Agreed. The Fathers Day ep actually made me cry. And I dont usually get very emotional about TV shows.
The Piper acting, for me, has been the biggest surprise. When they first announced that she was goign to be the Drs assistant I couldnt help but feel it was gonna suck. Quite the contrary. She is a very talented actor.
(I really wish I were joking about this. There really was a product that promised to do exactly what I'm describing here, although I can't remember the name.)
I beleive you. This may be a bit obscure, but does anybody recall the Basista technology touted(very breifly IIRC) by Corel for the WordPerfect suite. Basically the idea was that you could write a document in WordPerfet and then export it into a java type application for display on your web site... idea being that it would render the WordPerfect document exactly as it was seen in WP(with luck).
Agreed with the what the hell is picking on USENET when everything else4 is just as bad sentiment. Also from this quote
Usenet eventually gained a reputation as a refuge for pre-civilized thugs with a penchant for imbecile grammar and vicious talk. The antics of juveniles and troubled people started scaring off others -- democracy still needs laws, after all, so that its mechanisms are not hijacked by people in serious need of psychiatric help. I recall one incident, in which a bunch of high-spirited kids decided to invade another newsgroup as a prank. The prank effectively destroyed the target group.
Is it just me or does this guy kinda sound like he was once kill filed by an entire USENET group. I still use USENET. some of the comp.* and sci.* groups are great. I also go there for the entertainment value of reading the raving of net kooks. You get a fantastic quality of net kook on USENET because it takes effort to post mind numbing ramblings(as opposed to a blog or whatever).
By the way, if anyone here is in advertising or marketing, kill yourself. Thank you, thank you. Just a little thought. I'm just trying to plant seeds. Maybe one day they'll take root. I don't know. You try. You do what you can. Kill yourselves. Seriously though, if you are, do. No really, there's no rationalisation for what you do, and you are Satan's little helpers, OK? Kill yourselves, seriously. You're the ruiner of all things good. Seriously, no, this is not a joke. "There's gonna be a joke coming..." There's no fucking joke coming, you are Satan's spawn, filling the world with bile and garbage, you are fucked and you are fucking us, kill yourselves, it's the only way to save your fucking soul. Kill yourself, kill yourself, kill yourself now. Now, back to the show.
"You know what Bill's doing now, he's going for the righteous indignation dollar, that's a big dollar, a lot of people are feeling that indignation, we've done research, huge market. He's doing a good thing." Godammit, I'm not doing that, you scumbags, quit putting a godamn dollar sign on every fucking thing on this planet!
I am currently in Germany and there is a large advertising billboard with a hand flipping the bird on Kaiserstrausse in Frankfurt... up near the stration. Amuses me everyday on my way to work. Obviously Im easily amused.
I think you may be confused abotu the Jaffa Cake issue. There was a case to determine if a Jaffa Cake was a cake or a chocolate biscuit. And it was all about the VAT(Value Added Tax). Chocie biccies(Im an Australian that lives in the UK... so I call em biccies:) ) are subject to the VAT and cakes are not. There were simular arguments in both Australia and Canada(I recall hearign something about donuts in Canada... not Canadian tho) with the introduction of the GST(Goods and Services Tax). See here
For example the infamous UK Jaffa Cake case. Biscuits and cakes are considered a necessity by UK law and are zero rated. Chocolate-covered biscuits however are a luxury and subject to VAT at 17.5%. McVities and HM Customs & Excise2 argued over whether the Jaffa Cake was a cake (no VAT) or a chocolate biscuit (lots of VAT). The argument had to be taken to a tribunal (kind of like a court) to be resolved. In the end McVities baked a 12" Jaffa Cake which convinced the tribunal Chairman of the general cakeiness of the Jaffa Cake.
OK so thats the h2g2 site... but its still true:) Things get all the more interesting in terms of EU tax rules when you start doing whacky things like living in one country and working via a commute in another(me == works in Frankfurt and lives in London... germans have the most complex tax laws IMHO... but then what do you expect... theyre german after all:) ). Oh... and I hate HM Customs and Excise.
Odd. Im an Australian citizen that lived for a short time in California. I have an American Citibank account that I opened using my passport and nuttin more. Dont have a SSN or greencard(I was working remotely... wasnt breaking any immigrantion laws).
Indeed. Or any class in the JDK API as well... on multiple platforms... I only tested my java app on Solaris, Linux and Win32. Am I liable if it fails somehow on some wacky platform I might not even have access to? What if my app fails when another application is installed on the same machine and I never tested that condition(I cant pratically test interactions with all other software... nobody can). All this does is open one enormous can of legal worms. How would a judge or jury be able to decided on this... they usually barely understand what an operating system is... let alone a rich GUI API and system level APIs. How is it determined what actually failed? If the device driver Im using fails and Im reporting an error to the user, then it can look like *my* application is failing when this isnt the case. Users dont understand this.
