "Mobile Phone" I'd guess that the submitter isn't American.
naa I think they're going to get a million by about march in 2006, give or take a day. Though perhaps you meant a billion articles, and I assume there you mean an American billion, since, after all, a million millions of articles would take a hell of a lot of space!
I'm not really trying to offend you mate or anything, but noone really cares what you think. I certainly don't, and neither does Dell. Whether Linux is "ready for the desktop" is a completely personal opinion and simply doesn't matter here. Dell isn't going to read Slashdot, see a bunch of obsolete truths and say "STOP ALL LINUX PRODUCTION!!!" since how good Linux is actually has nothing to do with this topic. The issue at hand is that people actually want to use Linux, even if you don't, and, more importantly, there are a lot of those people. We are wondering why Dell isn't trying to gain money from those people, rip them off, do what good companies do.
I'm not trying to debunk your entire argument here (in fact even though I personally use Linux I happen to agree with you and I pretty well never recommend Linux to anyone else), I'm just trying to neutralise a couple of loose facts.
Firstly, I'm confused with your point about Linux missing a Windows Media Player/iTunes alike. You mention AmaroK as an app you miss in Windows, then say that there's no program that rips CDs, syncs to iPods, burns CDs and plays music files all in one program when AmaroK does all of this. How long has it been since you've used AmaroK? Granted iPod syncing is relatively new (iRiver syncing, which is what I like since I have an iRiver player, only came out in the last release), but yes it's there. CD burning is supported through K3B - something I personally like since I might like to change some of the settings, though other people might like it to go through transparently, and CD ripping is rarely used since, after all, as soon as you put in an audio CD it literally asks you if you want to rip the CD, but they're both there.
As you can probably tell, I really like AmaroK. Though I was a bit nervous with it at first (I was used to Winamp and XMMS), I've been totally bowled over since.
I'm not sure what's so hard about changing your display name in Kopete. You just have to click one of the protocol buttons down the bottom right and click "change display name". The butten's a little butterfly for MSN. Setting the display picture is a bit harder - you have to go into properties then User Info for that. I mean it's only another two clicks if you know what you're doing, but you're totally right - it should be in the protocol menu as well. The picture selector is pretty neat though.
Well last but not least, the nVidia drivers. Well I know at least with Ubuntu it's just a matter of running "apt-get install nvidia-drivers" or something similar and it's automatically updated, or alternatively go through synaptic. Whether going through the web site or going through synaptic is easier is just a matter of style. Using Linux I much rather go through synaptic, so much that I find that having to keep programs manually up to date is just a bit unnerving. I find going through synaptic very logical, and actually downloading a binary seems *illogical* for me using Linux since, after all, things like that are supposed to be handled for me.
I think your last point is actually pretty well the main totally valid one. Yes they have been rehashed before, but they need rehashing. Linux needs support from game makers and app vendors before it can really take off. This has improved by leaps and bounds in the past year, but it's still not enough. It needs definitely Macromedia/Adobe to get the web developers to convert (probably the only company standing in the way for them), perhaps AutoDesk for the 3D artists, and a huge number of game makers for games. Whether the interface is better or worse than Windows and MacOSX is simply a matter of personal preference. I find my KDE interface a lot more usable, funnily enough for lots of little reasons (most notably sloppy focus - I *love* sloppy focus). Anyway, my rambling is over.
Just wait one second! You say that Windows XP runs nicely after turning off the huge amount of bloat including the theme, the colour depth and the font engine, then complain about the bloat in KDE or Gnome? Did you think about actually turning off some of the extra eye candy? Perhaps changing the style (may I suggest the Classic KDE style?), most definitely the colour depth and perhaps other meaningless eyecandy such as auto-rendering of images in Konqueror.
You could after all be a little less hypocritical with your comparison.
Bullshit. Gnome isn't anything like OS-X - it's a complete copy of Windows XP! It's KDE that's a complete copy of OS-X. And it's a copy of Windows XP. Shit, I'm just confusing myself now. Lets just settle this by saying that Linux just copies everything, the arseholes.
Re:The Linux desktop is finally coming into it's o
on
A Look at GNOME 2.14
·
· Score: 1
Or all of the above. For example: "In Soviet Russia, You track Microsoft and KDE clutters and bloats you, but don't worry, you're too user-friendly to have the features Gnome wants."
