With all due respect to guidance cousnselors (my sister is one), it amazes me that most guidance counselors are teachers who wanted to do something besides teach. In other words, they are not trained counselors.
My wife is a social worker who would love to be a counselor, but you know what? She can't. The teachers union in our fair state is fighting tooth and nail to keep anyone without an education degree out of the schools. It's just ridiculous. I'm sorry, but my wife is FAR more qualified to do counseling for troubled kids than my sister. I think they need to separate out the eduational/career counseling from the "other" counseling.
A system executes computer processing tasks on a remote computer that communicates with a central computer. The remote computer receives a start message from the central computer. Based on the start message, the remote computer processes raw data to generate processed data, and stores the processed data. Finally, the remote computer sends a complete message to the central computer.
Ummmm... I think Microsoft might just initiate some action on this matter. That's DCOM. and probably CORBA as well, although I know nothing about it, an let's face it, whoever 'owns' CORBA isn't gonna get a nasty as M$ about it.
How is it not COM? A COM object in a 3-tier app exposes an interface, takes a request from the remote computer and returns data. Any M$ developer who attends there tech briefings knows Microsoft is COM-crazy these days. It's being billed as a cornerstone of every new development problem you need to solve. (OT: They are even taking about making the interface between objects XML.)
Anyway, I just think M$ is gonna take one look at that and say BULLSH*T!
I had tried Linix in the form of Redhat 5.2, only to find it didn't support my video card. Recently, I read 6.1 included support, so I tried it out. I have to say that the install was pretty damn easy. The only vaguely confusing thing was, since my USB mouse doesn't work, I plugged in an old mouse I had. When "choose your mouse" came up, I turned it over, read "Intellimouse 2.1A", chose M$ bus mouse 2.1A or higher from the menu, only to find later it didn't work. A reinstall with choosing "PS/2" mouse (DUH!) worked fine.
RH 6.1 detected my networked cable modem perfectly. I just chose "use DHCP" and "start automatically" and went to town. To try to get the "newbie" experience, I choose "graphical login." It was just like booting Win98!, you see a bunch of text crap go by, and up pops some windows (note the small "w").
I have to say, I am really impressed so far. Linux has come a LONG way on the ease of install since I've seen it last. (I drank beer once while I watched some guys install linux 2 years ago -- all night long and it never worked).
Anyway, I am a certified M$ developer (and regular slashdot reader/poster), who just wanted to say this is pretty neat and wanted to share it with my friends here at slashdot (that was, of course, the first place I went when Netscape came up). Now if they'd only port VB to Linux......:)
I agree that, to some extent government "mandates" can be straightjackets that stifle real progress. It's tough to design programs that are flexible enough to work well. I think government regulations do the most good when they have "targets" and don't specify the "how." I'm thinking of the Clean Air Act, arguably one of the most successful pieces of regulation in the U.S. It specifies goals of emmission/pollution levels, but companies can get there in a variety of ways. They can "buy" pollution credits off of other companies that are below the target, to cite just one instance. As for the other side, where gov. regulations actually hurt, I can think of two examples I have direct experience with. My wife is involved in the welfare system. Many of the reforms that have targeted welfare cheats by adding more and more rules actually hurt, because the judgement of the worker is taken away. Honest people who deserve help sometimes don't "bend the truth" around the rules and are disqualified, but dishonest people, who the worker often correctly spots as such, squeak by and the worker can do nothing except drag their feet to slow benefits down. The other example is mandatory minimum sentences and "three strikes and your out" laws, which similiarly takes away discrection on the part of prosecutors and judges to reserve years of scarce prison space to those they KNOW will commit more crimes if free. Thanks to our stupid "drug war", you'll spend serious jail time for having an ounce of weed, but very little for attacking someone with a knife! The regs above need to remain flexible as to the "how".
Why not use the little extra speed to increase the base level of the chip? Becuause IT'S THE SAME CHIP! The only difference between 300, 333, 366 celeron's is the stamp on them. Intel's yeilds were very good on this chip, 'cause core design/manufacturing had been pretty well worked out with the P2. TheCeleron 300(333/366)A is the same core as a P2. It was STRICTLY a marketing move. This has been pretty well documented.
