Adult. That's almost funny, because all it really means is possibly more graphic violence and a big step-up on sexual innuendo, both probably offered, in most situations, as a substitute for more creative, thoughtful writing.
So...
Don't miss "Hex Filets"
It's a cross between The X-Files and Friends, and it will feature Jack from "Will and Grace" the homosexual madcap who, in this incarnation, stars as a Java programmer. Here's an excerpt:
Moldwad: Hey, Skilly, I'll bet you I can keep it up all night.
Skilly: I doubt it.
Enter Jack.
Jack: Hey, Moldwad -- WHOA! Decided to open up a SEX file, huh!?
* Run laugh track *
Yeah. I can't wait for either show. The anticipation is just, you know, unbearable.
You can download the patch below. They've done, actually, an impressive job with it because, by way of a "peace offering" to the Web community, they've incorporated quite a large number of features from IE7 and future releases far earlier than expected.
The changes are actually pretty dramatic, with even some significant alterations to the UI and a number of fixes to the bookmarks system. Enjoy.
I predict there will be basically two categories of posts about Rails.
Either, one, that Rails is so amazing that after you use it sex seems laughably trivial by comparison, even and especially you count the production value -- one can, after all, only have one child (on average) using sex, but with Rails, dude, I HAD TEN.
Or, two, that Rails is no big deal, it's just another MVC re-think, heck I rolled one of those myself one afternoon a coupla years back, yeah it ruled but, you know, I'm really into that Java thing now. Besides, Rails is no good for BIG projects, for that you need Hibernate and a crane.
So I'll post one for the middle-of-the-road. Rails rules. I love it. I've reimplemented, in a week-and-a-half, a fairly large application that took me two months to do with Python. It's not a fair comparison because with Python I used Webware but did everything, like user management and logging, with no starting point, and also the first time around I wasn't as familiar with the problem domain.
With Rails I used the Salted Hash Login Generator which got the basics of my user login and management done in one fell swoop, an hour or two of work. I also re-used the view code from the Python app.
But the rest of it was fun. I enjoyed it. Things were done quickly and the API is awesome. ActiveRecord is not Hibernate -- yes, Javapeople, we know, we know -- but it's good. It's really good and super easy. And while there's some magic going on behind the scenes with Rails, it's not hard to understand at all.
That said, yes, if you're an online payroll system for IBM, Rails won't cut it. There are flaws, but for day-to-day stuff, not too many. It's updated very frequently, too.
My only complaint is the ubermensch of Rails, Dave Heinemeier, who, while smart, is also all too aware of it, and frequently shoots his blog off about topics which go beyond Web frameworks and into areas of either glib tech-prejudice or, at times, more subtle see-how-smart-I-am dorkposts -- the most insufferable species of Geek.
Otherwise, I strongly encourage anyone to check Rails out. It's great and a *lot* of other frameworks in other languages could stand to pay attention to the innovations in Rails. These innovations aren't so much technical epiphanies, as they are the meeting of many good ideas in one place, along with enthusiastic support and a lot of glue. Ruby's fun, too.
Check out, also, the frameworks from other languages which are shamelessly stealing from Rails:
I mean, don't we already have great browsers with tabs? I'm using one right now. All this news about tabs in IE is a little like Ford announcing a new product: a gas-powered, horseless carriage which will convey any number up to four passengers at a high rate of speed and without all the hassle horses require!
"Yay," yells the crowd! "And it will run over standard roads, too, won't it?"
"Standard roads? Oh, now let's not get carried away, son! No, SPECIAL roads will be required because, um, because, oh! Because ours is a SPECIAL vehicle, so we need SPECIAL roads and we'll build them and charge a minimal toll."
"Fuck you!" yells the crowd! Microsoft won't lend full support to CSS2 because they claim it's a flawed specification, which, of course, is true, in the sense that revenue model for Microsoft was not built into it.
To hell with this. I'm going to switch from Firefox because IE finally got tabbed browsing? Yawn. I have Maxthon installed and I *still* use Firefox.
I majored in English. I'd like to think that I'm aware of "the rudiments of communication".
So, I'd be interested in what you'd propose. Instead of "Grumpy Groundhog", would you prefer, say, "Electric Tornado Linux!" or "Silver Bullet Train Linux!!" or "Kung Fu Fists of Fury Linux!!!"? Maybe you were leaning more in the direction of "Ultra Rainbow Happy Linux of Most Excellentnessestness".
Or, perhaps, you're more in the made-up names camp: "Xinux", "Lazernix", "Mythix", "Dystro", "Majickx", or "UzerGlow". These, certainly, are more exciting than "Mepis", "Xandros", or the disaster that is "Mandriva".
Dude, personally, if I came across a distro called "Salma Hayek's Breasts Linux", I would use that in preference to anything else on the basis of the name alone. So, yeah, I agree, names have power.
In the spirit of that revelation I will immediately be uninstalling Mozilla, The Gimp, and all of my many Python libraries which have never gotten the "Py" + "Whatever-it-does" naming convention.
