I have to admit I do like Geany, but have you tried SciTE which shares the same engine as Notepad++? The only thing I can see straight away that it misses is macros.
The supposed myth comes directly from a quote by Henry Ford. In fact it appears there was a time where you could only buy a Model T in black, from the point the assembly line was developed, so it's not really a myth.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Ford: "By 1918, half of all cars in America were Model T's. However, it was a monolithic block; as Ford wrote in his autobiography, "Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black". Until the development of the assembly line, which mandated black because of its quicker drying time, Model T's were available in other colors including red."
This is actually an excellent idea, though I'm not sure how practical. The EU could have an independent office that runs a repo. Anybody can apply to have their software in the repo, though discretion can be used to pick the popular ones much like any distro does. When the user double-clicks on any file-type for the first time it asks which software you wish to use. So when the user first tries to launch a url it pops up and asks if the user would prefer "IE, Firefox, Opera, etc". When they click on a.doc it asks if the user would prefer "Abiword, OpenOffice, etc". Then this is downloaded and installed.
Then three things need to happen: 1) all government departments need to use this version of the OS. 2) this version needs to be made available at the same price as the standard version 3) only this version can be pre-installed on a machine
As opposed to offloading the costs onto the ISPs, I'd like to see that same department offer to host mirrors for other repos such as Gentoo and Ubuntu. These help boost productivity for workers all over Europe, and is where I'd like to see some of my hard earned taxes going to!
Meaning removing IE would require a huge reworking to windows.
Wasn't that disproved in the last anti-trust trial that Microsoft lost?
I believe Safari comes standard on a Mac...will the EU require Mac to carry IE so IE can have a chance to being competative on the Mac?
If Apple is convicted on the same charges as Microsoft then yes, if you set a precedent you have to follow it.
Either we are for less regulation and let the market decide, or we are for gov't intervention.
We let the market decide within the context if a given set of laws, and when those laws a broken the government intervenes. Anyway with the lack of regulation causing the current financial meltdown I'm guessing the "less regulation in the market" camp are going to keep quiet for a short period.
It's not really a PITA if you usually use one machine, in which case Firefox will remember the password for you after it's entered the first time. You only have to do it each time you change machine or reformat, and the balance of effort vs security seems well worth it. I bet the first thing the person that filched the monster.com username/passwords did was to use the same username (and variations on the real name) plus password to log into Amazon, Ebay, online gambling sites, and anywhere they can spend money. You'd be amazed at the number of people that use the same username and password across sites. Very profitable.
Your idea is less secure (security through obscurity) and I can't see it's any easier than using the nice wide range of point and click password safe apps out there. The password file is strongly encrypted so you can upload it somewhere as a backup. Not to say it's a bad idea though if it works for you, it is more than enough to put off any casual hacker.
I've been in the same position. I'd pretty much saved the company I was in and gotten it onto an even keel. The owner after a while got greedy and decided to hire somebody to replace me for less than 1/3 of my salary. Of course the replacement was sworn to secret as to his salary as he was told it was more than mine, but of course techies talk. I'd worked ridiculous hours and so leaving the company was going to be a relief for health reasons but of course pride was a little dented. On the other hand I reasoned as follows:
If someone is hired as a backup, it means you are going to be replaced *soon*. If there was enough work for two people he would have his own job to do. The changeover is going to be relatively quick as it is a cost saving exercise and he wants to minimise the time he is paying two salaries. The time you have to leave has already been fixed no matter what you do. If you DON'T educate the backup it won't make any difference. If it takes the new employee an extra month to learn how the system works then the owner still saves money over having to hire the extra more experienced person longer.
At the end of the day you left with pride and integrity. Any alternative action wouldn't have made any difference to the date of termination of your contract, unless you (a) begged for the job offering to increase your hours and (b) offered to cut your salary down to that of your replacement.
First of all it would probably be the co-worker repeating the conversation that has embellished (or maybe more kindly paraphrased) the conversation, but it sounds quite a reasonable thing to say if Doug is a straight-talking guy but a bully. To Kelly it must sound quite a good proposition. The promise to be ruthless is telling her what she wants to hear as she is going to need results to avoid further cuts hence viability of her whole department. Promising to make her look good is a bribe to get the job, knowing that if cuts are being made to management and she has other managers her own level which may put her OWN job at risk, then somebody with less ethics and willing to fake a few reports to make her look good will be an asset to her.
