I know I'm going to start a flamewar here.... sorry.
Reboot is by far one of the worst animated CGI Cartoons that I have ever seen. Beastwars, done by the same guys, is bounds and leaps beyond what this cartoon was. In fact, I'd even go to say that the only reason that reboot was ever popular is because it pretty much was the first full CGI cartoon pushed to american audiences.
The characters are blocky, the light is constantly off, the animatronics blow chunks, all the characters 'walk like an egyptian'.. I could go on. The visuals and plot, however, are excellent and unfortunately the lack of work by their animation team somewhat ruined that for me.
I guess I'm anal about animation, personally, if it's not animated at 30 fps or better it's not worth watching. Movies like Akira or Ninja Scroll or just about anything by Disney (despite plot) are grand to admire as an art form. The Gundam series is one of the better animated ones on TV, Tenchi and Ranma shouldn't be excluded from this though.
Also some of the more detailed scenes in DragonBall Z/GT. Unfortunately DragonBall really blows chunks in quality in the episodes where major plot events aren't happening. So sad. And funimation made things even worse by cropping almost half of each episode out for americans.
Personally, overall my favorite anime is 'The Professional', which had a great plot and was a groundbreaker, considering it was using 'decent' CGI in 1985.
Oh yes, and we mustn't forget John K., probably the best american animator working, creator of Ren & Stimpy.For those interested, there is a divx encoded copy of 'Man's Best Friend', floating around on gnutella. It's the episode that got John K. banned from MTV/Nickelodeon, and it's probably one of the best episodes out there. I suggest you take a look at it, it's not the greatest quality but watchable.
Oh yes. For those in the portland, or area, the guy who owns the Clinton St theatre has a vast collection of banned and 'disowned' cartoons, mainly from Warner Bros and a few Joe Fleischman (Popeye) cartoons that make some of the craziest Hentai look like Saturday morning television. He shows them every now and then in a series... Pretty neat stuff, cheap seats.. I guess Warner is trying to sue him for holding the episodes (which are mostly war propoganda and the bing crosby original clip).
Actually, I saw 2 nights ago on C-SPAN (you should watch it, if anything, to see how utterly ignorant your politicians are) a hearing where they were questioning the FBI regarding the Carnivore system.
The politik's do NOT like it, which is a good thing. A black-box packet sniffer tacked on to the end of the network is not cool.
I've also gotten requests from.... doubleclick, personally. I've seen the browser (IE in this specific case) connect to ads.doubleclick.net and on my linux machine *.doubleclick.net is blocked and a good 30% of the time I don't see banner ads on slashdot..
This is the biggest load of dung I've read in a while.
Personally, I like organization. I like being able to dictate to my computer what I want it to do. I also like knowing what's going on under the hood.
Everything this guy has said has been said a million times in science fiction, and still, no one is doing it. Why? Because the people who would create it, don't want it.
You don't start working under the engine of a car unless you're prepared to break something.
You don't work on plumbing without turning the water off first.
You don't work on electrical wires in your house, without turning the power off and/or understanding the wiring of the system you're working on.
And if you don't want to do any of the above, you call a PROFESSIONAL to do it for you.
In other words, no matter how easy you make it, it's still not going to work if you don't know what you're doing. So these types should learn already. I don't work on my car or do my plumbing, I hire someone that knows about it to do it for me, or, I anticipate breaking something and attempting to fix it. This is how I learn. It is the best way, IMHO.
I'm going to mount it on the dash of my car, so I can actually get somewhere on the freeway without some asshole doing 80 in front of me and weaving all over the road because he's in the middle of a business meeting with his right hand.
Well, if you're working in a high end environment, people are going to want modifications. Not everyone in your market is going to either have the manpower or the knowledge to get this done.
Sell MODS. In all environments that I've worked in or consulted for, people are always wanting 'this little feature' and 'that little extension that the competitor has'. No firm wants to pay for both, especially in a higher end environment where 5 digit (or higher) price tags are found.
Use your programmers as the moneymakers, not the code that they produce. Nothing requires you to release these changes as well, so a code base that 'does the job', and addons that are customized for various business use would be an ideal solution.
Alongside this suggestion, would be to take programmers who aren't working on a current project to provide API and development support for the sourced program, at a fee. Obviously, despire the documentation, the programmers are going to be able to provide even better support for their own code that they write.