As a resident Londoner ou are correct. Speakers Corner is located in Hyde Park in London and various lunatics congregate there on Sundays to generally spout dribble and have argument with random onlookers. Its not terribly serious, and can actually be quite fun if you enjoy arguing with trolls and idiots(and if your a slashdotter Im thinking you probably do:) )
Also, Apple did not steal the GUI from Xerox. Xerox created a GUI where you have a bunch of CLI windows, not much more. Apple ran with it.
This is exactly right. I grow extremely tired of the myth of Apple "stealing" the GUI from Xerox. It was a mutually benifical deal between the two companies. Ive had some experience working in Xerox R&D... in welwyn garden city in hertfordshie in the UK. Xerox were in the business of promoting their products... photo-freaking-copiers(now a lot more I admit). What were they gonna do once they came up with a PC type tech... develop a whole range of PCs and then roll out the GUI? Of course not. They were smart and basically "licenced" it to someone who *could* run with it. Sorry... just had an argument with someone in the office about this very topic... Im no Apple fanboy... but people... use common sense.
For whatever reason, they can't take some 2x4s and make something to solve a problem. It's downright pathetic that a budding mechanical engineer is expected to take a year or two of calc in highschool, but not expected to take a shop class, where he can learn to run a bead of weld, or turn the cranks on a mill, and otherwise actually apply all of that fun stuff he learned in geometry and trig... That's what it's all about, where the rubber meets the road.
There are some engineering programs that do require this. My under grad degree(In electronics/communications engineering no less) required me to take a semester of what Americans call shop class(Im Australian and got that degree at the University of Canberra). Did welding, carpentary and stuff. Was kinda cool.
When I did that degree, many years ago now, the Uni of Canberra was a very hands on university for engineering... I dont know if thats changed as I have since moved to Europe and have not been back there in many a year.
So it's a question of not only HOW did they manage to build the most precise structure in the history of the species with only copper tools, but why bother?
"fresh out of training" with no practical experience manipulating my innards is a GOOD thing?
One just itching to try new experimental techniques?
You hit the nail on the head. Young programmers who dont have that much real world programmer get all het up about the "next big thing" in design and development. Im not blamign them... they are at least enthusiastic. And to be honest with you I did exactly the same things when I was in my first job. Some of the first OO code I wrote is still lurking around on my personal CVS... some nice libraries that work fine and are well tested. But looking at the code itself is disturbing and embarrising:)
Im an Australian living in London and they use it quite a lot. The south east is full of tourists that shout a lot... can get on the Poms nerves at time, so seppo can be quite derogatory.
BTW if you tell a german your an Ozzie, hell likely think youre telling them you are from the east.
It's perfectly possible to write a memory leak in Java.
Exactly right. I would extend that to all sorts of other resource leakages as well such as JDBC connections etc. Im a C/C++/Java programmer and Im getting totally sick of yound wipper snappers telling me "You should just give up C++ it leaks and stuff... you cant have leaks in Java". To anyone that thinks that out there, shut the hell up. Resource managment is an important part of development and needs to *always* handled carefully. The ironic thing is if I question the aforementioned wipper snappers about the details of heap based garbage collectors they generally have absolutely no idea how they work. I find that telling.
Yes. I used to work on hard realtime applications and it is a very specific term that doesnt really have anything to do with speed, but with assurances that response will happen in a certain time period.
An example of a hard realtime system I heard of once that didnt require a lot of fast responses was on a oil rig. Im not 100% sure what this system did but it had to do it every hour to an oil pump. If it *didnt* do this thing every hour then "bad things happened". Typically these bad things involved pipes exploding and people catching fire.
OK fair enough. This is what happned to you. I think tho you should have prefaced it with a warning... but thats just my opinion.
On a related note... in university I knew a nursing student. She was full of interesting information such as yours. She once talk to me at length about colon surgery. To cut to the chase, if you ever need to have any form of colon surgery do *not* let the doctor explain what they are going to do. Simply tell them to knock you out before the operation and afterwards just say weather it worked or not. Thats what Im doing if fingers crossed I ever have to. Trust me on this one.
In that case relay congrats from North London:) Believe it or not, as I was having lunch today in a North London pub, a group of about 15 people gathered round a TV showing the coverage on Sky TV. A cheer went up when she safely touched down. I was a little amazed that such interest was to be found in such an unlikely place(was a fairly downgrade pub:) ).
