Heh, I really hope you didn't take it the wrong way. There aren't all too many ways of saying, "I don't think you know what you're talking about" in a delicate way, but I hope you can see why I had my doubts from what I quoted. Your reply helped to clear things up.
That's about what I thought. If I'd been really annoyed by your post I wouldn't have complimented you on it... <g>
This is just not true of many working environments. I am a professional programmer and analyst, I am not a novice. I use VB because the time it takes to create a basic front end is sooo much faster than anything else. Being professional is about choosing the right tools for the right purpuse and spending the appropriate amount of time on the right things. In most offices VB is the right tool.
I definitely agree about picking the right tool for the job. I wasn't complaining about VB but rather about referring to a novice throwing-a-page-together in an afternoon as professional. You can write professional code in any language because it's driven by experience, not your preference in programming languages.
A professional programmer is more likely to write code which has been planned out and written with reliability and ease of maintainance than a novice. They're also a lot more likely to understand things like testing input bounds, error handling and the like (ever break a website by entering a ' in a field?).
My major beef with ColdFusion (or at least it was last time I looked - have they changed it) is that it doesn't round-trip: you build your ColdFusion site, tweak the generated pages and then, when you rebuild the site, tweak them again. Forever. Which gets rather boring.
This isn't true for recent versions, which function similarly to ASP, PHP or JSP pages.
Hi, I've noticed a number of posts from you on this topic criticizing ASP solutions, but these three little lines of yours should give anyone serious doubts about your credibility in this area:
I've heard numerous similar comments about PHP vs ASP. VBscript is a mess and both JScript and VBScript are feature-poor languages. Does anyone want to spend time fighting their environment instead of building their application? In other words, if you really think that ASP pages can only be scripted with JScript or VBScript, as opposed to Perl or Python or something else, there's no way that you can have much knowledge about ASP.
Nice flame! I'm quite aware that alternatives exist; I've used ActiveState's PerlScript and have no question that it's a better choice. Here's why it wasn't relevant to the original discussion:
The author I was responding to was discussing novices and remarked about how easy ASP was to use, particularly in connection with Visual Basic. Other scripting languages are nice but they're hardly standard and it's rather doubtful that a novice will know they exist. It's also more likely that a Microsoft oriented company would have people with VB experience than Perl, Python or anything else. Most of the entry-level ASP developers I've met think JScript is extremely advanced - would you really want them using Perl without a little more experience?
If you already know Perl, PerlScript's better. The original poster was assuming newbies or VB programmers. Alternatives aren't going to be covered in "Teach yourself ASP in 21 days" or an ASP class; they probably won't be covered in any book a non-experienced programmer would find at the bookstore.
The biggest problem is practical realities - if you have a shared server, you probably won't have permission to install software on it. If it's not approved by the appropriate corporate types, you might not be allowed to use it. If you don't have any other Perl developers you might not by able to use it.
I _might_ give you PHP4 on that one. Otherwise, no. Read up on ASP -- it's very very cool.
[...] Yes. See above scenario. MS' Dev tools are nice, nice enough to merit using them to build a site. When you're talking Internet Time, poking at CGI scripts with vi is just not going to cut it -- time-to-market is everything, and ASP allows for quick, solid development.
This seems a bit out of date. ASP would be a cutting edge product if it was 1995 and the alternatives were CGI scripts. PHP and ColdFusion both match every selling point and have a bunch of additional features which ASP lacks. Anyone doing serious work is going to run into ASP's limitations very quickly.
Fact: Setting up Apache with PHP is ten times as hard as setting up IIS with ASP. Again, your choice: Compete or die.
I'd believe you, had I not actually done this. Having done this in numerous cases and watched people with various levels of technical skill do it, Windows takes a LOT more time to install than Linux. Even ignoring the base operating system install, it's not as if installing the option pack and configuring IIS is easier than checking "Web server" when installing RedHat. (You were aware that Apache + PHP ship on the RedHat CD, right?)
