Hey, I wouldn't call SQLite a "toy" database. It's SQLite; it's geared to light-weight uses. Do you need a full SQL2003 DB in your mobile app? There are many instances where SQLite does well. I'm on a team using it in an app that needs a simple DB, and it's great for the job.
As a starting place, your website needs a little help.
Seconded. Especially for end-users. Your product is a little more technical, so you don't need something perfect, but try to clean it up a little (have clear menu access to all the key parts of your site, organize the content a little better instead of having most stuff on the front page, have a news section for major updates/events, etc.). Also, make sure that it displays well in a variety of browsers (especially since with a technical audience, you're likely to be seeing all sorts of things running on all sorts of OSes)...
Grandparent's wording was fuzzy, but e-mail is client-to-client with one or more servers somewhere in between doing the hard work, whereas FTP requires one of the end-users to be running a server.
You laugh, but does no one remember Friendships? From Wikipedia
Finishing moves in later games included the Animality (turning into animal to violently finish off the opponent), the Brutality (decimating an opponent into pieces with a long combination of hits or combo), the Friendship (offering one's opponent a token of friendship), and the Babality (transforming the opponent into a baby). The Babality and Friendship moves were created as a jokey non-violent finishing move, a swipe at the US Congressional Investigation for Violence in Videogames who came down harshly on the Mortal Kombat games. Purists, fonder of the earlier style, were upset by the introduction of such finishing moves, yet Mortal Kombat's "purely violent" and dark gameplay was once again implemented after the release of Mortal Kombat 4.
Mod parent up. GPL stuff is copyrighted. BSD stuff is copyrighted. LGPL, MPL, and MIT license stuff is copyrighted. Creative Commons stuff is copyrighted. Public Domain stuff is copyr--err, wait. Never mind. But it is a good point that there is a ton of copyrighted content out there that it's perfectly okay to download, upload, and copy as you like. "Copyrighted" doesn't necessarily mean "do not copy".
The thing is, (good) programmers are trained to catch (or at least are familiar with) certain kinds of errors that are specific to software engineering, such as off-by-one errors and buffer overflows. They know that they're expected to deal with bad input gracefully. They also know not to leave magic numbers lying around, and are familiar with at least basic design patterns. It's not that programmers think more rigorously, it's that their rigorous thinking is already well-adapted to the problems that come up often in software engineering. Furthermore, they're familiar with the language they're working in and know how to use it effectively. Maybe we can have Joe Average write some pseudocode--introduce design ideas without having to get caught up in the minutiae--but I don't think having him write actual code will do anyone any good...
Hemp is cannabis grown specifically for industrial use and thus contains very low levels of cannabinoids (THC). The use of hemp dates back many thousands of years. Properly grown hemp has virtually no psychoactive (intoxicating) effects when consumed. With a relatively short growth cycle of 120 days, hemp is an efficient and economical crop for farmers to grow.
And this is why our country is the way it is. You didn't vote FOR a candidate, you voted AGAINST a candidate.
Right. And this is why the two-party system needs an overhaul. People can really vote for the candidate they want to win if there's several viable candidates.
Right. Amusingly, from what I've heard, that's all there is to the distinction: marketing. "Data" CD-Rs work just fine for burning music CDs, because the only distinction is whether they *call* it a "data" or "audio" CD-R.
One man's meat, as they say... I changed my Win2k theme to brick (brown/beige/tan) after trying out Ubuntu. The blue began to feel like it's out to stab my eyes after a while. I agree with sibling, use color to provide contrast for important things. I want my core UI to be subtle.
Visual Studio 2k3 was bloated and awkward, although 2k5 is a joy to use in comparison. I suggest anyone still on 2k3 move to 2k5. The Express Editions are free (as in beer) to download until November from Microsoft.com.
But what they *did* do was making pretty darn sure every MS product stuck to the guidlines.
Erm, Windows Media Player?
That said, most of their stuff does behave rather well. I can't believe that they let the WMP people get away with this (and I don't even use it; I stick with Media Player Classic..
Although, if we're talking about this in light of thumbnails being sold on cell phones, you (grandparent) have a better case. I guess craptastically sampled-down MP3s are being sold as ringtones...
The threshold for copyright is a "minimal degree of creativity"
But this is where it gets interesting... how much creativity does it take to rename variables, rearrange some independent statements? I'm not saying that this is the only way (or even that this is a common way) that applications with similar functionality have similiar source. But I'm sure many people here can write a simple script to make these changes for them. Your functionality is the same, your source code is only "nearly" identical (that is, not, strictly speaking, "identical"). Should "your" app be protected from infringement?
Hell, if we want to make this more interesting, if I write a Markov chaining program, feed it some Hemingway, give it a thesaurus, and have it (conservatively) write me something, is this protected? Is this creativity? Can I publish this? Can I call it "mine"?
Nice attempts to bring out the inconsistencies of the language, but try ghoti... At least in English, we don't have to deal with a language where nouns are conjugated depending on how they're used in a sentence or what preposition they're used with (as in Polish, among others; which, interestingly, has rather simple and consistent spelling rules)...
