Posts by Jared 25 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jul 2007
'Just bought 'Digital Fortress'
I don't know what these other guys are talking about. I think it was Dan Brown's best comedy. The funniest part was where he thought that a 16-bit encryption key was a sequence of 16 ascii characters. Why look up the word 'bit' when it's FAR more entertaining to make up your own definition?
I would consider the kindle if the cost of the books was far lower than the cost of the corresponding hard copies. It isn't.
Only £1.3 mil? That, my friend, is a bargain SAP implementation by almost any standards...My last one was budgeted for $30 million, and I'm sure we spent at least twice that before it became even remotely usable.
To paraphrase all the above comments with which I agree wholeheartedly, SAP sucks, most SAP consultants suck, and the SAP User Interfaces (all of them!) suck. I shouldn't complain though, I made a good living for several years making .NET and Adobe Flex-based interfaces to talk to SAP so users wouldn't have to learn to use any of the standard ones.
Strange, I'm in Arizona and I've never noticed a difference between 'contractor' and 'consultant.' I've had several contract positions and the pay is generally better than my salaried W2 counterparts'. I despise all company events, so I've never been disappointed to not be invited to sales rallies and the like. I do envy the full timers for their paid vacation though...
I did register quite some time ago, it just irritates me that I have to go through the trouble of logging in to access content that I feel like I should be able to access with one click, as that's how it was 'advertised' to google. Since there's not a huge probability that the article I'm trying to look at has the answer I'm after anyways, I don't want to be bothered with logging in to find out.
I was in charge of "search engine optimization" at a magazine company when I was an intern fresh out of college. You had to be a subscriber or a search engine bot to see all the articles, otherwise it would just show you the first paragraph. When I supplied an app to the QA people that changed their IE user agent so they could test as the various bots we "uncloaked" for, they were shocked that regular users could so simply gain access to all our information for free. I got a good chuckle out of it.
The shame here is that google et al allow this. They should hit a page with the googlebot user agent, then hit it with an IE user agent, and remove sites from their index that try this kind of nonsense. SQLServerCentral.com is the #1 culprit that I run into regularly, and they have the no-cache thing on so I have to resort to the user agent hack.
I'm primarily a business-logic layer guy, and rather mediocre at the database side of things (slowly improving), but having jumped around between MySQL, SAP (running on Oracle), and SQL Server in the last few years, I gotta say that I'm quite pleased with SQL Server 2005 and am quite looking forward to the new features. This was a good article that was quite informative on what's new in SQL Server 2008. I'm particularly looking forward to the described report designer, as the one included in VS 2005 is pure crap (better than Crystal Reports, but still crap).
I didn't see any mention of the new "Date" data type in 2008...That, I think, was *just a tad* overdue. I'm tired of having to store all my dates with times included.
I'm with BlueGreen, feel free to bash MS when they screw up. But when they come out with a decent product (C#, the .NET Framework, SQL Server, Flight Simulator, and the original XBox, for example), the bashing just comes off a bit petty.
If BlueGreen will hand out lollies at the Vista bashing convention, I'll sell popsicles at the IE bashing convention. But we expect to see some Java fanbois passing out sno-cones at the C# 3.0 convention. And MySQL fanbois (if there are any left) at pretty much all conventions.
@Geoff Mackenzie
"they still expected me to edit code in a proportional font in a dialog box "
It took me a while to figure out what you were talking about...Yeah, I would hate SQL Server too if I thought I had to edit the code through the interface included in VS 2005 or enterprise manager...Next time give SSMS a try :)
I'm embarrassed to admit it with all these holier than thou europeans around, but I give the death penalty two big thumbs up. I value consistency. And I know without a doubt that if some sicko tortured and killed my little 3 year old boy, I would want blood. The more excruciatingly painful, the better.
So even though rationally, I can see a number of good arguments against the death penalty, it doesn't seem fair to only support it for crimes committed against *me*, but not anybody else.
Does that make me barbaric? Probably. But like most barbarians, being labeled as such doesn't particularly bother me.
