Electron has made great strides in 2015 and is seeing some very active development lately. From the success of the Atom editor and Microsofts Visual Studio Code, there are many very professional tools built on this framework. In my view, it should be voted up as one of the most important projects of the last year for cross platform desktop application development.
My hope for the next couple of years is to see a fork of electron for mobile so we can start building cross platform mobile apps based on node.js and chromium.
For old school JavaScript developers like myself, the Electron project are of stuff dreams are made of.
Go language differs from many other languages in how it handles Errors. Can you summarize the benefits and drawbacks to the Go language error handling approach when compared to Java for large scale applications.
One real beauty I was involved with handling from Oracle was how they can charge you for all the cores on the VM host even though you are only using say 2 out of 16 cores for your server. Of course they would not do this if you were using their VM stack.
They tried this to me for Weblogic licenses and after getting a whopping quotation that was easily 20 times what it should have been, I just ended up porting the enterprise app over to Tomcat bringing our license costs for our J2EE stack down to nil.
Amazing to see news on Node.js on slashdot. There has been many important developments with node over the last year but nothing at all on slashdot. Glad to see someone is paying attention to the developments of this very important project.
Some important features added since v0.12 for instance around synchronous child process execution is essential for node to be utilized on non event based coding styles.
Regarding merging of node.js and io.js into a common stack supported by the node foundation, this is an awesome move. Node is too big for BDFL model and forking is not good at this stage. I don't really care about versioning model but going all the way to version 4 is a bit odd.
When I read the description, I saw the exact same thing as It sounded just like the discussion points for the upcoming FreeNAS 10. Its so wicked that Jordan now works for iXSystems:)
The new iXSystems FreeNAS 10 platform would be a great foundation as a general application server platform. I'm not sure how well it would behave as a desktop OS. You sure cannot go wrong with root ZFS though, which is something that is not trivial on linux.
I knew I would get some flaming for that. However, considering that I was pretty hot on Java back in the day and I was super pissed with what Microsoft did by single handedly killing JavaBeans, I can't help but slip in a $ in once in a while for old time sake;)
Today, I feel bad for all those system admins out there today who need to administer IPMI's. Talk about a massive pain in the butt to get to a damn IPMI KVM window to open let alone work properly.
1) Micro$oft - Effectively killed the JavaBean web plugin market with their own lackluster JVM via EEE (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish).
JavaBeans is the technology that has the biggest negative view on the net and rightly so. If Microsoft had not done such a good job killing it, Java would likely be in a different light today as more energy would have been spent making JavaBean libraries better while the real engineers at Sun still had control of the source.
2) Oracle - They just do not get open source or anything that came from Sun.
Google has popularized Java way more than Oracle could ever imagine.
"You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end" - B. Cantrill
Honestly, its a wicked idea however the use of Humans to execute the material retrieval for analysis does make much sense unless they are doing active and repetitive analysis at the captured space boulder.
Its seems more intuitive to just fly some robots up to do the capture and send back the samples back to Earth as needed?
I think that most agree that the biggest issue with end to end encryption adoption is mail client integration which at present its ridiculously bad.
One way the community can tackle this is to push for Mozilla foundation to work on a cross platform Thunderbird Mobile client and include GPG or similar encryption scheme baked into the core. With a mobile application and better working GPG encryption integration in desktop Thunderbird, many more would start using Thunderbird with encryption for all their communication needs and be able to drop the use of thin client apps from their usecases.
I don't think that commercial email client vendors, thick client or thin, will ever adopt end to end encryption unless end to end encryption is the primary selling point *and* the in such a case it must be fully cross platform (desktop and mobile) to be useful.
I know many Cubans and I agree that $8 per month is a large portion of a monthly salary so unless the Cuban customer has an external source of income, it will be very difficult under normal conditions. However, there is a very large portion of the population with family outside of the country which funnels in money and the Cubans getting that money have more than enough money to buy this service.