Anyway I've heard similar myself in office politics, and even seen a physical fist fight in the middle of an expensive PR event as a result, so I've no problem believing it.
Social 0 + technical 1 = always employed but on the bottom rung of the ladder Social 1 + technical 0 = better paid but expendable Social 1 + technical 1 = very well paid, job offers for 9/10 applications instead of 1/10, ending up as a contractor, and nice holidays all over the world whenever you want.
Indeed. People forget that you can allow or disallow others to use your code as you wish. I can put some code under the GPL, but if somebody was polite and asked if they could have a commercial license for their product in exchange for a couple of hundred bucks via PayPal I don't think I'd object.
Here in the UK we sell our electricity back the the grid. As things are privatised you don't have to sell back to the national provider, and we shopped around and got a pretty good rate on ours (more than we pay for it).
What a strange attitude. First of all why should he compromise his lifestyle just because he wants to reduce his carbon footprint and in the long run make money? He probably enjoys his nice plasma screens and needs the servers for work.
The biggest step to solar is sticking one on your roof and then tying it into your household supply. Then you just enjoy the reduced bills and the knowledge you are (a) going to make money out of it in the long run, (b) helping the environment, and (c) reducing political instability by reducing your country's dependence on foreign oil.
Reducing consumption helps save money, solar or not, and is good common sense. Eg choosing appliances that have low stand-by consumption. However it has no impact on this guy's excellent solar project.
Here in Woking there are businesses with solar roofs. So has the train station. Plus I know one of the retirement homes has also. We have a large solar array in our garden which provides most of our energy needs. Over here people get a 40 year mortgage on a house, so there is no reason the ROI needs to be any less than 15 years.
I've edited Python in vi, Notepad, SciTE, Geany, and other editors without any problem. Never used emacs though. If whitespace is causing bugs in your team's code you need to (a) introduce process or (b) lose some dead weight from your team. For (a) you can standardise on editor and whether to use tabs or spaces, or you can get the coders to end a whitespace block with a comment, eg # endif. I've only been using Python a couple of years but my experience so far suggests the problem is with you and not the language.
Isn't the old joke about C that it's like having a powerful gun pointed at your foot and there's no safety catch?
You must be a bit retarded to constantly have bugs due to Python indentation. But amateurs can be railroaded into reasonably good coding by using process. Simply make company policy to add a closure comment on the last line of an indented block.
My Indian friend was telling me he learned English when he grew up because his parents were from different regions and were forced to use English to communicate with each other. Anyway Russian would be better, much more money in writing botnets.
I do enjoy the way Python's indenting makes other people's code so readable. I used to waste so much time reformatting other people's C source code into some readable indentation format. Anyway after cutting and pasting Python code it seems to work with any format of indenting, tabs/spaces, as long as you are consistent. In fact I've just tried it with 2 spaces and with 6 spaces and it worked fine.
The problem with learning Perl is that you may walk into a future workplace and management will ask everybody if someone knows Perl. Being the honest person you are you'll instinctively raise your hand, not noticing everyone else is resolutely sitting on theirs. I've seen enough Perl code in the real world to convince me not to even look at the index page of a Perl book for that fear alone.
C does work on the server side of web applications, in fact many of the first server side apps were written in C running via CGI. No reason it won't work on shared hosting either, last time I looked my shared hosting provider had a CGI directory. You have have to compile on another machine and copy across. No problems with using C in Python or PHP (I've done the latter and it's very easy).
Me too. I started with machine code, moved to assembler, then BASIC, C, Java, PHP, Python, etc. Of course I had to learn other languages at University, including ADA, Pascal, and Haskell.
If you want to learn machine code or assembler I recommend picking up a cheap 8-bit computer from the 80's rather than trying under Linux. They are choc full of tools, including stepping debuggers, and the OS is simple and in ROM so you can't crash the machine and it's easy to track what is happening. I can recommend the BBC Micro, which I learned on.
If programming for pleasure then I would personally recommend C and Python. As posters have mentioned above, the former is very easy to learn and will force you to learn the principles of any OS (structures, memory allocation, etc). Python is a very productive OO language and simply nice to program in.
Perl is too messy and Ruby too obscure. Functional languages are rarely used outside of academia so don't bother with Lisp (I know the poster was joking (well I think he was (though you can have fun writing some Eliza type AI apps (but then you can in other languages without having to learn the functional paradigm)))).