That's actually what happens - it's enabled in KDE by default. For example, it says "Download Manager (KGet)", "Instant Messenger (Kopete)", Three web browsers, one each for Konqueror, Epipheny and Firefox. I'm not sure what happens in Gnome with this, but from my limited use of Gnome instead of Nautilus it says "File Manager" without even giving the apps name.
sheesh - you're taking this way too seriously. Don't you know that it says "It's funny, laugh!" if you put your mouse over the foot up here . . . wait a sec...
Well I thought it was very funny anyway. Especially the bit that says "The article talks about the technology but doesn't exactly lay out specifics".
Damn mate if you don't like the PDF reader, just don't use it. PDF stands for Portable document format, in other words there are plenty of other programs that can read PDF, and don't have those . . . features.
More than that - though google.cn is censored, my tests using a chinese proxy from xroxy.com and Firefox shows that google.com redirects to a Chinese internationalised page which is *not* censored. For example, here's Tiananmen Square, with full Chinese internationalisations. It also seems to get through fine. Can anyone give me an explaination as to how the Great Firewall of China misses this? Or, alternatively, what have I done or not done which didn't properly trigger the firewall?
wait, you're saying that Al Jazeera, which is both based in and subsidised by a country that served as one of the major launching sites of the Iraqi invasion is too biased against the US without mentioning the other two media outlets: BBC, a government funded media outlet of one of the invaders of Iraq, and *snicker* USA Today.
Wait, don't the RIAA get a portion of the profits from iTunes? That's not exactly such a brilliant screw you - "We've found another way of paying you money, so screw you".
Hmm reading the article and the forum threads it seems that the trojan wrecks the user account should it be run, so you don't have to enter the Admin password.
In other words MacOSX is giving *some* protection in that it can only attack the user that runs it, but that protection is shallow comfort. KDE has the best approach I think in this in that every executable, no matter what the extension etc, has the same executable icon. It also doesn't have automatic autoplay (possibly the worst "feature" of Windows). The icon of course in this case is what the trojan is exploiting.
I'm not sure about this though, but don't Macs like KDE instead of showing an icon for JPEGs show a preview of the picture instead of a standard icon?
No you don't, at least not in Sydney. Anyway I don't see how something like this *really* actually fuels graffiti. I'm one of those people who thinks that GTA doesn't fuel people going around shooting everybody, and like the designer said, it's not that hard to draw on a wall, and if a kid wants to do it he doesn't need a game to show him how.
Quoth the Simpsons:
Meyers: I did a little research and I discovered a startling thing...
There was violence in the past, long before cartoons were invented.
Kent: I see. Fascinating.
Meyers: Yeah, and know something, Kent? The Crusades, for instance.
Tremendous violence, many people killed, the darned thing went
on for thirty years.
Kent: And this was before cartoons were invented?
Meyers: That's right, Kent.
Hell I heard that many slashdotters in America didn't even know there was a huge blizzard going on since, after all, their overclocked P4s were keeping the basement to a nice toasty 40c.
What they should do is subtly leak that there's actually a backdoor in the pagerank system, say that including the number "42424242" in your web page somewhere instantly doubles your pagerank. Make it real and genuine as well, and better yet, release a press release saying "You should not use this backdoor!". Wait a little while until all the insidious users are exploiting this then ban everyone using it.
They were also a long time ago, at least in terms of computers. Wine has come leaps and bounds especially in terms of stability in just the last year. One of the main ideas behind this however is that Google will know which functions are needed, which lightens the set almost immeasurably. This is a relatively small program compared to WordPerfect so all they need to do is ensure those functions they use are stable, and when they want to port another program along they need to expand the set of functions that they need to be stable to incorperate the functions that program needs and do the maintenance job on that.
They also have the advantage in that they can modify Wine to suit the program and the program to suit Linux should they need it, and advantage that you don't have running Wine on your average computer. They can, for example, rewrite the file loading code to take advantage of the GTK file selecter and grab the files directly from the operating system. They don't *need* to go through the C:\ file system emulation, one of the bigger issues with Wine. They can also probably with small modifications route their audio through GStreamer, cutting out the Wine audio library which is sometimes considered buggy. If a certain section of the program proves buggy, they can simply port that section and do the rest through Wine.
Seriously, I think if a Linux version of Picasso ends up buggy then it's Google's fault, not Wine.
And when I can't collide or interact with it, it kinda ruffles me the wrong way. What kinda magical stuff is this supposed to be. Doesn't interact, doesn't shine, doesn't emit, doesn't absorb, all it does is offer some convenient gravity to explain a few things that don't make sense otherwise.