That's a winning example.
My favorite was when I worked as a web developer for a well-known computer magazine company. It was my first job out of college. Well they ran this article "reviewing" Opera. One of the criticisms (of Opera!) was that the menu on the magazine's own website didn't work. We got a letter from the coolest subscriber ever that had gone in and checked to see why it wouldn't render. He found a piece of javascript like this:
if (browser is opera)
return;
else
//render menu
Removing that piece of javascript was all that was required to make the site work fine in Opera. Even though I wasn't responsible for that particular piece of code, I was horrified.
Anyway, FWIW I think the trouble has three main root causes:
1. Some people like pretty colors and animations. Businesses are trying to attract those people.
2. Since no effort was made to ever standardize and improve javascript's serious design-time and run-time deficiencies, there is a market for flash-like technologies that compensate.
3. Companies are not willing to spend the money to have their sites render content gracefully when javascript/flash/whatever is turned off.
Unfortunately, the people who actually pay for websites don't share your perspective. It's not the author's fault that customers want rich, flashy, sexy web pages for their businesses (a few of them actually want content too, although that request is more rare...) The truth is that once average joe saw what you could do once you stepped out of the bounds of standardized markup languages, everybody wanted it. And the people that said 'no, that's stupid' found themselves out of work.
As a programmer with absolutely no eye for visual design, I couldn't agree more that our jobs would suck a lot less if we all could do the front ends of our websites using only markup. But that's just not realistic given the average customer's demands. They want cool hover effects, they want animations, they want the page to never do a full refresh, they want autocomplete, they want drag n' drop, they want a full desktop app experience. And since doing all those things is not possible in a markup language, and a pain to do even with javascript, Adobe, Microsoft, and Sun are trying to make it easier on the average developer to keep up with customer demands without spending most of the time on the freakin' UI. And employers are willing to pay for those skills...Here in AZ a mediocre flex developer can easily get contracts for $65-$75 an hour, well above the rate for an experienced java or c# guy.
I'm sick and tired of dicking around with the clusterF#@K that is HTML, CSS, and Javascript, so I welcome the RIA technologies as a way to get the UI effects customers want while still maintaining a reasonably clean code base (as compared to javascript and HTML). And I appreciate articles like this one that keep me up to date on what the latest news is in this world without boring me to death.
Wow, I have NEVER seen so many el reg commenters offended by a little light-hearted name calling. For people that always seem to delight in mocking people who pay for software ("paytards", if you will), you sure get sensitive and demand political correctness when the tables get turned. (I forget, haven't I seen a similar term regularly directed towards IE users?) And the funny thing is that the tables haven't even turned - el reg is obviously supportive of everything free and would certainly include themselves in the freetard epithet.
Calm down, folks. If anything, it's the real retarded folk who should be offended by el-reg's associating them with penny pinching software cheapos.
As for me, I just gave my pirated version of MS office the boot and gave open office a try. So far, it's only crashed my machine twice. Somebody give those open sourcers a medal!
The author's observations on university curricula may be representative of his experience or the UK, but they're nothing like my experience here in the US.
PHP becoming the part of the defacto environment for universities teaching CS while VB.NET is virtually unknown? I've never heard of a PHP course being offered by a university, but I've helped many people working on their business degrees (including the hybrid business/IT degree) with their VB.NET coursework. At Arizona State, all the would-be accountants and finance majors have to take at least one VB.NET course.
I have a BSE in Computer Systems Engineering from ASU (cross between EE and CS). While it's true that Java was heavily favored, the University was usually pretty good at picking the right tool for the course. C for the O/S course, Assembly for the embedded systems course, Lisp for the AI course, SQL (on MS Access - yuck) for the DB course, and Java for the data structures and algorithms courses. I would guess this is fairly common, as it appears that even the semi-evolved monkeys running ASU figured it out.
"If I want someone to write UI code I look for good graphics skills and then C# or PHP."