I got this idea from a company that sells business software (their software blows, but that's another story). I had to support this, written in COBOL (yech), for a business that used the softare.
Original price tag for distribution - roughly $7k for it and a 10 user license.
Technical Support - $4k per year
Modifications to translate custom price files used by their distributors - $3k
They handle multiple companies and seem to make a decent living while doing it. The fact that they have the programmers who develop the actual software write the modifications makes it a big plus to hire them to do the work in spite of the fact that hiring a 'y2k is over' out of work COBOL programmer is significantly cheaper.
USWest has been under mandate for the state of Oregon to provide 'excellent' customer service or get fined for each complaint.
So, if you're having problems that can be validated, and live in oregon, CALL THE PUBLIC UTILITIES COMMISSION.
The night I got my DSL, someone in Milwaukie (not OR, Wisconsin) ended up calling me at 3am his time, he was paged and woken up, all because he didn't flip a switch at his local office.
I am not shitting you. This coming from the same guy who waited for nearly 4 months to get a non-commerical phone line put in my apt while I caught a guy working on the box installing a line for someone else.
So, reap it while it's good. Seriously. and use the line 'I'm not getting off this phone until it works' - it works everytime.:)
Actually this law has been in place for a while. BBS systems have done this for a long time.
If you are under 18 and you access a porn site, for instance, and they offer a section where you can enter your age and you enter it falsely, it's a federal violation. It's in place to aid those who provide adult services a method of retaliation and prevention from lawsuits. It's also used to prevent someone with a laser printer and a laminator from suing the local quikee-mart when they buy booze off of 'em.
That's why, at least in the state of oregon, if you have worked previously at a convenience store and get 'stung' by the liquor commission the kids they use have to have valid, unmodified identification. Otherwise upper management can sue the state dry.
1) They ask that you don't send bug reports to them
2) Bunch of bugs but no source to analyze or fix
3) FreeBSD problems with ld, no output displayed so that perhaps a BSD guru could help them with it
4) using a alpha version of a widget library to develop GUI alpha aoftware, with the library statically linked
5) and a newsgroup to post in about it
Anyone see anything horribly contradictory here?:)
Kind of defeats the "release early, release often" approach they seem to be taking, eh?
Reminds me of BBS programmers for DOS that kept releasing more and more bugs but wouldn't DARE let the source out because they were afraid someone else would steal it. Of course they failed to say that their BBS was a modified version of another BBS with the source already opened.
I love opera, but this has to be the most whacked development model I've seen in a while.
It really isn't that hard. I'm currently working on a BBS project that uses RDBMS's to manage multiple BBS "templates".
I wrote a higher level abstraction for DBI, which i'm fine tuning and eventually going to release seperately. It has a CGI-like syntax, so it accepts different flags for the seperate parts of a query and has different functions for the queries. Considerably simpler than a hundred or so ".=" statements when writing up a few queries, and it handles just about everything now, with a few minor bugs and docs to work out.
DBI is very, very, very simple. Anyone who's really interested in figuring it out - if you have knowledge of how objects work from the outside just taking a look at some sample code should do the trick, and then taking a look at the POD.
Never had a need for bindings and such, perhaps in a more procedural application I could see how they'd be useful.
If anyone's interested in the source for this module, please email me at the address above and i'll get you a copy of the current moving target.
RMS does not. This has been the case for several years now, what work he MIGHT do on these projects does not involve his hands, as he has stated many times that his hands are somewhat crippled and he really can't program with them anymore.
I feel for him, and the "community" has lost as a result, but there is a time when someone must realize that when they are not contributing, they are detrimenting.
I'm irate about this and I'm goign to express it. This is not a flame. But this is the impossible goal. I just want to use my damn operating system, and have it work. Debian has failed in the last few months to provide me consistently with either.
You still have to download an unzip program to unzip files when you run under a MS system.
RedHat doesn't come with a copy of foo-bar-x.tgz, which is only source and I have to build.
And (this is not a flame), most debian packages require tweaking to WORK IN DEBIAN, period. Unfortunately with any form of package management (including the windows add/remove panels) a lot of "reverse-configuring" needs to happen before any user who wants more than the default is happy with the setup.