So does glass, but you aren't talking about how glass is magical are you? I'm haven't really formed a solid opinion on this dark matter thing but I'm certainly of the idea that it's most definitely possible. Is it *that* hard to believe that there's lots of matter we can't detect in our galaxy, especially seeing as how we have such a hard time detecting huge planets from nearby stars. Yes ether was wrong, the geocentric idea was wrong, etc, but you can't use that as a proof that something that's completely unrelated is wrong.
I think it's ironic that you say (or at least I think you infer) that anyone who believes in Dark Matter after actually looking at the evidence is "no better than religion", I assume meaning that their beliefs are based on faith, when you totally dismiss dark matter and call a competing theory you don't understand (or at least I assume you don't - I've formally studied Cosmology and Astronomy and I don't understand it all that well) a step in the right direction because dark matter "kinda ruffles [you] the wrong way". The point with dark matter is that it's correlated by the maths and by simulations, and to what we see. That doesn't mean it's *right*, but it still hasn't been falsified so we can't just dismiss it because we don't like it or it doesn't feel good to some people.
Slashdot Mirror
For starters, you just asked about a VB based syntax on /., you will recieve for the most part nothing but FUD and miss information and the pundits launch into tirades about how VB.Net is a toy compared to C# (which are both the same CLR language), Java, Ruby, PHP, Perl, and some whack job will likely even recommend Python.
.Net is not going to be your tool of choice.
.NET for. The main problem with VB.NET is that using a layout manager GUI with some code for only the important bits isn't really teaching you much. VB is a RAD language - it's not really a programming language. Asking whether VB is a good *Beginner*'s language is like asking whether designing a simple bridge is a good practice for beginning engineering. Sure it might help for construction engineering but it'll only slightly increase a small subset of the skills needed for say chemical engineering.
Next up. Right tool for the job. If you're interested in embedded applications, coding on linux, or high performance apps, going
I think you're right there, though I'd go a bit further with saying what you shouldn't use
Anyway, for someone who wants to be a designer or a scripter, or being able to program for personal use, without wanting to get a job as a serious programmer then perhaps VB would be a good beginners language. If they want to be a serious programmer then they're going to need to learn enough C to get knowledge of memory management, touch on a bit of assembly to get knowledge of how computers read instructions and how they actually work, learn a pure OO language, probably pure Java would be best (at least it's the most "safe"), and learn SQL to get knowledge of database management. Then they may need to go into some specialisations, perhaps OpenGL/DirectX if they want 3D graphics work, or an ASP scripting language (OK maybe VBScript) or PHP if they want to design a web frontend. Learning VB wont exactly help you in an actual job though.
When I posted there was a score of +4 with an interesting mod and an insightful mod. When the great grandparent posted someone had since added a funny mod. Since the grandparent posted two people have added overrated mods. You haven't figured out that moderations can change yet, and that someone labelled it funny only after I made my post?
Or perhaps, alternatively, giving people an excuse when the RIAA comes knocking on their door...
*sigh* For the mods who don't get the joke, the site linked is satire. Surely the poll at the side saying "Should Mac/Linux/Windows users intermarry?" might have tweaked a few neurons.
Somehow I doubt that the submitter would see it that way, seeing how only America says "Candy" and as they also say "Cell phone" as opposed to "Mobile Phone" I'd guess that the submitter isn't American.
ah I see. Sorry.
naa I think they're going to get a million by about march in 2006, give or take a day. Though perhaps you meant a billion articles, and I assume there you mean an American billion, since, after all, a million millions of articles would take a hell of a lot of space!
I'm not really trying to offend you mate or anything, but noone really cares what you think. I certainly don't, and neither does Dell. Whether Linux is "ready for the desktop" is a completely personal opinion and simply doesn't matter here. Dell isn't going to read Slashdot, see a bunch of obsolete truths and say "STOP ALL LINUX PRODUCTION!!!" since how good Linux is actually has nothing to do with this topic. The issue at hand is that people actually want to use Linux, even if you don't, and, more importantly, there are a lot of those people. We are wondering why Dell isn't trying to gain money from those people, rip them off, do what good companies do.
I'm not trying to debunk your entire argument here (in fact even though I personally use Linux I happen to agree with you and I pretty well never recommend Linux to anyone else), I'm just trying to neutralise a couple of loose facts.
