Linux distros excel at many aspects of an OS that can, and probably should, be decided in a meritocracy style voting / debate process. These distros even have small lords that take it upon themselves to strongly influence some technical evolutions, going as far as blocking what they don't see fit and pushing for what they feel should occur.
However, all the areas where Linux has these strongholds are [very] technical. Especially in the wake of this "consumerization of IT" phenomenon that rides on a big wave of money, it has become of paramount importance to have an OS excelling in ease of use, fantastic user interfaces and overall smooth interaction with the average human being. Linux and free software in general has always been utter shit in these aspects. Everybody keeps asking why and I think everybody actually knows the root of the problem.
I'll illustrate it using an analogy with a work of art, something like a painting, a song, a poem or even some kind of complex and yet elegant mechanism. When true artists present such creations to the world, the world has no saying like "I don't like the 3rd verse, change it!" or "Maybe you should've used some yellow here! Redo it!". This is not how true works of art exist. The author assumes a certain position, creates something as a whole and then the world judges it as being overall good, great, crap, etc.
I think the same principle applies to human interaction layers in software. Great user interfaces are works of art. Their creators need to conceive something that is at the same time useful and yet it enchants your senses every time you use it. It must feel cohesive and yet it must handle all sorts of tasks that are not strongly related to each other. Worst of all, a great user interface for an OS needs to be tightly integrated with the code doing the heavy duty lifting in the background. Their creators need to assume a position on how various things are done and their creation should be judged as a whole.
Why are state of the art user interfaces missing from Linux? Because most creators of great works of art live their lives in the shadow of powerful sponsors that often profit greatly from financing the creator through their "wonder" years. There are no such sponsors in the Linux world. Every single developer of Linux software creates his own user interface as well as he can. The end result is like a giant wall of hand paintings made by 5 year olds. Cute, but clearly nowhere near work of art status.
This situation will not change until the open source / free software movements will figure out a way to finance artists and strongly integrate them with developers. It seems to me like an impossible task that can only occur in a classical style software company like Microsoft, Apple, etc. So I think Linux is doomed for a long time to run in the background, doing the heavy lifting on space stations, labs, devices and servers. Occasionally it will spawn a child that apparently is not retarded, like Android, but take a second look and you'll spot the root problems in no time.
I think converting US to the metric system can be done in a very simple manner and the reason why it doesn't happen is primarily a political problem.
-
Imagine that the.gov passes a law saying: In 5 years everyone must use the metric system exclusively.
-
The law includes the following action plan:
-
1. For the first year this law is made public through advertising on all kinds of media channels (tv spots (prime time not required), magazine ads, Internet ads, a prominent header with this decision and a countdown timer on ALL.gov website, etc.). Also, all.gov institutions where interaction with the citizens takes place must have on display at a prominent location special written explanations and physical reference measurement units.
-
2. At the city boundary points of all major highways a special kilometer will be drawn using a standard method so that all the cities have the same thing. For example a big, specially decorated pole can be erected with the sign "START of ONE kilometer" and then another pole can be erected at the other end with the sign "END of ONE kilometer". Ideally, you should see the ending pole from the position of the start pole. Since America is all about crawling with the car for 3h each day, everyone will be able to get a feeling of a kilometer at various speeds.
-
3. In all city centers a specially decorated 10m marker will be drawn with all the appropriate divisions. This will remind everyone that this thing is happening and it will also serve as a memorial in the years to come.
"- Hey grandpa what's that?
- Well sonny, your grandpa was alive and kicking in the great times when we switched to this meter thing!
- Whoa, you're a real American hero grandpa!
- Yes sirree."
-
4. At all gas station pumps a special bottle holding a 1 liter sample will be displayed. Also, a recipient with 1 tonne of water will be displayed somewhere near the gas station paying counter.
-
5. After the first year, all the citizens who have a social security number will receive a package from the US.gov in the mail. The package will contain a "metric conversion kit", a letter and a certificate of the type "Congratulations citizen #### for living in this great time when we'll switch to the metric system, a very big change for our great American country... red white and blue...".