For a production machine/server? Yeah, I'd use the real thing. For a home machine? OC a celery and sink the extra money into a great video card or bigger monitor. My machine has an extra cooler, and it's ROCK solid as win 98 machine can be. Has been running at 450 for almost a year.
Great! Intel has always said they multiplier (bus speed x multplier - CPU speed) locked the Celeron's to prevent these dealer fraud problems. They didn't care about overclockers.
Anything that makes it easy to detect the fraud will mean that it's harder for Intel to have a leg to stand on for preventing overclocking of there chips. After all it's easy to detect fraud, right?
Call me silly, but I took great pleasure in spending on other things the $400 I saved not buying a 450mhz PII and overclocking a Celeron 300 instead:)
I mean, I despise those slugs that actually seek out entertainment when they could actually be contriubting to the GDP. Such innefficiency is intolerable and drags down everyone.
As a parent of a 5-year-old with a VERY active imagination, I've begun to worry about this issue a little.
My son has a very difficult time understanding the difference between what he imagines and what is "real". As such, I carefully monitor the content of what he sees/watches/plays. As he begins to grasp this distinction better, I probably will have less concerns.
All this is an aside to another point: It seems like this "imagination" ability is really stressed by teachers & pre-schools. Really. It's what Barney's all about for instance (I mean, the show is essentially about making stuff up, so's Rugrats also).... I wonder if this deliberate cultivation of "suspension" is causing more problems than the violent content itself.
Maybe this answers why most people play ultra-violent videogames and watch lots of violent TJ & movies and are never violent, and yet we have a few, spectacular incidents of very violent behavior in youngsters who seems oblivious to the "reality" of the event. Maybe were getting a higher percentage of these than before because of other factors, like the rise of "disconnection"? I don't know, just thinking out loud... what do you think?
How would this do anything? Most people are not public employees. Hell, we had a discussion a few weeks ago about how, if you're gonna submit anything to the court electronically, it had better be a WordPerfect document!
I would have to agree that is possible to write BAD vb code. I just meant that it is usually possible to figure out what's going on. For the guy who said globals are almost always neccesary (sp?) in Vb, the current project doesn't have ANY. The problem isn't the encapsulation into classes. The problem is mostly naming conventions.
Anyway, I would also agree with the comment above that it lets people without the skill start a project that quickly becomes unmaintainable. I think many of these stem from lack of DATABASE knowledge than programming. The current project could be so much improved if it had a decent backend. Instead it's in 8 Access databases with NO relationships. And some Btrieve, which isn't too bad. But of course, you can't change the database without starting all over. Most folks realize FAR too late that you can change the logic & the presentation forever, but changing the data structure means starting over!
I Quote from the essay.... Maintenance programmers, if somebody ever consulted them, would demand ways to hide the housekeeping details so they could see the forest for the trees. They would demand all sorts of shortcuts so they would not have to type so much and so they could see more of the program at once on the screen. They would complain loudly about the myriad petty time-wasting tasks the compilers demand of them.
This is precisely the reason VB is so popular for business apps. You have to really work hard to confuse matters sufficiently in a VB program so that a decent maintenance programmer can't figure it out.... although I could write my own list applicicable to Vb for my current project... My favorite: Make sure you have the same variable name to reference a database in several different classes in several different programs, but have it point to three different databases depending on which variable is in scope currently:)
Can you say really amazing pornography? I thought so.... It seems like any technology improvement is sucked up there anyway. That's OK. Let the perverts drive the cost/unit down.
On a personal note, I was pretty pumped to get 115K a second on a download on my cable adapter (I refuse to say cable MODEM!) the other day:)
Keep one file on a PGP disk (or just PGP encrypt an individual ascii file) never change this password. Enter all passwords & accounts into this file....
for the web stuff, unless it's an e-commerce site I enter my card PERMANENTLY into (so I can one-click shop on Amazon, for instance), I just use one login and password. I find that cypherpunks/cypherpunks works for almost everything.
ummm... I tried Linux. Downloaded the redhat 6 cd via modem. Couldn't get X to work. Downloaded patched for my ATI card for XFree86. Couldn't get it to work. Installed readhat 6.1. Couldn't get it to work. Yes, I read the manuals. Yes, I read the howto's (I still have 'em). Posted to a linux newsgroup. Got flamed.
