Plain Windows GUI's are functional (the pre-XP and "Classic Theme" ones). The Fischer-Price GUI and those god-awful "branded" UI's (custom window shapes, colors, widgets, etc) are what are non-functional (not even dysfunctional, since that would mean they kinda almost function). Microsoft has a HIG, and if they would follow it, so would most of their platform's major app vendors. Unfortunately, Microsoft seems to have no internal organizational discipline about this sort of thing. They come off as a corporation with an attitude like a kid in a candy store. They want one of those, and one of those, and ooh! one of those over there, and no, wait, not that... but one of those... They just never make up their mind about how it should look. Vista is another example of it, since it's the second major UI overhaul in as many major releases. Oddly enough, the users tend to be either silent or ignored (or both).
Linux GUI's are inconsistent, which makes them unusable for the exact same reason as the horrible deviant Windows GUI's. That said, the community tends to bust the devs' balls when they can't tolerate the UI (like GIMP). The community tends to not be very picky, though. Only the worst offenders even hear a peep of a complaint. It would help if there was a community HIG.
Mac apps live and die by the GUI. If they don't follow the Apple HIG, there has to be a really good reason for it, or people won't use the app. A popular app with a bad UI is just begging to be relegated to the trash can within a year, since another dev will copy the good parts of their app and give it a decent GUI. And a developer of an app can't help but hear the complaints if he has a bad UI. There's not a chance in hell you can shut up a Mac user about their precious UI. (Before you flame me, look at my/. user name.)
In short, a HIG makes all the difference. It's a statement of how a UI is supposed to work and what is to be expected by the user and provided by the developer. Linux needs a HIG.
Or maybe he's commenting on how the general lack of style in the geek community tends to make apps look like shit. That, and there's no BigMeanCorporation to enforce a HIG on linux apps, so it's a relative free-for-all UI-wise. That's great for a limited human-interaction interface like a CLI where app-interaction is king, but a GUI suffers when it lacks continuity and unification. GUI's just aren't about app-stacking. They're for human interaction, and commonly-understood guidelines make them more usable.
Linux alone is forever a server, never a desktop. Linux with a HIG stands a chance against Mac OS and Windows in the desktop space. And no, a window manager is not a HIG.
I used Lotus 1-2-3 back in the day (version 3-point-something, so... 1996 or 1997 for my high school) and I recall that it wasn't a bad program. But I've had hundreds of hours of Excel time since then, and I don't share your dislike for it. Excel is the one product that Microsoft makes that doesn't suck. (Not counting some games. I rather liked AoE.)
Recently, I've been using OO.o, and I'm unimpressed. It just seems shoddy. Try sorting a "database" table sometime. Excel makes short work of it. It requires that headings have a different style from the data, and you pick a column (move the cursor to it) and hit one of the sort buttons. A "blink" later and your data is nicely sorted. Sure, it's a dumb sort, but it's a spreadsheet for cryin' out loud. I'm not looking for a real database, or I'd be using one. Now do the same thing with OO.o. I'm not sure what it requires for headings to be left alone, but when you hit a quick-sort button, it sorts the headings down into the middle of the data.
Now, I like free-as-in-whatever software as much as the next guy, but this is just pathetic. I'm comparing the latest OO.o to Excel 2000 (6-years old!). It's not a case of needing the latest-greatest, and I'm not expecting much. I have simple needs, and I'd use a simple tool (a basic spreadsheet program with basic table sorting and cell-function capabilities) if I could get one. But Excel is the only one with acceptable functionality so far (I haven't tried Lotus 1-2-3 as it's a bit hard to find and even harder to run on a MacBook Pro).
Also to note: I'm not paying ripoff prices for buggy bloatware. I paid a fairly low price (for commercial software) for an older version (when Office XP was released, I grabbed a clearance copy of Office 2k) and since it met my needs, I'm still using it. Microsoft must hate me by now. Now if only WINE or Cedega or CrossOver or somebody would get a Macintel version of WINE going, I'd be all over it... me and my Excel 2000.
The fact that apple doesn't want to tell what they cost to produce makes me think that their margins are pretty obscene, and they know it would make people angry to know just how much they're pocketing.
Apple has quarterly financial meetings for their shareholders. They always mention their product-by-product profit margins, and they're almost always around 25-30%. Lower (25%) on Mac Minis and iPods, and higher (30%, and even as high as 35% sometimes) on high-end systems like MacBook Pros and G5 towers. Software is a different story. They usually just pick a reasonably low price point and market it regardless of their development costs. I doubt they lose money, but it's certainly not high-margin like the hardware.