-
The kit will also consist of the following items:
- A specially decorated 1m ruler made out of wood and containing all the divisions.
- A specially decorated glass bottle with all the divisions of a liter embossed in the glass.
- A set of weights from grams to 1 Kg.
- etc. (other measurement references)
-
That's the first version of the plan.
-
The key of this plan is that.gov must make a special event out of this conversion and all the items involved must be special in that they must be of a high quality, nice design and have "collector value". They can license small shops where ma and pa can build these things by hand - which could be great in these times. Creating them this way will also convey the message that these things are American, made by Americans, in America so they are a good thing. Pushing for the feeling that this change is a "good thing" and it's "owned by us" will have a chain effect in all the smaller things of life and it will immediately start to cast a light of old and stupid on the previous units. Everyone wants a cool new thing.
-
And here is the problem. The US.gov is not interested primarily to operate for the greater good of all its people. Instead, it operates to keep them dumb, fat and entertained so that they are easy to control and rally behind great American success stories like Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, ? [to be continued].
I'm also an European and I don't mind being called that.
-
I'm from Romania so a strong argument can be made that I like to be called an European in order to wash out some of the sin behind the dirt and corruption staining the name of my home country. Be that as it may, I'm a strong believer that a united Europe is the only way to proceed through the following decades from an economical point of view. I also believe that the countries in Eastern Europe will bring a lot to the table for all the other Europeans in the same time frame. Economical unity does not interfere much with cultural/national identity. Besides, I think on this front the US media machines did a lot more harm. So even though I may enjoy a Swiss landscape, French wine, German cars, English music, Italian spaghetti sauce or Greek oranges you can still bet your ass I will always hail the Romanian football team (idiots!), Romanian theater and Romanian sense of humor.
-
6 days ago I voted in the election of my representatives in the European Parliament. After living in communism and bowing my head to Russia for decades, I know all too well why a united Europe is a good thing. So go ahead, call me European and see if I like it.
- Bookmarks (Imported all my bookmarks from Firefox 3.0.1. ~1350 items)
= When I closed Chrome after the import, a chrome.exe process hanged. I restarted Chrome and all my bookmarks were GONE! As if the import never happened.
= No bookmark organizer. Are you kidding me? 1350 bookmarks and no organizer?????
= No "Open all tabs" in the bookmark menu.
- Search engines (Imported from Firefox 3.0.1)
= No place to type a search and choose the search engine that will handle the search. Apparently, the search engines are called from the address bar where if you type something you will get contextual options to direct searches through the imported search engines. The problem is that if you want to search for www.slashdot.org via the IMDB search engine you will not get that entry in the contextual menu of the address bar because it is not detected as a movie title. Not good.
- Plugins
= No plugins whatsoever.
= Major problems: No anti ads support. No Adblock. No nothing. Do you imagine Google (99.99% income from ads) allowing anti-ads technology to flower in their browser?
The GOOD
- The UI is good. It supports very little customization but it is good in it's original form. If Google Talk tought us anything is that Google is not capable and/or willing to upgrade any application any earlier than 5-10 years since it's original version so you will need to assume Chrome's UI will remain as it is for a long long long time. Even so, the UI is ok. Looking at Firefox 3.0.1 after Chrome... well... this makes FF look like a turd. I had ~50 extensions in FF 2 and about ~30 were related to UI customization. The UI extension list went down to about 20 with FF 3.
- The developer tools seem embedded in the browser and they are very good from the get go. Just imagine having Firebug in Netscape 3. It's nice.
That's it. Solid effort from Google but not a real threat for Firefox. Huge threat for IE though.
P.S: It's ironic++ that Google tried so hard to build a browser that looks nothing like a standard Windows application and yet, it only runs on Windows. Way to spend those millions of billions Google.
Is it just me or is that thing shaped like a giant eu-ru dick head? Just imagine it with a long booster attached on the launch ramp. What would the TV comment sound like? And now 3, 2, 1... woooowww yeah baby!