(RedHat you ask? Of course a novice would use RedHat. If you want to complain, remember that I was being nice and assuming that NT was being installed with the defaults on generic hardware with the drivers on the Windows CD and that you weren't doing *any* IIS configuration, particularly not with things like virtual servers where it's very easy to get IIS into a state where it ignores its configuration data and displays error messages that have nothing to do with the actual problem.)
At the end of the day, competing with Microsoft means providing Visual Basic, or something so much like it that the end user can't tell the difference. Productivity counts. They want to be able to knock together something professional in an afternoon without being overly technical, and ASP -- again, whether you like it or not -- lets them do that.
By definition, anything put together by a novice in an afternoon would not be professional. Professional code should documented and maintainable, handle errors and weird input in some fashion other than choking and/or providing security holes and should have at least some thought towards performance. None of this is particularly likely in the situation you mentioned.
There's also considerable debate over just how easy ASP is. I've heard marketing types claim that but have never seen any justification for it. It's only easier if you already know VB and have Windows development experience with COM. Most of the people I know who've used both would consider ColdFusion much easier to start with, particularly if you have an HTML background. A coworker of mine mentioned that one of the web development classes he'd taken was supposed to cover both ColdFusion and ASP; by the end of the first week ASP was dropped by unanimous consent as everyone thought it was much harder and couldn't see a reason to use it. I've heard numerous similar comments about PHP vs ASP. VBscript is a mess and both JScript and VBScript are feature-poor languages. Does anyone want to spend time fighting their environment instead of building their application?
Ever try to send an email? It's one simple command in PHP or ColdFusion. It's several lines of ASP, assuming you have CDONTS or similar installed in the first place. Want to handle an uploaded file in a form? Very simple in PHP or ColdFusion, very complicated and non-intuitive in ASP. (No, I don't consider evaluating, purchasing, installing and using a 3rd-party COM object intuitive, particularly for a novice.)
Don't forget the documentation you'll need isn't in one place, either - there are separate sections for VBScript/JScript, ADO, CDONTS and everything else. A depressingly high percentage of the examples in Microsoft's documentation are just plain wrong to boot. How are newbies supposed to know where to find the documentation they need, much less judge whether it is correct? Note that neither of the common tasks I mentioned above is covered anywhere a novice ASP user would know to check, so they'll have to hope it's covered in a book or spend some time searching the web. In contrast, someone with a text editor and either www.php.net or the Cold Fusion docs would be able to develop page using only that information.
All very true, but certainly you'd have to agree that the syntax found in ASP (VBScript) is much easier for the new developer to pick up than what's found in Perl or PHP.
Not at all. ASP's complete inability to do non-trivial tasks with built-in language features requires you to understand COM. VB is also not a particularly intuitive language. It only seems easier if you already know VB. For someone without a programming background but HTML experience, something like ColdFusion would be a LOT easier. PHP is a little harder to pick up than ColdFusion but is also easier to get started with than ASP, as you don't have to use COM objects for everything beyond basic operations and you can avoid quite a few issues regarding input data thanks to the automatic variable creation and escaping.
I doubt if thi is prior art, since it does not track you during your session.
7val's patent isn't about pure session tracking either, as that's been around for ages. Their system is different because it uses the hostname to store the session identifier. The only claim on innovation that they have is using the hostname to store data for their program, which the urlcalc site also does.
It's a shame that illegal search-and-seizure of a legitimate business must be equated with stealing the intellectual property of the music industry.
... But they do own the copyright to all that music that people steal. And that's illegal, and undefendable.
It's almost like you've avoided reading any of the articles describing what is and is not legal in either case. I strongly doubt there would be much if any controversy had the MPAA and RIAA gone after actual pirates. The problem is that they are using piracy as an excuse to limit legitimate users, often in ways which have almost no effect against piracy.