Not to mention, the last version of apache I installed whacked the entire contents of my CGI-BIN directory and replaced my current CGI project with a couple of stupid fscking manual interpreters. Spare me the CGI, I need no more test.cgi's please. I've gotten over this, thanks to a two week old backup that I've had to spend the last 3 days recoding. I'm very happy about that. really.
So please, spare the damned politics and do me a favor and spend a little more time checking out your packages, and getting potato to something more than a slightly working heap.
I love debian because of it's blend of ease of use and raw power - the fact that I don't have GNOME, E, and X preconfigured for me when I want WindowMaker and.. nothing is a welcome thing. The fact that my network configuration isn't at the mercy of some hapless python script is another thing.
However, I would really appreciate it if you spend your precious windows of time before you are all cursed with carpal-tunnel syndrome WORKING ON DEBIAN and not ON MAILING LISTS WITH UNIMPORTANT POLITICAL DICK JOCKEYING.
I understand for many of you this may be fun. Of course, I look at it just like the "Freedows" project, which went just about nowhere because people were spending too much damned time TALKING and not enough time WORKING.
What have we heard of Freedows in the last year? What about Slackware a year ago? "What's that?" Sound familiar?
And as much as I hate to drop this low, what does RMS do anymore other than sit on his ass and complain about non-free software? I understand he was a great founder of a great movement and I honor and respect him for that. However, crippled hands or not, he does not do much of anything related to the GNU project anymore, coding or otherwise. I have yet to see this year RMS announce anything from the GNU project that is under his supervision or control. All I hear is "RMS said this", "RMS said that". You make the conclusion.
Sorry for the rant, but I am getting rather sick and fricking tired of good projects wasted away by a bunch of people who are too in tune with their email client and their political side to think about what their whole goal was in the first place. So create your free distribution, but leave it up to the people who actually pay the damned cash to serve this stuff up to decide whether or not it should be "included".
Believing the Sun is green and actually having it be green are two different things. Besides, this has very little to do with the quality of software. It has to do with shady business practices. IBM makes great software and hardware, but going into business (in some form or another) with them 15 years ago was the only option if you were going to make software. Simple case in point, the company that you work for only got it's start working with, you guessed it, IBM. Auto parts manufacturers do not have to worry about whether they team up with Chevy or Ford. They only have to worry about making the best parts in the business. Why is that? I could come up with a thousand more rebuttals to this arguement. The problem isn't the programmers (well... at least in this case:), it's the suits that tell the programmers what to do. Unfortunately for you, you are yet again, in a position of no control. When an animal fears it attacks. This can be seen easily on slashdot anytime the GPL is violated, and for good reason. Most people would prefer NOT to test the GPL in court.:) I understand your feelings, but you must come to terms with the fact that the people who are above you have screwed you and your colleagues in many, many ways unimaginable to the rest of us. Whether or not this decision is the shovel that breaks the first patch of ground to be strip-mined, it will happen, someone will find a loose patch of dirt. -Erik-
Re:it is our fault heres why...
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This could not BE MORE CORRECT.
Case in point - this morning on Portland's KOIN-6 news, I was watching a "comment forum" where people call in and voice their opinions on the Microsoft breakup..
I called in, saying "I am a programmer and system administrator, and would like to talk about the problems that Microsoft has made for programmers and system admins since well before Windows 95."
The screener on the other end of the line stuttered thickly as he asked me where I was from. I had a gut feeling then that I was not going to get through just because of that. After all, the reason that I had called in, is because 90% of the "comments" were "businessmen" that obviously felt that MS was doing no wrong and felt the "evil gov't" was doing them wrong somehow. I was hoping that I could at least get through to a few open minded people, if not the obviously uneducated reporter (Lars Larsen.. what a name) that was answering questions.
I sat on hold. The show was being aired through the phone whilst I was on hold. 30 minutes and countless questions later, the show had ended.
The one comment that actually got through that was actually in opposition of it was another semi-knowledgable (but low in argumentative skills) person who stated that the point of the whole trial was not the fact that microsoft had it's hands in too much dirt (no comment), but that they had strong-armed OEM's into configuring windows to Microsoft's specifications or would not be able to resell it.
The commenter was promptly disconnected and the show ended, with the reporter saying, "So what? The point is, is that people do not want 5 different operating systems out there with different software for each system.". Sounds logical to me.
paulydavis (the starter of this thread) is VERY VERY RIGHT. If you hear or see something like this on radio or television, DO YOUR PART, get ON THE PHONE AND VOICE YOUR DAMN OPINION.