On a final note, I do agree with you to a point. It would be nice if developers paid a *little* more attention to names. But beauty is in the eye of the beholder, bud.
That if, say, you're an English speaker unfamiliar with the "i's" long "e" sound, you'll be likely to pronounce it "Man-dreyeva", which sounds like New York slang for "Mandriver", which sounds like gay porn?
Not that there's anything wrong with that...
Well, actually, for a product name, yes there is. That's awful. God. A name only an engineer could love.
Why do these supposedly smart people Balmer, Gates, Lyons, McBride, Schwartz, etc. of the world always sound so stupid when they attept to attack the GPL?
Well, I don't think they do sound stupid at all. I think, very frequently, they sound pretty smart.
I've seen so many comments on Slashdot and in other places which seem to indicate by their content that the commenter believes greed is limited to only the United States. I mean, I've seen several comments here which point out that the flow of IP under the GPL is bidirectional. The poster says "Duh!".
Personally, I don't think that the engineers in developing nations are so stupid that they fail to recognize this fact and need our help to remind them. I do think, however, that many engineering companies management teams will seriously pause at the idea of giving up their research under the GPL, for the same reasons as any management team which sees a value in proprietary knowledge.
The U.S. didn't invent greed, no, we just worked out a system that allowed greed to be more than just a motivator.
Plato says, in Phaedrus: "... you must determine which kind of speech is appropriate to each kind of soul... offer a complex and elaborate speech to a complex soul and a simple speech to a simple one." I believe this is all that is happening here with Schwartz. He has tailored his speech and he knows, exactly, who he is speaking to. We shouldn't assume that people like him are stupid simply because we don't like to the language he speaks.
Well, gosh, with Troy under his belt, all my concerns about the movie sucking are straight out! *cough*
Many times I've been shocked about how little some people know or understand about the Internet, especially considering that it surrounds so many aspects of their everyday lives. And yet, since this is the same with film, a much older medium, I suppose it shouldn't be a surprise at all.
I'll constantly read commentaries blaming the suck-factor (in their opinion) of a film on this particular actor or that particular director, or on the quality of the writing. Let me offer only that it isn't that simple.
Many, many, many people touch a film and can have the power to change it significantly before any public audience views it. By the time a studio movie is publicly released, the script has gone through, oh, ten, twelve, twenty major revisions, producers have had their say, the director his, and the editor his (all masculine pronouns used for the sake of convenience, now lost completely due to this note). During that time each major player in the production of the film has been presented with choices -- choices, mind you, not creations from their own brains, but choices based on the quality of the people who've been hired, and who may have been hired for any number of experience, quality, or political reasons -- about costuming, production design, sound design and mixing, and even photography which, although affected by directorial input is almost always actually executed by a director of photography who, like the others, makes *strong* suggestions and provides choices.
Given how collaborative and varied film is, it's almost a miracle that any good movies get made at all. And yet, there are still many times I'll hear comments like the one above, as if the writer had any real input at all on the quality, good or bad, of Troy. Believe me, they were fucking given 10,000 notes, and expected to make changes quickly. And they did so, with a smile, even when they were faced with the problem of taking a fucking stupid note and trying to figure out how to incorporate it into the script without having to rewrite the entire story to justify it. And it was a *they*. I don't care if only one (living) writer is listed, there were more who didn't get credited. That is the way it works.
Keep in mind that this is the industry that employs Harvey Weinstein, the man who, when he owned the Lord of the Rings rights, wrote to Peter Jackson asking, "Why does there have to be so many hobbits?"
I realize that the above quote doesn't exclude the possibility that the film sucked, in that opinion, due to the efforts of others. But it would be nice if, sometimes, people could keep an open mind and realize that when a film sucks, there may be no direct reason. Sometimes they just suck. Same for the reverse, sometimes they're just great and all of the elements came together. But it's not useful to assign blanket blame or congratulations to anyone in film, unless they've got an established track record and what you're doing is evaluating a body of work.
I rescind my comments in the case of Joel Schumacher, whom I still blame for Batman's nipples. I hate you with the white-hot intensity of a thousand suns, you bastard.
This makes good conversation fodder, but can frustrate readers who prefer direct presentation of scientific arguments.
Plato's Republic is presented as narrative and imagined dialogue. It's been providing good conversation fodder for, oh, a little while now. Perhaps the limitation isn't the form...
Yeah, well, I guess corporate IT depts are probably struggling with mgmt to implement company-wide changeovers, especially for all those companies that are Microstooges and have big service and standardization contracts, yadda yadda yadda.
But for all you individuals out there who aren't experiencing the Browsing Bliss that is Firefox, preferring IE to downloading a small file and doing a simple install, well, I don't pity you any more than anyone who walks into a dynamite factory and says, "Man, it's dark, anyone got a match?"
Well, no it doesn't ...
on
Bayesian Tail
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
All due respect, you're being a bit hard on the guy. He's not doing badly here.
The [brackets] used in the usage message are standard in the Unix world for specifying an optional or default argument. Just look at any man page. So that, actually, is pretty straightforward. The name of the default config file would likely also be spelled out in the man page, which I would expect, so that's not confusing.