I'm sorry. I'd really like to check out linux. But I've installed DOZENS of operating systems, and I can't get it to work and I have mainstream video hardware (NEC monitor, but too old for redhat's list I guess, ATI all-in-wonder pro). What's the deal? Should I try a different distro?
... not trying to troll or defend M$, just wanting to share in this historic moment.
It is with mixed feelings I read this decision. I've been a microsoft hater with the best of 'em. A dedicated Mac fan of many years, cursing M$ at every chance. Yet, when I actually started programming again, picking up visual basic for a project at work and actually using Windows for the first time since the 3.1 days, I grudingly grew to like it.
So I don't hate Microsoft anymore. They treat me well as a developer. Much better than Apple ever did..... and now I read slashdotters gloating and think "Will we really be better off?" Microsoft did bring together a fractured PC industry. Granted, they did it (often) by shoving standards down our throats. The w3? I'm sorry, but they didn't get the web where it is today. Microsoft and Netscape throwing out propietary extensions did. The w3 is like the UN. Nobody listens to them when its really important.
Anyway, I'm rambling... but I'm curious what will happen next. I don't think Linux will take over the desktop. Too little emphasis on ease of use, IMHO.....
The program basically connects to a Database over the network, and lets a user modify it. The mapping of inputs to tables is fairly one to one, so basically it's just a front end to the DB. Easy right? Hardly... i>
The funny thing is, I could whip this up with as a three-tier, pretty robust IIS, whatever databse you have (I mean, everything has an ODBC driver)and a VB-COM object in a few days.... oh, that's right, VB is a TOY language... GOOD LUCK ON THAT JAVA! Hope you get those JDBC drivers to work!
I realize this is probably a hopeless task here on slashdot, but I wish folks would lighten up on the VB-bashing.
Vb is like any other computer software/hardware tool. It's just a tool. There are good VB programmers, and there are bad ones.
VB is used in corporate settings a lot because it integrates well with other microsoft products they probably have (or non-microsoft products like crystal reports, visio, whatever). It is trivial in VB, for instance, to OLE embed existing excel sheets users already use and populate and strip data from it instead of rewriting the same interface. (can you type OLE1.CreateLink c:\Docs\Excel.xls, OLE1.Refresh?)
It can be written so that it is VERY quick to develop and VERY fast. If you class properly, type your variables & scope correctly, use a proper database backend (NOT access) and don't use bound controls, it can approach C++ in execution speed with FAR lower devopment time. Generally, on these types of corporate data matinenance applications, it is not application execution speed that is the limiting factor, but network bandwidth and database access. The speed you would gain from taking a well-written VB app of this type in C++ would be miniscule. Note the well-written part. You could redo a poorly written VB app in C and speed it up, could so could a proper re-write in VB! Granted, it is not for every project, but there is a reason it is used in lots of fortune 500 companies (Like GM). Because it is the proper tool for the job.
Because you can't disconnect the object from the recordset.... It's going to sit there, locking records and consuming resources. If it's a (god forbid) access database it's REALLY gonna suck up the resources. It makes people feel like programmers, but they're not. I say again: If you use bound controls, you might as well just write the front end in access in an MDE and a separate backend. It'll have the same "performance" characteristics (i.e, it'll suck, and it'll corrupt and really suck with more than 5 users).
Oh well...back to programming in VB...(I wasted a day trying to get my databound flexgrid to refresh it's contents . . .
Here's a tip: DON'T USE DATABOUND CONTROLS! Geez. People who call themselves "programmers" using databound controls.... write some code! Seriously, if you're gonna use data-bound controls, you might as well "write" the app in Access.
Hmmm... "makes your brain bigger and testicles smaller". I believe beer, at least in practice, has the opposite effect, and I drink lots of that, so I should balance out to a brain/testicle ratio of 1.0, indicative of a proper balance of the pursuits of the mind and those of the body.