I've known these stats for years (along with the stats given by retailers showing that they make less than 10% on every sale) and still have no problem shelling out for Apple hardware.
Sorry, I should clarify. I was speaking in the general sense. Most states don't outlaw the use of headphones while driving (and states are the ones that set most of the traffic laws). Stupid piddly-shit towns with a city council with too much spare time really don't count, since they have little or no say in the overall legal framework of the traffic laws in their state.
There are entire books about stupid municipal laws. They make good reading in the bathroom. I'd say this law falls into a similar category. And when you're done, you can use the law to wipe.
I just opened up MS Word and typed "Hello World!" and saved it to my desktop. 24,064 bytes. Why? What in God's name is that bloated app bloating in it's bloated files?
From what I recall, it saves a memory dump to a file. That would include app state, undo, and other information that didn't need to survive, and it shoves it into semi-permanent storage. This explains a bunch of retarded, mind-boggling things we've all heard (and disbelieved) about Word, such as: 1) There are old, deleted, removed items still lingering in the saved data. (Proven, and has bitten people in the ass. I'm guessing it's Undo steps saved as part of the dump.) 2) Your example - "Hello, World!" takes 24k. (How much working memory does a fresh instance of Word use in the amount of time it takes to open a new document from the Normal template, type something, and save it? I'd guess about 24k.) 3) Every Word release comes with a new format, while Excel and other Office apps don't always have a new format. (The app footprint changes with every release, of course, so the memory dump does too.) 4) Word can usually open its own format very quickly, while other apps take FOREVER to import it. (It just loads working memory with whatever's in the file, while other apps don't use the same info and have to figure out what everything means.) 5) Word sometimes can't even open its own format. (Whoops, something got out of place before this file was dumped, now Word can't reconstruct its memory map! CRASH!)
Absolutely retarded. And Microsoft has the nerve to ask why anyone would want to use other software. I dare them to ask why anyone would want to use THEIR insecure, buggy, incompatible, locked-in, proprietary, asstastic formats and the apps that produce them. Microsoft should've stuck to what it did best: make Excel better.
It's not illegal to wear headphones while driving. It's also not illegal for deaf people to get a license.
It is illegal to allow your vehicle to go out of control. If you can't hear, you can still control your vehicle. If you are listening to your iPod rather than your car stereo, you can still control your vehicle. If you're holding a cell-phone and/or are distracted by active conversation, then that impairs your ability to control your vehicle and increases the chances that you will lose control of it. Therefore, wearing headphones is not illegal (and won't be, lest the deaf have some choice sign-language for state legislatures), but talking on a cell-phone (hands-free or not) is becoming illegal in more and more places.
Plus it's large and complex, so you're not likely to see a single obsessive genius crank it out, either.
Don't count on it. I've been working on an accounting system on and off for a few years now. It's just now starting the coding stage. And I have a feeling it'll regress into design at least one more time before I finally get the damn thing coded.
My motivation was my intense hatred for the idiocy of Peachtree and my bewilderment at how their software could possibly suck so hard and yet be so popular. It seems that's just the way the software industry works.
It's no worse than people who call it OSX or OS X. The name is MacOS X, and the X is optional. It's the MacOS, and to keep down confusion about which one, you specify the X to mean "not the old crufty one". It's also funny when people refer to the old crufty one as "OS9 version 8.6" or somesuch.
This message is brought to you by non-artsy-but-still-uppity Mac user #19980512.
I happen to prefer good vinyl over any of them, and I'm not alone.
That's because you and the others you allude to are luddites with an elitism streak. People with golden ears don't brag about it. People with golden ears look for better recording technology. And there are good reasons why vinyl disks were left behind.
1) They're very susceptible to damage that reduces the audio quality. Scratches on vinyl cause audible clicks and pops. Scratches on CD's cause... the DAC to look for parity bits and rebuild the audio data that it was supposed to read. A heavily scratched CD will simply refuse to track. Very seldom do you find an audio CD with scratches that cause audible glitches, though it's not entirely impossible. 2) They have a crappy dynamic range. They're roughly equivalent to 11.025 kHz-sampled digital audio. (They're more like 13kHz, but that's not an option in most audio software, and it doesn't make it much better than if it were only 11kHz.) That "sweetness" that vinyl-philes so often describe is actually compression and distortion to force all of the audio signal into this pathetic range. It can be duplicated with any hardware EQ you might have lying around, even from playback using a CD or other digital recording.