As for changing the if construct into a switch, well, I'm trusting the accuracy of your excerpt, but I didn't find his code to be very difficult to read, to be honest, and certainly not a candidate for DailyWTF, which typically contains laughably horrible code.
As far as other code may go, the guy states that this is in a nascent stage, so jumping on his source files seems like a bit of an easy shot:|
Every opportunity I get I tell people about Firefox, and since the Internet is my living I get asked a lot, as do many of the people here on Slashdot.
The fact is, Firefox is giving the best features to both consumers and developers before they're asking for them, not after the fact. This, I think, is an important distinction. Microsoft is only picking up the ball because, after they announced they would no longer be playing the game, they've realized that the browser isn't going away after all and, oh by the way, Firefox is kicking ass all over IE on a number of fronts.
This is not only self-serving and a way of marginalizing mainstream consumer demands -- all while convincing them that they don't really want what they want after all, no, what they really want is what Microsoft happens to be pushing -- but it's cynical, pure and simple.
The great thing about Microsoft, though, is that they make it so easy for you to hate them. They don't apologize, and they never deliver without being asked, but they are constantly telling you what you really want, even though you didn't realize you needed it, whatever "it" happens to be, like their new touted shell that passes around.Net objects. I'm sure we'll all be "needing" that, too.
Yeah, that shows who the best robots, err, I mean coders are.
Yes, I often encounter this attitude among those that suck at TopCoder. Well, if that's all there is to these "so-called competitions" then, you know, just make some "little templates" of your own -- be a "robot", that is -- and make yourself $50,000 in the algorithm competition. I mean, that's all there is to it, right? Just a few templates? All those other guys are just robots...
Or, here's an idea, you might try stowing your ego for ten minutes, and actually trying to learn something. Because something tells me if you were in contention for the top prize, you'd hardly be calling the competitors at TopCoder, who've worked hard to develop their talent with algorithms, "robots".
It's better for everyone to think you're an idiot, than for you to open your mouth and remove all doubt.
If you don't see this, you are either ignorant or willfully blind to what is currently happenning.
Jeez, dude, those are the only choices? It couldn't possibly be that someone has a different opinion? It couldn't be that someone has carefully considered a different set of criteria for their reasoning and is approaching the problem from a different angle? It couldn't be that, for example, a given pragmatist might reject 'absurd' scenarios in favor of a 'most likely' approach in order to arrive at a well considered, reasonable, logical difference of viewpoint?
No!
It can only be that IF YOU DON'T SEE THIS, YOU'RE BLIND OR IGNORANT.
Cool. C++, with a link to Visual Studio, is easier than Python.
Unless you're using some subscription release of Visual Studio, VS doesn't even support visual GUI widgets via C++ yet. You've got to use VB, or C#, or J# or some other freakin' sharp to get that.
I think one of the primay points of using a scripting language, bud, is to *get away* from IDE's. IDE's are there because certain large languages and frameworks, or certain requirements for memory management or debugging, are so complicated that using an IDE is a productivity booster. But with Perl or Python, an IDE frequently gets in the way.
Also, if you are building a "modest OpenGL/GUI" app on Windows, well... why? If you're building something that uses extensive GUI on Windows, why not use Windows Forms or, hell, win32? Try using GLUT for Win32 to complement that.
Or, sit down and learn wxPython, which has OpenGL support and, dude, is as easy to learn as a GUI toolkit gets. I mean, I'm sorry, but if you have a hard time getting around wxPython, then maybe GUI development just isn't for you. Or maybe you need to be a bit more patient and get out of that Visual Basic mind-mode.
Anyway, it might not be a bad idea to get away from IDE a little. Cutting a little code without IntelliSense, or whatever the hell it's called, might put your mind to thinking about *why and how* things are working the way they are, instead of satisfying the requirements of the pop-up window telling you that you need to supply some widget reference.
Randall Hyde's long-term project ...
on
High Level Assembly
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Actually, HLA ain't nothing new, and if you've been doing any hanging out on comp.lang.asm then you've seen his name popping up on posts about every single day, several times per day, promoting HLA and helping newbies for years now.
I downloaded his book, "Art of Assembly Language" (avail. at No Starch, http://www.nostarch.com/) a couple of years ago before it had been published by No Starch and it's well written, still available for free either HTML , or PDF.
If you're using Windoze then it's definitely worth checking out the excellent RadASM assembly language IDE for Windows, which is itself written in assembly, and also supports HLA. Randall Hyde devotes a chapter somewhere, either in his book or on his site, I can't remember, to configuring and using RadASM.
One of the posts has questioned the value of teaching assembly to newbies, but I think there's a huge value for serious students. It's hard to appreciate garbage collection, for one, until you've had to pick up your own memory trash. But more importantly, most compilers out there output to some intermediary assembly language, and understanding the inner workings of your processor, your compiler and your own programs is one essential difference between being, well, a hack and being really, really good. There are other differences, to be sure, but that's one.
