I'm not intolerant to free thinking. I'm simply sick and tired of people responding to a valid question with the MySQL_is_the_answer_to_all_problems mantra. It's a useless response.
FWIW, I use MySQL and PostgreSQL on a daily basis, and haven't touched Oracle in years. When you can develop a system from scratch you have a choice in the tools you use. When you join an existing team, you don't.
Just checking, but does it really matter? He asked a question, and I doubt he has the ability to come in and say, "Hey, use this open source database instead." Sometimes people need to use closed source software, and have to learn how to use it. Answer his question or keep your mouth shut.
Any particular reason? Do they know that all their clients will be using IE? IE usage in the wild is only at about 85% these days and will probably decrease in the future.
Some organizations with the US Department of Defence are very unlikely to change, and have standardized on particular platforms whether they make technological sense or not. Very often going up against that kind of bureaucracy is a battle that few can win, including heavy hitters like SAIC.
In cases like this it is a known fact that all people using a particular application will be using the same browser because they do not have a choice.
You cannot treat any organization within the USG as "the wild."
And the whooshing noise *you* hear is the displacement caused by the (partial) sarcasm of my response. And, as the other reply points out, this happens all to often.
Don't EVER comment your code if you work for a company. That's a sure fire way to lose your job! If you don't comment your code then you are the only person who can understand it, making you indispensible.
Great idea! The myth of indispensibility is a great reason. May your next job be as a maintenance programmer in a Perl shop where the previous "indispensible" developer had his ass fired for threatening the boss and you get 50,000 lines of Perl dumped in your lap.
Sure, while the contract is between the employee and MS, MS can still file suit against Google for poaching. Regardless of whether it is meritorious or not, it becomes a salvo in the battle.
This isn't an unexpected decision: as others have said the judge pretty much had to rule the way he did. And, as others noted, it is difficult to enforce. Nevertheless, I expect that Google will obey, because the consequences of getting caught not doing it can be dire. Microsoft will undoubtedly (if they haven't already) request full disclosure of all email and paper communication related to the case, both past, present, and future.
I lived through this bullshit in the early 1990s when I was in Symantec's Developer Tools Group. We hired Gene Wang from Borland, and Philippe Kahn went non-linear, filing a lawsuit against Symantec and Gene. We couldn't delete any email, throw out any paper, or discuss the case. We sent Borland truckloads of paper for their lawyers to go through. We called it "The Wrath of Kahn." Gordon Eubanks (the Symantec CEO at the time) just gave Gene other stuff to do until the courts resolved things. It was worth the wait: Gene was awesome to work for.
Try an experiment: download the given and surname data from the US Census bureau. Now take a random given name and a random surname, glom them together, and chances are you have someone's (yes, a real person's) name. Now do that, but add a database of name nicknames (Bill, Will, Willy, William) and you've probably generates a few more. The fact that they took a sampling of real names, generated variations, and came up with some new names, is hardly an invasive measure.
Government agencies will often use their contractors to perform work that would be illegal for the USG agency to do itself. That's one of the little loopholes that everyone in the game knows but doesn't talk about. It isn't about vetting the contractor for "ethics."
Now, I'm not saying that what the TSA does with the data they muster is right or valid, but I am saying that you need to be a little more informed in your outrage.
well i can pay 0.99 for a song regardless of its length and listen to it as much as i want. Is there a difference?
Well, you can't pay $0.99 for a twelve minute song. You can only buy songs a la carte that are less than 8 or 9 minutes. Otherwise you have to buy the whole album.
I don't know what the pricing model is in Hollywood: what percentage of ticket sales is distributed? Companies will want to make money on this.
ideally i'd like to get movies through itunes, pay something reasonable like $4.99 for _just_ the movie no special stuff. IMO that would be as good a deal as the.99 per song thing.
So you think it is OK to pay $4.99 to download a 130 minute movie that you can then watch as often as you want? Weird.
I would expect a different pricing model, similar to the iTMS "books-on-tape", where the cost appears to be a function of the length of the book.
I find that outline Mode in GNU Emacs works great. If you are wedded to the HTML output, consider Markdown: the syntax is easy to learn, you can write raw text and get decently formatted output on the other side. And, if you decide to move to a wiki later, some (like WordPress) can support Markdown syntax, so no reformatting is needed.