They provide all the shows in the South Park archive (11 years of it) and they all work by streaming to desktop through a Flash Based player. The whole website is mostly Flash based and despite that it works pretty well, being fun, snappy and clean. Everything works the same in both Windows (tried it on XP) and Linux (tried it on Fedora 8).
The video quality is decent, certainly viewable on a 24" LCD in full screen from about 1m away. It's about the same quality you get from an STV/XVID/180Mb/22min release so that kind of distribution is, for now, obsoleted. HD quality is nowhere to be seen so that remains a big missing feature.
The commercial breaks are about 4, spread throughout the broadcast and they only contain one, fairly short, ad spot per break. It seems fair enough to me, with the only downside being that if you scroll forward past a point where an ad should be, you first get the ad and then you get to that point in the show. This makes scrolling very annoying. Another problem is the way the ads break in. It seems very very raw with no transition or anything. Strangely, today I got no ads whatsoever. It is to be expected that the ad system will change continuously until it gets unbearably annoying and we'll have to forget the site but for now it's ok.
The real problems are if you are in one of those 3rd world countries (Canada, UK, Australia, etc.) that are banned by the site because of copyright laws and/or other existing contracts. Also, there is a problem with the way the shows become available online. They come online for 7 days from first air date and then they disappear for 21 days and then they get available again, for good. The reason for this strange publishing policy is also rooted in some existing contractual obligations.
I think the way South Park became available online is a significant step towards legal Internet availability of copyright infected content and - for now - it provides a way for any self-respecting fan to honor the show by watching it through the website. At least once:). The releases can still come back in a flash if the ad system becomes "better" or if the website doesn't go HD soon but for now "come on down to southparkstudios.com and see the show online".
Based on my experience instability is not in issue with a large number of extensions (I have ~50 active all the time).
Performance degradation is an issue, however. Opening a new window (not a tab) does take a few seconds and RAM consumption is ~200Mb. On my current PC (AMD64 4000+, 2Gb RAM) the performance hit is not noticeable and about 25 of my 50 extensions are realted to web development. I think the magic number may be somewhere around 30.
I don't know why but some pages/sites do crash Firefox. The most notable one is the beta AJAX interface for Yahoo email. The best solution was to give up Yahoo completely for GMail.
This is just a drop in the bucket. I'm curios to see if I'll live to see it publicly recognized, that having a law, writing that ownership on an idea exists, is fundamentally wrong. The problem is so elemental that many people will have to die before this thruth comes forcefully to light, just like it was with communism.
With so much outsourcing for the actual work, with services so expensive, America more than anyone is dependent on the cash flow from copyright. To make matters worse, the society is based on greed and the only stopper to that is competition, twisted so much as it turned into distributed greed, helped to prosper by the law. Even if a spiritual revolution should come tommorow, and looking at who is the elected president there are no worries for that, the enterprise demons created by this society won't just dissapear without a fight. And that is natural.
A thick, well established and powerfull layer of people fight over your bodies as you stand and watch your politically correct shows day in and day out. How can this perfect 1984 society claim to honour freedom as it's founding fathers did, when freedom was lost a long time ago? How will you be able to kill the sick system that already exists when all you know is TV and TV dinners? How can you justify yourselves the fact that your copyright laws caused millions on this planet to die in horrible sufferings because medicine developments are stalled when you need dozens of patents to even start research on anything?
I'll humbly suggest the first step: Literally throw away your TV and start caring about each other. Stop buying crap, stop buying movies from Hollywood and start getting your music by going to concerts played by your local artists. Maybe then, your children will have a fighting chance and the rest of the world won't have to enter in the third war against a once great nation.
P.S: I appologies for my english. It should've been better by now.
I think many people would like to donate them money so that they can be helped in this state-sponsored oppression. I know I do, so I would like to know if there is any way to do this.
Warning! Answers to this post may lead to phishing sites so beware.
... to check if this is not another "Microsoft buys Linux" article but since today is not April 1st I guess I just don't give a crap.
BTW Dell is very close to anonymous in Romania where IBM, HP, Fujitsu & DIY servers rule almost 100% of the market.