How many developers here have had to hunt around for a list of countries to populate a select box? Or chained select boxes for country -> county/state -> town? How nice would it be to have a central repository where you can download all (in any mixed selection of languages) in cvs/xml/etc?
It's good thing when you get used to it as it makes source code much clearer. If you find that the forced indentation is bulking up your code too much then you are probably missing a trick... in Python there is always a short-cut and you just have to think more Python-like. For example in C/PHP I would type: x=1; y=2; z=3; When you first look at Python you are tempted to write: x=1 y=2 z=3 Quickly you find you can: x,y,z = 1,2,3
I was thinking the same thing but from a moral viewpoint rather than a legal one. If you sign a non-compete clause you should be respecting it rather than trying to find a loophole in it. You've been paid to do a job, and whilst still in that job and are still accepting your company's paycheck you have developed in your minds what you think is a version 2.0 of their product.
To get to this point you have learned by making mistakes at your company's expense, and also whilst being privy to customer feedback internal to your company. This is exactly why they had you sign the non-compete clause in the first place.
If you cannot sell your version 2.0 to management, or simply no longer wish to work with them, then why not outsource yourself? Spin off yourselves as a separate company with an exclusive contract with your current company for that product you intend to develop. Benefits are: * you are independent and can run things the way you want to * you have a definite client at the end of your development meaning: a) continued financial security in a volatile world b) it will be easy to raise finance on the back of this for offices, equipment, etc c) somebody your new software house can put on their portfolio whilst prospecting for new work as the current one draws to a close * you can generate extra revenue by developing modules providing features outside the contracted specification * you will have won a client rather than made an enemy, and maintained your professional integrity.
Slashdot Mirror
I have to admit I do like Geany, but have you tried SciTE which shares the same engine as Notepad++? The only thing I can see straight away that it misses is macros.
Phillip.
The main reason I usually have for rebooting is moving house. The car journey lasts longer than the UPS.
Phillip.
The supposed myth comes directly from a quote by Henry Ford. In fact it appears there was a time where you could only buy a Model T in black, from the point the assembly line was developed, so it's not really a myth.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Ford:
"By 1918, half of all cars in America were Model T's. However, it was a monolithic block; as Ford wrote in his autobiography, "Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black". Until the development of the assembly line, which mandated black because of its quicker drying time, Model T's were available in other colors including red."
Phillip.
This is actually an excellent idea, though I'm not sure how practical. The EU could have an independent office that runs a repo. Anybody can apply to have their software in the repo, though discretion can be used to pick the popular ones much like any distro does. When the user double-clicks on any file-type for the first time it asks which software you wish to use. So when the user first tries to launch a url it pops up and asks if the user would prefer "IE, Firefox, Opera, etc". When they click on a .doc it asks if the user would prefer "Abiword, OpenOffice, etc". Then this is downloaded and installed.
Then three things need to happen:
1) all government departments need to use this version of the OS.
2) this version needs to be made available at the same price as the standard version
3) only this version can be pre-installed on a machine
As opposed to offloading the costs onto the ISPs, I'd like to see that same department offer to host mirrors for other repos such as Gentoo and Ubuntu. These help boost productivity for workers all over Europe, and is where I'd like to see some of my hard earned taxes going to!
Phillip.
Meaning removing IE would require a huge reworking to windows.
Wasn't that disproved in the last anti-trust trial that Microsoft lost?
I believe Safari comes standard on a Mac...will the EU require Mac to carry IE so IE can have a chance to being competative on the Mac?
If Apple is convicted on the same charges as Microsoft then yes, if you set a precedent you have to follow it.
Either we are for less regulation and let the market decide, or we are for gov't intervention.
We let the market decide within the context if a given set of laws, and when those laws a broken the government intervenes. Anyway with the lack of regulation causing the current financial meltdown I'm guessing the "less regulation in the market" camp are going to keep quiet for a short period.
Phillip.
I think if you post something like this to Slashdot and nobody contests it, that's about as official as you can get :-)
Phillip.
Why doesn't -242C exist? -273C exists.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_zero
Phillip.