Now, it's been a good 23 years since the CD arrived on the scene, and yes, it's about time we get something new. But honestly, the basic ideas behind Red Book audio are probably as far as we need to go. Just increase the sampling rate to 192kHz and double the bit-depth (to 32-bit) and we're set. It's quite possible for this quality to be recorded (all the pro recording gear is 192kHz, 32-bit now) so distribution is all we need. 4 (bytes) x 192000 (samples) x 60 (seconds) = 46,080,000 bytes per minute of audio, so a DVD (4.2 GB) could hold about 91 minutes of audio. All at a quality that impresses the golden-est of the true golden-ears.
Note that the wannabes will always find nonexistent faults with anything that doesn't make them look cool or different (and they're really trying for "better"). I hope you're not falling for their bullshit and following their crowd. It's a shame that people are fooled by those asshats, and those of us who actually know better (because we understand the technology) have a sort of pity for those gullible ones. It's frequently as P.T. Barnum said, "A fool and his money are soon parted." Don't buy in.
If you "at one time" held the 1st-class FCC radio license, then you still have it. That particular license class was a lifetime license. My dad has one. It's still valid now, 20+ years later. My mom had a 3rd-class and was rudely interruped in her studies for a 2nd-class license by my birth. 2nd- and 3rd-class licenses had expiration dates. 1st-class did not.
That said, it probably isn't worth much in this day and age, and has probably been devalued by the FCC in favor of more recent (and costlier) licenses.
I'm with ya all the way on the control-equals-violation-of-freedom thing, though.
I would venture a guess that most Americans (not every english speaker, but a good chunk of them) think Hara-Kiri is a famous (and dead) baseball announcer for the Chicago Cubs. It's easier to distinguish "seppuku" from "Harry Caray". At least, that's the only reason I can come up with...
And I know Gamecube owners who can't wait for the Wii so they can remove the purple lunchbox away from their living room.
Heh... they bought the purple one? Wow. You do realize that it was released in three colors at launch (purple, orange, and black), and has since had one color dropped and another one added (orange dropped, silver/"platinum" added), right? So, perhaps they should've bought a black one or waited a while longer for the silver one. (Or an orange one... Orange ones have to be worth $$$ now, since they seem to be quite rare. I've never even seen one.)
My "platinum" Gamecube looks nice next to my Mac Mini and other silver-colored components. The only part that looks a bit odd is the Gameboy Player it sits on, which is black and isn't produced in any other colors.
You already have the freedom (it's not a right) not to listen. And that freedom is not restricted to porn.
Nobody's forcing you to: - listen. To anything. - turn your computer on. - connect to the Internet. - browse the web. - check your email. - open emails that have offensive content. (It could be said that Microsoft Outlook and OE force this, but you aren't forced to use them.) - use any number of other services that people use to transfer "offensive" content.
Personally, I find porn to be one of the more immature and ignorant things in life. There was once a time when I didn't feel that way, and I wouldn't have that opinion of porn if I hadn't been able to see just how depraved it is. Exposure to porn didn't make me a worse person, but protection from that exposure just might have.
You shouldn't hide things from people. Show them and explain why things are "bad" if you think it's necessary. This goes for adults as well as children. If you have an opinion that you think other people should share, convince them. Don't beat people over the head with it like it's a stick. That makes people defensive and angry, and they find other reasonings with which to fight back.
It's only been mentioned on/. about eighty hojillion times that the.xxx domain is a bad idea. As a government, if you want to censor things by forcing them into.xxx, and you make the laws to follow up on that, you can shove any site into.xxx just because you don't like it. Drugs? Bad. Goes to.xxx. Alcohol?.xxx. Political dissent? Into the.xxx void it goes. Only.xxx is uncensored, and everyone blocks it anyway, so it becomes the dingy back alley of the Internet where all the shady deals go on, but everyone is (mostly) free.
It's also been mentioned at least forty hojillion times on/. that a better idea is the.kids domain, where ONLY.kids is censored, and everyone leaves the rest of the 'net alone. If you want to be guaranteed that you're only viewing "good" and "wholesome" webpages and such, then only allow access to.kids. It's like a sandbox with armed guards. Nobody's going to mess with the kiddies. All is safe and well. Someone is thinking of the children. The fainting whiny-bitch-lady can STFU.
No, procedural programming is older than functional programming.
Procedural programming is where everything is in one giant procedure, like QBASIC before GOSUBs.
Functional programming is where you can break off into "functions", like C. C was never procedural. (Just the fact that it starts in main() makes it functional, much like Java is OO.)
When I was a new programmer, I used GUI generators to autogenerate a bunch of crap for me. I would name everything really strangely, and I wouldn't actually make anything useful. My instructors used to wonder what I was doing.
I would pick apart the autogenerated code and find the places where my weird-named objects would turn up, then I would try to figure out how it got called and what it called in turn. Basically, I would build a hypothetical call stack and unravel the "secrets" of autogenerated code. It's an amazingly effective way for me to learn. You might give it a shot sometime.