For me, OOo (or, more specifically, NeoOffice/J on Mac OS X, though from what I've seen the same is true for pure OOo) cannot handle Word files with non-trivial templates/styles. The company I work for is predominately a MS shop in the office space, and I am constantly handed documents from our PMs in the corporate templates that I cannot use them in OO... the formatting is completely fscked.
What happens when you buy a VW and Chrysler decides they can't exist anymore?
What you're asking is what if Apple's DRM suddenly stops working and I'm left with a pile of audio files that I can't use? That's a good question. One equally valid for any of the other DRM schemes too, frankly.
I suppose I should burn audio CDs for each of the albums I've bought from iTMS: these are then DRM free, and I "own" the resulting media and their contents, without physical DRM.
I play music I buy on iTMS in iTunes and on my iPod. I can also burn it on to a CD and play it in my wife's car, if I want to (though I surmise you can burn CDs from Yahoo and Rhapsody and friends as well, no?)
My point is that I pay Apple once for the song. After I've done that, I have it in perpetuity, not until I stop paying them $5/month for it.
When I said that you rent the music from Yahoo!, I'm saying that once you stop paying your $4.99 every month you no longer can use that music. If I "buy" a song from iTMS or rip it from a CD that I bought at the record store I can listen to it as often as I want, for as long as I want.
The RIAA comes out ahead on this deal.
These pay-per-month services are rentals: you stop paying and you no longer have access to the music (though I suppose its only a matter of time, if it hasn't happened already, before someone cracks the DRM in these rental services). With iTMS you own the track you've paid US$0.99 for. It's yours.
People forget this, or don't think about it. Hilary Rosen's recent drivel makes the same mistake when she complains about iTMS lockin while saying how great Rhapsody or Napster or Yahoo! or whatever is. Of course, you're locked into those too. Anyway.
HTML email is still evil, as far as I'm concerned. I don't send it, and it gets deleted immediately if it arrives in my inbox. Mailing lists that don't give me a choice between text and HTML email will not be subscribed to. I usually read mail in Emacs using VM anyway, but when I do use something like Apple's Mail client, I have image loading turned off (I don't need people tracking what mail I read by inserting a tracker in it.)
But as many others have said, I'm one of those old crusty programmers that prefers plain text over HTML for most things. The average business user, and most non-business users, don't know the difference and don't care.
I'm missing something here: Why hasn't Adobe just asked Nikon for the SDK so that they can access the data? Sure, it's a RPITA that they have to go through this nonsense, but for a company as happy to get patents on technology (just look at the patent list associated with PDF, and the fact that the PDF spec allows use of some patents) the reality that Nikon wants to hold some cards close to their chest (I won't get into an argument about WB info being a stupid thing to encrypt) should not be a big deal.
With regards to the Open Source impact of this, why not get Tridge to reverse engineer the format. Even if an Open Source group received the SDK, they probably couldn't resdistribute it anyway.
Why don't OS people put their money (ha!) where their mouth is and start sending requests (in the tens of thousands) to Nikon and see what they do.
You are not limited to using XCode on Mac OS X. Once you have the developer tools installed you can use Make and Emacs (or VIM, or whatever) if you want. You could even install KDevelop and use that, if you wanted. You can develop with Qt and its tools as well, if you want to go that direction as well.
You also don't need to develop in Cocoa, if you feel up to learning the lower-level Carbon APIs and do not want to write code in Objective C.
I expect that someone has provided Cocoa bindings for Python, if you want to write "native" look apps with that. However, the existing Tk interfaces just work.
People need to remember that the first article in the series was talking about using the Mini as an embedded development platform. Mac OS X is hardly an embedded OS, so being able to replace it with a more customizable system (i.e., Linux, NetBSD) is a plus, especially if you can make use of the hardware provided in the sexy little package.
Putting a crippled Linux/BSD on a Mini when you have OS X installed is silly: except for the sheer studliness of it go out and buy a cheap x86 box to get your Linux fix.
I think it's rediculous that a library call should cause the calling application to exit because of a failed assertion.
Really? Seems to me that the library is telling you that you are caling it wrong, and you should fix your code. Which is, of course, the whole point.
Assertions are a Good Thing on many levels, especially when developing new code, since they will enforce the invariants in your API during development. Obviously you would have include conditional code that checks arguments and returns an error condition on bogus input. But for tight libraries this extra checking may not be useful, and the assertions work fine during development to ensure you're not doing anything boneheaded.