It's not really a PITA if you usually use one machine, in which case Firefox will remember the password for you after it's entered the first time. You only have to do it each time you change machine or reformat, and the balance of effort vs security seems well worth it. I bet the first thing the person that filched the monster.com username/passwords did was to use the same username (and variations on the real name) plus password to log into Amazon, Ebay, online gambling sites, and anywhere they can spend money. You'd be amazed at the number of people that use the same username and password across sites. Very profitable.
Your idea is less secure (security through obscurity) and I can't see it's any easier than using the nice wide range of point and click password safe apps out there. The password file is strongly encrypted so you can upload it somewhere as a backup. Not to say it's a bad idea though if it works for you, it is more than enough to put off any casual hacker.
Phillip.
I've been in the same position. I'd pretty much saved the company I was in and gotten it onto an even keel. The owner after a while got greedy and decided to hire somebody to replace me for less than 1/3 of my salary. Of course the replacement was sworn to secret as to his salary as he was told it was more than mine, but of course techies talk. I'd worked ridiculous hours and so leaving the company was going to be a relief for health reasons but of course pride was a little dented. On the other hand I reasoned as follows:
If someone is hired as a backup, it means you are going to be replaced *soon*. If there was enough work for two people he would have his own job to do. The changeover is going to be relatively quick as it is a cost saving exercise and he wants to minimise the time he is paying two salaries. The time you have to leave has already been fixed no matter what you do. If you DON'T educate the backup it won't make any difference. If it takes the new employee an extra month to learn how the system works then the owner still saves money over having to hire the extra more experienced person longer.
At the end of the day you left with pride and integrity. Any alternative action wouldn't have made any difference to the date of termination of your contract, unless you (a) begged for the job offering to increase your hours and (b) offered to cut your salary down to that of your replacement.
Phillip.
First of all it would probably be the co-worker repeating the conversation that has embellished (or maybe more kindly paraphrased) the conversation, but it sounds quite a reasonable thing to say if Doug is a straight-talking guy but a bully. To Kelly it must sound quite a good proposition. The promise to be ruthless is telling her what she wants to hear as she is going to need results to avoid further cuts hence viability of her whole department. Promising to make her look good is a bribe to get the job, knowing that if cuts are being made to management and she has other managers her own level which may put her OWN job at risk, then somebody with less ethics and willing to fake a few reports to make her look good will be an asset to her.
Anyway I've heard similar myself in office politics, and even seen a physical fist fight in the middle of an expensive PR event as a result, so I've no problem believing it.
Phillip.
Social 0 + technical 1 = always employed but on the bottom rung of the ladder
Social 1 + technical 0 = better paid but expendable
Social 1 + technical 1 = very well paid, job offers for 9/10 applications instead of 1/10, ending up as a contractor, and nice holidays all over the world whenever you want.
Phillip.
Indeed. People forget that you can allow or disallow others to use your code as you wish. I can put some code under the GPL, but if somebody was polite and asked if they could have a commercial license for their product in exchange for a couple of hundred bucks via PayPal I don't think I'd object.
Phillip.
Here in the UK we sell our electricity back the the grid. As things are privatised you don't have to sell back to the national provider, and we shopped around and got a pretty good rate on ours (more than we pay for it).
Phillip.
What a strange attitude. First of all why should he compromise his lifestyle just because he wants to reduce his carbon footprint and in the long run make money? He probably enjoys his nice plasma screens and needs the servers for work.
The biggest step to solar is sticking one on your roof and then tying it into your household supply. Then you just enjoy the reduced bills and the knowledge you are (a) going to make money out of it in the long run, (b) helping the environment, and (c) reducing political instability by reducing your country's dependence on foreign oil.
Reducing consumption helps save money, solar or not, and is good common sense. Eg choosing appliances that have low stand-by consumption. However it has no impact on this guy's excellent solar project.
Phillip.
Here in Woking there are businesses with solar roofs. So has the train station. Plus I know one of the retirement homes has also. We have a large solar array in our garden which provides most of our energy needs. Over here people get a 40 year mortgage on a house, so there is no reason the ROI needs to be any less than 15 years.
Phillip.
I've edited Python in vi, Notepad, SciTE, Geany, and other editors without any problem. Never used emacs though. If whitespace is causing bugs in your team's code you need to (a) introduce process or (b) lose some dead weight from your team. For (a) you can standardise on editor and whether to use tabs or spaces, or you can get the coders to end a whitespace block with a comment, eg # endif. I've only been using Python a couple of years but my experience so far suggests the problem is with you and not the language.
