Judging by the team I've found myself on since taking a new job (more money, sunnier climate), there's plenty of work out there for people who want to get into computers. Knowledge optional.
PHP has a lot of little language quirks that can bite you on the ass pretty regularly while you climb the learning curve. It's easier to get started writing bad PHP code, then distribute it to a mass audience, than just about any other web scripting language. Those two things are responsible for 99% of the bad blood towards it. From me it gets some bonus points in the hate column for basically turning into Java with dynamic typing in PHP5, but I'm pretty anti-Java, and I guess other people like that.
About 70% of my job is PHP programming, and I can live with it. Still, when you apply all the painfully learned practices to make PHP suitable for larger scale development and realize how far you've come from the simple promise of PHP, you can't help but wonder why anyone would ever choose the language over something like Python (or Perl, Ruby, etc.) for all but the tiniest scripts. In my case, it's because I'm buried under a pile of legacy code that was, unfortunately, not written with maintenance in mind.
The Starcraft universe is unique and pretty cool. WoW, by comparison was pretty shallow, and the lore they've added to WoW isn't anything compelling. I'm a devout WoW player (since day one), but I'd take WoS over WoW any day of the week. Besides, fantasy MMOs have been done to death, IMHO.
That was my first instinct as well, which is rare nowadays when entertainment companies announce pricing information. I wish other video game companies (and record companies for that matter) would take pricing cues from Nintendo. $9-10 for some of the gold sitting in Nintendo's vaults is downright cheap considering how much better some of their old games are than what's coming up for either the PS3 or the Xbox 360.
To be fair, neither has the GGP. Apple updates require reboots all the time, and I've applied at least one or two to my PowerBook over the last couple months. Pretty much every OS requires a reboot from time to time if you're diligent about updating; even my RHEL and Ubuntu machines at work.
If you've ever had the misfortune of using an old Windows box or pre-OS X Mac, it's really amazing how far both sides have come from a reliability standpoint. I don't like to use Windows very much (my only Windows box exists solely for WoW and CS:Source), but it's not really as bad as a lot of people make it out to be. My computer-illiterate parents keep their little Dell virus- and spyware-free without having me around, so it's not like it's a very difficult task. Certainly no more daunting a task than using Linux.
He says the failure to open-source Java means that it can't be used on millions of $100, Linux-powered PCs envisioned under Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child project, to bring affordable computing to children in developing nations.
Keeping these kids the hell away from Java is a good way to give them an advantage over all those poor kids learning to program in developed nations.
Web standards are well-documented, and have validators that can help you catch some subtle mistake that might not break anything on your system, but could cause major problems under other conditions. It just seems a more natural target than any individual browser to me. Plus, coding to the standard is the best way to ensure that your site *mostly* works on really fringe browsers.
If you end up having to take a step or two away from the standards to support a major browser (usually IE, but it's really not too terrible anymore), then it's no big deal, and once you've worked on a couple complex sites you end up with a pretty good idea of where the problem areas are and how to fix them in the most compliant way possible. Hopefully some day this process won't be necessary, but I'm not holding my breath.
So: Start from the standard, then test from there until you end up with something that works everywhere you need. Definitely a lot simpler than it used to be in the days of having to support IE3 and NS4.
Cartoon Network probably got a very good deal on the rights to it, and figured "hey, why not?"
Turner Broadcasting (CN's parent) has aired SbtB for years on TBS in the morning and early afternoon, and I think they can do whatever the hell they want with it. It's basically the reverse of what happened with Family Guy, which aired on AS and now shows up at different times on TBS.
The servers have been broken for over a year. I don't care what the problem is, it could have been fixed by now.
I finally gave up and quit, even though I still think the game could be fun for a long time. It's just too broken. Damn shame, but the only vote you've got is your dollars in the end.
I awoke one morning, many years ago, while spending a lazy summer at my grandparents' house, to discover they had somehow acquired HBO service. This came as a shock to my grandparents -- particularly my grandfather, the cheapest man in the world -- who had, perhaps, the most barebones cable package known to man. They had less than "basic" cable, just local channels, just because they had issues getting the local news over an antenna because of their house's location on some hilly terrain.
My grandfather, being the sort who actually reads -- from start to finish -- the manual and all accompanying literature for everything he buys, might have been the only person in the continental United States at that time proficient in programming his old VCR (it actually showed the right time). He also had the good fortune of being geographically located near a newly-opened Big Lots store (which, for those of you who don't know, is some sort of extreme discount retailer that sells a lot of irregular items and overstocked stuff nobody needs).