Just as a quick check, if you have ever (seriously) threatened to "open up a can of whoop-ass on" someone, you probably have a b/t ratio of less than 0.5. Similarly, if you have ever written a 50-line post to alt.movies about the numberous time travel contradictions in "Back to the Future 2", you probably have a b/t ratio over 1.5....:)
Re:Why Mozilla 5.0 will die. (At least on the Mac)
on
Whither Netscape 5.0?
·
· Score: 2
What good does it do to work in the user experience if the back-end code is shifting out from underneath it?
Ah, a perfect example of the linux mind set. I wrote about this in a post here a while back. It's all about power v. ease-of-use. This statement betrays the underlying theme: "Power/function is everything. You do it first, then do UI."
Of the three OS paradigms that matter today: *nix, WinXX, & MacOS, we see a clear lineage. Unix: Power is everything, UI is secondary. Mac: UI is everything, power is secondary. And WinXX: Try to split the difference (often losing both, sometimes hitting a nice balance).
When I write an app, I usually spend MORE time interviewing users, having them look at possible UI's, etc., then coding the "power." In other words, I do it FIRST.
One thing some folks seem to be having difficulty understanding is that we (Americans) LIKE being different, even if it is somewhat illogical. America was pretty much founded by a bunch of outcasts who thought everyone else could just, basically, go ***&($# themselves.
I'm telling you: the U.S. will never go metric entirely. You have some real anti-change folks here. Logical, intelligent, rational, scientific arguments fade away in the face of these folks. You're talking about folks in my neck of the woods (Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas) where bringing up evolution, even in a purely innocent sense, is likely to get you an argument, and if you think only a few would start talking creationism, think again. You'd be on the minority side of that argument at your average dinner party.
It's like soccer.... folks in almost every other country love it and think it is the greatest sport in the world, so most Americans hate it. I just heard a caller on a sports call in show talk about soccer, only to be followed by six people who called in for the express purpose of saying he was an idiot and soccer sucked
Or... you could download the 120-day trial of SQL Server 7 from MS. It's WONDERFUL Data Transformation Services can be used to read and write to a wide variety of sources, including Oracle DB's, DB2, and practically anything with an ODBC driver. It's an amazing to me that Microsoft provides this tool that doesn't just import INTO SQL7, but out of it.
Slashdot Mirror
With all due respect to guidance cousnselors (my sister is one), it amazes me that most guidance counselors are teachers who wanted to do something besides teach. In other words, they are not trained counselors.
My wife is a social worker who would love to be a counselor, but you know what? She can't. The teachers union in our fair state is fighting tooth and nail to keep anyone without an education degree out of the schools. It's just ridiculous. I'm sorry, but my wife is FAR more qualified to do counseling for troubled kids than my sister. I think they need to separate out the eduational/career counseling from the "other" counseling.
A system executes computer processing tasks on a remote computer that communicates with a central computer. The remote computer receives a start message from the central computer. Based on the start message, the remote computer processes raw data to generate processed data, and stores the processed data. Finally, the remote computer sends a complete message to the central computer.
Ummmm... I think Microsoft might just initiate some action on this matter. That's DCOM. and probably CORBA as well, although I know nothing about it, an let's face it, whoever 'owns' CORBA isn't gonna get a nasty as M$ about it.
How is it not COM? A COM object in a 3-tier app exposes an interface, takes a request from the remote computer and returns data. Any M$ developer who attends there tech briefings knows Microsoft is COM-crazy these days. It's being billed as a cornerstone of every new development problem you need to solve. (OT: They are even taking about making the interface between objects XML.)
Anyway, I just think M$ is gonna take one look at that and say BULLSH*T!
I had tried Linix in the form of Redhat 5.2, only to find it didn't support my video card. Recently, I read 6.1 included support, so I tried it out. I have to say that the install was pretty damn easy. The only vaguely confusing thing was, since my USB mouse doesn't work, I plugged in an old mouse I had. When "choose your mouse" came up, I turned it over, read "Intellimouse 2.1A", chose M$ bus mouse 2.1A or higher from the menu, only to find later it didn't work. A reinstall with choosing "PS/2" mouse (DUH!) worked fine.