Exactly spot on about javascript no longer being a so called bad thing. And Im willing to admit that I was, once, one of those so-called professional developers that frowned upon it. Since learning javascript and using it quite extensivly Ive come to quite like the language and have even pondered using it as a stand alone scripting language(have yet to find anything particularly appropriate). Its a nice little language.
I agree with you to a great extend. It is of course like most new things about 80 to 90 persent bullshit to about 10 to 20 percent real world. Ive be doing R&D on client side user interfaces for the last year. The whole AJAX thing is about a bit more than I think you say... The old ActiveX XMLHttpRequest does actually give a bit of power to the client developer without locking into things like XUL and JSR 168... which I suspect are dead in the water now. Mainly because of thing like google maps etc... which Ive shown to non techincal people... automatically impressed.
The one major thing is that IE has not changed in years. Were about to get IE 7... this is the thing to watch. If it breaks, say, googles stuff then whats gonna happen?
Me too. Whats cool is I even have something to send them already. A few weeks ago I was working with a code monkey who had a dislike of if then else statments. I was getting him to write some fairly simple database accessing server side code, and he decided it would be a better idea to use a switch statment on results from the database. Problem was that the results wear String objects(this was Java)... and switch, of course, doesnt switch on Strings. Bummer. How to solve. Well switching on the hashCode of the object obviously. I spent about two hours going over all the things wrong with that. Still didnt convince him... gave up.. went home. Had a stiff drink.
Yes. Yes. Yes. Well American politic aside I have to ask questions of how on earth this will be enforced. We already offshore labour to other countries willing to give breaks. How much easier is it to offshore servers serving up porn?
And stop kiddies downloading porn? How many kiddies do you think download prn from ligit porn sites using their dads credit cards. You guessed it... a big zip Id say. Much more likely its coming from P2P networks or irc or some such. I like pollies when they try to have ideas. They are so cute. I guess they sound like they are doing something to Mom and Pop in middle America or wherever.
BTW... Australia already tried to clamp down on porn. Guess what happened. Porn went offshore.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. The Fathers Day ep actually made me cry. And I dont usually get very emotional about TV shows.
The Piper acting, for me, has been the biggest surprise. When they first announced that she was goign to be the Drs assistant I couldnt help but feel it was gonna suck. Quite the contrary. She is a very talented actor.
(I really wish I were joking about this. There really was a product that promised to do exactly what I'm describing here, although I can't remember the name.)
I beleive you. This may be a bit obscure, but does anybody recall the Basista technology touted(very breifly IIRC) by Corel for the WordPerfect suite. Basically the idea was that you could write a document in WordPerfet and then export it into a java type application for display on your web site... idea being that it would render the WordPerfect document exactly as it was seen in WP(with luck).
Not only did we throw her out. We put her in prison for a bit also.
Agreed with the what the hell is picking on USENET when everything else4 is just as bad sentiment. Also from this quote
Usenet eventually gained a reputation as a refuge for pre-civilized thugs with a penchant for imbecile grammar and vicious talk. The antics of juveniles and troubled people started scaring off others -- democracy still needs laws, after all, so that its mechanisms are not hijacked by people in serious need of psychiatric help. I recall one incident, in which a bunch of high-spirited kids decided to invade another newsgroup as a prank. The prank effectively destroyed the target group.
Is it just me or does this guy kinda sound like he was once kill filed by an entire USENET group. I still use USENET. some of the comp.* and sci.* groups are great. I also go there for the entertainment value of reading the raving of net kooks. You get a fantastic quality of net kook on USENET because it takes effort to post mind numbing ramblings(as opposed to a blog or whatever).
I think both gentlmen would agree with you. You say it like its a bad thing.
DAMN MARKETERS!
By the way, if anyone here is in advertising or marketing, kill yourself. Thank you, thank you. Just a little thought. I'm just trying to plant seeds. Maybe one day they'll take root. I don't know. You try. You do what you can. Kill yourselves. Seriously though, if you are, do. No really, there's no rationalisation for what you do, and you are Satan's little helpers, OK? Kill yourselves, seriously. You're the ruiner of all things good. Seriously, no, this is not a joke. "There's gonna be a joke coming..." There's no fucking joke coming, you are Satan's spawn, filling the world with bile and garbage, you are fucked and you are fucking us, kill yourselves, it's the only way to save your fucking soul. Kill yourself, kill yourself, kill yourself now. Now, back to the show.