Firstly, I'm confused with your point about Linux missing a Windows Media Player/iTunes alike. You mention AmaroK as an app you miss in Windows, then say that there's no program that rips CDs, syncs to iPods, burns CDs and plays music files all in one program when AmaroK does all of this. How long has it been since you've used AmaroK? Granted iPod syncing is relatively new (iRiver syncing, which is what I like since I have an iRiver player, only came out in the last release), but yes it's there. CD burning is supported through K3B - something I personally like since I might like to change some of the settings, though other people might like it to go through transparently, and CD ripping is rarely used since, after all, as soon as you put in an audio CD it literally asks you if you want to rip the CD, but they're both there.
As you can probably tell, I really like AmaroK. Though I was a bit nervous with it at first (I was used to Winamp and XMMS), I've been totally bowled over since.
I'm not sure what's so hard about changing your display name in Kopete. You just have to click one of the protocol buttons down the bottom right and click "change display name". The butten's a little butterfly for MSN. Setting the display picture is a bit harder - you have to go into properties then User Info for that. I mean it's only another two clicks if you know what you're doing, but you're totally right - it should be in the protocol menu as well. The picture selector is pretty neat though.
Well last but not least, the nVidia drivers. Well I know at least with Ubuntu it's just a matter of running "apt-get install nvidia-drivers" or something similar and it's automatically updated, or alternatively go through synaptic. Whether going through the web site or going through synaptic is easier is just a matter of style. Using Linux I much rather go through synaptic, so much that I find that having to keep programs manually up to date is just a bit unnerving. I find going through synaptic very logical, and actually downloading a binary seems *illogical* for me using Linux since, after all, things like that are supposed to be handled for me.
I think your last point is actually pretty well the main totally valid one. Yes they have been rehashed before, but they need rehashing. Linux needs support from game makers and app vendors before it can really take off. This has improved by leaps and bounds in the past year, but it's still not enough. It needs definitely Macromedia/Adobe to get the web developers to convert (probably the only company standing in the way for them), perhaps AutoDesk for the 3D artists, and a huge number of game makers for games. Whether the interface is better or worse than Windows and MacOSX is simply a matter of personal preference. I find my KDE interface a lot more usable, funnily enough for lots of little reasons (most notably sloppy focus - I *love* sloppy focus). Anyway, my rambling is over.
Just wait one second! You say that Windows XP runs nicely after turning off the huge amount of bloat including the theme, the colour depth and the font engine, then complain about the bloat in KDE or Gnome? Did you think about actually turning off some of the extra eye candy? Perhaps changing the style (may I suggest the Classic KDE style?), most definitely the colour depth and perhaps other meaningless eyecandy such as auto-rendering of images in Konqueror.
You could after all be a little less hypocritical with your comparison.
Bullshit. Gnome isn't anything like OS-X - it's a complete copy of Windows XP! It's KDE that's a complete copy of OS-X. And it's a copy of Windows XP. Shit, I'm just confusing myself now. Lets just settle this by saying that Linux just copies everything, the arseholes.
Or all of the above. For example: "In Soviet Russia, You track Microsoft and KDE clutters and bloats you, but don't worry, you're too user-friendly to have the features Gnome wants."
That's actually what happens - it's enabled in KDE by default. For example, it says "Download Manager (KGet)", "Instant Messenger (Kopete)", Three web browsers, one each for Konqueror, Epipheny and Firefox. I'm not sure what happens in Gnome with this, but from my limited use of Gnome instead of Nautilus it says "File Manager" without even giving the apps name.
sheesh - you're taking this way too seriously. Don't you know that it says "It's funny, laugh!" if you put your mouse over the foot up here . . . wait a sec...
Well I thought it was very funny anyway. Especially the bit that says "The article talks about the technology but doesn't exactly lay out specifics".
Damn mate if you don't like the PDF reader, just don't use it. PDF stands for Portable document format, in other words there are plenty of other programs that can read PDF, and don't have those . . . features.
Oh sorry, the Sony guy just came back from holidays in Australia - huge misunderstanding there!
More than that - though google.cn is censored, my tests using a chinese proxy from xroxy.com and Firefox shows that google.com redirects to a Chinese internationalised page which is *not* censored. For example, here's Tiananmen Square, with full Chinese internationalisations. It also seems to get through fine. Can anyone give me an explaination as to how the Great Firewall of China misses this? Or, alternatively, what have I done or not done which didn't properly trigger the firewall?
wait, you're saying that Al Jazeera, which is both based in and subsidised by a country that served as one of the major launching sites of the Iraqi invasion is too biased against the US without mentioning the other two media outlets: BBC, a government funded media outlet of one of the invaders of Iraq, and *snicker* USA Today.