For those that can get a dependable connection and I can see them paying for the service by hosting a black market movie theater in their living rooms for $0.50 a seat. Its possible that they can sell 10 seats in their living room and make $5 USD a showing. Maybe even people in a neighborhood will have a co-op and share the monthly cost.
The biggest issue in Cuba is internet infrastructure or lack thereof. I have spent time in some big Cuban cities and they are lucky to have a telephone let alone an internet connection. The only Cubans with internet that I know worked for the government and the connection, which worked a fraction of the time, was at the government offices.
There may be secondary benefits of doing this such as oxygenation of the oceans. Nanobubbles can be produced very inexpensively using the technology shown here here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
I would disagree. They are spot on when it comes to business tools vs toys.If you want to get the job done and be totally business, nothing can beat a BlackBerry. The Hub, general PIM functions, sound profiles, notifications cannot be matched by anybody to date.
I made a huge mistake recently by switching from BB10 over to a Galaxy S5 and several weeks in, I am kicking myself for doing this. The Android is a gorgeous OS with lots of fun toys but when it comes to PIM and business productivity it just plain sucks. I had to root the damn thing just to get the volume button to not adjust my ringer volume... WTF! Also, Android is so incredibly inconsistent and fragmented with its UI's. At least BlackBerry and Apple strive to get consistency with UI design.
I know that Apple likely does a better job with PIM than Android but it still cannot compare to BlackBerry.
The new BlackBerry Blend is an awesome implementation and model. Who needs syncing and the could when all your secure information is locked into to just one device that you have with you at all times. The concept is sound and implemented very well.
But BlackBerry sucks for Linux support and you cannot run BB Link on many older OSX machines. This was a huge issue for me and a big reason for my switching as I don't buy new iWare and don't run Windows at my house any more. Also BB's method for connecting over USB through a virtual ethernet connection is beyond stupid. For instance, if you are running a Cisco VPN client and connected, it will block the BB connection and how stupid is that.
I will switch back though once I find an old laptop that I can run Windohs 7 to connect and find someone that will trade a new Galaxy S5 for a Z30.
Sorry but I'm +1 on the change in jode.js and any open source project. I would prefer to avoid insulting the sensitive developers out there in code by avoiding gender pronouns.
Ben, sorry but you were being a di*k / a**hole there.
I agree that Bryan Cantrill could have been softer on how he blogged about this but that is not Bryan's style and I find his style very refreshing for the most part.
Now that is not to say that I may switch to io.js as I am getting very impatient about the 0.12 release getting out. Its taking way too long to have a production stable execSync().
I would always shoot for more disk but then issues arise from managing such large disks in the 1+ TB range that we tend to fill up fast.
For a laptop or desktop, I am targeting two large drives in a RaidZ mirror on Linux. I would do the same for a desktop.
For more data and centralization for my house or office, I would choose an iXSystems FreeNAS Mini. It has all the features that you need for your data and can be easily configured to send out warning messages on various measurements like disk space, SMART messages and raidz warnings. I think that de-dupe is coming soon if its not there already. The Mini is super powerful for its size and power footprint.
With ZFS, it solves the nasty issue of having to recover files on massive disks like those we get today. There is nothing worse than waiting for fsck, surface scans or recovery operations on 1TB+ drives; It takes forever. With a well maintained ZFS system those issues are gone.
Another really cool thing about ZFS is the ability to maintain a perfect audit on the faults in your drives. Once ZFS starts saying there are issues with the drive, you send it back to the vendor in warranty period with the error messages and you get a brand new drive. I met someone at BSDCan this year who has not purchased a new drive in years because he keeps finding errors before the warranty expires. Pretty sweet.
There are many usecases where people will need a centralized version control system (VCS). SVN was written ground up to be best in class centralized VCS and they accomplished this goal while building a very elegant and efficient client server framework to boot.
However IMO, SVN is still missing one very important feature: obliterate. This is a huge weakness with large repositories.
I also missed branch aware meta data in the early versions (I've been using since 0.8x) and not sure if this has changed. Git has done a very good job there.