"You know what Bill's doing now, he's going for the righteous indignation dollar, that's a big dollar, a lot of people are feeling that indignation, we've done research, huge market. He's doing a good thing." Godammit, I'm not doing that, you scumbags, quit putting a godamn dollar sign on every fucking thing on this planet!
RIP Bill Hicks.
I am currently in Germany and there is a large advertising billboard with a hand flipping the bird on Kaiserstrausse in Frankfurt... up near the stration. Amuses me everyday on my way to work. Obviously Im easily amused.
I think you may be confused abotu the Jaffa Cake issue. There was a case to determine if a Jaffa Cake was a cake or a chocolate biscuit. And it was all about the VAT(Value Added Tax). Chocie biccies(Im an Australian that lives in the UK... so I call em biccies :) ) are subject to the VAT and cakes are not. There were simular arguments in both Australia and Canada(I recall hearign something about donuts in Canada... not Canadian tho) with the introduction of the GST(Goods and Services Tax). See here
:) Things get all the more interesting in terms of EU tax rules when you start doing whacky things like living in one country and working via a commute in another(me == works in Frankfurt and lives in London... germans have the most complex tax laws IMHO... but then what do you expect... theyre german after all :) ). Oh... and I hate HM Customs and Excise.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A4803040
From there
For example the infamous UK Jaffa Cake case. Biscuits and cakes are considered a necessity by UK law and are zero rated. Chocolate-covered biscuits however are a luxury and subject to VAT at 17.5%. McVities and HM Customs & Excise2 argued over whether the Jaffa Cake was a cake (no VAT) or a chocolate biscuit (lots of VAT). The argument had to be taken to a tribunal (kind of like a court) to be resolved. In the end McVities baked a 12" Jaffa Cake which convinced the tribunal Chairman of the general cakeiness of the Jaffa Cake.
OK so thats the h2g2 site... but its still true
Odd. Im an Australian citizen that lived for a short time in California. I have an American Citibank account that I opened using my passport and nuttin more. Dont have a SSN or greencard(I was working remotely... wasnt breaking any immigrantion laws).
Indeed. Or any class in the JDK API as well... on multiple platforms... I only tested my java app on Solaris, Linux and Win32. Am I liable if it fails somehow on some wacky platform I might not even have access to? What if my app fails when another application is installed on the same machine and I never tested that condition(I cant pratically test interactions with all other software... nobody can). All this does is open one enormous can of legal worms. How would a judge or jury be able to decided on this... they usually barely understand what an operating system is... let alone a rich GUI API and system level APIs. How is it determined what actually failed? If the device driver Im using fails and Im reporting an error to the user, then it can look like *my* application is failing when this isnt the case. Users dont understand this.
As a resident Londoner ou are correct. Speakers Corner is located in Hyde Park in London and various lunatics congregate there on Sundays to generally spout dribble and have argument with random onlookers. Its not terribly serious, and can actually be quite fun if you enjoy arguing with trolls and idiots(and if your a slashdotter Im thinking you probably do :) )
Also, Apple did not steal the GUI from Xerox. Xerox created a GUI where you have a bunch of CLI windows, not much more. Apple ran with it.
This is exactly right. I grow extremely tired of the myth of Apple "stealing" the GUI from Xerox. It was a mutually benifical deal between the two companies. Ive had some experience working in Xerox R&D... in welwyn garden city in hertfordshie in the UK. Xerox were in the business of promoting their products... photo-freaking-copiers(now a lot more I admit). What were they gonna do once they came up with a PC type tech... develop a whole range of PCs and then roll out the GUI? Of course not. They were smart and basically "licenced" it to someone who *could* run with it. Sorry... just had an argument with someone in the office about this very topic... Im no Apple fanboy... but people... use common sense.
For whatever reason, they can't take some 2x4s and make something to solve a problem. It's downright pathetic that a budding mechanical engineer is expected to take a year or two of calc in highschool, but not expected to take a shop class, where he can learn to run a bead of weld, or turn the cranks on a mill, and otherwise actually apply all of that fun stuff he learned in geometry and trig... That's what it's all about, where the rubber meets the road.
There are some engineering programs that do require this. My under grad degree(In electronics/communications engineering no less) required me to take a semester of what Americans call shop class(Im Australian and got that degree at the University of Canberra). Did welding, carpentary and stuff. Was kinda cool.
When I did that degree, many years ago now, the Uni of Canberra was a very hands on university for engineering... I dont know if thats changed as I have since moved to Europe and have not been back there in many a year.
So it's a question of not only HOW did they manage to build the most precise structure in the history of the species with only copper tools, but why bother?
Cause they didnt have TV?
"fresh out of training" with no practical experience manipulating my innards is a GOOD thing?