Wait, don't the RIAA get a portion of the profits from iTunes? That's not exactly such a brilliant screw you - "We've found another way of paying you money, so screw you".
Hmm reading the article and the forum threads it seems that the trojan wrecks the user account should it be run, so you don't have to enter the Admin password.
In other words MacOSX is giving *some* protection in that it can only attack the user that runs it, but that protection is shallow comfort. KDE has the best approach I think in this in that every executable, no matter what the extension etc, has the same executable icon. It also doesn't have automatic autoplay (possibly the worst "feature" of Windows). The icon of course in this case is what the trojan is exploiting.
I'm not sure about this though, but don't Macs like KDE instead of showing an icon for JPEGs show a preview of the picture instead of a standard icon?
No you don't, at least not in Sydney. Anyway I don't see how something like this *really* actually fuels graffiti. I'm one of those people who thinks that GTA doesn't fuel people going around shooting everybody, and like the designer said, it's not that hard to draw on a wall, and if a kid wants to do it he doesn't need a game to show him how.
Quoth the Simpsons:
Meyers: I did a little research and I discovered a startling thing...
There was violence in the past, long before cartoons were invented.
Kent: I see. Fascinating.
Meyers: Yeah, and know something, Kent? The Crusades, for instance.
Tremendous violence, many people killed, the darned thing went
on for thirty years.
Kent: And this was before cartoons were invented?
Meyers: That's right, Kent.
Hell I heard that many slashdotters in America didn't even know there was a huge blizzard going on since, after all, their overclocked P4s were keeping the basement to a nice toasty 40c.
What they should do is subtly leak that there's actually a backdoor in the pagerank system, say that including the number "42424242" in your web page somewhere instantly doubles your pagerank. Make it real and genuine as well, and better yet, release a press release saying "You should not use this backdoor!". Wait a little while until all the insidious users are exploiting this then ban everyone using it.
They were also a long time ago, at least in terms of computers. Wine has come leaps and bounds especially in terms of stability in just the last year. One of the main ideas behind this however is that Google will know which functions are needed, which lightens the set almost immeasurably. This is a relatively small program compared to WordPerfect so all they need to do is ensure those functions they use are stable, and when they want to port another program along they need to expand the set of functions that they need to be stable to incorperate the functions that program needs and do the maintenance job on that.
They also have the advantage in that they can modify Wine to suit the program and the program to suit Linux should they need it, and advantage that you don't have running Wine on your average computer. They can, for example, rewrite the file loading code to take advantage of the GTK file selecter and grab the files directly from the operating system. They don't *need* to go through the C:\ file system emulation, one of the bigger issues with Wine. They can also probably with small modifications route their audio through GStreamer, cutting out the Wine audio library which is sometimes considered buggy. If a certain section of the program proves buggy, they can simply port that section and do the rest through Wine.
Seriously, I think if a Linux version of Picasso ends up buggy then it's Google's fault, not Wine.
And when I can't collide or interact with it, it kinda ruffles me the wrong way. What kinda magical stuff is this supposed to be. Doesn't interact, doesn't shine, doesn't emit, doesn't absorb, all it does is offer some convenient gravity to explain a few things that don't make sense otherwise.
So does glass, but you aren't talking about how glass is magical are you? I'm haven't really formed a solid opinion on this dark matter thing but I'm certainly of the idea that it's most definitely possible. Is it *that* hard to believe that there's lots of matter we can't detect in our galaxy, especially seeing as how we have such a hard time detecting huge planets from nearby stars. Yes ether was wrong, the geocentric idea was wrong, etc, but you can't use that as a proof that something that's completely unrelated is wrong.
I think it's ironic that you say (or at least I think you infer) that anyone who believes in Dark Matter after actually looking at the evidence is "no better than religion", I assume meaning that their beliefs are based on faith, when you totally dismiss dark matter and call a competing theory you don't understand (or at least I assume you don't - I've formally studied Cosmology and Astronomy and I don't understand it all that well) a step in the right direction because dark matter "kinda ruffles [you] the wrong way". The point with dark matter is that it's correlated by the maths and by simulations, and to what we see. That doesn't mean it's *right*, but it still hasn't been falsified so we can't just dismiss it because we don't like it or it doesn't feel good to some people.