Screw that "by hand" stuff, though. If there's a wizard, it's there for a reason and I should use it. I just need to know why, when, and how.
I've never used any of those languages, nor do I forsee the need to.
I learned Logo in middle school. I learned QBASIC (ugh), Pascal (ugh), COBOL (ugh++), and RPG (!) in high school. I learned C, C++, VB, and Java in college.
Those landed me a job doing CAD drawings for a small company.
Eventually, I learned PHP on my own.
That gave me enough "experience" to get a PHP job.
So what have I learned? - All the languages I was told were going to be useful "in real life" have turned out to be mostly worthless (perhaps I haven't reached the level of the C++ stuff yet... I'm reserving judgement on that one). - Concepts are best learned from pseudocode, not from any particular language. - Comfortable syntax is learned from languages that are built around a particular concept. - Databases are the real reason OOP is a necessity. Data objects are your friends. - Most programmers are not architects/designers. They're too impatient. They jump right in and code a plate of spaghetti before thinking about how long they'll have to support that code. Some of them do fairly well at making things efficient, though, so you can't fault them all.
I don't know ASM, so I tend to disagree with the hardcore "I coded in ASM uphill both ways naked in the snow blah blah blah bring me my cane, sonny" crowd. It's time to pull the plug, gramps.
I also disagree with the academics that sip lattes, listen to jazz, wear berets, and say that everyone should learn and use [insert obscure language here] and piss and moan that it's not happening. Man up, nancy. The real world uses real tools for real work. Your toy languages are not going to be used. So take your Smalltalk, LISP, and Prolog back to your local Starbucks where you can "ooh" and "aah" about how "advanced" they are.
If you're going to teach concepts, do so. Don't use a language as a crutch. Teach in pseudocode. Give examples of "how-to" in multiple languages. If you're going to teach a language, don't teach concepts. Teach what that tool is supposed to be used for. PHP is for dynamic web pages. C++ is for, well, damn near anything, but not dynamic web pages. Java is kinda like C++, but slower (unless you fuss with compiling natively), and can be multi-platform with minor changes. Perl is great for a quick, unreadable script. VB is nice if you want to spend lots of money for the ability to build piddly-shit apps that only you will use.
And remember that not everyone learns things the same way. Someone who "just gets it" with C, C++, Java, PHP, and similar-looking languages might have an aneurysm just looking at code in Objective C. (I did.) Sometimes a familiar syntax matters. And yet, that same person (now bleeding out on the floor) might have no trouble at all deciphering Visual Basic or Pascal even though they're different. (Again, me.) That should tell the designers of the aneurysm language that the syntax is annoying, shitty, and induces aneurysms. (Go Smalltalk and Obj-C!)
Your comment belies your deep misunderstanding of what OOP really is. If you're writing something as simple as a procedural perl script, then the script is the object.
Java is good at reinforcing this idea by expecting you to name your file the same as the object within, and automatically executing public static void main(String[] args) first. Then you can write procedural stuff to your heart's content within that member function. (I come from the "C++ is god" camp, and I refuse to call it a method. It just sounds gay.)
Perl and PHP and similar "scripting languages" don't enforce this since they're meant to just cut to the chase and get stuff done. But if you treat them the same way, you're still doing OOP. In fact, "functional" programming is just OOP without enforced objects.
What's not being taught is pattern recognition. Most people lack the ability to mentally pick something apart, find it's similarities and differences (especially in a fractal or hierarchy), and logically plan out the next level or iteration of the pattern. Personally, I find it frustrating to have to use things designed by mere mortals (hehe...) and worse yet, clean up their messes. Usually I just slash and burn, then replace bad code in the apps I work with. It gets old fast, but at least I don't have to do it twice. Usually.
There are lighthouses on rivers. There's one in Hannibal, Missouri on Cardiff Hill overlooking the Mississippi River.
Cletus would fit right in with the hicks in the midwest, especially in the Ozark Mountains near Springfield, Missouri. The problem is, it's apparently easier to draw coniferous trees around a mountain cabin, which is a good way to eliminate the oak-forested Ozarks as a probable location for the cartoon city of Springfield.
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Plain Windows GUI's are functional (the pre-XP and "Classic Theme" ones). The Fischer-Price GUI and those god-awful "branded" UI's (custom window shapes, colors, widgets, etc) are what are non-functional (not even dysfunctional, since that would mean they kinda almost function). Microsoft has a HIG, and if they would follow it, so would most of their platform's major app vendors. Unfortunately, Microsoft seems to have no internal organizational discipline about this sort of thing. They come off as a corporation with an attitude like a kid in a candy store. They want one of those, and one of those, and ooh! one of those over there, and no, wait, not that... but one of those... They just never make up their mind about how it should look. Vista is another example of it, since it's the second major UI overhaul in as many major releases. Oddly enough, the users tend to be either silent or ignored (or both).