:)
One just itching to try new experimental techniques?
You hit the nail on the head. Young programmers who dont have that much real world programmer get all het up about the "next big thing" in design and development. Im not blamign them... they are at least enthusiastic. And to be honest with you I did exactly the same things when I was in my first job. Some of the first OO code I wrote is still lurking around on my personal CVS... some nice libraries that work fine and are well tested. But looking at the code itself is disturbing and embarrising
Im an Australian living in London and they use it quite a lot. The south east is full of tourists that shout a lot... can get on the Poms nerves at time, so seppo can be quite derogatory.
/Works in Frankfurt... Germans get on my nerves.
BTW if you tell a german your an Ozzie, hell likely think youre telling them you are from the east.
It's perfectly possible to write a memory leak in Java.
Exactly right. I would extend that to all sorts of other resource leakages as well such as JDBC connections etc. Im a C/C++/Java programmer and Im getting totally sick of yound wipper snappers telling me "You should just give up C++ it leaks and stuff... you cant have leaks in Java". To anyone that thinks that out there, shut the hell up. Resource managment is an important part of development and needs to *always* handled carefully. The ironic thing is if I question the aforementioned wipper snappers about the details of heap based garbage collectors they generally have absolutely no idea how they work. I find that telling.
that "real time = real fast."
Yes. I used to work on hard realtime applications and it is a very specific term that doesnt really have anything to do with speed, but with assurances that response will happen in a certain time period.
An example of a hard realtime system I heard of once that didnt require a lot of fast responses was on a oil rig. Im not 100% sure what this system did but it had to do it every hour to an oil pump. If it *didnt* do this thing every hour then "bad things happened". Typically these bad things involved pipes exploding and people catching fire.
The site I have the pictures on is down...
Also. Am I the only one to wonder why someone would have a site detailing such a thing?
OK fair enough. This is what happned to you. I think tho you should have prefaced it with a warning... but thats just my opinion.
On a related note... in university I knew a nursing student. She was full of interesting information such as yours. She once talk to me at length about colon surgery. To cut to the chase, if you ever need to have any form of colon surgery do *not* let the doctor explain what they are going to do. Simply tell them to knock you out before the operation and afterwards just say weather it worked or not. Thats what Im doing if fingers crossed I ever have to. Trust me on this one.
In that case relay congrats from North London :) Believe it or not, as I was having lunch today in a North London pub, a group of about 15 people gathered round a TV showing the coverage on Sky TV. A cheer went up when she safely touched down. I was a little amazed that such interest was to be found in such an unlikely place(was a fairly downgrade pub :) ).
Exactly spot on about javascript no longer being a so called bad thing. And Im willing to admit that I was, once, one of those so-called professional developers that frowned upon it. Since learning javascript and using it quite extensivly Ive come to quite like the language and have even pondered using it as a stand alone scripting language(have yet to find anything particularly appropriate). Its a nice little language.
I agree with you to a great extend. It is of course like most new things about 80 to 90 persent bullshit to about 10 to 20 percent real world. Ive be doing R&D on client side user interfaces for the last year. The whole AJAX thing is about a bit more than I think you say... The old ActiveX XMLHttpRequest does actually give a bit of power to the client developer without locking into things like XUL and JSR 168... which I suspect are dead in the water now. Mainly because of thing like google maps etc... which Ive shown to non techincal people... automatically impressed.
The one major thing is that IE has not changed in years. Were about to get IE 7... this is the thing to watch. If it breaks, say, googles stuff then whats gonna happen?
Me too. Whats cool is I even have something to send them already. A few weeks ago I was working with a code monkey who had a dislike of if then else statments. I was getting him to write some fairly simple database accessing server side code, and he decided it would be a better idea to use a switch statment on results from the database. Problem was that the results wear String objects(this was Java)... and switch, of course, doesnt switch on Strings. Bummer. How to solve. Well switching on the hashCode of the object obviously. I spent about two hours going over all the things wrong with that. Still didnt convince him... gave up.. went home. Had a stiff drink.
Yes. Yes. Yes. Well American politic aside I have to ask questions of how on earth this will be enforced. We already offshore labour to other countries willing to give breaks. How much easier is it to offshore servers serving up porn?
And stop kiddies downloading porn? How many kiddies do you think download prn from ligit porn sites using their dads credit cards. You guessed it... a big zip Id say. Much more likely its coming from P2P networks or irc or some such. I like pollies when they try to have ideas. They are so cute. I guess they sound like they are doing something to Mom and Pop in middle America or wherever.
BTW... Australia already tried to clamp down on porn. Guess what happened. Porn went offshore.