This perfect storm of a pay channel being piped into the house of an incredibly cheap man with the free time of a retiree, allowing him to make daily trips looking for sub-dollar VHS tapes to purchase by the hundreds, conspired to create the greatest library of stolen cable the world has ever seen.
Thousands of tapes. How many thousands? I don't know for sure. I don't visit a whole lot because my relatives are crazy, but last time I asked he was sitting on ~20,000. Some large portion of that is recorded figure skating (his major vice) and old Bob Ross painting shows, but the majority of it is just about every single movie that has been on HBO since the late '80's.
He labels each new tape with a number. This number corresponds to the position on his elaborate system of shelves (which consumes two bedrooms, a sitting room, a closet, a hallway, and most of the den), and everything is basically laid out in order so higher numbers are in the back of the house. When he records a show (he never wastes tape, so each tape holds multiple shows), he labels an index card with the show title and the number of the tape on which it appears, then files that card in alphabetical order in a huge box with all the rest.
On the rare occasions that I visit nowadays, I have no problem finding anything he has. Though he has made the switch to DVD, aside from dividing the remaining space on his current shelf by the width of the standard VHS tape and skipping that many numbers in his index system to accomodate future recordings, then starting a new shelf (he builds them) of a different size for his budding DVD collection; he hasn't ever had any problems with losing tapes or things getting out of order.
This might not seem like a very good system for organizing books, and it isn't. Thus, you might not see the point of mentioning it in response to this query. Here it is:
You and your wife are apparently smart enough to read and collect 3,500 books. My grandfather only reads TV Guide, Popular Mechanics, woodworking magazines, and The Bible. You have access to barcode scanners, databases, and computing power. He has access to a box, a pen, and a stack of index cards. It took him about five minutes fifteen years ago to devise a system that has allowed him to organize a media library at least five times larger and considerably more complex than yours.
Why do you fucking have to Ask Slashdot to figure this out?!
Get shelf. Put books on shelf in some order. Remember what order you put books on shelf (or write it down). You're welcome.
There's no advantage to seperate virtual address spaces when you have 64 bit architectures. Even on 32bit architectures, a 2/2 or 3/1 split is only a problem if you have more than two or three gigabytes of physical ram or if your application wants to memory map more than two or three gigs of virtual address space. If you need to do that, then get an architecture that supports it. Most people still have less than 2 gigs of ram in their computers, why optimize for those that do when the computers people will be buying when four gigs of ram or more is common will already be 64 bit.
I'm not disputing that Apple might have gone the wrong way with this particular decision (I honestly don't know enough about the implications to argue either way), but you have to remember Apple's rather huge presence in the creative community, and growing presence in the scientific community.
In the cases where you assume people need to get another architecture, consider that maybe Apple wants to be that architecture. Though the majority of customers buying Apple's computers do indeed use them -- I'm sure -- with less than 2GB of RAM, I'd be willing to bet that given their relatively small presence in the overall desktop and workstation market and their relatively large presence in the two demanding groups of users named above that they have significantly more than their "fair share" of users with large amounts of RAM.
Now, maybe their decisions cause some performance loss for the majority of their users, while significantly enhancing the experiences of some of their most loyal and demanding (not to mention profitable) users. As long as Safari loads quickly and Taco can play his beloved WoW, you'll likely not hear too many complaints. If that's the case, maybe their bad design decisions aren't so bad after all.
This is the only show out of the current Adult Swim lineup that I still watch. In a block of programming that, IMHO, jumped the shark a long time ago, Futurama is a shining beacon of comedy with replay value.
I've seen every episode multiple times, own the DVDs, and I'll still sit down and watch it if it's on when I wander past the television. How the hell King of the Hill remains on television while Futurama can't catch a break is beyond me.
... not much. The guy was an Industrial Engineering major (nothing wrong with that, mind you) with pretty much zero computer skills. We gave him this PHP project that a bunch of our interns had hacked on over the years (and me, when it gets truly FUBAR) and he just crossed his eyes the entire semester. They're bringing him back, though, so I figure if you can swap out backup tapes (the only thing he did successfully) you're hired.
He also had the most amazing ability to completely awkward-up any conversation he was involved in. Truly mind-boggling.
I'm in MC right now, and the joke is getting old to me. I can only imagine what it must be like for the people who don't play. You like WoW, we get it, now shut up about it.
You're right. Your OOP interface is simpler than that second mess of code, which would actually run. Now, add all the stuff you have to write first for the OOP example to work and we'll have a fair comparison.
Nobody's saying everything has to be done inline, what some folks are saying (and it's reasonable, IMHO), is that there's lots of places where OOP gets in the way more than it helps. Simple functions could abstract your second example out to where it's just as simple as the first example, without having to worry about classes at all.