I haven't been a huge fan of HLA myself for various, and admittedly completely arbitrary reasons. But Randall Hyde has put megatons of work into his stuff, doing some extremely impressive things, and he's always ready and willing to be helpful on the newsgroups, so if you have an interest then I would probably go to his site and to comp.lang.asm before I went anywhere else. Anyone stands to learn a ton.
I just finished installing and configuring Postfix with TLS, Cyrus SASL, Maildir storage (which Postfix simply "does" by appending a "/" at the end of a mailbox path), and virtual users alongside Courier-IMAP, and, man, was it easy. I had the help of O'Reilly's
Postfix: The Definitive Guide and between that, the provided documentation and the wealth of resources available on the Web, I was able to get everything up and running in record time.
I know this sounds like a commercial, but it's hard not to sound that way when everything just kind've worked the first time. I now have authenticated, encrypted SMTP and POP and my users are, literally, thanking me. My experience has been that using Postfix was an easy way for me to look good.
Here's a Postfix SASL HOWTO which came in handy, but there are a lot of resources on the Web, especially at the Postfix site.
Sorry, Ethiopian has more Muslims than Christians, although you're correct in stating that the Eastern Orthodox Church is important and widespread there. Nevertheless, Islam is predominant.
The average annual income is 108 US$ (2004, [4]), but one has to keep in mind the large gap between poor and super-rich, as well as between urban and country people. When we visited Addis, a taxi driver earned 130 Birr (about 13 Euro) per day.
Okay, I could be wrong, but it is only on Slashdot that I believe I could find an article trying to sell a free OS to a populace that's known for its poverty and starvation levels. The religious parallels are pretty plain here, I think, where we've got Linux zealots, like Christians of the nineteenth century, going to "save those poor souls" from the damnation of proprietary software. This reminds me of the Richard Stallman dreck that began, "Well, it's free software, so it's ethical..."
Now let's all cross ourselves and chant "Hail Stallman."
On Thursday, 1st of April, we first met the head of the School of Information System Technology of AAU. He showed no interest in the possibilities of Open Source Software regarding especially developing countries. Nevertheless he was using Linux as a tool for teaching special features of Operating Systems in his lecture on this topic.
Could it be that he showed no interest because he's grown up in a country where people die of malnutrition and corrupt leaders reserve aid money for their own consumption? But in the face of that he's got some quasi-religious technodipwad pointing out the oh-so-bitter ironies of how open source is viewed in this the-most-needful of nations.
God. It makes me want to go and do an install of Windows XP.
This is "sad and all" is it? Well, notwithstanding that the quote didn't literally "kill" you -- oh, man, if you're not in comedy you should be -- you might take into consideration, dipshit, that the mother, Martha Williams, lives in low-income housing, is likely not in possession of the powers of the English language which you, as her zany critic, wield with formidable (but sensitive!) cleverness, and that her son's suicide has become grist for your wacky mill.
You'd hate to be the one to explain that you can never get anything "off that Web completely"?
God, dude, you might not be able to help being a prick -- honestly, I believe that people like you are usually doing the very best they're capable of -- but you should still consider stroking yourself in private...
It's pretty ridiculous to lament the current state of average software quality and then require developers to reinvent the wheel every time they're on a new job or working for a new client. It may not be lawful, in all instances, to copy code between projects and clients, but in order to meet requirements, especially time requirments, while ensuring a quality project that's as bug free as possible, copying is not only a necessity but a common practice.
Besides, what are we really talking about most of the time? Code libraries? What's the difference, really, if I copy code from my library or use routines from memory, things that I've been required to code over and over again, like validation routines, or basic algorithms?
No one is going to say that they go from client to client and write brand new code each time. Furthermore, if I were a client I would have to seriously question whether I'd even want that. If I were on a tight time constraint I wouldn't get it even if I did want it.
It would be like commissioning someone to build a bridge and then requiring that they only use brand new formulas anc techniques. Okay, but I'm not gonna be the first guy to test it...
Lindows.com has been asking customers for name suggestions. Robertson said his favorite was that the new name be "Lindos" along with the slogan, "Because it's the W that is causing all the problems."
Why is it so difficult to find decent software names? Why does Adobe have "Photoshop" and the open source community have "The Gimp", which literally means a person with a limp? Why is there "Oracle" and "SQL Server", one which is cool, both historically and as a product brand, and one which is straightforward and easy to remember (if nothing else), but the OS community as "PostgreSQL"?
A lot of programmers in the Slashdot community take cheap shots at marketing and this is important, because extreme marketing types can be every bit as annoying as extreme nerds, but it would be nice if it was acknowledged that marketing is, actually, a legitimate discipline and that product naming is important.
Lindos? So this is the BEST they can do?: Ask the community or drop the 'W'? Come on, guys. You came up with the software, why not make a legitimate effort to take the name seriously?
Would you go around to all your friends to ask what to name your child? And if you couldn't come up with anything by taking a poll would you just, say, drop the 'H' in John, if that was your first name, and call it done? I mean let's face it, good software is a lot harder to make than a baby, for most of us anyway...
Of course it's a ploy. But if the Big Bad Wolf, needing to make friends with a few of the forest's other creatures, offers to make you a nice lunch and can prove -- via a reasonable license -- that it's not poisoned, well, then eat up and say thank you.