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I'm not intolerant to free thinking. I'm simply sick and tired of people responding to a valid question with the MySQL_is_the_answer_to_all_problems mantra. It's a useless response. FWIW, I use MySQL and PostgreSQL on a daily basis, and haven't touched Oracle in years. When you can develop a system from scratch you have a choice in the tools you use. When you join an existing team, you don't.
Just checking, but does it really matter? He asked a question, and I doubt he has the ability to come in and say, "Hey, use this open source database instead." Sometimes people need to use closed source software, and have to learn how to use it. Answer his question or keep your mouth shut.
Any particular reason? Do they know that all their clients will be using IE? IE usage in the wild is only at about 85% these days and will probably decrease in the future.
Some organizations with the US Department of Defence are very unlikely to change, and have standardized on particular platforms whether they make technological sense or not. Very often going up against that kind of bureaucracy is a battle that few can win, including heavy hitters like SAIC.
In cases like this it is a known fact that all people using a particular application will be using the same browser because they do not have a choice.
You cannot treat any organization within the USG as "the wild."
And the whooshing noise *you* hear is the displacement caused by the (partial) sarcasm of my response. And, as the other reply points out, this happens all to often.
Don't EVER comment your code if you work for a company. That's a sure fire way to lose your job! If you don't comment your code then you are the only person who can understand it, making you indispensible.
Great idea! The myth of indispensibility is a great reason. May your next job be as a maintenance programmer in a Perl shop where the previous "indispensible" developer had his ass fired for threatening the boss and you get 50,000 lines of Perl dumped in your lap.
Sure, while the contract is between the employee and MS, MS can still file suit against Google for poaching. Regardless of whether it is meritorious or not, it becomes a salvo in the battle.
This isn't an unexpected decision: as others have said the judge pretty much had to rule the way he did. And, as others noted, it is difficult to enforce. Nevertheless, I expect that Google will obey, because the consequences of getting caught not doing it can be dire. Microsoft will undoubtedly (if they haven't already) request full disclosure of all email and paper communication related to the case, both past, present, and future.
I lived through this bullshit in the early 1990s when I was in Symantec's Developer Tools Group. We hired Gene Wang from Borland, and Philippe Kahn went non-linear, filing a lawsuit against Symantec and Gene. We couldn't delete any email, throw out any paper, or discuss the case. We sent Borland truckloads of paper for their lawyers to go through. We called it "The Wrath of Kahn." Gordon Eubanks (the Symantec CEO at the time) just gave Gene other stuff to do until the courts resolved things. It was worth the wait: Gene was awesome to work for.
A couple of things to keep in mind here:
Now, I'm not saying that what the TSA does with the data they muster is right or valid, but I am saying that you need to be a little more informed in your outrage.
well i can pay 0.99 for a song regardless of its length and listen to it as much as i want. Is there a difference?
Well, you can't pay $0.99 for a twelve minute song. You can only buy songs a la carte that are less than 8 or 9 minutes. Otherwise you have to buy the whole album.
I don't know what the pricing model is in Hollywood: what percentage of ticket sales is distributed? Companies will want to make money on this.
ideally i'd like to get movies through itunes, pay something reasonable like $4.99 for _just_ the movie no special stuff. IMO that would be as good a deal as the .99 per song thing.
So you think it is OK to pay $4.99 to download a 130 minute movie that you can then watch as often as you want? Weird.
I would expect a different pricing model, similar to the iTMS "books-on-tape", where the cost appears to be a function of the length of the book.
I find that outline Mode in GNU Emacs works great. If you are wedded to the HTML output, consider Markdown: the syntax is easy to learn, you can write raw text and get decently formatted output on the other side. And, if you decide to move to a wiki later, some (like WordPress) can support Markdown syntax, so no reformatting is needed.
For me, OOo (or, more specifically, NeoOffice/J on Mac OS X, though from what I've seen the same is true for pure OOo) cannot handle Word files with non-trivial templates/styles. The company I work for is predominately a MS shop in the office space, and I am constantly handed documents from our PMs in the corporate templates that I cannot use them in OO... the formatting is completely fscked.
When Apple was moving to PowerPC the initial development systems were IBM POWER workstations running AIX.
