I was perplexed for the longest time how the republican party worked since all of their policies seem to be in favor of the rich. where did they get their votes? It finally clicked for me: they get their money from the rich (by favoring that segment in policies, taxes etc.) and the votes from the religious zealots (by appealing to the creationism, every-sperm-is-sacred etc. crowds).

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful. - Seneca

> I don't always write GUIs, but when I do, I prefer wx.

After that line, I swear I heard "stay thirsty my friends".

A reality check for congress critters and senate squatters:

http://blog.agrawals.org/2012/01/18/the-chart-every-member-of-congress-should-see/

Meeting halfway my ass. If the media companies were so precious that we needed all kinds of laws to specially protect them, how about protecting the much bigger industry that they are about to destroy?

"Hey let's go out for some Canadian tonight, Eh?"

FTFY.

But what the hell are you talking aboot? You do have Canadian Bacon. That ought to count for something.

I had the exact same feeling and I was on a ZX spectrum too! It was awesome changing one little variable to change the colors in a for loop etc.. you're absolutely right, that really got me hooked on programming.

The "things" that matter the most to me, my most valuable "things", are protected by a flimsy wooden door with easily breakable hinges and easily pickable locks - my wife and kids. I would think if you apply your logic, then unless your wife and kids were locked up in a vault in, say, fort knox, you would consider it unsecure?

My point being that it's a risk/reward thing. If you have something on your tablet that needs 3 factor authentication, you would have 3 factor authentication. But not everything needs 3 factor authentication. I don't need to lock up my family in fort knox. Just like I don't need what I have on my tablet to be protected by a 3 factor auth.

Tugendhat - is he related to Tophamhatt? Together, they seem to have cornered the ground locomotion market. The barons are back!!!

> Why is this so hard?

Two reasons, from my experience:

1. we have large corporate clients (think multinational). They use our services exactly once every year. Over 1,000,000 people in total. Imagine the logistics involved to get a desktop/native application deployed - for that one time use? What if we need to tweak something halfway. How do we re-deploy?

2. That application is "distributed". Everyone does a little bit that is then accumulated. Sure, we could write a client-server app. Then we'd need to figure out threading issues on the server side, work out the communication protocols, work out locking issues. Or we could let, say, Apache handle the threading (we're good but i'd rather trust software that has undergone years and years of usage - there are other web servers that do this better, i know.) Let HTTP be the communication protocol. Let the backend database handle data locking issues (at least using standard SQL concepts allows everyone to be able to wrap their heads around the issues involved). You could argue that we could use a native app that then uses HTTP. For that, see #1.

Native apps were great. Far richer experience in terms of UI. But far, far, poorer in terms of distributed-ness and ease of deployment. Or, looking at it another way, the current state of things are due to the evolution of one native app - the browser. It's just that it comes with an established integrated communication protocol and a UI that's flexible/extendable and the guarantee that the shell/runtime is multi-vendor - but largely compatible and available on most computers shielding you from deployment hassles. So it IS a native app that comes with the pieces you need (comm protocol, extension language, widespread availability).

> how do you connect to a remote PC with bash and run your commands there? Oh, you can't. With PowerShell you can easily do that.

man ssh

specifically the part about "if command is specified, it is executed on the remote host instead of a login shell".

Your move, chief.

> The hard cold truth is that Windows Server is used on around 50% of servers

Yeah? where did you pull that number from?

> Linux is fine for hobbyist stuff and some real work

'some' real work? are you kidding me? You're right. Hobbyist stuff. The same hobbyist stuff that's been paying my bills for over 12 years now.

I always thought that was bullshit. How do i *Know* if the email was intended for me? because it's got my email address, that's how.

Now, how can someone demand that i "promptly delete" the email? i have server logs, backups, and a whole array of things (required - as i understand it - as part of SOX) that would have to be scrubbed. Who's paying? The sender wants me to foot the bill to do all that when i had NO say in whether or not I got the email? How about if I sent the sender an email everyday - unintentionally - and ask that they scrub all of it off their servers? Would they do it? Just because I said so?

I would love to send the senders of those fucking boilerplates something to the effect of - "since apparently you want me to observe a contract that i didn't agree to - which i did by scrubbing all the traces of your email - now it's your turn: the bill is $10,000, pay up, the invoice is in the mail".

I have been on the hiring end of it. I was disgusted and subsequently quit working with a big name 'Technology Consulting' firm - who shall remain anonymous - after their rep repeatedly referred to recruitment "sessions" (where they have a bunch of applicants come to their office and have me interview them) as "cattle call". Really?!! That told me a lot about how much value they placed on PEOPLE that they were working with.

I second "Thinking in C++" except for its craptastic typesetting. The content more than makes up for it though. However, If C++ is not your cup of tea. I'd presume "Thinking in Python" would be of similar high calibre. He does state that it's not a beginning book. But if you can grok Eckel's books, you can be sure that you've really understood the concepts - at least it was like that with the 2 C++ books.

after that, i'd say PAIP for those willing to go slightly off the beaten track. Once you have a handle of LISP (gasp!), any "new" language feature you might encounter in newer languages will not be intimidating.

> Even something like diamonds..

You may want to read the first line under this section: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamonds_as_an_investment#Financial_feasibility

The price you see for diamonds are because of controlled supply - NOT a limited supply. And you can thank these fine folks:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Beers#Legal_issues_on_monopolizing_and_fixing_prices

As someone else here said, this, to me, is like internet going into retirement.

i started reading /. around 98 and visit at least once a day (there are days i skip these days with 2 kids and all but still..). There were other sites that I visited at their prime (e.g. expertsexchange.com back when they were just starting out and were good and hadn't quite caught on to the "expert sex change" faux pas). But over time, /. has been the only constant site on the internet - and these days with family, almost the only site on the internet worth visiting.

The reason i've kept coming back is that I've learned a LOT from the discussions. Frankly, i've never been able to find something worthwhile to spend my allocated training dollars on because it would never even compare to what i learn here - training sessions have always been a waste of time..

I owe a lot of my success to the knowledgeable discussions here - from intricacies of logical fallacies, to language and grammer (i love the quote that i read here "i helped my uncle jack off a horse" vs "I helped my uncle Jack, off a horse" heh), views on what ethical non-douchey management should be (at least i hope i have been able to avoid becoming a douche to my employees) and last but definitely not the least the "news for nerds". The millions of contributors here have been my mentors - i started at a small company so i didn't really have one in real life.

And that wouldn't have been possible without you. I don't know you personally - and you don't know me but I wanted you to know that what you created has had a profound influence on me and a significant contributor to my own success.

Thank you and best wishes,
Hooya.

P.S. Now quit thinking about Natalie Portman and hot grits.