Nothing's changed. But the software is useful and it's nice to know that public opinion can hold some sway over Microsoft, however tenuous...
Slashdot Mirror
Because most programmers are male, and most male programmers have a fear of commit.
Adult. That's almost funny, because all it really means is possibly more graphic violence and a big step-up on sexual innuendo, both probably offered, in most situations, as a substitute for more creative, thoughtful writing.
...
So
Don't miss "Hex Filets"
It's a cross between The X-Files and Friends, and it will feature Jack from "Will and Grace" the homosexual madcap who, in this incarnation, stars as a Java programmer. Here's an excerpt:
Moldwad: Hey, Skilly, I'll bet you I can keep it up all night.
Skilly: I doubt it.
Enter Jack.
Jack: Hey, Moldwad -- WHOA! Decided to open up a SEX file, huh!?
* Run laugh track *
Yeah. I can't wait for either show. The anticipation is just, you know, unbearable.
You can download the patch below. They've done, actually, an impressive job with it because, by way of a "peace offering" to the Web community, they've incorporated quite a large number of features from IE7 and future releases far earlier than expected.
The changes are actually pretty dramatic, with even some significant alterations to the UI and a number of fixes to the bookmarks system. Enjoy.
http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/
I predict there will be basically two categories of posts about Rails.
Either, one, that Rails is so amazing that after you use it sex seems laughably trivial by comparison, even and especially you count the production value -- one can, after all, only have one child (on average) using sex, but with Rails, dude, I HAD TEN.
Or, two, that Rails is no big deal, it's just another MVC re-think, heck I rolled one of those myself one afternoon a coupla years back, yeah it ruled but, you know, I'm really into that Java thing now. Besides, Rails is no good for BIG projects, for that you need Hibernate and a crane.
So I'll post one for the middle-of-the-road. Rails rules. I love it. I've reimplemented, in a week-and-a-half, a fairly large application that took me two months to do with Python. It's not a fair comparison because with Python I used Webware but did everything, like user management and logging, with no starting point, and also the first time around I wasn't as familiar with the problem domain.
With Rails I used the Salted Hash Login Generator which got the basics of my user login and management done in one fell swoop, an hour or two of work. I also re-used the view code from the Python app.
But the rest of it was fun. I enjoyed it. Things were done quickly and the API is awesome. ActiveRecord is not Hibernate -- yes, Javapeople, we know, we know -- but it's good. It's really good and super easy. And while there's some magic going on behind the scenes with Rails, it's not hard to understand at all.
That said, yes, if you're an online payroll system for IBM, Rails won't cut it. There are flaws, but for day-to-day stuff, not too many. It's updated very frequently, too.
My only complaint is the ubermensch of Rails, Dave Heinemeier, who, while smart, is also all too aware of it, and frequently shoots his blog off about topics which go beyond Web frameworks and into areas of either glib tech-prejudice or, at times, more subtle see-how-smart-I-am dorkposts -- the most insufferable species of Geek.
Otherwise, I strongly encourage anyone to check Rails out. It's great and a *lot* of other frameworks in other languages could stand to pay attention to the innovations in Rails. These innovations aren't so much technical epiphanies, as they are the meeting of many good ideas in one place, along with enthusiastic support and a lot of glue. Ruby's fun, too.
Check out, also, the frameworks from other languages which are shamelessly stealing from Rails:
Subway (Python)
Catalyst (Perl)
Amen, brother.
I mean, don't we already have great browsers with tabs? I'm using one right now. All this news about tabs in IE is a little like Ford announcing a new product: a gas-powered, horseless carriage which will convey any number up to four passengers at a high rate of speed and without all the hassle horses require!
"Yay," yells the crowd! "And it will run over standard roads, too, won't it?"
"Standard roads? Oh, now let's not get carried away, son! No, SPECIAL roads will be required because, um, because, oh! Because ours is a SPECIAL vehicle, so we need SPECIAL roads and we'll build them and charge a minimal toll."
"Fuck you!" yells the crowd! Microsoft won't lend full support to CSS2 because they claim it's a flawed specification, which, of course, is true, in the sense that revenue model for Microsoft was not built into it.
To hell with this. I'm going to switch from Firefox because IE finally got tabbed browsing? Yawn. I have Maxthon installed and I *still* use Firefox.
Uh. What?
I majored in English. I'd like to think that I'm aware of "the rudiments of communication".
So, I'd be interested in what you'd propose. Instead of "Grumpy Groundhog", would you prefer, say, "Electric Tornado Linux!" or "Silver Bullet Train Linux!!" or "Kung Fu Fists of Fury Linux!!!"? Maybe you were leaning more in the direction of "Ultra Rainbow Happy Linux of Most Excellentnessestness".
Or, perhaps, you're more in the made-up names camp: "Xinux", "Lazernix", "Mythix", "Dystro", "Majickx", or "UzerGlow". These, certainly, are more exciting than "Mepis", "Xandros", or the disaster that is "Mandriva".