What happens when you buy a VW and Chrysler decides they can't exist anymore?
What you're asking is what if Apple's DRM suddenly stops working and I'm left with a pile of audio files that I can't use? That's a good question. One equally valid for any of the other DRM schemes too, frankly.
I suppose I should burn audio CDs for each of the albums I've bought from iTMS: these are then DRM free, and I "own" the resulting media and their contents, without physical DRM.
Which is essentially my point, though not stated as eloquently.
I play music I buy on iTMS in iTunes and on my iPod. I can also burn it on to a CD and play it in my wife's car, if I want to (though I surmise you can burn CDs from Yahoo and Rhapsody and friends as well, no?) My point is that I pay Apple once for the song. After I've done that, I have it in perpetuity, not until I stop paying them $5/month for it.
When I said that you rent the music from Yahoo!, I'm saying that once you stop paying your $4.99 every month you no longer can use that music. If I "buy" a song from iTMS or rip it from a CD that I bought at the record store I can listen to it as often as I want, for as long as I want. The RIAA comes out ahead on this deal.
That's "Beauty, eh?" you hoser.
The argument doesn't hold up.
These pay-per-month services are rentals: you stop paying and you no longer have access to the music (though I suppose its only a matter of time, if it hasn't happened already, before someone cracks the DRM in these rental services). With iTMS you own the track you've paid US$0.99 for. It's yours.
People forget this, or don't think about it. Hilary Rosen's recent drivel makes the same mistake when she complains about iTMS lockin while saying how great Rhapsody or Napster or Yahoo! or whatever is. Of course, you're locked into those too. Anyway.
HTML email is still evil, as far as I'm concerned. I don't send it, and it gets deleted immediately if it arrives in my inbox. Mailing lists that don't give me a choice between text and HTML email will not be subscribed to. I usually read mail in Emacs using VM anyway, but when I do use something like Apple's Mail client, I have image loading turned off (I don't need people tracking what mail I read by inserting a tracker in it.)
But as many others have said, I'm one of those old crusty programmers that prefers plain text over HTML for most things. The average business user, and most non-business users, don't know the difference and don't care.
Or, more likely, KApfel.
I'm missing something here: Why hasn't Adobe just asked Nikon for the SDK so that they can access the data? Sure, it's a RPITA that they have to go through this nonsense, but for a company as happy to get patents on technology (just look at the patent list associated with PDF, and the fact that the PDF spec allows use of some patents) the reality that Nikon wants to hold some cards close to their chest (I won't get into an argument about WB info being a stupid thing to encrypt) should not be a big deal.
With regards to the Open Source impact of this, why not get Tridge to reverse engineer the format. Even if an Open Source group received the SDK, they probably couldn't resdistribute it anyway.
Why don't OS people put their money (ha!) where their mouth is and start sending requests (in the tens of thousands) to Nikon and see what they do.
You are not limited to using XCode on Mac OS X. Once you have the developer tools installed you can use Make and Emacs (or VIM, or whatever) if you want. You could even install KDevelop and use that, if you wanted. You can develop with Qt and its tools as well, if you want to go that direction as well.
You also don't need to develop in Cocoa, if you feel up to learning the lower-level Carbon APIs and do not want to write code in Objective C.
I expect that someone has provided Cocoa bindings for Python, if you want to write "native" look apps with that. However, the existing Tk interfaces just work.
People need to remember that the first article in the series was talking about using the Mini as an embedded development platform. Mac OS X is hardly an embedded OS, so being able to replace it with a more customizable system (i.e., Linux, NetBSD) is a plus, especially if you can make use of the hardware provided in the sexy little package.
Putting a crippled Linux/BSD on a Mini when you have OS X installed is silly: except for the sheer studliness of it go out and buy a cheap x86 box to get your Linux fix.
I think it's rediculous that a library call should cause the calling application to exit because of a failed assertion.
Really? Seems to me that the library is telling you that you are caling it wrong, and you should fix your code. Which is, of course, the whole point.
Assertions are a Good Thing on many levels, especially when developing new code, since they will enforce the invariants in your API during development. Obviously you would have include conditional code that checks arguments and returns an error condition on bogus input. But for tight libraries this extra checking may not be useful, and the assertions work fine during development to ensure you're not doing anything boneheaded.