RH 6.1 detected my networked cable modem perfectly. I just chose "use DHCP" and "start automatically" and went to town. To try to get the "newbie" experience, I choose "graphical login." It was just like booting Win98!, you see a bunch of text crap go by, and up pops some windows (note the small "w").
I have to say, I am really impressed so far. Linux has come a LONG way on the ease of install since I've seen it last. (I drank beer once while I watched some guys install linux 2 years ago -- all night long and it never worked).
Anyway, I am a certified M$ developer (and regular slashdot reader/poster), who just wanted to say this is pretty neat and wanted to share it with my friends here at slashdot (that was, of course, the first place I went when Netscape came up). Now if they'd only port VB to Linux......:)
I agree that, to some extent government "mandates" can be straightjackets that stifle real progress. It's tough to design programs that are flexible enough to work well. I think government regulations do the most good when they have "targets" and don't specify the "how." I'm thinking of the Clean Air Act, arguably one of the most successful pieces of regulation in the U.S. It specifies goals of emmission/pollution levels, but companies can get there in a variety of ways. They can "buy" pollution credits off of other companies that are below the target, to cite just one instance.
As for the other side, where gov. regulations actually hurt, I can think of two examples I have direct experience with. My wife is involved in the welfare system. Many of the reforms that have targeted welfare cheats by adding more and more rules actually hurt, because the judgement of the worker is taken away. Honest people who deserve help sometimes don't "bend the truth" around the rules and are disqualified, but dishonest people, who the worker often correctly spots as such, squeak by and the worker can do nothing except drag their feet to slow benefits down. The other example is mandatory minimum sentences and "three strikes and your out" laws, which similiarly takes away discrection on the part of prosecutors and judges to reserve years of scarce prison space to those they KNOW will commit more crimes if free. Thanks to our stupid "drug war", you'll spend serious jail time for having an ounce of weed, but very little for attacking someone with a knife!
The regs above need to remain flexible as to the "how".
Why not use the little extra speed to increase the base level of the chip? Becuause IT'S THE SAME CHIP! The only difference between 300, 333, 366 celeron's is the stamp on them. Intel's yeilds were very good on this chip, 'cause core design/manufacturing had been pretty well worked out with the P2. TheCeleron 300(333/366)A is the same core as a P2. It was STRICTLY a marketing move. This has been pretty well documented.
For a production machine/server? Yeah, I'd use the real thing. For a home machine? OC a celery and sink the extra money into a great video card or bigger monitor. My machine has an extra cooler, and it's ROCK solid as win 98 machine can be. Has been running at 450 for almost a year.
Great! Intel has always said they multiplier (bus speed x multplier - CPU speed) locked the Celeron's to prevent these dealer fraud problems. They didn't care about overclockers.
:)
Anything that makes it easy to detect the fraud will mean that it's harder for Intel to have a leg to stand on for preventing overclocking of there chips. After all it's easy to detect fraud, right?
Call me silly, but I took great pleasure in spending on other things the $400 I saved not buying a 450mhz PII and overclocking a Celeron 300 instead
I mean, I despise those slugs that actually seek out entertainment when they could actually be contriubting to the GDP. Such innefficiency is intolerable and drags down everyone.
As a parent of a 5-year-old with a VERY active imagination, I've begun to worry about this issue a little.
My son has a very difficult time understanding the difference between what he imagines and what is "real". As such, I carefully monitor the content of what he sees/watches/plays. As he begins to grasp this distinction better, I probably will have less concerns.
All this is an aside to another point: It seems like this "imagination" ability is really stressed by teachers & pre-schools. Really. It's what Barney's all about for instance (I mean, the show is essentially about making stuff up, so's Rugrats also).... I wonder if this deliberate cultivation of "suspension" is causing more problems than the violent content itself.
Maybe this answers why most people play ultra-violent videogames and watch lots of violent TJ & movies and are never violent, and yet we have a few, spectacular incidents of very violent behavior in youngsters who seems oblivious to the "reality" of the event. Maybe were getting a higher percentage of these than before because of other factors, like the rise of "disconnection"? I don't know, just thinking out loud... what do you think?
How would this do anything? Most people are not public employees. Hell, we had a discussion a few weeks ago about how, if you're gonna submit anything to the court electronically, it had better be a WordPerfect document!
