No quick decisions on sub program
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GLASGOW, SCOTLAND -- Canada&#39;s defence minister cautioned yesterday that no swift decisions should be made about Ottawa&#39;s controversial submarine program in the wake of the fire aboard HMCS Chicoutimi that killed a submariner and left the vessel adrift and
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Tycho:  I don't know whose fault it is exactly, mine or theirs, but I won't be installing Vista anytime soon.  I would like some crazy shit to happen when I minimize something don't get me wrong.  I want my windows to go Waja-wajow(!) is possible.  But if there's a great reason to "trade horses midstream" or whatever the going metaphor is I haven't discovered it.
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By Palenik, Charles John  Question: My office has had a series of "DISCUSSIONS" concerning placement of heat indicators on instrument bags. We need a third party to help m do the light thing.
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But we don't know when, and by how much. Here's what to do.
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The web is loaded with articles that tell you how to get started with VBScript ... there are a couple here! But there aren&#39;t too many telling you how to do the things that really count ... like administering
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Sandro Zic recently gave a presentation on Java and PHP, and posted his slides here. I didn't attend his talk, so I don't have all the facts, but I would like to comment on one of his slides [...]. First, a minor point. Limited or no OOP has rarely stopped any software from being enterprise-ready. Most modern operating systems continue to be written in C, and the large Cobol programs running on mainframes that manage your bank accounts and insurance do not use OOP. [...] Let's address some of his other criticisms: Virtually no multi-threading, Lack of maintenance tools, and Immature frameworks.
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Making investment decisions all boils down to answering two questions.
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I&#146;m on teleconferences several times a day. They&#146;re either great, or a mess. Some people don&#146;t know how to start one; other times there&#146;s no one in charge of moving the call forward or there&#146;s no agenda. Sometimes you don&#146;t know who is on the call. Save yourselves!
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Brian Moon has posted some thoughts about "the post" that Terry Chay recently wrote including comments on smart versus intelligent, object nonense, and funky function names.    So, if you are not smart, then stop coding PHP.  Its a good thing that C developers are smart.  They have to remember all those functions.  Assembly language developers donât have to remember functions.  I guess they are not smart?   Ok, that last paragraph was tongue in cheek.  Knowing 3000+ functions does not make you smart.  It means you have a good memory.  I will take intelligence over smart or a good memory any day.     His comments on the "object nonsense" makes note of the difference between functions and methods and the function naming issue - well, he has "no solid defense" as they do make it difficult to learn the language and send some developers running back to the manual to make sure the parameter order is right each time.
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Let someone else make the tough decisions.
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I'm back, with a very interesting topic too!  Joel Spolsky, ex-Microsoft Manager and software engineering guru has a new essay, How Microsoft Lost the API War that is creating quite a big storm in the blogging communitiy.  Joel posits that the priests in the holy Temple of Microsoft have lost their way, because it has split into two factions, and the wrong faction is winning. One faction worships on the alter of backward compatibility, while the other is led by fervent priests who are proselytizing to raise up the new gods of .NET and Longhorn. Joel suggests that the new gods will cause the destruction of the holy Temple because Microsoft's great victories were built on the altar of keeping customers happy with backward compatibility. Furthermore the old gods of the Windows API continue to grow more grotesque and cruel with the passing of time, driving former worshipers into the arms of the friendlier gods of World Wide Web.  This story sounds extremely plausible. I must admit that i fit the profile of the developer who used to develop on the Window's API, is familiar with COM and Win32 who now develops mostly using PHP and Python. However I continue to develop and maintain Windows apps that keep our customers happy, and we still plan to develop new Windows apps. Some points:  Temple of the Blind? Firstly, Microsoft is still a compelling place to work for to people who feel that they can make a difference. The Temple continues to attract talented people with a Unix background. For example we have the recent hiring of Ward Cunningham, author of the Wiki.  Microsoft is still able to keep talented people like Raymond Chen, and others like him who continue to look after the Windows API, and Longhorn apparently will still give high priority to backward compatibility. Open sourcerers like Miguel Icaza are sufficiently attracted to the .NET vision to stake their careers on Mono. Longhorn and .NET are compelling technologies, so even if Win32 is not so cute anymore, M'soft is providing something that remains very attractive.  What i do see M'soft doing wrong is that they aren't disseminating the .NET runtime fast enough. It remains an optional install in XP Service Pack 2 for example. Also their IE dev team appears to be hog-tied due to political reasons; nevertheless IE remains good enough, particularly when I can embed IE as an activeX control, something I cannot do with Mozilla (AFAIK) - Update: I'm wrong.  Temple of the Spider?  Secondly, people don't merely use a web browser. They run the web browser in the OS.  So let me ask you, if you are using DreamWeaver or HomeSite or Photoshop or vi or emacs or Gimp, how many of you are willing to give it up for a java applet (or whatever your favorite technology is) running in your web-browser? Precisely.  Temple of the Abandoned?  Third, Joel makes the claim that developers are not developing to the Windows API. Well he could be right. But I bet a lot of them are still calling Win32.  If you are using a framework or IDE like Delphi or wxWindows (or .NET or VB) then you certainly are insulated from the Windows API, but that doesn't mean that you're not calling the Windows API all the time. I don't see Borland dropping their Windows version of Delphi at any point in time.   In fact, the fact that many developers are using some form of framework is a compelling argument for Microsoft to enhance the .NET framework to attract developers who are using other frameworks.  Today, not that many students learn x86 assembler, but that doesn't mean that Intel lost the CPU wars. Just because fewer people are learning Win32 doesn't mean Microsoft has lost the API wars, if the frameworks run predominantly on Win32.  Temple of the Lost  Joel even warns you in the beginning that "because I'm talking about big trends, I need to exaggerate and generalize". But you still get sucked in because Joel Spolsky is a first-class writer, in the same order as Philip Greenspun or Eric Raymond. That makes him so persuasive and plausible. But this is not Indiana Jones and doomed temples, but Steve Jobs and reality distortion fields.  Other opinions:  Harry Fuecks (PHP is ASP's upgrade path),  Dennis Hamilton (M'soft is just covering all bases), Robert McLaws (Joel is wrong in 7 points), Oliver Travers (the web is not good enough), One Run-time to Rule them all....
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Less than thirteen months remain for US television stations to move off the old analog VHF and UHF spectra, into their new digital allotments. But even now, the FCC has to deal with stations that have yet to finalize their construction plans.
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Internet decisions aren't always made at Internet speeds.
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Many don&#39;t realize they are eligible; others feel application forms are too complicated to fill out. By Justin Pope / Associated Press.
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I think I've mentioned this before but on Saturday Feb 12th I'll be talking  about the Jakarta FeedParser at CodeCon  in San Francisco.  I published an outline  of the talk on the FeedParser wiki.  I'm hoping to have a 0.5 release done before then and havepotentially another suprise in the works.
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IF you can't decide if you're indecisive or not... help is at hand. Well, it will be in a few years' time.   By 2012 Google should have the technology in place to analyse every bit of information you type into the search engine.
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I'm trying to discover why three out of three of my selected hard-disk recorders refuse to work on my Debian Etch (Demudi) system. Once again I ask myself the relevant questions: Is it me ? Is my computer trying to tell me something ? Is it something I said ? Whatever the reason(s), my reviews of those three programs must remain in limbo until I figure out what's wrong. The applications are all known to run perfectly well on other machines, so I'm sure there's an external problem. When testing new applications one must be prepared with the newest dependencies. CVS sources are often required. Sometimes one must mutter obscure invocations. Alas, I was not sufficiently prepared. Time for a radical shift.