I particularly like what Joyent is doing with their big data analysis. Node.js is catching up to python in performance and in time it should be a very strong server side language for many applications including Data Analysis and Modeling. So don't forget JavaScript. It may be very immature for use in this field but there is no reason that trailblazing can happen shortly with Node.
Agreed, if your goal is to remove CO2, then using a fuel cell by itself is not a helpful fuel cycle. However, the Fuel Cell based cycle is very promising and can help to improve the viability of remove solar farms where transmission loss is a significant detractor.
I wonder since the output of a fuel cell is pure heated CO2, this output can be fed back directly into the solar input side to further improve efficiency?
Maybe there are other absorption cycle that can be added to the chain after the fuel cell that leverages the heated and concentrated CO2?
I laugh until I cry when I see people saying that the blackberry infrastructure is old school, when the big corporations and users are throwing so much money and data at cloud computing.
Blackberry backend is cloud infrastructure in the purest form. The guarantee of the BB Cloud is that It offers a guarantee that your data will get through to the end customer. This is the essense of cloud computing. Yes, when it goes down your data gets held up but this is the same with any cloud infrastructure. In the case of this latest outage, I do not believe there was much if any lost transactions and it simply came down to long delays.
Yes, it is true that RIM can do a much better job at building and scaling their infrastructure to be future ready. Tripple fault tolerance on all infrastructure in any cloud computing is an absolute must and this should be the minimum that all companies adhere to. RIM will need to raise the bar a few more noches to ensure that their cloud maintains the highest possible level of quality of service.
Many argue that BIS and BES is too complex a model and needs to be simplified. This cannot be farther from the truth. In order to make large and complex solutions robust and scalable, you must add complexity by adding extra layers within the infrastructure in order to make it work. Stable, secure and light weight messaging and data transactioning can only be done with a cloud infastructure in between.
The biggest challenge with the blackberry cloud is not its instability but rather that when it fails, many users are affected and thus it is good news to post on blogs. In reality, the BB cloud is likely more stable on average than most other solutions out there for messaging and data transfer from mobile devices. The only reason you do not hear otherwise is that failures are localized and would only affect hundreds of users which does not make for very good news.
I purchased my first Mac at on a Blue and White at version 10.0.x. I did so because it looked like an awesome development platform. Over the years, I discovered that was not the case. Even after moving up through many other Macs, I have consistently come back to trying to develop on a Mac and it just does not work for me.
For doing complex Web development using Tomcat, Apache and a ton of DHTML, I have found that Mac OSX is just not user friendly enough for managing all the different tail windows, process start stop windows, code windows etc.. to build complex apps. The window management is to cluttered to manage so many tasks. I am not a fan of using IDE's and prefer to use programmers editors and standard open libraries. On Mac, the only way to use Progammers editor and edit multiple sources at one time, was to have many windows open. In windows any decent code editor has tabs to manage opened files. It has taken mac almost 8 years to get this right and now finally some editors support tabs. I think KDE is now finally including MDI frameworks OOTB but Gnome still is not so same issue there.
Another huge issue with development in Mac OSX is the inability to effectivley extend Finder like you can in Windows with windows explorer shell extensions. The ability to trick out Windows Explorer shortcut menus with tools like File Menu Tools and Tortoise SVN make it amazingly powerful development system. This is a problem of the Vanilla consumer base of Mac systems and is a huge problem in my mind. I am absolutely spoiled in windows with the dozens of tools I have extended in Windows Explorer. Linux has shell extensions but lack a ubiquitous file manager that crosses all apps which makes shell extensions less valuable to users. Hate to say it but Microsoft did the right thing when it comes to Windows Explorers ubiquitous nature in windows.
To make use of my Mac, I now use VMware Fusion running Windows and this has made me way more efficient by orders of magnitudue than using Mac directly. Windows on a Macbook is often better than Windows on a Windows laptop. Call it comfort level but I am always cursing my Macs when doing deveopment with stupid things like not being able to resize a window in the top left corner.