I assume this was a joke...You can't really think there's a relationship between knowing C# and/or PHP and writing good UI code. In a typical 3-tier environment (DB, BL, UI) C#, Java, and PHP are strong in the middle and weak at the ends. They are piss-poor UI languages. You should reconsider your hiring criteria.
"To spend more in one area means spending less in another."
Yes, but *which* other. If we're going to start re-allocating money to help save children around the world, there are an awful lot of necks on the chopping block before we start taking funds out of the 'stop pedophilia' coffer. You've got a long way to go to prove that UNICEF and "police" compete for the *same* government funding (particularly since this article makes no mention of which police organizations were involved). unQED
"As I've already said, UNICEF is funded by National Governments. I have contributed to them via my taxes just as everyone else who pays taxes has. Your subsequent statement is an Appeal to Pity fallacy."
You're evading my point. You cannot claim that the governments' priorities are skewed and yours are not when both you and the governments choose to spend money on things less important than starving and diseased children.
"He did *not* say we "should not spend resources on paedophiles" he simply questioned the priorities under which the amounts of funding are allocated."
That's quite a stretch, particularly for a response to an article that said nothing about how much this operation cost the taxpayers. How about you and Ulm tell us how much you think the government ought to have spent trying to find a father who rapes his own daughters. Then find out how much this little roundup cost, and maybe we'll have nothing to debate.
"They do. It's called *money*."
That's a little better, but there's still two problems with it. 1) You have to prove that fighting pedophilia and and UNICEF compete for the same funding, and 2) Making that argument is hypocritical unless each penny you spend is spent on something more important than starving/diseased children. How much have you donated to UNICEF this year, and how much has gone into upgrading your computer and eating out?
"Who said anything about "waiting for the most important problem to be solved"? Those are your words, not mine or Ulm's."
Ulm argued that we should not spend resources on pedophiles because preventable deaths of children is a more important problem. My version is simply more generalized to demonstrate the implications of his flawed reasoning.
"Yes, like the "surprise" that people on here are willing to skip the concept of "innocent until proven guilty" and jump straight to demanding "castrate them with no anaesthetic" and similar sentiments..."
You're correct, my mistake...I should have specified that I desire the castration to happen with a splintery wooden spoon *after* being proven guilty. Not before.
"Should we *ignore* the most important problem of millions of children dying because it's happening somewhere else?"
Speaking of straw man arguments...
Can you my CPU just spent trillions of cycles playing the crysis demo while hundreds of children died from preventable causes? It's a traveshamockery!
Ulm's argument only makes sense if the two priorities compete for the same resources. If these police from 28 countries are typically busy saving starving and sick children when they're not putting their abusers in jail, then he would have a logical argument. But since it's more likely that these policemen are usually busy trying to fine people for going 5 over the speed limit, I think I'm going to applaud this effort as an extremely worthwhile use of our resources.
I find it hard to accept that anybody educated enough to know what a 'straw man' argument is would accept Ulm's logic as sound...But life's full of surprises.
Can you imagine a world where everybody waited for the most important problem to be solved before anybody could work on the second most important problem? Hardly a model of efficiency.
Castrate 'em with a splintery wooden spoon.
Lest we forget, .NET is a framework...I am unaware of any official standards for frameworks. What would be the point? Certainly you don't believe that the MS employee was trying to imply that .NET conformed to some official TCP/IP-like specification certified by IEEE. His word choice was a bit ambiguous and a little ironic (as you pointed out), but in all fairness, plenty of people use the word "standard" when they mean "broadly used or accepted."
I hate most of the same things about Microsoft that other people do, but .NET is not on that list. It's my experience that .NET gives companies the most bang for their buck. Today at work I wasted close to two hours waiting for my java app to compile, maven to build the ear, jboss to deploy the ear, etc....Over and over. I could have done it in 1/10th the time using the .NET tools. It's a strong framework with great tools and MS would be very, very foolish not to capitalize on its .NET reputation as it tries to compete with the flex/flash/AIR behemoth.