/. user name.)
Linux GUI's are inconsistent, which makes them unusable for the exact same reason as the horrible deviant Windows GUI's. That said, the community tends to bust the devs' balls when they can't tolerate the UI (like GIMP). The community tends to not be very picky, though. Only the worst offenders even hear a peep of a complaint. It would help if there was a community HIG.
Mac apps live and die by the GUI. If they don't follow the Apple HIG, there has to be a really good reason for it, or people won't use the app. A popular app with a bad UI is just begging to be relegated to the trash can within a year, since another dev will copy the good parts of their app and give it a decent GUI. And a developer of an app can't help but hear the complaints if he has a bad UI. There's not a chance in hell you can shut up a Mac user about their precious UI. (Before you flame me, look at my
In short, a HIG makes all the difference. It's a statement of how a UI is supposed to work and what is to be expected by the user and provided by the developer. Linux needs a HIG.
Or maybe he's commenting on how the general lack of style in the geek community tends to make apps look like shit. That, and there's no BigMeanCorporation to enforce a HIG on linux apps, so it's a relative free-for-all UI-wise. That's great for a limited human-interaction interface like a CLI where app-interaction is king, but a GUI suffers when it lacks continuity and unification. GUI's just aren't about app-stacking. They're for human interaction, and commonly-understood guidelines make them more usable.
Linux alone is forever a server, never a desktop. Linux with a HIG stands a chance against Mac OS and Windows in the desktop space. And no, a window manager is not a HIG.
I'm just waiting for Bush and Co. to get their buddy Germany to reinstate the sister-bureaucracy to the DHS - The Reichssicherheitshauptamt.
I used Lotus 1-2-3 back in the day (version 3-point-something, so... 1996 or 1997 for my high school) and I recall that it wasn't a bad program. But I've had hundreds of hours of Excel time since then, and I don't share your dislike for it. Excel is the one product that Microsoft makes that doesn't suck. (Not counting some games. I rather liked AoE.)
Recently, I've been using OO.o, and I'm unimpressed. It just seems shoddy. Try sorting a "database" table sometime. Excel makes short work of it. It requires that headings have a different style from the data, and you pick a column (move the cursor to it) and hit one of the sort buttons. A "blink" later and your data is nicely sorted. Sure, it's a dumb sort, but it's a spreadsheet for cryin' out loud. I'm not looking for a real database, or I'd be using one. Now do the same thing with OO.o. I'm not sure what it requires for headings to be left alone, but when you hit a quick-sort button, it sorts the headings down into the middle of the data.
Now, I like free-as-in-whatever software as much as the next guy, but this is just pathetic. I'm comparing the latest OO.o to Excel 2000 (6-years old!). It's not a case of needing the latest-greatest, and I'm not expecting much. I have simple needs, and I'd use a simple tool (a basic spreadsheet program with basic table sorting and cell-function capabilities) if I could get one. But Excel is the only one with acceptable functionality so far (I haven't tried Lotus 1-2-3 as it's a bit hard to find and even harder to run on a MacBook Pro).
Also to note: I'm not paying ripoff prices for buggy bloatware. I paid a fairly low price (for commercial software) for an older version (when Office XP was released, I grabbed a clearance copy of Office 2k) and since it met my needs, I'm still using it. Microsoft must hate me by now. Now if only WINE or Cedega or CrossOver or somebody would get a Macintel version of WINE going, I'd be all over it... me and my Excel 2000.
The fact that apple doesn't want to tell what they cost to produce makes me think that their margins are pretty obscene, and they know it would make people angry to know just how much they're pocketing.
Apple has quarterly financial meetings for their shareholders. They always mention their product-by-product profit margins, and they're almost always around 25-30%. Lower (25%) on Mac Minis and iPods, and higher (30%, and even as high as 35% sometimes) on high-end systems like MacBook Pros and G5 towers. Software is a different story. They usually just pick a reasonably low price point and market it regardless of their development costs. I doubt they lose money, but it's certainly not high-margin like the hardware.
I've known these stats for years (along with the stats given by retailers showing that they make less than 10% on every sale) and still have no problem shelling out for Apple hardware.
Sorry, I should clarify. I was speaking in the general sense. Most states don't outlaw the use of headphones while driving (and states are the ones that set most of the traffic laws). Stupid piddly-shit towns with a city council with too much spare time really don't count, since they have little or no say in the overall legal framework of the traffic laws in their state.