Otherwise, you're going to be stepping on a lot of "astroturf" in the next few months/years. And you'll only have yourself to thank for it.
Your statements define exactly why the antitrust suit exists.
The fact that I still have to use windows to do normal, everyday operations in some cases to do my work, despite my chagrin, means that microsoft has an unfair monopoly.
It all comes down to the fact that there is no standard API for doing just about anything (unless you count POSIX, which can't really stand on it's own for anything high-level) so developers get locked in. It should not be that way.
for($c=0;$row = $sth->fetch_arrayref;$c++) { # print can be replaced with output to CGI.pm print "$c: $@row[0] $@row[1]\n"; }; $sth->finish;
That's 8 lines if you count the finish statement. The SQL may not work for all RDBMS's, and I'm not sure what hte DBI module name is for mysql (I work in postgres). Putting simple keywords liek "Gateway Micro server ARM" would have triggered these articles. You could even generate forms from these descriptions that would enable for standardized keywords to be used in teh "description" row of the table. This is first grade database programming.
It would be up to the highly paid writing staff of andover.net to actually read the related search returns and perhaps decide on whether they were related or not.
And if each "section" of slashdot was kept in a different table, you'd just have to add another line to table join them, or write a slightly more complex but easy routine to search each table manually if joining were not easily possible.
I love slashdot, I have been here since... well, for a long time, before user accounts, back when you actually typed in your own name before each post. I would have never expected something out of them like this back then, but I do now, because they are so big and funded now. Perhaps i'll pickup slashcode this weekend and write the changes in (if easily possible, i have another project that i'm pushing to get a better job).
horsepower + money + staff = no excuse. I mean, other places manage with a lot more traffic, why can't they?
For those of you needing to fill the urge now, I strongly suggest you check out counterstrike, a modification for Half-Life. It's a shooter, but the object is terrorism/counterterrorism.
CS currently has more servers than UT and Q3 COMBINED, and Valve is literally helping the modification developers with the actual process themselves. This week Valve is developing brand new networking code for a game that is TWO YEARS OLD, mostly revolving around this game. (although they'd like to say it's TFC:)
There's nothing like silently walking around, walking through a door and getting shot THROUGH the door, in the head, by a M4A1 Carbine, then proceeding to see the blood trail hit the wall next to the door.:)
Think of it as Shogo meets Die Hard (movie) meets Action Quake meets the terror factor of Half Life and Hexen II. I've never fallen out of my chair playing Quake because I was so frightened, this game solves that problem.
Sorry for the ad, but this game is truly Something Different - it deserves the fanbase it has.
Boy does that sound familiar. At my office we must spend half our day playing counterstrike...:)
DOOM was a great, and honestly, with the exception of SP Shogo and SP Half-Life (and CS of course) it still rules. These games have depth and atmosphere that no other games can touch - they're just clones. Yes, even Quake3, which I purchased, end up playing for 20 minutes and thinking "god this sucks", and then quitting, going to planetquake and checking to see if there are any mods in release soon. I'd like to work on one myself, but I have not the time to learn everything under the sun about Q3, i've had enough fun with just map editing thank you.
I just pray that JC actually uses his talent to produce more than glitter this time. It's nice to see Q3, but not very fun to play... If I wanted a game like that, "whack a mole" provides just about the same level of intelligence, and I get a good geek workout as well.:)
Slashdot Mirror
I hate martial arts movies, but you have to see (if you can find it) 'Drunken Master'..
Hilarious.
Erik
I know I'm going to start a flamewar here.... sorry.
Reboot is by far one of the worst animated CGI Cartoons that I have ever seen. Beastwars, done by the same guys, is bounds and leaps beyond what this cartoon was. In fact, I'd even go to say that the only reason that reboot was ever popular is because it pretty much was the first full CGI cartoon pushed to american audiences.
The characters are blocky, the light is constantly off, the animatronics blow chunks, all the characters 'walk like an egyptian'.. I could go on. The visuals and plot, however, are excellent and unfortunately the lack of work by their animation team somewhat ruined that for me.