(And, in case you're wondering, ever single MP3 with one I have is made from CDs I own at home or work. They've all been purchased legally & are undistributed except in that I use MP3 & a fast network connection so I don't have to carry them back and forth. The one exception is a recording of the Napolean XIV "They're Coming to Take Me Away", which I was unable to buy locally. If anyone has a source, that will be remedied.)
YOU GET MODERATED DOWN FOR HAVING A DIFFERING OPINION
The SJG case is [mostly] a matter of public record at this point. It's hard to see how statements at variance with accepted fact should be treated as equally valid opinions. Even a troll can't believe that we would be obliged to respect your "opinion" if you started telling people that the sky is brown with yellow dots, right?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but AFAIK you still can't run Linux on a 286. There was that one project... did that get anywhere?
Oops, that could have been clearer. The idea is that an organization might have older clients using things like 286es that really aren't going to do well with operating systems beyond DOS. Since these older systems would most likely not support more recent protocols like NETBIOS over TCP/IP, whatever ever you use for a server would need to talk NETBEUI. I believe this would limit your choices to Windows, OS/2 and, now, Linux.
Again, the idea is that while it's not going to be used in a large-scale network environment, it'll be handy to have for people in quirky, highly-underfunded environments where Linux is probably already attractive due to low resource requirements and compatibility with older, less common hardware.
As many have mentioned already, this product is so old and out-dated, no one really wants it.
NETBEUI is basically a dinosaur, true. However, open-sourcing a NETBEUI stack is useful for anyone still stuck with outdated equipment. This is particularly good when you consider that a certain segment of Open-Source software users are people trying to keep some semblence of a computing environment patched together out of what they can scrounge. Someone at, say, a charity with a pack of old [2-4]86s would probably appreciate the ability to use Linux to replace their current "server".
Regular programs require more work to install. Remember that while the Joe Sixpacks of the world might remember running an install program, they probably won't remember allowing an ActiveX control to run and they'll have no way of knowing that, because they checked the "Always trust $CORP" box six months ago, they just ran arbitrary code a few minutes ago. The problems come when you consider how many people have checked the "Always trust content from Microsoft". As pointed out on BUGTRAQ, this will allow controls from Microsoft to be installed transparently. Bad, but it's not the end of the world, right? Consider that someone could use this to install an older version of a Microsoft control with a known vulnerability. Ooops. Maybe IE6 will fix it.
Curious - I got back a similar version except that the second paragraph contained some idiocy about how they hadn't patented cookies but merely their usage in 1-click ordering. Of course, my original message had no mention whatsoever of cookies and was about their [ab]use of software patents. I wonder when one of these large companies will realize that sending back an off-topic boiler-plate response doesn't exactly improve matters from a customer relations standpoint.
...are tied to local markets to the point where I think we're talking apples and oranges (no pun). Here even your standard fast food is like 7 bucks a meal (sandwich, fries, drink), so four for Taco Hell (3 tacos, nachos, drink) was a godsend. I say was because they're prices are nickel-and-diming up to the same rate as the other guys.
Quite true. I've noticed that as well, particularly with the places where the cheap items keep shrinking or becoming blander, in an effort to get the guy who came in for the.39 Budget Special to spring for the 1.69 Ultra Jumbo Xtreme Special.
Im not saying that he is taking advangtage of everyone else. Sure he has the right to do what he is doing. I just don't see how Dilbert and burrito's are relevant.
In this case, I think they are related in the sense that Scott Adams is a noted vegan promoting vegan burritos. This isn't inconsistent with his books & some of the cartoons cartoons.
If they made a Ford Mustang with a linux logo on it, would you buy it?
Not because of the logo. If it was a decent car at a decent price, perhaps.
Taco Bell had to make their stuff cheap so people will buy it. Back in high school I could buy like fifteen tacos for six or seven dollars, which made them quite a bit cheaper than everything else around
Even with the specials, TB's prices here are actually higher than most of the corner-taco-shop places when you look at the food/dollar ratio. Sure, I might have to pay an whopping $2.50 for a carne-asada burrito but it's big enough to score a touchdown with and there is simply no comparison on flavor.