And thank you for bringing up the fact that HTML is a standard, which I assume was to illustrate the point that the most nasty, disgusting, terrible, pseudo-specifications some half-assed mad scientist came up with as a college prank can become a "standard", while truly good products may thrive without ever being called such.
I'll take my Java and my PHP separately, please. Java is OK for the enterprise, but it sucks for smaller, "quick and dirty" projects on a tight budget. PHP is great for smaller projects but sucks for enterprise. Putting the two together is like turning my hammer into a screwdriver.
Personally, I enjoy doing a bit of Java at work and coming home to a loving PHP box in the evening...The mistress isn't as fun when she's the wife.
Since Zend Studio was already written in Java and slower than molasses in the North Pole, its users will undoubtably feel comfortable moving to the slower than tree sap in the North Pole Eclipse platform. But for the rest of us that don't want to take coffee breaks while eclipse builds our workspaces, lets hope the really great PHP tools (Komodo, Maguma et al) will stay on top.
I agree with those saying the problem probably wasn't very straightforward to diagnose. I doubt the motherboard even POSTed, so memtest and the linux disk methods are out. I would have suspected the motherboard, the video card, the psu, then the RAM, in that order. I probably would have eventually gotten around to the real problem by testing the two modules individually (I think they mentioned there were two...). 3 out of 10 is pretty good for the beginners likely to work at "nerd herd" kinds of places for $10 per hour.
If you're even mildly surprised that a news network is willing to grossly exaggerate the facts to make the story more interesting, then your parents have probably neglected to tell you about santa, the tooth fairly, the birds and the bees, and never let you watch the ending of "Old Yeller."
@Joe - I'll be a tech in that company any day...12 hour days, no charge.
It's been rightfully pointed out that Gosling's quote had nothing to do with the meat of the article...But I do agree with it. Although I would substitute "scripting languages" with "weakly typed languages." IMHO, It's very difficult to write a scalable app when the principles of object orientation can be thrown out the window either on purpose or by accident. I did Perl in the CGI days, moved to PHP for all the same reasons everybody else did, used ASP.NET for a couple contracts and fell in love, and was more recently forced into Flex + J2EE. For small projects PHP rocks, but when you're writing a large app that has lots of reusable parts, I can't shake the feeling that I'm writing a bunch of "throwaway code." I'll take ASP.NET for scalability any day.
No matter how smart and flexible a framework or platform is, you're going to have serious problems if you try to make it do something it wasn't intended to do. Whether it's rails, smarty, or sharepoint, you have to evaluate how close of a match your project is to what the framework does. Even if it's a 90% match, that 10% might be painful enough to make it well worth writing something from scratch.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World's_largest_software_companies
I've worked as an extensions developer on SAP for a couple years now. This kind of thing is typical...They sell first, deliver later (if at all). Their business software does everything in theory, but it really doesn't do anything in practice. A standard ERP system costs millions to install (a few million for the software itself, tens or hundreds of millions for the armies of consultants required), and after you're done, you feel like you've somehow taken a big step backwards.
If you think Microsoft puts out crappy products and has shady business practices, give SAP a go and you'll think Microsoft is headed by Mother Teresa.
Blizzard doesn't care what people do with their software. They care that the maximum number of people buy it. If the majority of potential buyers might be discouraged from purchasing their software because they might accidentally run into some seriously perverse people, then its in their best interest and well within their rights to limit such activity.
I'm a 29 year old gamer, but not into WoW...No freakin' way am I putting money into a game if there's even a small chance I'm going to be exposed to wackos like those folks. Blizzard did a good job looking out for its own interests, which is just what I would expect any company to do.
Many people support freedom of speech so much that they completely ignore its counterpart...Freedom FROM speech. If I find your particular brand of expression revolting, I should not be constitutionally bound to be subjected to it. Keep it secret, keep it safe, keep it out of my friggin' living room.
I'm no IE fanboy, but any first-grade programmer knows that if you're accepting input from other programs, the onus is on you to validate it. Trusting data fed to you by external sources is idiocy. Firefox should own up to this one and keep its longstanding tradition of putting user security ahead of its own interests.
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