There are entire books about stupid municipal laws. They make good reading in the bathroom. I'd say this law falls into a similar category. And when you're done, you can use the law to wipe.
I just opened up MS Word and typed "Hello World!" and saved it to my desktop. 24,064 bytes. Why? What in God's name is that bloated app bloating in it's bloated files?
From what I recall, it saves a memory dump to a file. That would include app state, undo, and other information that didn't need to survive, and it shoves it into semi-permanent storage. This explains a bunch of retarded, mind-boggling things we've all heard (and disbelieved) about Word, such as:
1) There are old, deleted, removed items still lingering in the saved data. (Proven, and has bitten people in the ass. I'm guessing it's Undo steps saved as part of the dump.)
2) Your example - "Hello, World!" takes 24k. (How much working memory does a fresh instance of Word use in the amount of time it takes to open a new document from the Normal template, type something, and save it? I'd guess about 24k.)
3) Every Word release comes with a new format, while Excel and other Office apps don't always have a new format. (The app footprint changes with every release, of course, so the memory dump does too.)
4) Word can usually open its own format very quickly, while other apps take FOREVER to import it. (It just loads working memory with whatever's in the file, while other apps don't use the same info and have to figure out what everything means.)
5) Word sometimes can't even open its own format. (Whoops, something got out of place before this file was dumped, now Word can't reconstruct its memory map! CRASH!)
Absolutely retarded. And Microsoft has the nerve to ask why anyone would want to use other software. I dare them to ask why anyone would want to use THEIR insecure, buggy, incompatible, locked-in, proprietary, asstastic formats and the apps that produce them. Microsoft should've stuck to what it did best: make Excel better.
Because usage thereof varies from twit soccer mom to twit soccer mom.
It's not illegal to wear headphones while driving. It's also not illegal for deaf people to get a license.
It is illegal to allow your vehicle to go out of control. If you can't hear, you can still control your vehicle. If you are listening to your iPod rather than your car stereo, you can still control your vehicle. If you're holding a cell-phone and/or are distracted by active conversation, then that impairs your ability to control your vehicle and increases the chances that you will lose control of it. Therefore, wearing headphones is not illegal (and won't be, lest the deaf have some choice sign-language for state legislatures), but talking on a cell-phone (hands-free or not) is becoming illegal in more and more places.
Plus it's large and complex, so you're not likely to see a single obsessive genius crank it out, either.
Don't count on it. I've been working on an accounting system on and off for a few years now. It's just now starting the coding stage. And I have a feeling it'll regress into design at least one more time before I finally get the damn thing coded.
My motivation was my intense hatred for the idiocy of Peachtree and my bewilderment at how their software could possibly suck so hard and yet be so popular. It seems that's just the way the software industry works.
It's no worse than people who call it OSX or OS X. The name is MacOS X, and the X is optional. It's the MacOS, and to keep down confusion about which one, you specify the X to mean "not the old crufty one". It's also funny when people refer to the old crufty one as "OS9 version 8.6" or somesuch.
This message is brought to you by non-artsy-but-still-uppity Mac user #19980512.
I happen to prefer good vinyl over any of them, and I'm not alone.
That's because you and the others you allude to are luddites with an elitism streak. People with golden ears don't brag about it. People with golden ears look for better recording technology. And there are good reasons why vinyl disks were left behind.
1) They're very susceptible to damage that reduces the audio quality. Scratches on vinyl cause audible clicks and pops. Scratches on CD's cause... the DAC to look for parity bits and rebuild the audio data that it was supposed to read. A heavily scratched CD will simply refuse to track. Very seldom do you find an audio CD with scratches that cause audible glitches, though it's not entirely impossible.
2) They have a crappy dynamic range. They're roughly equivalent to 11.025 kHz-sampled digital audio. (They're more like 13kHz, but that's not an option in most audio software, and it doesn't make it much better than if it were only 11kHz.) That "sweetness" that vinyl-philes so often describe is actually compression and distortion to force all of the audio signal into this pathetic range. It can be duplicated with any hardware EQ you might have lying around, even from playback using a CD or other digital recording.
Now, it's been a good 23 years since the CD arrived on the scene, and yes, it's about time we get something new. But honestly, the basic ideas behind Red Book audio are probably as far as we need to go. Just increase the sampling rate to 192kHz and double the bit-depth (to 32-bit) and we're set. It's quite possible for this quality to be recorded (all the pro recording gear is 192kHz, 32-bit now) so distribution is all we need. 4 (bytes) x 192000 (samples) x 60 (seconds) = 46,080,000 bytes per minute of audio, so a DVD (4.2 GB) could hold about 91 minutes of audio. All at a quality that impresses the golden-est of the true golden-ears.