I guess I'm anal about animation, personally, if it's not animated at 30 fps or better it's not worth watching. Movies like Akira or Ninja Scroll or just about anything by Disney (despite plot) are grand to admire as an art form. The Gundam series is one of the better animated ones on TV, Tenchi and Ranma shouldn't be excluded from this though.
Also some of the more detailed scenes in DragonBall Z/GT. Unfortunately DragonBall really blows chunks in quality in the episodes where major plot events aren't happening. So sad. And funimation made things even worse by cropping almost half of each episode out for americans.
Personally, overall my favorite anime is 'The Professional', which had a great plot and was a groundbreaker, considering it was using 'decent' CGI in 1985.
Oh yes, and we mustn't forget John K., probably the best american animator working, creator of Ren & Stimpy.For those interested, there is a divx encoded copy of 'Man's Best Friend', floating around on gnutella. It's the episode that got John K. banned from MTV/Nickelodeon, and it's probably one of the best episodes out there. I suggest you take a look at it, it's not the greatest quality but watchable.
Oh yes. For those in the portland, or area, the guy who owns the Clinton St theatre has a vast collection of banned and 'disowned' cartoons, mainly from Warner Bros and a few Joe Fleischman (Popeye) cartoons that make some of the craziest Hentai look like Saturday morning television. He shows them every now and then in a series... Pretty neat stuff, cheap seats.. I guess Warner is trying to sue him for holding the episodes (which are mostly war propoganda and the bing crosby original clip).
Erik
Heh, Fist of the North Star was hilarious...
:)
If braveheart had the same voice actors, they would all be going 'yip yip yip yip yip' as they sliced people to pieces...
Sorry, I still can't get over that. And I love anime to death.
Erik
Actually, I saw 2 nights ago on C-SPAN (you should watch it, if anything, to see how utterly ignorant your politicians are) a hearing where they were questioning the FBI regarding the Carnivore system.
The politik's do NOT like it, which is a good thing. A black-box packet sniffer tacked on to the end of the network is not cool.
Erik
Amen to that..
A one handed single fingered monkey can play quake 3.
Erik
I've also gotten requests from .... doubleclick, personally. I've seen the browser (IE in this specific case) connect to ads.doubleclick.net and on my linux machine *.doubleclick.net is blocked and a good 30% of the time I don't see banner ads on slashdot..
Um... can anyone say hypocrisy?
-Erik-
At least gibson calls it 'fiction'.
This is the biggest load of dung I've read in a while.
Personally, I like organization. I like being able to dictate to my computer what I want it to do. I also like knowing what's going on under the hood.
Everything this guy has said has been said a million times in science fiction, and still, no one is doing it. Why? Because the people who would create it, don't want it.
-Erik-
I'm sorry if this sounds like a flame.
You don't start working under the engine of a car unless you're prepared to break something.
You don't work on plumbing without turning the water off first.
You don't work on electrical wires in your house, without turning the power off and/or understanding the wiring of the system you're working on.
And if you don't want to do any of the above, you call a PROFESSIONAL to do it for you.
In other words, no matter how easy you make it, it's still not going to work if you don't know what you're doing. So these types should learn already. I don't work on my car or do my plumbing, I hire someone that knows about it to do it for me, or, I anticipate breaking something and attempting to fix it. This is how I learn. It is the best way, IMHO.
-Erik-
No matter how much it costs.
:)
I'm going to mount it on the dash of my car, so I can actually get somewhere on the freeway without some asshole doing 80 in front of me and weaving all over the road because he's in the middle of a business meeting with his right hand.
You can take that ANYWAY you want to..
-Erik-
Well, if you're working in a high end environment, people are going to want modifications. Not everyone in your market is going to either have the manpower or the knowledge to get this done.
Sell MODS. In all environments that I've worked in or consulted for, people are always wanting 'this little feature' and 'that little extension that the competitor has'. No firm wants to pay for both, especially in a higher end environment where 5 digit (or higher) price tags are found.
Use your programmers as the moneymakers, not the code that they produce. Nothing requires you to release these changes as well, so a code base that 'does the job', and addons that are customized for various business use would be an ideal solution.
Alongside this suggestion, would be to take programmers who aren't working on a current project to provide API and development support for the sourced program, at a fee. Obviously, despire the documentation, the programmers are going to be able to provide even better support for their own code that they write.
I got this idea from a company that sells business software (their software blows, but that's another story). I had to support this, written in COBOL (yech), for a business that used the softare.