'I know a lot of people are concerned about Big Brother, but my response to that is, if you are not doing anything wrong, why should you worry about it?'"
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's trying to communicate with us...
Judging by the team I've found myself on since taking a new job (more money, sunnier climate), there's plenty of work out there for people who want to get into computers. Knowledge optional.
HALP!
PHP has a lot of little language quirks that can bite you on the ass pretty regularly while you climb the learning curve. It's easier to get started writing bad PHP code, then distribute it to a mass audience, than just about any other web scripting language. Those two things are responsible for 99% of the bad blood towards it. From me it gets some bonus points in the hate column for basically turning into Java with dynamic typing in PHP5, but I'm pretty anti-Java, and I guess other people like that.
About 70% of my job is PHP programming, and I can live with it. Still, when you apply all the painfully learned practices to make PHP suitable for larger scale development and realize how far you've come from the simple promise of PHP, you can't help but wonder why anyone would ever choose the language over something like Python (or Perl, Ruby, etc.) for all but the tiniest scripts. In my case, it's because I'm buried under a pile of legacy code that was, unfortunately, not written with maintenance in mind.
We'll all be on the watch list by then anyway.
Some things never change.
The Starcraft universe is unique and pretty cool. WoW, by comparison was pretty shallow, and the lore they've added to WoW isn't anything compelling. I'm a devout WoW player (since day one), but I'd take WoS over WoW any day of the week. Besides, fantasy MMOs have been done to death, IMHO.
That was my first instinct as well, which is rare nowadays when entertainment companies announce pricing information. I wish other video game companies (and record companies for that matter) would take pricing cues from Nintendo. $9-10 for some of the gold sitting in Nintendo's vaults is downright cheap considering how much better some of their old games are than what's coming up for either the PS3 or the Xbox 360.
To be fair, neither has the GGP. Apple updates require reboots all the time, and I've applied at least one or two to my PowerBook over the last couple months. Pretty much every OS requires a reboot from time to time if you're diligent about updating; even my RHEL and Ubuntu machines at work.
If you've ever had the misfortune of using an old Windows box or pre-OS X Mac, it's really amazing how far both sides have come from a reliability standpoint. I don't like to use Windows very much (my only Windows box exists solely for WoW and CS:Source), but it's not really as bad as a lot of people make it out to be. My computer-illiterate parents keep their little Dell virus- and spyware-free without having me around, so it's not like it's a very difficult task. Certainly no more daunting a task than using Linux.
After all, they're talking about them.
I'll just keep stealing my music.
Keeping these kids the hell away from Java is a good way to give them an advantage over all those poor kids learning to program in developed nations.
Web standards are well-documented, and have validators that can help you catch some subtle mistake that might not break anything on your system, but could cause major problems under other conditions. It just seems a more natural target than any individual browser to me. Plus, coding to the standard is the best way to ensure that your site *mostly* works on really fringe browsers.
If you end up having to take a step or two away from the standards to support a major browser (usually IE, but it's really not too terrible anymore), then it's no big deal, and once you've worked on a couple complex sites you end up with a pretty good idea of where the problem areas are and how to fix them in the most compliant way possible. Hopefully some day this process won't be necessary, but I'm not holding my breath.
So: Start from the standard, then test from there until you end up with something that works everywhere you need. Definitely a lot simpler than it used to be in the days of having to support IE3 and NS4.
Where the fuck is Duck Hunt?!
Turner Broadcasting (CN's parent) has aired SbtB for years on TBS in the morning and early afternoon, and I think they can do whatever the hell they want with it. It's basically the reverse of what happened with Family Guy, which aired on AS and now shows up at different times on TBS.
The servers have been broken for over a year. I don't care what the problem is, it could have been fixed by now.
I finally gave up and quit, even though I still think the game could be fun for a long time. It's just too broken. Damn shame, but the only vote you've got is your dollars in the end.
I awoke one morning, many years ago, while spending a lazy summer at my grandparents' house, to discover they had somehow acquired HBO service. This came as a shock to my grandparents -- particularly my grandfather, the cheapest man in the world -- who had, perhaps, the most barebones cable package known to man. They had less than "basic" cable, just local channels, just because they had issues getting the local news over an antenna because of their house's location on some hilly terrain.
My grandfather, being the sort who actually reads -- from start to finish -- the manual and all accompanying literature for everything he buys, might have been the only person in the continental United States at that time proficient in programming his old VCR (it actually showed the right time). He also had the good fortune of being geographically located near a newly-opened Big Lots store (which, for those of you who don't know, is some sort of extreme discount retailer that sells a lot of irregular items and overstocked stuff nobody needs).