Dude, personally, if I came across a distro called "Salma Hayek's Breasts Linux", I would use that in preference to anything else on the basis of the name alone. So, yeah, I agree, names have power.
In the spirit of that revelation I will immediately be uninstalling Mozilla, The Gimp, and all of my many Python libraries which have never gotten the "Py" + "Whatever-it-does" naming convention.
On a final note, I do agree with you to a point. It would be nice if developers paid a *little* more attention to names. But beauty is in the eye of the beholder, bud.
Me? I happen to like "Grumpy Groundhog".
You? You are one.
That if, say, you're an English speaker unfamiliar with the "i's" long "e" sound, you'll be likely to pronounce it "Man-dreyeva", which sounds like New York slang for "Mandriver", which sounds like gay porn?
...
Not that there's anything wrong with that
Well, actually, for a product name, yes there is. That's awful. God. A name only an engineer could love.
Well, I don't think they do sound stupid at all. I think, very frequently, they sound pretty smart.
I've seen so many comments on Slashdot and in other places which seem to indicate by their content that the commenter believes greed is limited to only the United States. I mean, I've seen several comments here which point out that the flow of IP under the GPL is bidirectional. The poster says "Duh!".
Personally, I don't think that the engineers in developing nations are so stupid that they fail to recognize this fact and need our help to remind them. I do think, however, that many engineering companies management teams will seriously pause at the idea of giving up their research under the GPL, for the same reasons as any management team which sees a value in proprietary knowledge.
The U.S. didn't invent greed, no, we just worked out a system that allowed greed to be more than just a motivator.
Plato says, in Phaedrus: "... you must determine which kind of speech is appropriate to each kind of soul ... offer a complex and elaborate speech to a complex soul and a simple speech to a simple one." I believe this is all that is happening here with Schwartz. He has tailored his speech and he knows, exactly, who he is speaking to. We shouldn't assume that people like him are stupid simply because we don't like to the language he speaks.
Many times I've been shocked about how little some people know or understand about the Internet, especially considering that it surrounds so many aspects of their everyday lives. And yet, since this is the same with film, a much older medium, I suppose it shouldn't be a surprise at all.
I'll constantly read commentaries blaming the suck-factor (in their opinion) of a film on this particular actor or that particular director, or on the quality of the writing. Let me offer only that it isn't that simple.
Many, many, many people touch a film and can have the power to change it significantly before any public audience views it. By the time a studio movie is publicly released, the script has gone through, oh, ten, twelve, twenty major revisions, producers have had their say, the director his, and the editor his (all masculine pronouns used for the sake of convenience, now lost completely due to this note). During that time each major player in the production of the film has been presented with choices -- choices, mind you, not creations from their own brains, but choices based on the quality of the people who've been hired, and who may have been hired for any number of experience, quality, or political reasons -- about costuming, production design, sound design and mixing, and even photography which, although affected by directorial input is almost always actually executed by a director of photography who, like the others, makes *strong* suggestions and provides choices.
Given how collaborative and varied film is, it's almost a miracle that any good movies get made at all. And yet, there are still many times I'll hear comments like the one above, as if the writer had any real input at all on the quality, good or bad, of Troy. Believe me, they were fucking given 10,000 notes, and expected to make changes quickly. And they did so, with a smile, even when they were faced with the problem of taking a fucking stupid note and trying to figure out how to incorporate it into the script without having to rewrite the entire story to justify it. And it was a *they*. I don't care if only one (living) writer is listed, there were more who didn't get credited. That is the way it works.
Keep in mind that this is the industry that employs Harvey Weinstein, the man who, when he owned the Lord of the Rings rights, wrote to Peter Jackson asking, "Why does there have to be so many hobbits?"
I realize that the above quote doesn't exclude the possibility that the film sucked, in that opinion, due to the efforts of others. But it would be nice if, sometimes, people could keep an open mind and realize that when a film sucks, there may be no direct reason. Sometimes they just suck. Same for the reverse, sometimes they're just great and all of the elements came together. But it's not useful to assign blanket blame or congratulations to anyone in film, unless they've got an established track record and what you're doing is evaluating a body of work.
I rescind my comments in the case of Joel Schumacher, whom I still blame for Batman's nipples. I hate you with the white-hot intensity of a thousand suns, you bastard.
This makes good conversation fodder, but can frustrate readers who prefer direct presentation of scientific arguments. Plato's Republic is presented as narrative and imagined dialogue. It's been providing good conversation fodder for, oh, a little while now. Perhaps the limitation isn't the form ...
Yeah, well, I guess corporate IT depts are probably struggling with mgmt to implement company-wide changeovers, especially for all those companies that are Microstooges and have big service and standardization contracts, yadda yadda yadda. But for all you individuals out there who aren't experiencing the Browsing Bliss that is Firefox, preferring IE to downloading a small file and doing a simple install, well, I don't pity you any more than anyone who walks into a dynamite factory and says, "Man, it's dark, anyone got a match?"
All due respect, you're being a bit hard on the guy. He's not doing badly here.