Don't get me wrong, I own 3 macs at home and am typing on a Macbook pro 17" right now but I do very little development on it unless through Fusion running Windows XP.
Hopefully some day, that will change but for now I have to be pragmatic and just pump out the code in the environment that is the most effective for me.
I have given it a go and compared it to QCad which I have a licensed copy and used heavily of late. Although, it is likely much more feature rich than QCad, it is missing one key feature of having a "Layers Pane" that is always visible. In DraftSight, you must open a modal dialog to manage the layers which IMO is kind of clicky for complex layer management. This is a pretty glaring usability miss for me and I am holding off for them to implement this before I jump on the band wagon.
On the bright side, hopefully this will like the fire under QCad developers to get 3.0 out there which has been "under development" for a couple of years now. QCad itself has some issues too such as poor workflows and some basic usability features and its well due for some improvements.
Good to see some progress in the free / reasonably priced 2D Cad world:)
I have not heard of anybody successfully hacking a password protected Blackberry. Even with physical access. Maybe there is a way but it is probably too costly and time consuming to even consider. Definitely no such hack has been documented.
If anyboyd has any examples where a password protected BB is cracked, I would be interested to hear about it:)
Thanks for the pointer. Right now I only maintain simple SVN depot's and with little collaboration so it is pretty light weight and little branching or merging required (if at all). My big Depot's are in P4 and required by my current employer and I maintain a strict Trunk=Prod Branch=Dev CR model. It is slow but steady as long as my team follows the rules:). P4 is pretty heavy weight but it reasonably fast.
I will do some research on GIT for fronting SVN in the future when I have time to play outside in the OpenSource domain again.
Slashdot Mirror
Electron has made great strides in 2015 and is seeing some very active development lately. From the success of the Atom editor and Microsofts Visual Studio Code, there are many very professional tools built on this framework. In my view, it should be voted up as one of the most important projects of the last year for cross platform desktop application development.
My hope for the next couple of years is to see a fork of electron for mobile so we can start building cross platform mobile apps based on node.js and chromium.
For old school JavaScript developers like myself, the Electron project are of stuff dreams are made of.
Go language differs from many other languages in how it handles Errors. Can you summarize the benefits and drawbacks to the Go language error handling approach when compared to Java for large scale applications.
True. In actuality, we did not need the J2EE features like JavaBeans. We were fine with just servlets so Tomcat was a perfect fit for our stacks.
One real beauty I was involved with handling from Oracle was how they can charge you for all the cores on the VM host even though you are only using say 2 out of 16 cores for your server. Of course they would not do this if you were using their VM stack.
They tried this to me for Weblogic licenses and after getting a whopping quotation that was easily 20 times what it should have been, I just ended up porting the enterprise app over to Tomcat bringing our license costs for our J2EE stack down to nil.
Amazing to see news on Node.js on slashdot. There has been many important developments with node over the last year but nothing at all on slashdot. Glad to see someone is paying attention to the developments of this very important project.
Some important features added since v0.12 for instance around synchronous child process execution is essential for node to be utilized on non event based coding styles.
Regarding merging of node.js and io.js into a common stack supported by the node foundation, this is an awesome move. Node is too big for BDFL model and forking is not good at this stage. I don't really care about versioning model but going all the way to version 4 is a bit odd.
When I read the description, I saw the exact same thing as It sounded just like the discussion points for the upcoming FreeNAS 10. Its so wicked that Jordan now works for iXSystems :)
The new iXSystems FreeNAS 10 platform would be a great foundation as a general application server platform. I'm not sure how well it would behave as a desktop OS. You sure cannot go wrong with root ZFS though, which is something that is not trivial on linux.
I knew I would get some flaming for that. However, considering that I was pretty hot on Java back in the day and I was super pissed with what Microsoft did by single handedly killing JavaBeans, I can't help but slip in a $ in once in a while for old time sake ;)
Today, I feel bad for all those system admins out there today who need to administer IPMI's. Talk about a massive pain in the butt to get to a damn IPMI KVM window to open let alone work properly.