This perfect storm of a pay channel being piped into the house of an incredibly cheap man with the free time of a retiree, allowing him to make daily trips looking for sub-dollar VHS tapes to purchase by the hundreds, conspired to create the greatest library of stolen cable the world has ever seen.
Thousands of tapes. How many thousands? I don't know for sure. I don't visit a whole lot because my relatives are crazy, but last time I asked he was sitting on ~20,000. Some large portion of that is recorded figure skating (his major vice) and old Bob Ross painting shows, but the majority of it is just about every single movie that has been on HBO since the late '80's.
He labels each new tape with a number. This number corresponds to the position on his elaborate system of shelves (which consumes two bedrooms, a sitting room, a closet, a hallway, and most of the den), and everything is basically laid out in order so higher numbers are in the back of the house. When he records a show (he never wastes tape, so each tape holds multiple shows), he labels an index card with the show title and the number of the tape on which it appears, then files that card in alphabetical order in a huge box with all the rest.
On the rare occasions that I visit nowadays, I have no problem finding anything he has. Though he has made the switch to DVD, aside from dividing the remaining space on his current shelf by the width of the standard VHS tape and skipping that many numbers in his index system to accomodate future recordings, then starting a new shelf (he builds them) of a different size for his budding DVD collection; he hasn't ever had any problems with losing tapes or things getting out of order.
This might not seem like a very good system for organizing books, and it isn't. Thus, you might not see the point of mentioning it in response to this query. Here it is:
You and your wife are apparently smart enough to read and collect 3,500 books. My grandfather only reads TV Guide, Popular Mechanics, woodworking magazines, and The Bible. You have access to barcode scanners, databases, and computing power. He has access to a box, a pen, and a stack of index cards. It took him about five minutes fifteen years ago to devise a system that has allowed him to organize a media library at least five times larger and considerably more complex than yours.
Why do you fucking have to Ask Slashdot to figure this out?!
Get shelf. Put books on shelf in some order. Remember what order you put books on shelf (or write it down). You're welcome.
I'm not disputing that Apple might have gone the wrong way with this particular decision (I honestly don't know enough about the implications to argue either way), but you have to remember Apple's rather huge presence in the creative community, and growing presence in the scientific community.
In the cases where you assume people need to get another architecture, consider that maybe Apple wants to be that architecture. Though the majority of customers buying Apple's computers do indeed use them -- I'm sure -- with less than 2GB of RAM, I'd be willing to bet that given their relatively small presence in the overall desktop and workstation market and their relatively large presence in the two demanding groups of users named above that they have significantly more than their "fair share" of users with large amounts of RAM.
Now, maybe their decisions cause some performance loss for the majority of their users, while significantly enhancing the experiences of some of their most loyal and demanding (not to mention profitable) users. As long as Safari loads quickly and Taco can play his beloved WoW, you'll likely not hear too many complaints. If that's the case, maybe their bad design decisions aren't so bad after all.
Just a thought.
This is the only show out of the current Adult Swim lineup that I still watch. In a block of programming that, IMHO, jumped the shark a long time ago, Futurama is a shining beacon of comedy with replay value.
I've seen every episode multiple times, own the DVDs, and I'll still sit down and watch it if it's on when I wander past the television. How the hell King of the Hill remains on television while Futurama can't catch a break is beyond me.
A couple million got out. They live in the Atlanta area. Please pick them up.
No dice!
... not much. The guy was an Industrial Engineering major (nothing wrong with that, mind you) with pretty much zero computer skills. We gave him this PHP project that a bunch of our interns had hacked on over the years (and me, when it gets truly FUBAR) and he just crossed his eyes the entire semester. They're bringing him back, though, so I figure if you can swap out backup tapes (the only thing he did successfully) you're hired.
He also had the most amazing ability to completely awkward-up any conversation he was involved in. Truly mind-boggling.
I'm in MC right now, and the joke is getting old to me. I can only imagine what it must be like for the people who don't play. You like WoW, we get it, now shut up about it.
You're right. Your OOP interface is simpler than that second mess of code, which would actually run. Now, add all the stuff you have to write first for the OOP example to work and we'll have a fair comparison.
Nobody's saying everything has to be done inline, what some folks are saying (and it's reasonable, IMHO), is that there's lots of places where OOP gets in the way more than it helps. Simple functions could abstract your second example out to where it's just as simple as the first example, without having to worry about classes at all.
You tell 'em, comrade!
Then I'll still have the main copy of my data that resides on my own box?