Original price tag for distribution - roughly $7k for it and a 10 user license.
Technical Support - $4k per year
Modifications to translate custom price files used by their distributors - $3k
They handle multiple companies and seem to make a decent living while doing it. The fact that they have the programmers who develop the actual software write the modifications makes it a big plus to hire them to do the work in spite of the fact that hiring a 'y2k is over' out of work COBOL programmer is significantly cheaper.
-Erik-
For those who live in Oregon:
:)
USWest has been under mandate for the state of Oregon to provide 'excellent' customer service or get fined for each complaint.
So, if you're having problems that can be validated, and live in oregon, CALL THE PUBLIC UTILITIES COMMISSION.
The night I got my DSL, someone in Milwaukie (not OR, Wisconsin) ended up calling me at 3am his time, he was paged and woken up, all because he didn't flip a switch at his local office.
I am not shitting you. This coming from the same guy who waited for nearly 4 months to get a non-commerical phone line put in my apt while I caught a guy working on the box installing a line for someone else.
So, reap it while it's good. Seriously. and use the line 'I'm not getting off this phone until it works' - it works everytime.
-Erik-
Actually this law has been in place for a while. BBS systems have done this for a long time.
If you are under 18 and you access a porn site, for instance, and they offer a section where you can enter your age and you enter it falsely, it's a federal violation. It's in place to aid those who provide adult services a method of retaliation and prevention from lawsuits. It's also used to prevent someone with a laser printer and a laminator from suing the local quikee-mart when they buy booze off of 'em.
That's why, at least in the state of oregon, if you have worked previously at a convenience store and get 'stung' by the liquor commission the kids they use have to have valid, unmodified identification. Otherwise upper management can sue the state dry.
I don't get why they don't get it...
:)
1) They ask that you don't send bug reports to them
2) Bunch of bugs but no source to analyze or fix
3) FreeBSD problems with ld, no output displayed so that perhaps a BSD guru could help them with it
4) using a alpha version of a widget library to develop GUI alpha aoftware, with the library statically linked
5) and a newsgroup to post in about it
Anyone see anything horribly contradictory here?
Kind of defeats the "release early, release often" approach they seem to be taking, eh?
Reminds me of BBS programmers for DOS that kept releasing more and more bugs but wouldn't DARE let the source out because they were afraid someone else would steal it. Of course they failed to say that their BBS was a modified version of another BBS with the source already opened.
I love opera, but this has to be the most whacked development model I've seen in a while.
-Erik-
It really isn't that hard. I'm currently working on a BBS project that uses RDBMS's to manage multiple BBS "templates".
I wrote a higher level abstraction for DBI, which i'm fine tuning and eventually going to release seperately. It has a CGI-like syntax, so it accepts different flags for the seperate parts of a query and has different functions for the queries. Considerably simpler than a hundred or so ".=" statements when writing up a few queries, and it handles just about everything now, with a few minor bugs and docs to work out.
DBI is very, very, very simple. Anyone who's really interested in figuring it out - if you have knowledge of how objects work from the outside just taking a look at some sample code should do the trick, and then taking a look at the POD.
Never had a need for bindings and such, perhaps in a more procedural application I could see how they'd be useful.
If anyone's interested in the source for this module, please email me at the address above and i'll get you a copy of the current moving target.
-Erik-
I would do just about anything for a book on postgres... Something that goes deeper than SQL '92 preferably...
:)
HOPE YOU'RE LISTENING O'REILLY
-Erik-
RMS does not. This has been the case for several years now, what work he MIGHT do on these projects does not involve his hands, as he has stated many times that his hands are somewhat crippled and he really can't program with them anymore.
I feel for him, and the "community" has lost as a result, but there is a time when someone must realize that when they are not contributing, they are detrimenting.
-Erik-
I'm irate about this and I'm goign to express it. This is not a flame. But this is the impossible goal. I just want to use my damn operating system, and have it work. Debian has failed in the last few months to provide me consistently with either.
.. nothing is a welcome thing. The fact that my network configuration isn't at the mercy of some hapless python script is another thing.
You still have to download an unzip program to unzip files when you run under a MS system.
RedHat doesn't come with a copy of foo-bar-x.tgz, which is only source and I have to build.