The contenders for biggest enemies of Java are:
1) Micro$oft - Effectively killed the JavaBean web plugin market with their own lackluster JVM via EEE (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish).
JavaBeans is the technology that has the biggest negative view on the net and rightly so. If Microsoft had not done such a good job killing it, Java would likely be in a different light today as more energy would have been spent making JavaBean libraries better while the real engineers at Sun still had control of the source.
2) Oracle - They just do not get open source or anything that came from Sun.
Google has popularized Java way more than Oracle could ever imagine.
"You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end" - B. Cantrill
Honestly, its a wicked idea however the use of Humans to execute the material retrieval for analysis does make much sense unless they are doing active and repetitive analysis at the captured space boulder.
Its seems more intuitive to just fly some robots up to do the capture and send back the samples back to Earth as needed?
I think that most agree that the biggest issue with end to end encryption adoption is mail client integration which at present its ridiculously bad.
One way the community can tackle this is to push for Mozilla foundation to work on a cross platform Thunderbird Mobile client and include GPG or similar encryption scheme baked into the core. With a mobile application and better working GPG encryption integration in desktop Thunderbird, many more would start using Thunderbird with encryption for all their communication needs and be able to drop the use of thin client apps from their usecases.
I don't think that commercial email client vendors, thick client or thin, will ever adopt end to end encryption unless end to end encryption is the primary selling point *and* the in such a case it must be fully cross platform (desktop and mobile) to be useful.
I know many Cubans and I agree that $8 per month is a large portion of a monthly salary so unless the Cuban customer has an external source of income, it will be very difficult under normal conditions. However, there is a very large portion of the population with family outside of the country which funnels in money and the Cubans getting that money have more than enough money to buy this service.
For those that can get a dependable connection and I can see them paying for the service by hosting a black market movie theater in their living rooms for $0.50 a seat. Its possible that they can sell 10 seats in their living room and make $5 USD a showing. Maybe even people in a neighborhood will have a co-op and share the monthly cost.
The biggest issue in Cuba is internet infrastructure or lack thereof. I have spent time in some big Cuban cities and they are lucky to have a telephone let alone an internet connection. The only Cubans with internet that I know worked for the government and the connection, which worked a fraction of the time, was at the government offices.
There may be secondary benefits of doing this such as oxygenation of the oceans. Nanobubbles can be produced very inexpensively using the technology shown here here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
I would disagree. They are spot on when it comes to business tools vs toys.If you want to get the job done and be totally business, nothing can beat a BlackBerry. The Hub, general PIM functions, sound profiles, notifications cannot be matched by anybody to date.
I made a huge mistake recently by switching from BB10 over to a Galaxy S5 and several weeks in, I am kicking myself for doing this. The Android is a gorgeous OS with lots of fun toys but when it comes to PIM and business productivity it just plain sucks. I had to root the damn thing just to get the volume button to not adjust my ringer volume ... WTF! Also, Android is so incredibly inconsistent and fragmented with its UI's. At least BlackBerry and Apple strive to get consistency with UI design.
I know that Apple likely does a better job with PIM than Android but it still cannot compare to BlackBerry.
The new BlackBerry Blend is an awesome implementation and model. Who needs syncing and the could when all your secure information is locked into to just one device that you have with you at all times. The concept is sound and implemented very well.
But BlackBerry sucks for Linux support and you cannot run BB Link on many older OSX machines. This was a huge issue for me and a big reason for my switching as I don't buy new iWare and don't run Windows at my house any more. Also BB's method for connecting over USB through a virtual ethernet connection is beyond stupid. For instance, if you are running a Cisco VPN client and connected, it will block the BB connection and how stupid is that.
I will switch back though once I find an old laptop that I can run Windohs 7 to connect and find someone that will trade a new Galaxy S5 for a Z30.