Phillip.
Isn't the old joke about C that it's like having a powerful gun pointed at your foot and there's no safety catch?
You must be a bit retarded to constantly have bugs due to Python indentation. But amateurs can be railroaded into reasonably good coding by using process. Simply make company policy to add a closure comment on the last line of an indented block.
if a == b:
a = 1
b = 2 # end of if block
c = 3
That should help.
Phillip.
My Indian friend was telling me he learned English when he grew up because his parents were from different regions and were forced to use English to communicate with each other. Anyway Russian would be better, much more money in writing botnets.
Phillip.
I do enjoy the way Python's indenting makes other people's code so readable. I used to waste so much time reformatting other people's C source code into some readable indentation format. Anyway after cutting and pasting Python code it seems to work with any format of indenting, tabs/spaces, as long as you are consistent. In fact I've just tried it with 2 spaces and with 6 spaces and it worked fine.
Phillip.
The problem with learning Perl is that you may walk into a future workplace and management will ask everybody if someone knows Perl. Being the honest person you are you'll instinctively raise your hand, not noticing everyone else is resolutely sitting on theirs. I've seen enough Perl code in the real world to convince me not to even look at the index page of a Perl book for that fear alone.
Phillip.
C does work on the server side of web applications, in fact many of the first server side apps were written in C running via CGI. No reason it won't work on shared hosting either, last time I looked my shared hosting provider had a CGI directory. You have have to compile on another machine and copy across. No problems with using C in Python or PHP (I've done the latter and it's very easy).
All in all I think you're completely wrong.
Phillip.
Me too. I started with machine code, moved to assembler, then BASIC, C, Java, PHP, Python, etc. Of course I had to learn other languages at University, including ADA, Pascal, and Haskell.
If you want to learn machine code or assembler I recommend picking up a cheap 8-bit computer from the 80's rather than trying under Linux. They are choc full of tools, including stepping debuggers, and the OS is simple and in ROM so you can't crash the machine and it's easy to track what is happening. I can recommend the BBC Micro, which I learned on.
If programming for pleasure then I would personally recommend C and Python. As posters have mentioned above, the former is very easy to learn and will force you to learn the principles of any OS (structures, memory allocation, etc). Python is a very productive OO language and simply nice to program in.
Perl is too messy and Ruby too obscure. Functional languages are rarely used outside of academia so don't bother with Lisp (I know the poster was joking (well I think he was (though you can have fun writing some Eliza type AI apps (but then you can in other languages without having to learn the functional paradigm)))).
Phillip.
How many developers here have had to hunt around for a list of countries to populate a select box? Or chained select boxes for country -> county/state -> town? How nice would it be to have a central repository where you can download all (in any mixed selection of languages) in cvs/xml/etc?
Phillip.
It's good thing when you get used to it as it makes source code much clearer. If you find that the forced indentation is bulking up your code too much then you are probably missing a trick... in Python there is always a short-cut and you just have to think more Python-like. For example in C/PHP I would type:
x=1; y=2; z=3;
When you first look at Python you are tempted to write:
x=1
y=2
z=3
Quickly you find you can:
x,y,z = 1,2,3
Phillip.
I was thinking the same thing but from a moral viewpoint rather than a legal one. If you sign a non-compete clause you should be respecting it rather than trying to find a loophole in it. You've been paid to do a job, and whilst still in that job and are still accepting your company's paycheck you have developed in your minds what you think is a version 2.0 of their product.
To get to this point you have learned by making mistakes at your company's expense, and also whilst being privy to customer feedback internal to your company. This is exactly why they had you sign the non-compete clause in the first place.
If you cannot sell your version 2.0 to management, or simply no longer wish to work with them, then why not outsource yourself? Spin off yourselves as a separate company with an exclusive contract with your current company for that product you intend to develop. Benefits are:
* you are independent and can run things the way you want to
* you have a definite client at the end of your development meaning:
a) continued financial security in a volatile world
b) it will be easy to raise finance on the back of this for offices, equipment, etc
c) somebody your new software house can put on their portfolio whilst prospecting for new work as the current one draws to a close
* you can generate extra revenue by developing modules providing features outside the contracted specification
* you will have won a client rather than made an enemy, and maintained your professional integrity.
Phillip.