Note that the wannabes will always find nonexistent faults with anything that doesn't make them look cool or different (and they're really trying for "better"). I hope you're not falling for their bullshit and following their crowd. It's a shame that people are fooled by those asshats, and those of us who actually know better (because we understand the technology) have a sort of pity for those gullible ones. It's frequently as P.T. Barnum said, "A fool and his money are soon parted." Don't buy in.
If you "at one time" held the 1st-class FCC radio license, then you still have it. That particular license class was a lifetime license. My dad has one. It's still valid now, 20+ years later. My mom had a 3rd-class and was rudely interruped in her studies for a 2nd-class license by my birth. 2nd- and 3rd-class licenses had expiration dates. 1st-class did not.
That said, it probably isn't worth much in this day and age, and has probably been devalued by the FCC in favor of more recent (and costlier) licenses.
I'm with ya all the way on the control-equals-violation-of-freedom thing, though.
I would venture a guess that most Americans (not every english speaker, but a good chunk of them) think Hara-Kiri is a famous (and dead) baseball announcer for the Chicago Cubs. It's easier to distinguish "seppuku" from "Harry Caray". At least, that's the only reason I can come up with...
Rendezvous is no more. It's called Bonjour now. Those are just Apple's fancy names for what everyone else calls "zeroconf".
Zeroconf has nothing to do with IM or file-sharing. It's a network service configuration protocol. Think LDAP-helper here.
Meh. Screw that. Here's how I roll...
1 part tequila (good tequila makes it better, obviously)
3 parts Mountain Dew
I call it a "Margarita Douche".
And I know Gamecube owners who can't wait for the Wii so they can remove the purple lunchbox away from their living room.
Heh... they bought the purple one? Wow. You do realize that it was released in three colors at launch (purple, orange, and black), and has since had one color dropped and another one added (orange dropped, silver/"platinum" added), right? So, perhaps they should've bought a black one or waited a while longer for the silver one. (Or an orange one... Orange ones have to be worth $$$ now, since they seem to be quite rare. I've never even seen one.)
My "platinum" Gamecube looks nice next to my Mac Mini and other silver-colored components. The only part that looks a bit odd is the Gameboy Player it sits on, which is black and isn't produced in any other colors.
You already have the freedom (it's not a right) not to listen. And that freedom is not restricted to porn.
/. about eighty hojillion times that the .xxx domain is a bad idea. As a government, if you want to censor things by forcing them into .xxx, and you make the laws to follow up on that, you can shove any site into .xxx just because you don't like it. Drugs? Bad. Goes to .xxx. Alcohol? .xxx. Political dissent? Into the .xxx void it goes. Only .xxx is uncensored, and everyone blocks it anyway, so it becomes the dingy back alley of the Internet where all the shady deals go on, but everyone is (mostly) free.
/. that a better idea is the .kids domain, where ONLY .kids is censored, and everyone leaves the rest of the 'net alone. If you want to be guaranteed that you're only viewing "good" and "wholesome" webpages and such, then only allow access to .kids. It's like a sandbox with armed guards. Nobody's going to mess with the kiddies. All is safe and well. Someone is thinking of the children. The fainting whiny-bitch-lady can STFU.
Nobody's forcing you to:
- listen. To anything.
- turn your computer on.
- connect to the Internet.
- browse the web.
- check your email.
- open emails that have offensive content. (It could be said that Microsoft Outlook and OE force this, but you aren't forced to use them.)
- use any number of other services that people use to transfer "offensive" content.
Personally, I find porn to be one of the more immature and ignorant things in life. There was once a time when I didn't feel that way, and I wouldn't have that opinion of porn if I hadn't been able to see just how depraved it is. Exposure to porn didn't make me a worse person, but protection from that exposure just might have.
You shouldn't hide things from people. Show them and explain why things are "bad" if you think it's necessary. This goes for adults as well as children. If you have an opinion that you think other people should share, convince them. Don't beat people over the head with it like it's a stick. That makes people defensive and angry, and they find other reasonings with which to fight back.
It's only been mentioned on
It's also been mentioned at least forty hojillion times on
No, procedural programming is older than functional programming.
Procedural programming is where everything is in one giant procedure, like QBASIC before GOSUBs.
Functional programming is where you can break off into "functions", like C. C was never procedural. (Just the fact that it starts in main() makes it functional, much like Java is OO.)
Turn it around.