:|
The [brackets] used in the usage message are standard in the Unix world for specifying an optional or default argument. Just look at any man page. So that, actually, is pretty straightforward. The name of the default config file would likely also be spelled out in the man page, which I would expect, so that's not confusing.
As for changing the if construct into a switch, well, I'm trusting the accuracy of your excerpt, but I didn't find his code to be very difficult to read, to be honest, and certainly not a candidate for DailyWTF, which typically contains laughably horrible code.
As far as other code may go, the guy states that this is in a nascent stage, so jumping on his source files seems like a bit of an easy shot
The fact is, Firefox is giving the best features to both consumers and developers before they're asking for them, not after the fact. This, I think, is an important distinction. Microsoft is only picking up the ball because, after they announced they would no longer be playing the game, they've realized that the browser isn't going away after all and, oh by the way, Firefox is kicking ass all over IE on a number of fronts.
This is not only self-serving and a way of marginalizing mainstream consumer demands -- all while convincing them that they don't really want what they want after all, no, what they really want is what Microsoft happens to be pushing -- but it's cynical, pure and simple.
The great thing about Microsoft, though, is that they make it so easy for you to hate them. They don't apologize, and they never deliver without being asked, but they are constantly telling you what you really want, even though you didn't realize you needed it, whatever "it" happens to be, like their new touted shell that passes around .Net objects. I'm sure we'll all be "needing" that, too.
Yes, I often encounter this attitude among those that suck at TopCoder. Well, if that's all there is to these "so-called competitions" then, you know, just make some "little templates" of your own -- be a "robot", that is -- and make yourself $50,000 in the algorithm competition. I mean, that's all there is to it, right? Just a few templates? All those other guys are just robots ...
Or, here's an idea, you might try stowing your ego for ten minutes, and actually trying to learn something. Because something tells me if you were in contention for the top prize, you'd hardly be calling the competitors at TopCoder, who've worked hard to develop their talent with algorithms, "robots".
It's better for everyone to think you're an idiot, than for you to open your mouth and remove all doubt.
Jeez, dude, those are the only choices? It couldn't possibly be that someone has a different opinion? It couldn't be that someone has carefully considered a different set of criteria for their reasoning and is approaching the problem from a different angle? It couldn't be that, for example, a given pragmatist might reject 'absurd' scenarios in favor of a 'most likely' approach in order to arrive at a well considered, reasonable, logical difference of viewpoint?
No!
It can only be that IF YOU DON'T SEE THIS, YOU'RE BLIND OR IGNORANT.
This is why Stallmanites make me want to puke.
Cool. C++, with a link to Visual Studio, is easier than Python.
... why? If you're building something that uses extensive GUI on Windows, why not use Windows Forms or, hell, win32? Try using GLUT for Win32 to complement that.
Unless you're using some subscription release of Visual Studio, VS doesn't even support visual GUI widgets via C++ yet. You've got to use VB, or C#, or J# or some other freakin' sharp to get that.
I think one of the primay points of using a scripting language, bud, is to *get away* from IDE's. IDE's are there because certain large languages and frameworks, or certain requirements for memory management or debugging, are so complicated that using an IDE is a productivity booster. But with Perl or Python, an IDE frequently gets in the way.
Also, if you are building a "modest OpenGL/GUI" app on Windows, well
Or, sit down and learn wxPython, which has OpenGL support and, dude, is as easy to learn as a GUI toolkit gets. I mean, I'm sorry, but if you have a hard time getting around wxPython, then maybe GUI development just isn't for you. Or maybe you need to be a bit more patient and get out of that Visual Basic mind-mode.
Anyway, it might not be a bad idea to get away from IDE a little. Cutting a little code without IntelliSense, or whatever the hell it's called, might put your mind to thinking about *why and how* things are working the way they are, instead of satisfying the requirements of the pop-up window telling you that you need to supply some widget reference.
Actually, HLA ain't nothing new, and if you've been doing any hanging out on comp.lang.asm then you've seen his name popping up on posts about every single day, several times per day, promoting HLA and helping newbies for years now.
I downloaded his book, "Art of Assembly Language" (avail. at No Starch, http://www.nostarch.com/) a couple of years ago before it had been published by No Starch and it's well written, still available for free either HTML , or PDF.
If you're using Windoze then it's definitely worth checking out the excellent RadASM assembly language IDE for Windows, which is itself written in assembly, and also supports HLA. Randall Hyde devotes a chapter somewhere, either in his book or on his site, I can't remember, to configuring and using RadASM.
One of the posts has questioned the value of teaching assembly to newbies, but I think there's a huge value for serious students. It's hard to appreciate garbage collection, for one, until you've had to pick up your own memory trash. But more importantly, most compilers out there output to some intermediary assembly language, and understanding the inner workings of your processor, your compiler and your own programs is one essential difference between being, well, a hack and being really, really good. There are other differences, to be sure, but that's one.
I haven't been a huge fan of HLA myself for various, and admittedly completely arbitrary reasons. But Randall Hyde has put megatons of work into his stuff, doing some extremely impressive things, and he's always ready and willing to be helpful on the newsgroups, so if you have an interest then I would probably go to his site and to comp.lang.asm before I went anywhere else. Anyone stands to learn a ton.