Please, don't play victim here. You're conviction screams the fact that you're the average Joe and this is what happens to Joe. It's just the way the world works: Joe gets a big stick in his behind with the Law as lubricant.
People are nothing but predictible engine pieces when they are a part of a well designed software development process. Borland is entering into a very profitable market where the likes of IBM/Rational, Computer Associates or Serenea/Merant have made billions in the last decade. It is a market opaque to the average Joe programmer because the tools sold here only make sense in the context of a good software development process and such a process can mostly be found only in large companies. This is not to say that small development teams are incapable of a good development effort but in small teams the process occurs mostly naturally if there are sufficiently sane, smart and intuitive people in charge.
If all you know about change management is Visual SourceSafe you can bet your ass you won't understand shit from Borland's latest move. I wish them success because I can have only respect for a company that developed something as good as Delphi and I also have a lot of sympathy for them because they took a very hard hit from Microsoft and survived. (About 6 years ago Microsoft was unable to buy Borland so they just offered suitcases filled with money directly to the Delphi core developers. The result is C#.).
I worked a lot with Delphi and C# in Visual Studio 2003/2005. Also flirted with Visual C++ and hated
everything about Visual Basic. Delphi is very very very easy to learn and use and, if it should be required, it can provide control down to assembler code.
There are two key elements you need to look at. One is the IDE (Integrated Development Environment) you will be using, and the other one is the framework of classes that will give you the abstractisation level needed so that GUI technical details can be ignored. The actual programming language is not of critical importance, basically if you know one you will adapt very fast to another.
The Delphi IDE is very visual and intuitive. Any other one I used pales compared to it and Visual Studio 2005 only now is capable to provide features Delphi had since 10 years ago. You just have to use it a little and you'll see.
Most Windows applications are built with helper frameworks. The Delphi framework is named VCL and is very easy to use. The visual components (buttons, checkboxes, windows, etc.) are all programmed so that they expose events that will be fired for you.
It goes like this: you see a button in the designer and you choose an event this button exposes like the OnClick event. Double click on the event name and the IDE takes you to the place where you'll write the code behind that button. This model is very easy to understand and will work well for small applications. It is used with limited succes even in large applications where it should normally have no place. For small applications you have no need to understand how Windows manages GUI details.
People around here may tempt you towards new and hip things, old dogs like C++ or the traditionally easy VB. Don't listen! VB6 was a piece of crap and VB.NET is cool if you like typing a lot of crap. C++ is a monster that will bite you the first chance it gets and it's visual editor is about as good as the one in VB if not worse.
Try Delphi, it's exceptional despite the fact it has some dust on it.:)
I never used WinZIP. RAR is my choice since 1996. Flirted with ACE for a few mounths in 1997, but I went back to RAR and used it ever since.
Who in God's green Earth would want to use ZIP?
With all the theory behind the principles that our economy is based on, we're still in deep shit. The people with power to drive the entertainment industry are just as stupid as most of the others. Their decisions are still based on the good old greed that drives the world.
In the forementioned business people are much much stupider then everywhere else and the reason is simple. This is a profitable business based on hits created by the only people that actually are smart. The profit is unavoidable and there are some stupid people that receive this profit. Until the digital age everything was stable and there was no event that could reveal this stupidity. With the advent of the digital the really greedy pieces of shit that climbed on the big pile, saw all this billion of $ they lose because people don't pay for everything they can get for free. With their little minds they made a simple calculus: If 1 woman can make 1 baby in 9 mounths => 9 women can make 1 baby in one mounth. The entertainment industry is unavoidably profitable and this is corrected by the laws of the equilibrium theory. The people that actually make the profit, being the only ones who can influence the system, are the ones who will kill this profit.
Everything is very simple, the system balances itself out. I would be more amazed if they managed to come out with something outrageously attractive for the guy who always watched "pirated" movies. There is one entity that worries me in this sense and it's name has something to do with very large numbers.
Slashdot Mirror
Linux distros excel at many aspects of an OS that can, and probably should, be decided in a meritocracy style voting / debate process. These distros even have small lords that take it upon themselves to strongly influence some technical evolutions, going as far as blocking what they don't see fit and pushing for what they feel should occur.