I'm constantly amazed that TB still does business in this area. My guess is that they're banking on the "Bad at Math" segment of the population who will decide that a 59 cent micro-taco is a great deal.
Delivery Taco Bell - that is the ultimate in geek eating.
For geeks who like pseudo-Mexican food, anyway. Living in an area (Southern California) with millions of real Mexican restaurants I've yet to see any reason to pay more for food that isn't fit even for that idiot Chihuahua. If you want unhealthy, I'll see your chalupa and raise you an authentic chimichanga with extra cheese. Mmmm - I can already hear the arteries clogging!
Besides, everyone knows that takeout Chinese food is the true geek dinner. (Not to be confused with cold pizza and beer: Breakfast of Programmers)
In what way are the two incompatible? It's quite possible to make a buck and do something you believe is right at the same time.
It seems rather common to assume that anyone who sells something is somehow trying to take advantage of everyone else. Sure, some companies try to screw the consumer at every turn but that no more guarantees that all companies do any more than the existence of murders or farm-animal molesters means all or even most people do such things.
Lastly, remember that Scott Adams has a single product - Dilbert. He makes money using the brand but he'll also lose the most if he damages it. If he wants to use his creation to push vegan food, so be it.
I take it you have never tried to stream audio over a modem before. Nobody encodes MP3s at 48kbps anymore, for good reason, they sound terrible. Plus whenever I stream audio, the audio invariably breaks up/pops whenever one of the other two people I share the modem
This is increasingly not a problem as faster connections are becoming increasingly more pervasive, not less. Personally, I haven't needed to use an analog modem in the last two years. Given the millions of people who have cable or DSL, streaming audio is becoming increasingly usable.
I for one, cannot begin to distinguish what a "pretty little icon" does until I hover my mouse over it and wait for the help text. And I have to do that repeatedly each time. Something in my brain doesn't recognize pictures, but does just fine with complex sequences of words. Button bars are useless, and are the first thing I turn *off* when I see them.
I agree completely that most GUIs are useless and have seen dozens of people in the "You are in a maze of twisty icons, all alike" trance
A well-designed GUI doesn't need to be like that. Frankly, if you have to look at the help text, the GUI designer hasn't done his job. Another sign of a GUI developer who spent more time at www.bustybabes.com than building a usable interface is poor keyboard navigation.
A properly designed GUI could take advantage of the flexibility you get from a higher resolution display and non-keyboard input, even if you end up using it just for shoving bits of text around. Unfortunately, most of the GUIs are horribly designed; I'm rather disappointed at how frequently I wish the developer had included a SQL query tool as it would be easier to use that than fight a constricting interface.
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A professional programmer is more likely to write code which has been planned out and written with reliability and ease of maintainance than a novice. They're also a lot more likely to understand things like testing input bounds, error handling and the like (ever break a website by entering a ' in a field?).
(RedHat you ask? Of course a novice would use RedHat. If you want to complain, remember that I was being nice and assuming that NT was being installed with the defaults on generic hardware with the drivers on the Windows CD and that you weren't doing *any* IIS configuration, particularly not with things like virtual servers where it's very easy to get IIS into a state where it ignores its configuration data and displays error messages that have nothing to do with the actual problem.)
There's also considerable debate over just how easy ASP is. I've heard marketing types claim that but have never seen any justification for it. It's only easier if you already know VB and have Windows development experience with COM. Most of the people I know who've used both would consider ColdFusion much easier to start with, particularly if you have an HTML background. A coworker of mine mentioned that one of the web development classes he'd taken was supposed to cover both ColdFusion and ASP; by the end of the first week ASP was dropped by unanimous consent as everyone thought it was much harder and couldn't see a reason to use it. I've heard numerous similar comments about PHP vs ASP. VBscript is a mess and both JScript and VBScript are feature-poor languages. Does anyone want to spend time fighting their environment instead of building their application?