NDISWrapper is *not* a good solution. It encourages hardware manufacturers to stick to making only binary Windows drivers instead of opening up their driver development, publishing spec sheets, and tightly conforming to standards, or at the very least realising that there is more than one OS out there. It also introduces an artificial layer of abstraction into communication with hardware, affecting performance. NDISWrapper-like functionality would be a bad move for Apple...
I also strongly object to the notion that a copyright is something that can be bought and sold, or even that a corporation can own them (and the way "work for hire" gets abused - it makes sense with respect to newspapers and magazines, but in music it makes no sense).
It also makes sense in software (whether you're talking about proprietary work or the FSF)...
Slashdot Mirror
You've got a good memory...
Well, they did develop it...
Hey, I wouldn't call SQLite a "toy" database. It's SQLite; it's geared to light-weight uses. Do you need a full SQL2003 DB in your mobile app? There are many instances where SQLite does well. I'm on a team using it in an app that needs a simple DB, and it's great for the job.
Seconded. Especially for end-users. Your product is a little more technical, so you don't need something perfect, but try to clean it up a little (have clear menu access to all the key parts of your site, organize the content a little better instead of having most stuff on the front page, have a news section for major updates/events, etc.). Also, make sure that it displays well in a variety of browsers (especially since with a technical audience, you're likely to be seeing all sorts of things running on all sorts of OSes)...
That may be, but there's a big market of people who drop on a video card what they could get a current console for.
As some relative said, try Abiword.
Grandparent's wording was fuzzy, but e-mail is client-to-client with one or more servers somewhere in between doing the hard work, whereas FTP requires one of the end-users to be running a server.
(emphasis added)
Mod parent up. GPL stuff is copyrighted. BSD stuff is copyrighted. LGPL, MPL, and MIT license stuff is copyrighted. Creative Commons stuff is copyrighted. Public Domain stuff is copyr--err, wait. Never mind. But it is a good point that there is a ton of copyrighted content out there that it's perfectly okay to download, upload, and copy as you like. "Copyrighted" doesn't necessarily mean "do not copy".
The thing is, (good) programmers are trained to catch (or at least are familiar with) certain kinds of errors that are specific to software engineering, such as off-by-one errors and buffer overflows. They know that they're expected to deal with bad input gracefully. They also know not to leave magic numbers lying around, and are familiar with at least basic design patterns. It's not that programmers think more rigorously, it's that their rigorous thinking is already well-adapted to the problems that come up often in software engineering. Furthermore, they're familiar with the language they're working in and know how to use it effectively. Maybe we can have Joe Average write some pseudocode--introduce design ideas without having to get caught up in the minutiae--but I don't think having him write actual code will do anyone any good...
Right. And this is why the two-party system needs an overhaul. People can really vote for the candidate they want to win if there's several viable candidates.
Right. Amusingly, from what I've heard, that's all there is to the distinction: marketing. "Data" CD-Rs work just fine for burning music CDs, because the only distinction is whether they *call* it a "data" or "audio" CD-R.
One man's meat, as they say... I changed my Win2k theme to brick (brown/beige/tan) after trying out Ubuntu. The blue began to feel like it's out to stab my eyes after a while. I agree with sibling, use color to provide contrast for important things. I want my core UI to be subtle.
Visual Studio 2k3 was bloated and awkward, although 2k5 is a joy to use in comparison. I suggest anyone still on 2k3 move to 2k5. The Express Editions are free (as in beer) to download until November from Microsoft.com.
Erm, Windows Media Player?
That said, most of their stuff does behave rather well. I can't believe that they let the WMP people get away with this (and I don't even use it; I stick with Media Player Classic..
Although, if we're talking about this in light of thumbnails being sold on cell phones, you (grandparent) have a better case. I guess craptastically sampled-down MP3s are being sold as ringtones...
If the typical MP3 were downsampled to 8khz/8 bits, I don't think there'd be as much of an issue...
But this is where it gets interesting... how much creativity does it take to rename variables, rearrange some independent statements? I'm not saying that this is the only way (or even that this is a common way) that applications with similar functionality have similiar source. But I'm sure many people here can write a simple script to make these changes for them. Your functionality is the same, your source code is only "nearly" identical (that is, not, strictly speaking, "identical"). Should "your" app be protected from infringement?
Hell, if we want to make this more interesting, if I write a Markov chaining program, feed it some Hemingway, give it a thesaurus, and have it (conservatively) write me something, is this protected? Is this creativity? Can I publish this? Can I call it "mine"?
Nice attempts to bring out the inconsistencies of the language, but try ghoti... At least in English, we don't have to deal with a language where nouns are conjugated depending on how they're used in a sentence or what preposition they're used with (as in Polish, among others; which, interestingly, has rather simple and consistent spelling rules)...
NDISWrapper is *not* a good solution. It encourages hardware manufacturers to stick to making only binary Windows drivers instead of opening up their driver development, publishing spec sheets, and tightly conforming to standards, or at the very least realising that there is more than one OS out there. It also introduces an artificial layer of abstraction into communication with hardware, affecting performance. NDISWrapper-like functionality would be a bad move for Apple...
A thread where spelling and grammar nazis won't be modded off-topic! Yes!
It also makes sense in software (whether you're talking about proprietary work or the FSF)...