When I was a new programmer, I used GUI generators to autogenerate a bunch of crap for me. I would name everything really strangely, and I wouldn't actually make anything useful. My instructors used to wonder what I was doing.
I would pick apart the autogenerated code and find the places where my weird-named objects would turn up, then I would try to figure out how it got called and what it called in turn. Basically, I would build a hypothetical call stack and unravel the "secrets" of autogenerated code. It's an amazingly effective way for me to learn. You might give it a shot sometime.
Screw that "by hand" stuff, though. If there's a wizard, it's there for a reason and I should use it. I just need to know why, when, and how.
I've never used any of those languages, nor do I forsee the need to.
I learned Logo in middle school.
I learned QBASIC (ugh), Pascal (ugh), COBOL (ugh++), and RPG (!) in high school.
I learned C, C++, VB, and Java in college.
Those landed me a job doing CAD drawings for a small company.
Eventually, I learned PHP on my own.
That gave me enough "experience" to get a PHP job.
So what have I learned?
- All the languages I was told were going to be useful "in real life" have turned out to be mostly worthless (perhaps I haven't reached the level of the C++ stuff yet... I'm reserving judgement on that one).
- Concepts are best learned from pseudocode, not from any particular language.
- Comfortable syntax is learned from languages that are built around a particular concept.
- Databases are the real reason OOP is a necessity. Data objects are your friends.
- Most programmers are not architects/designers. They're too impatient. They jump right in and code a plate of spaghetti before thinking about how long they'll have to support that code. Some of them do fairly well at making things efficient, though, so you can't fault them all.
I don't know ASM, so I tend to disagree with the hardcore "I coded in ASM uphill both ways naked in the snow blah blah blah bring me my cane, sonny" crowd. It's time to pull the plug, gramps.
I also disagree with the academics that sip lattes, listen to jazz, wear berets, and say that everyone should learn and use [insert obscure language here] and piss and moan that it's not happening. Man up, nancy. The real world uses real tools for real work. Your toy languages are not going to be used. So take your Smalltalk, LISP, and Prolog back to your local Starbucks where you can "ooh" and "aah" about how "advanced" they are.
If you're going to teach concepts, do so. Don't use a language as a crutch. Teach in pseudocode. Give examples of "how-to" in multiple languages. If you're going to teach a language, don't teach concepts. Teach what that tool is supposed to be used for. PHP is for dynamic web pages. C++ is for, well, damn near anything, but not dynamic web pages. Java is kinda like C++, but slower (unless you fuss with compiling natively), and can be multi-platform with minor changes. Perl is great for a quick, unreadable script. VB is nice if you want to spend lots of money for the ability to build piddly-shit apps that only you will use.
And remember that not everyone learns things the same way. Someone who "just gets it" with C, C++, Java, PHP, and similar-looking languages might have an aneurysm just looking at code in Objective C. (I did.) Sometimes a familiar syntax matters. And yet, that same person (now bleeding out on the floor) might have no trouble at all deciphering Visual Basic or Pascal even though they're different. (Again, me.) That should tell the designers of the aneurysm language that the syntax is annoying, shitty, and induces aneurysms. (Go Smalltalk and Obj-C!)
Your comment belies your deep misunderstanding of what OOP really is. If you're writing something as simple as a procedural perl script, then the script is the object.
Java is good at reinforcing this idea by expecting you to name your file the same as the object within, and automatically executing public static void main(String[] args) first. Then you can write procedural stuff to your heart's content within that member function. (I come from the "C++ is god" camp, and I refuse to call it a method. It just sounds gay.)
Perl and PHP and similar "scripting languages" don't enforce this since they're meant to just cut to the chase and get stuff done. But if you treat them the same way, you're still doing OOP. In fact, "functional" programming is just OOP without enforced objects.
What's not being taught is pattern recognition. Most people lack the ability to mentally pick something apart, find it's similarities and differences (especially in a fractal or hierarchy), and logically plan out the next level or iteration of the pattern. Personally, I find it frustrating to have to use things designed by mere mortals (hehe...) and worse yet, clean up their messes. Usually I just slash and burn, then replace bad code in the apps I work with. It gets old fast, but at least I don't have to do it twice. Usually.
There are lighthouses on rivers. There's one in Hannibal, Missouri on Cardiff Hill overlooking the Mississippi River.
Cletus would fit right in with the hicks in the midwest, especially in the Ozark Mountains near Springfield, Missouri. The problem is, it's apparently easier to draw coniferous trees around a mountain cabin, which is a good way to eliminate the oak-forested Ozarks as a probable location for the cartoon city of Springfield.
Springfield is on the other side of the state from St. Louis. If I'm not mistaken, it's in the 816 area code.