I know this sounds like a commercial, but it's hard not to sound that way when everything just kind've worked the first time. I now have authenticated, encrypted SMTP and POP and my users are, literally, thanking me. My experience has been that using Postfix was an easy way for me to look good.
Here's a Postfix SASL HOWTO which came in handy, but there are a lot of resources on the Web, especially at the Postfix site.
Sorry, Ethiopian has more Muslims than Christians, although you're correct in stating that the Eastern Orthodox Church is important and widespread there. Nevertheless, Islam is predominant.
Okay, I could be wrong, but it is only on Slashdot that I believe I could find an article trying to sell a free OS to a populace that's known for its poverty and starvation levels. The religious parallels are pretty plain here, I think, where we've got Linux zealots, like Christians of the nineteenth century, going to "save those poor souls" from the damnation of proprietary software. This reminds me of the Richard Stallman dreck that began, "Well, it's free software, so it's ethical ..."
Now let's all cross ourselves and chant "Hail Stallman."
On Thursday, 1st of April, we first met the head of the School of Information System Technology of AAU. He showed no interest in the possibilities of Open Source Software regarding especially developing countries. Nevertheless he was using Linux as a tool for teaching special features of Operating Systems in his lecture on this topic.
Could it be that he showed no interest because he's grown up in a country where people die of malnutrition and corrupt leaders reserve aid money for their own consumption? But in the face of that he's got some quasi-religious technodipwad pointing out the oh-so-bitter ironies of how open source is viewed in this the-most-needful of nations.
God. It makes me want to go and do an install of Windows XP.
This is "sad and all" is it? Well, notwithstanding that the quote didn't literally "kill" you -- oh, man, if you're not in comedy you should be -- you might take into consideration, dipshit, that the mother, Martha Williams, lives in low-income housing, is likely not in possession of the powers of the English language which you, as her zany critic, wield with formidable (but sensitive!) cleverness, and that her son's suicide has become grist for your wacky mill.
...
You'd hate to be the one to explain that you can never get anything "off that Web completely"?
God, dude, you might not be able to help being a prick -- honestly, I believe that people like you are usually doing the very best they're capable of -- but you should still consider stroking yourself in private
It's pretty ridiculous to lament the current state of average software quality and then require developers to reinvent the wheel every time they're on a new job or working for a new client. It may not be lawful, in all instances, to copy code between projects and clients, but in order to meet requirements, especially time requirments, while ensuring a quality project that's as bug free as possible, copying is not only a necessity but a common practice.
...
Besides, what are we really talking about most of the time? Code libraries? What's the difference, really, if I copy code from my library or use routines from memory, things that I've been required to code over and over again, like validation routines, or basic algorithms?
No one is going to say that they go from client to client and write brand new code each time. Furthermore, if I were a client I would have to seriously question whether I'd even want that. If I were on a tight time constraint I wouldn't get it even if I did want it.
It would be like commissioning someone to build a bridge and then requiring that they only use brand new formulas anc techniques. Okay, but I'm not gonna be the first guy to test it
Why is it so difficult to find decent software names? Why does Adobe have "Photoshop" and the open source community have "The Gimp", which literally means a person with a limp? Why is there "Oracle" and "SQL Server", one which is cool, both historically and as a product brand, and one which is straightforward and easy to remember (if nothing else), but the OS community as "PostgreSQL"?
A lot of programmers in the Slashdot community take cheap shots at marketing and this is important, because extreme marketing types can be every bit as annoying as extreme nerds, but it would be nice if it was acknowledged that marketing is, actually, a legitimate discipline and that product naming is important.
Lindos? So this is the BEST they can do?: Ask the community or drop the 'W'? Come on, guys. You came up with the software, why not make a legitimate effort to take the name seriously?
Would you go around to all your friends to ask what to name your child? And if you couldn't come up with anything by taking a poll would you just, say, drop the 'H' in John, if that was your first name, and call it done? I mean let's face it, good software is a lot harder to make than a baby, for most of us anyway ...
Okay.
..."
... Yes."
... Yeah."
..."
So what did he say as he was leaving?
GREEN: "What do you think this is about? Hmmm? MONEY?"
MCNEALY: "Well, um
JOY: "Actually, yes."
MCNEALY: "Well, okay, yeah, yes. I would have to, yeah
GREEN: "Oh, so THAT'S the way it is. So you've coldly abandoned the noble principles of SOFTWARE!?!?"
JOY: "Uhhh
MCNEALY: "The what?"
GREEN: "Well if all you people care about is 2 billion measly dollars, I'M LEAVING!!!"
JOY: "Okay."
MCNEALY: "Yeah, don't let the door hit your ass on the way out
Of course it's a ploy. But if the Big Bad Wolf, needing to make friends with a few of the forest's other creatures, offers to make you a nice lunch and can prove -- via a reasonable license -- that it's not poisoned, well, then eat up and say thank you.
...
Nothing's changed. But the software is useful and it's nice to know that public opinion can hold some sway over Microsoft, however tenuous