I would have to agree that is possible to write BAD vb code. I just meant that it is usually possible to figure out what's going on. For the guy who said globals are almost always neccesary (sp?) in Vb, the current project doesn't have ANY. The problem isn't the encapsulation into classes. The problem is mostly naming conventions.
Anyway, I would also agree with the comment above that it lets people without the skill start a project that quickly becomes unmaintainable. I think many of these stem from lack of DATABASE knowledge than programming. The current project could be so much improved if it had a decent backend. Instead it's in 8 Access databases with NO relationships. And some Btrieve, which isn't too bad.
But of course, you can't change the database without starting all over. Most folks realize FAR too late that you can change the logic & the presentation forever, but changing the data structure means starting over!
I Quote from the essay .... Maintenance programmers, if somebody ever consulted them, would demand ways to hide the housekeeping details so they could see the forest for the trees. They would demand all sorts of shortcuts so they would not have to type so much and so they could see more of the program at once on the screen. They would complain loudly about the myriad petty time-wasting tasks the compilers demand of them.
This is precisely the reason VB is so popular for business apps. You have to really work hard to confuse matters sufficiently in a VB program so that a decent maintenance programmer can't figure it out.... although I could write my own list applicicable to Vb for my current project... My favorite: Make sure you have the same variable name to reference a database in several different classes in several different programs, but have it point to three different databases depending on which variable is in scope currently :)
Where exactlty did they put the "f8" key on the damn thing, anyway?
Bandwidth boys and girls? I knew you could!
:)
Can you say really amazing pornography? I thought so.... It seems like any technology improvement is sucked up there anyway. That's OK. Let the perverts drive the cost/unit down.
On a personal note, I was pretty pumped to get 115K a second on a download on my cable adapter (I refuse to say cable MODEM!) the other day
Keep one file on a PGP disk (or just PGP encrypt an individual ascii file) never change this password. Enter all passwords & accounts into this file....
for the web stuff, unless it's an e-commerce site I enter my card PERMANENTLY into (so I can one-click shop on Amazon, for instance), I just use one login and password. I find that cypherpunks/cypherpunks works for almost everything.
ummm... I tried Linux. Downloaded the redhat 6 cd via modem. Couldn't get X to work. Downloaded patched for my ATI card for XFree86. Couldn't get it to work. Installed readhat 6.1. Couldn't get it to work. Yes, I read the manuals. Yes, I read the howto's (I still have 'em). Posted to a linux newsgroup. Got flamed.
I'm sorry. I'd really like to check out linux. But I've installed DOZENS of operating systems, and I can't get it to work and I have mainstream video hardware (NEC monitor, but too old for redhat's list I guess, ATI all-in-wonder pro). What's the deal? Should I try a different distro?
... not trying to troll or defend M$, just wanting to share in this historic moment.
It is with mixed feelings I read this decision. I've been a microsoft hater with the best of 'em. A dedicated Mac fan of many years, cursing M$ at every chance. Yet, when I actually started programming again, picking up visual basic for a project at work and actually using Windows for the first time since the 3.1 days, I grudingly grew to like it.
So I don't hate Microsoft anymore. They treat me well as a developer. Much better than Apple ever did..... and now I read slashdotters gloating and think "Will we really be better off?" Microsoft did bring together a fractured PC industry. Granted, they did it (often) by shoving standards down our throats. The w3? I'm sorry, but they didn't get the web where it is today. Microsoft and Netscape throwing out propietary extensions did. The w3 is like the UN. Nobody listens to them when its really important.
Anyway, I'm rambling... but I'm curious what will happen next. I don't think Linux will take over the desktop. Too little emphasis on ease of use, IMHO.....
Curious what everyone else thinks.
write a fickin' trigger! Geez.
The program basically connects to a Database over the network, and lets a user modify it. The mapping of inputs to tables is fairly one to one, so basically it's just a front end to the DB. Easy right? Hardly... i>
The funny thing is, I could whip this up with as a three-tier, pretty robust IIS, whatever databse you have (I mean, everything has an ODBC driver)and a VB-COM object in a few days.... oh, that's right, VB is a TOY language... GOOD LUCK ON THAT JAVA! Hope you get those JDBC drivers to work!