And (this is not a flame), most debian packages require tweaking to WORK IN DEBIAN, period. Unfortunately with any form of package management (including the windows add/remove panels) a lot of "reverse-configuring" needs to happen before any user who wants more than the default is happy with the setup.
Not to mention, the last version of apache I installed whacked the entire contents of my CGI-BIN directory and replaced my current CGI project with a couple of stupid fscking manual interpreters. Spare me the CGI, I need no more test.cgi's please. I've gotten over this, thanks to a two week old backup that I've had to spend the last 3 days recoding. I'm very happy about that. really.
So please, spare the damned politics and do me a favor and spend a little more time checking out your packages, and getting potato to something more than a slightly working heap.
I love debian because of it's blend of ease of use and raw power - the fact that I don't have GNOME, E, and X preconfigured for me when I want WindowMaker and
However, I would really appreciate it if you spend your precious windows of time before you are all cursed with carpal-tunnel syndrome WORKING ON DEBIAN and not ON MAILING LISTS WITH UNIMPORTANT POLITICAL DICK JOCKEYING.
I understand for many of you this may be fun. Of course, I look at it just like the "Freedows" project, which went just about nowhere because people were spending too much damned time TALKING and not enough time WORKING.
What have we heard of Freedows in the last year? What about Slackware a year ago? "What's that?" Sound familiar?
And as much as I hate to drop this low, what does RMS do anymore other than sit on his ass and complain about non-free software? I understand he was a great founder of a great movement and I honor and respect him for that. However, crippled hands or not, he does not do much of anything related to the GNU project anymore, coding or otherwise. I have yet to see this year RMS announce anything from the GNU project that is under his supervision or control. All I hear is "RMS said this", "RMS said that". You make the conclusion.
Sorry for the rant, but I am getting rather sick and fricking tired of good projects wasted away by a bunch of people who are too in tune with their email client and their political side to think about what their whole goal was in the first place. So create your free distribution, but leave it up to the people who actually pay the damned cash to serve this stuff up to decide whether or not it should be "included".
-Erik-
Oh goodness. Sorry for the horrible formatting, GF's box, no slash-cookie :)
-Erik-
Believing the Sun is green and actually having it be green are two different things. Besides, this has very little to do with the quality of software. It has to do with shady business practices. IBM makes great software and hardware, but going into business (in some form or another) with them 15 years ago was the only option if you were going to make software. Simple case in point, the company that you work for only got it's start working with, you guessed it, IBM. Auto parts manufacturers do not have to worry about whether they team up with Chevy or Ford. They only have to worry about making the best parts in the business. Why is that? I could come up with a thousand more rebuttals to this arguement. The problem isn't the programmers (well... at least in this case :), it's the suits that tell the programmers what to do. Unfortunately for you, you are yet again, in a position of no control. When an animal fears it attacks. This can be seen easily on slashdot anytime the GPL is violated, and for good reason. Most people would prefer NOT to test the GPL in court. :) I understand your feelings, but you must come to terms with the fact that the people who are above you have screwed you and your colleagues in many, many ways unimaginable to the rest of us. Whether or not this decision is the shovel that breaks the first patch of ground to be strip-mined, it will happen, someone will find a loose patch of dirt. -Erik-
This could not BE MORE CORRECT.
Case in point - this morning on Portland's KOIN-6 news, I was watching a "comment forum" where people call in and voice their opinions on the Microsoft breakup..
I called in, saying "I am a programmer and system administrator, and would like to talk about the problems that Microsoft has made for programmers and system admins since well before Windows 95."
The screener on the other end of the line stuttered thickly as he asked me where I was from. I had a gut feeling then that I was not going to get through just because of that. After all, the reason that I had called in, is because 90% of the "comments" were "businessmen" that obviously felt that MS was doing no wrong and felt the "evil gov't" was doing them wrong somehow. I was hoping that I could at least get through to a few open minded people, if not the obviously uneducated reporter (Lars Larsen.. what a name) that was answering questions.
I sat on hold. The show was being aired through the phone whilst I was on hold. 30 minutes and countless questions later, the show had ended.
The one comment that actually got through that was actually in opposition of it was another semi-knowledgable (but low in argumentative skills) person who stated that the point of the whole trial was not the fact that microsoft had it's hands in too much dirt (no comment), but that they had strong-armed OEM's into configuring windows to Microsoft's specifications or would not be able to resell it.