However, all the areas where Linux has these strongholds are [very] technical. Especially in the wake of this "consumerization of IT" phenomenon that rides on a big wave of money, it has become of paramount importance to have an OS excelling in ease of use, fantastic user interfaces and overall smooth interaction with the average human being. Linux and free software in general has always been utter shit in these aspects. Everybody keeps asking why and I think everybody actually knows the root of the problem.
I'll illustrate it using an analogy with a work of art, something like a painting, a song, a poem or even some kind of complex and yet elegant mechanism. When true artists present such creations to the world, the world has no saying like "I don't like the 3rd verse, change it!" or "Maybe you should've used some yellow here! Redo it!". This is not how true works of art exist. The author assumes a certain position, creates something as a whole and then the world judges it as being overall good, great, crap, etc.
I think the same principle applies to human interaction layers in software. Great user interfaces are works of art. Their creators need to conceive something that is at the same time useful and yet it enchants your senses every time you use it. It must feel cohesive and yet it must handle all sorts of tasks that are not strongly related to each other. Worst of all, a great user interface for an OS needs to be tightly integrated with the code doing the heavy duty lifting in the background. Their creators need to assume a position on how various things are done and their creation should be judged as a whole.
Why are state of the art user interfaces missing from Linux? Because most creators of great works of art live their lives in the shadow of powerful sponsors that often profit greatly from financing the creator through their "wonder" years. There are no such sponsors in the Linux world. Every single developer of Linux software creates his own user interface as well as he can. The end result is like a giant wall of hand paintings made by 5 year olds. Cute, but clearly nowhere near work of art status.
This situation will not change until the open source / free software movements will figure out a way to finance artists and strongly integrate them with developers. It seems to me like an impossible task that can only occur in a classical style software company like Microsoft, Apple, etc. So I think Linux is doomed for a long time to run in the background, doing the heavy lifting on space stations, labs, devices and servers. Occasionally it will spawn a child that apparently is not retarded, like Android, but take a second look and you'll spot the root problems in no time.
I said this. Managed to post anonymously by mistake.
I think converting US to the metric system can be done in a very simple manner and the reason why it doesn't happen is primarily a political problem.
-
Imagine that the .gov passes a law saying: In 5 years everyone must use the metric system exclusively.
-
The law includes the following action plan:
-
1. For the first year this law is made public through advertising on all kinds of media channels (tv spots (prime time not required), magazine ads, Internet ads, a prominent header with this decision and a countdown timer on ALL .gov website, etc.). Also, all .gov institutions where interaction with the citizens takes place must have on display at a prominent location special written explanations and physical reference measurement units.
-
2. At the city boundary points of all major highways a special kilometer will be drawn using a standard method so that all the cities have the same thing. For example a big, specially decorated pole can be erected with the sign "START of ONE kilometer" and then another pole can be erected at the other end with the sign "END of ONE kilometer". Ideally, you should see the ending pole from the position of the start pole. Since America is all about crawling with the car for 3h each day, everyone will be able to get a feeling of a kilometer at various speeds.
-
3. In all city centers a specially decorated 10m marker will be drawn with all the appropriate divisions. This will remind everyone that this thing is happening and it will also serve as a memorial in the years to come. "- Hey grandpa what's that? - Well sonny, your grandpa was alive and kicking in the great times when we switched to this meter thing! - Whoa, you're a real American hero grandpa! - Yes sirree."
-
4. At all gas station pumps a special bottle holding a 1 liter sample will be displayed. Also, a recipient with 1 tonne of water will be displayed somewhere near the gas station paying counter.
-
5. After the first year, all the citizens who have a social security number will receive a package from the US .gov in the mail. The package will contain a "metric conversion kit", a letter and a certificate of the type "Congratulations citizen #### for living in this great time when we'll switch to the metric system, a very big change for our great American country ... red white and blue ...".
-
The kit will also consist of the following items:
- A specially decorated 1m ruler made out of wood and containing all the divisions.