I realize this is probably a hopeless task here on slashdot, but I wish folks would lighten up on the VB-bashing.
Vb is like any other computer software/hardware tool. It's just a tool. There are good VB programmers, and there are bad ones.
VB is used in corporate settings a lot because it integrates well with other microsoft products they probably have (or non-microsoft products like crystal reports, visio, whatever). It is trivial in VB, for instance, to OLE embed existing excel sheets users already use and populate and strip data from it instead of rewriting the same interface. (can you type OLE1.CreateLink c:\Docs\Excel.xls, OLE1.Refresh?)
It can be written so that it is VERY quick to develop and VERY fast. If you class properly, type your variables & scope correctly, use a proper database backend (NOT access) and don't use bound controls, it can approach C++ in execution speed with FAR lower devopment time. Generally, on these types of corporate data matinenance applications, it is not application execution speed that is the limiting factor, but network bandwidth and database access. The speed you would gain from taking a well-written VB app of this type in C++ would be miniscule. Note the well-written part. You could redo a poorly written VB app in C and speed it up, could so could a proper re-write in VB!
Granted, it is not for every project, but there is a reason it is used in lots of fortune 500 companies (Like GM). Because it is the proper tool for the job.
--a PROUD vb programmer
Because you can't disconnect the object from the recordset.... It's going to sit there, locking records and consuming resources. If it's a (god forbid) access database it's REALLY gonna suck up the resources. It makes people feel like programmers, but they're not. I say again: If you use bound controls, you might as well just write the front end in access in an MDE and a separate backend. It'll have the same "performance" characteristics (i.e, it'll suck, and it'll corrupt and really suck with more than 5 users).
Oh well...back to programming in VB...(I wasted a day trying to get my databound flexgrid to refresh it's contents . . .
Here's a tip: DON'T USE DATABOUND CONTROLS! Geez. People who call themselves "programmers" using databound controls.... write some code! Seriously, if you're gonna use data-bound controls, you might as well "write" the app in Access.
Hmmm... "makes your brain bigger and testicles smaller".
:)
I believe beer, at least in practice, has the opposite effect, and I drink lots of that, so I should balance out to a brain/testicle ratio of 1.0, indicative of a proper balance of the pursuits of the mind and those of the body.
Just as a quick check, if you have ever (seriously) threatened to "open up a can of whoop-ass on" someone, you probably have a b/t ratio of less than 0.5. Similarly, if you have ever written a 50-line post to alt.movies about the numberous time travel contradictions in "Back to the Future 2", you probably have a b/t ratio over 1.5....
What good does it do to work in the user experience if the back-end code is shifting out from underneath it?
Ah, a perfect example of the linux mind set. I wrote about this in a post here a while back. It's all about power v. ease-of-use. This statement betrays the underlying theme: "Power/function is everything. You do it first, then do UI."
Of the three OS paradigms that matter today: *nix, WinXX, & MacOS, we see a clear lineage. Unix: Power is everything, UI is secondary. Mac: UI is everything, power is secondary. And WinXX: Try to split the difference (often losing both, sometimes hitting a nice balance).
When I write an app, I usually spend MORE time interviewing users, having them look at possible UI's, etc., then coding the "power." In other words, I do it FIRST.
Just my 2 cents......One thing some folks seem to be having difficulty understanding is that we (Americans) LIKE being different, even if it is somewhat illogical. America was pretty much founded by a bunch of outcasts who thought everyone else could just, basically, go ***&($# themselves.
I'm telling you: the U.S. will never go metric entirely. You have some real anti-change folks here. Logical, intelligent, rational, scientific arguments fade away in the face of these folks. You're talking about folks in my neck of the woods (Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas) where bringing up evolution, even in a purely innocent sense, is likely to get you an argument, and if you think only a few would start talking creationism, think again. You'd be on the minority side of that argument at your average dinner party.
It's like soccer.... folks in almost every other country love it and think it is the greatest sport in the world, so most Americans hate it. I just heard a caller on a sports call in show talk about soccer, only to be followed by six people who called in for the express purpose of saying he was an idiot and soccer sucked
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