The commenter was promptly disconnected and the show ended, with the reporter saying, "So what? The point is, is that people do not want 5 different operating systems out there with different software for each system.". Sounds logical to me.
paulydavis (the starter of this thread) is VERY VERY RIGHT. If you hear or see something like this on radio or television, DO YOUR PART, get ON THE PHONE AND VOICE YOUR DAMN OPINION.
Otherwise, you're going to be stepping on a lot of "astroturf" in the next few months/years. And you'll only have yourself to thank for it.
-Erik-
Your statements define exactly why the antitrust suit exists.
The fact that I still have to use windows to do normal, everyday operations in some cases to do my work, despite my chagrin, means that microsoft has an unfair monopoly.
It all comes down to the fact that there is no standard API for doing just about anything (unless you count POSIX, which can't really stand on it's own for anything high-level) so developers get locked in. It should not be that way.
-Erik-
DOH
s/$dbi/$dbh/ - typo, sorry. $dbi won't work because it'll clash with the DBI module.
-Erik-
To search a database using DBI (this is crude code):
... well, for a long time, before user accounts, back when you actually typed in your own name before each post. I would have never expected something out of them like this back then, but I do now, because they are so big and funded now. Perhaps i'll pickup slashcode this weekend and write the changes in (if easily possible, i have another project that i'm pushing to get a better job).
# we will assume $searchstring is alreayd provided.
$searchstring = '%'.$searchstring.'%';
$dbi->connect("DBI:mysql:dbname=slashdot", "slashdot", "blahpassword);
$query = "select description, id from articles where description LIKE $searchstring;";
$sth->prepare($query) || croak("blah");
$sth->execute || croak("blah");
for($c=0;$row = $sth->fetch_arrayref;$c++) {
# print can be replaced with output to CGI.pm
print "$c: $@row[0] $@row[1]\n"; };
$sth->finish;
That's 8 lines if you count the finish statement. The SQL may not work for all RDBMS's, and I'm not sure what hte DBI module name is for mysql (I work in postgres). Putting simple keywords liek "Gateway Micro server ARM" would have triggered these articles. You could even generate forms from these descriptions that would enable for standardized keywords to be used in teh "description" row of the table. This is first grade database programming.
It would be up to the highly paid writing staff of andover.net to actually read the related search returns and perhaps decide on whether they were related or not.
And if each "section" of slashdot was kept in a different table, you'd just have to add another line to table join them, or write a slightly more complex but easy routine to search each table manually if joining were not easily possible.
I love slashdot, I have been here since
horsepower + money + staff = no excuse. I mean, other places manage with a lot more traffic, why can't they?
-Erik-
For those of you needing to fill the urge now, I strongly suggest you check out counterstrike, a modification for Half-Life. It's a shooter, but the object is terrorism/counterterrorism.
:)
:)
CS currently has more servers than UT and Q3 COMBINED, and Valve is literally helping the modification developers with the actual process themselves. This week Valve is developing brand new networking code for a game that is TWO YEARS OLD, mostly revolving around this game. (although they'd like to say it's TFC
There's nothing like silently walking around, walking through a door and getting shot THROUGH the door, in the head, by a M4A1 Carbine, then proceeding to see the blood trail hit the wall next to the door.
Think of it as Shogo meets Die Hard (movie) meets Action Quake meets the terror factor of Half Life and Hexen II. I've never fallen out of my chair playing Quake because I was so frightened, this game solves that problem.
Sorry for the ad, but this game is truly Something Different - it deserves the fanbase it has.
-Erik-
Boy does that sound familiar. At my office we must spend half our day playing counterstrike... :)
:)
DOOM was a great, and honestly, with the exception of SP Shogo and SP Half-Life (and CS of course) it still rules. These games have depth and atmosphere that no other games can touch - they're just clones. Yes, even Quake3, which I purchased, end up playing for 20 minutes and thinking "god this sucks", and then quitting, going to planetquake and checking to see if there are any mods in release soon. I'd like to work on one myself, but I have not the time to learn everything under the sun about Q3, i've had enough fun with just map editing thank you.
I just pray that JC actually uses his talent to produce more than glitter this time. It's nice to see Q3, but not very fun to play... If I wanted a game like that, "whack a mole" provides just about the same level of intelligence, and I get a good geek workout as well.
-Erik-