- A specially decorated glass bottle with all the divisions of a liter embossed in the glass.
- A set of weights from grams to 1 Kg.
- etc. (other measurement references)
-
That's the first version of the plan.
-
The key of this plan is that .gov must make a special event out of this conversion and all the items involved must be special in that they must be of a high quality, nice design and have "collector value". They can license small shops where ma and pa can build these things by hand - which could be great in these times. Creating them this way will also convey the message that these things are American, made by Americans, in America so they are a good thing. Pushing for the feeling that this change is a "good thing" and it's "owned by us" will have a chain effect in all the smaller things of life and it will immediately start to cast a light of old and stupid on the previous units. Everyone wants a cool new thing.
-
And here is the problem. The US .gov is not interested primarily to operate for the greater good of all its people. Instead, it operates to keep them dumb, fat and entertained so that they are easy to control and rally behind great American success stories like Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, ? [to be continued].
-
Too bad.
I'm also an European and I don't mind being called that.
-
I'm from Romania so a strong argument can be made that I like to be called an European in order to wash out some of the sin behind the dirt and corruption staining the name of my home country. Be that as it may, I'm a strong believer that a united Europe is the only way to proceed through the following decades from an economical point of view. I also believe that the countries in Eastern Europe will bring a lot to the table for all the other Europeans in the same time frame. Economical unity does not interfere much with cultural/national identity. Besides, I think on this front the US media machines did a lot more harm. So even though I may enjoy a Swiss landscape, French wine, German cars, English music, Italian spaghetti sauce or Greek oranges you can still bet your ass I will always hail the Romanian football team (idiots!), Romanian theater and Romanian sense of humor.
-
6 days ago I voted in the election of my representatives in the European Parliament. After living in communism and bowing my head to Russia for decades, I know all too well why a united Europe is a good thing. So go ahead, call me European and see if I like it.
10 minutes with Chrome:
The BAD
- Bookmarks (Imported all my bookmarks from Firefox 3.0.1. ~1350 items)
= When I closed Chrome after the import, a chrome.exe process hanged. I restarted Chrome and all my bookmarks were GONE! As if the import never happened.
= No bookmark organizer. Are you kidding me? 1350 bookmarks and no organizer?????
= No "Open all tabs" in the bookmark menu.
- Search engines (Imported from Firefox 3.0.1)
= No place to type a search and choose the search engine that will handle the search. Apparently, the search engines are called from the address bar where if you type something you will get contextual options to direct searches through the imported search engines. The problem is that if you want to search for www.slashdot.org via the IMDB search engine you will not get that entry in the contextual menu of the address bar because it is not detected as a movie title. Not good.
- Plugins
= No plugins whatsoever.
= Major problems: No anti ads support. No Adblock. No nothing. Do you imagine Google (99.99% income from ads) allowing anti-ads technology to flower in their browser?
The GOOD
- The UI is good. It supports very little customization but it is good in it's original form. If Google Talk tought us anything is that Google is not capable and/or willing to upgrade any application any earlier than 5-10 years since it's original version so you will need to assume Chrome's UI will remain as it is for a long long long time. Even so, the UI is ok. Looking at Firefox 3.0.1 after Chrome... well... this makes FF look like a turd. I had ~50 extensions in FF 2 and about ~30 were related to UI customization. The UI extension list went down to about 20 with FF 3.
- The developer tools seem embedded in the browser and they are very good from the get go. Just imagine having Firebug in Netscape 3. It's nice.
That's it. Solid effort from Google but not a real threat for Firefox. Huge threat for IE though.
P.S: It's ironic++ that Google tried so hard to build a browser that looks nothing like a standard Windows application and yet, it only runs on Windows. Way to spend those millions of billions Google.
Is it just me or is that thing shaped like a giant eu-ru dick head? Just imagine it with a long booster attached on the launch ramp. What would the TV comment sound like? And now 3, 2, 1... woooowww yeah baby!
This just in.
Apparently, VIM, a 17 year old text editor software with that sexy '70s green-crt look & feel, causes eye strain no matter the color scheme.