Sorry but I'm +1 on the change in jode.js and any open source project. I would prefer to avoid insulting the sensitive developers out there in code by avoiding gender pronouns.
Ben, sorry but you were being a di*k / a**hole there.
I agree that Bryan Cantrill could have been softer on how he blogged about this but that is not Bryan's style and I find his style very refreshing for the most part.
Now that is not to say that I may switch to io.js as I am getting very impatient about the 0.12 release getting out. Its taking way too long to have a production stable execSync().
I would always shoot for more disk but then issues arise from managing such large disks in the 1+ TB range that we tend to fill up fast.
For a laptop or desktop, I am targeting two large drives in a RaidZ mirror on Linux. I would do the same for a desktop.
For more data and centralization for my house or office, I would choose an iXSystems FreeNAS Mini. It has all the features that you need for your data and can be easily configured to send out warning messages on various measurements like disk space, SMART messages and raidz warnings. I think that de-dupe is coming soon if its not there already. The Mini is super powerful for its size and power footprint.
With ZFS, it solves the nasty issue of having to recover files on massive disks like those we get today. There is nothing worse than waiting for fsck, surface scans or recovery operations on 1TB+ drives; It takes forever. With a well maintained ZFS system those issues are gone.
Another really cool thing about ZFS is the ability to maintain a perfect audit on the faults in your drives. Once ZFS starts saying there are issues with the drive, you send it back to the vendor in warranty period with the error messages and you get a brand new drive. I met someone at BSDCan this year who has not purchased a new drive in years because he keeps finding errors before the warranty expires. Pretty sweet.
There are many usecases where people will need a centralized version control system (VCS). SVN was written ground up to be best in class centralized VCS and they accomplished this goal while building a very elegant and efficient client server framework to boot.
However IMO, SVN is still missing one very important feature: obliterate. This is a huge weakness with large repositories.
I also missed branch aware meta data in the early versions (I've been using since 0.8x) and not sure if this has changed. Git has done a very good job there.
I particularly like what Joyent is doing with their big data analysis. Node.js is catching up to python in performance and in time it should be a very strong server side language for many applications including Data Analysis and Modeling. So don't forget JavaScript. It may be very immature for use in this field but there is no reason that trailblazing can happen shortly with Node.
Agreed, if your goal is to remove CO2, then using a fuel cell by itself is not a helpful fuel cycle. However, the Fuel Cell based cycle is very promising and can help to improve the viability of remove solar farms where transmission loss is a significant detractor.
I wonder since the output of a fuel cell is pure heated CO2, this output can be fed back directly into the solar input side to further improve efficiency?
Maybe there are other absorption cycle that can be added to the chain after the fuel cell that leverages the heated and concentrated CO2?
Formic acid can be stored and used in a fuel cell to have a very good solar storage fuel. No need to worry about CO if kept within this fuel cycle.
Related Abstract: http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content...
I laugh until I cry when I see people saying that the blackberry infrastructure is old school, when the big corporations and users are throwing so much money and data at cloud computing.
Blackberry backend is cloud infrastructure in the purest form. The guarantee of the BB Cloud is that It offers a guarantee that your data will get through to the end customer. This is the essense of cloud computing. Yes, when it goes down your data gets held up but this is the same with any cloud infrastructure. In the case of this latest outage, I do not believe there was much if any lost transactions and it simply came down to long delays.
Yes, it is true that RIM can do a much better job at building and scaling their infrastructure to be future ready. Tripple fault tolerance on all infrastructure in any cloud computing is an absolute must and this should be the minimum that all companies adhere to. RIM will need to raise the bar a few more noches to ensure that their cloud maintains the highest possible level of quality of service.
Many argue that BIS and BES is too complex a model and needs to be simplified. This cannot be farther from the truth. In order to make large and complex solutions robust and scalable, you must add complexity by adding extra layers within the infrastructure in order to make it work. Stable, secure and light weight messaging and data transactioning can only be done with a cloud infastructure in between.