Ever try to send an email? It's one simple command in PHP or ColdFusion. It's several lines of ASP, assuming you have CDONTS or similar installed in the first place. Want to handle an uploaded file in a form? Very simple in PHP or ColdFusion, very complicated and non-intuitive in ASP. (No, I don't consider evaluating, purchasing, installing and using a 3rd-party COM object intuitive, particularly for a novice.)
Don't forget the documentation you'll need isn't in one place, either - there are separate sections for VBScript/JScript, ADO, CDONTS and everything else. A depressingly high percentage of the examples in Microsoft's documentation are just plain wrong to boot. How are newbies supposed to know where to find the documentation they need, much less judge whether it is correct? Note that neither of the common tasks I mentioned above is covered anywhere a novice ASP user would know to check, so they'll have to hope it's covered in a book or spend some time searching the web. In contrast, someone with a text editor and either www.php.net or the Cold Fusion docs would be able to develop page using only that information.
(And, in case you're wondering, ever single MP3 with one I have is made from CDs I own at home or work. They've all been purchased legally & are undistributed except in that I use MP3 & a fast network connection so I don't have to carry them back and forth. The one exception is a recording of the Napolean XIV "They're Coming to Take Me Away", which I was unable to buy locally. If anyone has a source, that will be remedied.)
The original Whistle devices had the major drawback that you could not add additional software to the system. Does anyone know if this changed?
Again, the idea is that while it's not going to be used in a large-scale network environment, it'll be handy to have for people in quirky, highly-underfunded environments where Linux is probably already attractive due to low resource requirements and compatibility with older, less common hardware.
Regular programs require more work to install. Remember that while the Joe Sixpacks of the world might remember running an install program, they probably won't remember allowing an ActiveX control to run and they'll have no way of knowing that, because they checked the "Always trust $CORP" box six months ago, they just ran arbitrary code a few minutes ago. The problems come when you consider how many people have checked the "Always trust content from Microsoft". As pointed out on BUGTRAQ, this will allow controls from Microsoft to be installed transparently. Bad, but it's not the end of the world, right? Consider that someone could use this to install an older version of a Microsoft control with a known vulnerability. Ooops. Maybe IE6 will fix it.
Curious - I got back a similar version except that the second paragraph contained some idiocy about how they hadn't patented cookies but merely their usage in 1-click ordering. Of course, my original message had no mention whatsoever of cookies and was about their [ab]use of software patents. I wonder when one of these large companies will realize that sending back an off-topic boiler-plate response doesn't exactly improve matters from a customer relations standpoint.
I'm constantly amazed that TB still does business in this area. My guess is that they're banking on the "Bad at Math" segment of the population who will decide that a 59 cent micro-taco is a great deal.
This would, of course, lead to capitalist-pig spin-offs such as "Programmer Chow", "Web Developer Chow" and, of course, pterry's MEALS.
Besides, everyone knows that takeout Chinese food is the true geek dinner. (Not to be confused with cold pizza and beer: Breakfast of Programmers)
It seems rather common to assume that anyone who sells something is somehow trying to take advantage of everyone else. Sure, some companies try to screw the consumer at every turn but that no more guarantees that all companies do any more than the existence of murders or farm-animal molesters means all or even most people do such things.
Lastly, remember that Scott Adams has a single product - Dilbert. He makes money using the brand but he'll also lose the most if he damages it. If he wants to use his creation to push vegan food, so be it.
A properly designed GUI could take advantage of the flexibility you get from a higher resolution display and non-keyboard input, even if you end up using it just for shoving bits of text around. Unfortunately, most of the GUIs are horribly designed; I'm rather disappointed at how frequently I wish the developer had included a SQL query tool as it would be easier to use that than fight a constricting interface.
Given that this isn't something appropriate for either JavaScript or HTML, I'm somehow unsurprised that it wasn't covered.