We'll keep you posted as the story develops.
You're right. 8 mil. downloads sais looooooser.
No Sun, that's a BAD Sun!
The video quality is decent, certainly viewable on a 24" LCD in full screen from about 1m away. It's about the same quality you get from an STV/XVID/180Mb/22min release so that kind of distribution is, for now, obsoleted. HD quality is nowhere to be seen so that remains a big missing feature.
The commercial breaks are about 4, spread throughout the broadcast and they only contain one, fairly short, ad spot per break. It seems fair enough to me, with the only downside being that if you scroll forward past a point where an ad should be, you first get the ad and then you get to that point in the show. This makes scrolling very annoying. Another problem is the way the ads break in. It seems very very raw with no transition or anything. Strangely, today I got no ads whatsoever. It is to be expected that the ad system will change continuously until it gets unbearably annoying and we'll have to forget the site but for now it's ok.
The real problems are if you are in one of those 3rd world countries (Canada, UK, Australia, etc.) that are banned by the site because of copyright laws and/or other existing contracts. Also, there is a problem with the way the shows become available online. They come online for 7 days from first air date and then they disappear for 21 days and then they get available again, for good. The reason for this strange publishing policy is also rooted in some existing contractual obligations.
I think the way South Park became available online is a significant step towards legal Internet availability of copyright infected content and - for now - it provides a way for any self-respecting fan to honor the show by watching it through the website. At least once :). The releases can still come back in a flash if the ad system becomes "better" or if the website doesn't go HD soon but for now "come on down to southparkstudios.com and see the show online".
Fspace Ahas Rmetallic Tsmell
Performance degradation is an issue, however. Opening a new window (not a tab) does take a few seconds and RAM consumption is ~200Mb. On my current PC (AMD64 4000+, 2Gb RAM) the performance hit is not noticeable and about 25 of my 50 extensions are realted to web development. I think the magic number may be somewhere around 30.
I don't know why but some pages/sites do crash Firefox. The most notable one is the beta AJAX interface for Yahoo email. The best solution was to give up Yahoo completely for GMail.
This is just a drop in the bucket. I'm curios to see if I'll live to see it publicly recognized, that having a law, writing that ownership on an idea exists, is fundamentally wrong. The problem is so elemental that many people will have to die before this thruth comes forcefully to light, just like it was with communism.
With so much outsourcing for the actual work, with services so expensive, America more than anyone is dependent on the cash flow from copyright. To make matters worse, the society is based on greed and the only stopper to that is competition, twisted so much as it turned into distributed greed, helped to prosper by the law. Even if a spiritual revolution should come tommorow, and looking at who is the elected president there are no worries for that, the enterprise demons created by this society won't just dissapear without a fight. And that is natural.
A thick, well established and powerfull layer of people fight over your bodies as you stand and watch your politically correct shows day in and day out. How can this perfect 1984 society claim to honour freedom as it's founding fathers did, when freedom was lost a long time ago? How will you be able to kill the sick system that already exists when all you know is TV and TV dinners? How can you justify yourselves the fact that your copyright laws caused millions on this planet to die in horrible sufferings because medicine developments are stalled when you need dozens of patents to even start research on anything?
I'll humbly suggest the first step: Literally throw away your TV and start caring about each other. Stop buying crap, stop buying movies from Hollywood and start getting your music by going to concerts played by your local artists. Maybe then, your children will have a fighting chance and the rest of the world won't have to enter in the third war against a once great nation.
P.S: I appologies for my english. It should've been better by now.
What posts?
I think many people would like to donate them money so that they can be helped in this state-sponsored oppression. I know I do, so I would like to know if there is any way to do this. Warning! Answers to this post may lead to phishing sites so beware.
... to check if this is not another "Microsoft buys Linux" article but since today is not April 1st I guess I just don't give a crap. BTW Dell is very close to anonymous in Romania where IBM, HP, Fujitsu & DIY servers rule almost 100% of the market.