The biggest challenge with the blackberry cloud is not its instability but rather that when it fails, many users are affected and thus it is good news to post on blogs. In reality, the BB cloud is likely more stable on average than most other solutions out there for messaging and data transfer from mobile devices. The only reason you do not hear otherwise is that failures are localized and would only affect hundreds of users which does not make for very good news.
- JsD
I have never thought that a Goldberg machine can be actually partially useful such as teaching history (albeit very loosely).
Maybe they should create a new class of Goldberg machines to provide some educational purpose ;)
- JsD
I purchased my first Mac at on a Blue and White at version 10.0.x. I did so because it looked like an awesome development platform. Over the years, I discovered that was not the case. Even after moving up through many other Macs, I have consistently come back to trying to develop on a Mac and it just does not work for me.
For doing complex Web development using Tomcat, Apache and a ton of DHTML, I have found that Mac OSX is just not user friendly enough for managing all the different tail windows, process start stop windows, code windows etc.. to build complex apps. The window management is to cluttered to manage so many tasks. I am not a fan of using IDE's and prefer to use programmers editors and standard open libraries. On Mac, the only way to use Progammers editor and edit multiple sources at one time, was to have many windows open. In windows any decent code editor has tabs to manage opened files. It has taken mac almost 8 years to get this right and now finally some editors support tabs. I think KDE is now finally including MDI frameworks OOTB but Gnome still is not so same issue there.
Another huge issue with development in Mac OSX is the inability to effectivley extend Finder like you can in Windows with windows explorer shell extensions. The ability to trick out Windows Explorer shortcut menus with tools like File Menu Tools and Tortoise SVN make it amazingly powerful development system. This is a problem of the Vanilla consumer base of Mac systems and is a huge problem in my mind. I am absolutely spoiled in windows with the dozens of tools I have extended in Windows Explorer. Linux has shell extensions but lack a ubiquitous file manager that crosses all apps which makes shell extensions less valuable to users. Hate to say it but Microsoft did the right thing when it comes to Windows Explorers ubiquitous nature in windows.
To make use of my Mac, I now use VMware Fusion running Windows and this has made me way more efficient by orders of magnitudue than using Mac directly. Windows on a Macbook is often better than Windows on a Windows laptop. Call it comfort level but I am always cursing my Macs when doing deveopment with stupid things like not being able to resize a window in the top left corner.
Don't get me wrong, I own 3 macs at home and am typing on a Macbook pro 17" right now but I do very little development on it unless through Fusion running Windows XP.
Hopefully some day, that will change but for now I have to be pragmatic and just pump out the code in the environment that is the most effective for me.
- JsD
I have given it a go and compared it to QCad which I have a licensed copy and used heavily of late. Although, it is likely much more feature rich than QCad, it is missing one key feature of having a "Layers Pane" that is always visible. In DraftSight, you must open a modal dialog to manage the layers which IMO is kind of clicky for complex layer management. This is a pretty glaring usability miss for me and I am holding off for them to implement this before I jump on the band wagon.
On the bright side, hopefully this will like the fire under QCad developers to get 3.0 out there which has been "under development" for a couple of years now. QCad itself has some issues too such as poor workflows and some basic usability features and its well due for some improvements.
Good to see some progress in the free / reasonably priced 2D Cad world :)
I have not heard of anybody successfully hacking a password protected Blackberry. Even with physical access. Maybe there is a way but it is probably too costly and time consuming to even consider. Definitely no such hack has been documented.
If anyboyd has any examples where a password protected BB is cracked, I would be interested to hear about it :)
- JsD
Thanks for the pointer. Right now I only maintain simple SVN depot's and with little collaboration so it is pretty light weight and little branching or merging required (if at all). My big Depot's are in P4 and required by my current employer and I maintain a strict Trunk=Prod Branch=Dev CR model. It is slow but steady as long as my team follows the rules :). P4 is pretty heavy weight but it reasonably fast.
I will do some research on GIT for fronting SVN in the future when I have time to play outside in the OpenSource domain again.