... nothing to see here, move along
Your going to have to excuse my grammar. Whooops :)
Please, don't play victim here. You're conviction screams the fact that you're the average Joe and this is what happens to Joe. It's just the way the world works: Joe gets a big stick in his behind with the Law as lubricant.
... it seems the water is still wet and it flows towards the ground.
People are nothing but predictible engine pieces when they are a part of a well designed software development process. Borland is entering into a very profitable market where the likes of IBM/Rational, Computer Associates or Serenea/Merant have made billions in the last decade. It is a market opaque to the average Joe programmer because the tools sold here only make sense in the context of a good software development process and such a process can mostly be found only in large companies. This is not to say that small development teams are incapable of a good development effort but in small teams the process occurs mostly naturally if there are sufficiently sane, smart and intuitive people in charge.
If all you know about change management is Visual SourceSafe you can bet your ass you won't understand shit from Borland's latest move. I wish them success because I can have only respect for a company that developed something as good as Delphi and I also have a lot of sympathy for them because they took a very hard hit from Microsoft and survived. (About 6 years ago Microsoft was unable to buy Borland so they just offered suitcases filled with money directly to the Delphi core developers. The result is C#.).
I worked a lot with Delphi and C# in Visual Studio 2003/2005. Also flirted with Visual C++ and hated everything about Visual Basic. Delphi is very very very easy to learn and use and, if it should be required, it can provide control down to assembler code.
There are two key elements you need to look at. One is the IDE (Integrated Development Environment) you will be using, and the other one is the framework of classes that will give you the abstractisation level needed so that GUI technical details can be ignored. The actual programming language is not of critical importance, basically if you know one you will adapt very fast to another.
The Delphi IDE is very visual and intuitive. Any other one I used pales compared to it and Visual Studio 2005 only now is capable to provide features Delphi had since 10 years ago. You just have to use it a little and you'll see.
Most Windows applications are built with helper frameworks. The Delphi framework is named VCL and is very easy to use. The visual components (buttons, checkboxes, windows, etc.) are all programmed so that they expose events that will be fired for you. It goes like this: you see a button in the designer and you choose an event this button exposes like the OnClick event. Double click on the event name and the IDE takes you to the place where you'll write the code behind that button. This model is very easy to understand and will work well for small applications. It is used with limited succes even in large applications where it should normally have no place. For small applications you have no need to understand how Windows manages GUI details.
People around here may tempt you towards new and hip things, old dogs like C++ or the traditionally easy VB. Don't listen! VB6 was a piece of crap and VB.NET is cool if you like typing a lot of crap. C++ is a monster that will bite you the first chance it gets and it's visual editor is about as good as the one in VB if not worse.
Try Delphi, it's exceptional despite the fact it has some dust on it. :)
You are a perfect image of the company you work in: A piece of steaming shit.
I never used WinZIP. RAR is my choice since 1996. Flirted with ACE for a few mounths in 1997, but I went back to RAR and used it ever since. Who in God's green Earth would want to use ZIP?
With all the theory behind the principles that our economy is based on, we're still in deep shit. The people with power to drive the entertainment industry are just as stupid as most of the others. Their decisions are still based on the good old greed that drives the world.
In the forementioned business people are much much stupider then everywhere else and the reason is simple. This is a profitable business based on hits created by the only people that actually are smart. The profit is unavoidable and there are some stupid people that receive this profit. Until the digital age everything was stable and there was no event that could reveal this stupidity. With the advent of the digital the really greedy pieces of shit that climbed on the big pile, saw all this billion of $ they lose because people don't pay for everything they can get for free. With their little minds they made a simple calculus: If 1 woman can make 1 baby in 9 mounths => 9 women can make 1 baby in one mounth. The entertainment industry is unavoidably profitable and this is corrected by the laws of the equilibrium theory. The people that actually make the profit, being the only ones who can influence the system, are the ones who will kill this profit.
Everything is very simple, the system balances itself out. I would be more amazed if they managed to come out with something outrageously attractive for the guy who always watched "pirated" movies. There is one entity that worries me in this sense and it's name has something to do with very large numbers.