Twitter?

Banning power companies from door to door selling would be BRILLIANT. I am sick of those guys - the amount of crap they spew is incredible. I've heard it all - "Oh we're just dialing in the new power service", "We don't want you to buy anything", "We're not selling anything" and "Can we just see your bill" are all very common. None of them can answer the question "How much money will you save me?" - so I shut the door on them.

I imagine that someone with no idea about the technology could very easily be sweet-talked into changing their billing company all for no benefit. Go ACCC :)

BTW I have found numerous times that when stuck on the phone to some company, saying "Fix this now or I'm calling the ACCC" often gets your issue fixed.

According to the web developer toolbar -> Information -> Page Size:

Documents (8 files) - 57 KB
Images (14 files) - 278 KB
Objects (2 files) - 409 KB
Scripts (4 files) - 102 KB (311 KB uncompressed)
Style Sheets (2 files) - 25 KB (124 KB uncompressed)

Total 872 KB (1179 KB uncompressed)

Hardly any of them are in it just for the money. The ones that are just drop out during uni when they realise that you need a brain. I've only met one or two coders who really salivate over the money. Most just want an interesting job to work on and good people to work with.

Maybe Australia is different, but 99% of the coders that I've worked with would never drop the ball in order to just make more money (I can only think of one guy and he was a genuine psychopath). All of the good ones stick around and get the damn thing delivered, normally even when that means late nights and horrible bosses. We have professional pride and always strive to deliver the best possible system given the constraints. If you don't, then word gets around pretty quickly and you'll find it very difficult to get more work. You can always spot these people, they have lots of 3-6 month projects on their resume, and when you drill them for details it's always a bit too vague.

Wow, really? Maybe you should try using notepad and vbc.exe to compile. Super quick!

Java and Visual Studio less skilled developers? Nope. No it doesn't.

But thank you for your disclosure, that explains a lot.

Here here. Well said. If you think you can do everything without structured data you've never heard of accurate reporting before, which is what businesses need to be competitive and not waste money and all that fancy schmancy business stuff.

Insightful? People like noSQL because it allows them to have messy unstructured data and not do any data modelling.

We're still using SQL 20 years later because it's a great layer between your OO code and your relational data. Unless you want to use a heirachical database (which no-one does) SQL works fine. Sure you can use an ORM but at some stage you'll need to handle the conversion between relational and OO.. unless you're happy being ignorant as to how your database works and not be able to performance tune anything.

Yeah, what morons. Imagine shielding yourself from explosions by using the strongest transparent material available!

The clue's in the name:

> was found hidden inside an unoccupied office in the Icelandic
>Parliament, Althingi, connected to the internal network

It was Al's thingy wasn't it?

I was there last week. Facebook is blocked. Twitter is blocked, Youtube is blocked. Blogspot is blocked. Yes, the firewall is there.

Stop. Just stop now.

I'm sick and tired of rape jokes. Rape is not funny. Just don't.

The other day I overheard a 12 year old repeat a rape joke from family guy. It takes a lot to appall me but that did.

Best for you right now? Update your .bashrc file.

Best for all the people who miss this little nugget? Include it in the kernel.

Excellent quote.

Timothy, you're asking the wrong question. "Is anyone using this system in production?" bzzzz, wrong. The correct question is "What systems are people _using_ in production?"

A few years ago I completed a massive stop motion project:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nd0nQE_nw20

which has over 6000 shots, and used a combination of webcam shots, digital camera shots and a live action camera.

I will like to venture the opinion that the software for stop motion animation is generally terrible.

I tried out a bunch of software and almost all of them were either :

- Too expensive

- Crashed too often

- Difficult to use

- Had practically no features

- Were impossible to evaluate

For something that's such a simple thing, take a bunch of shots and join them together, the software that's out there is _terrible_. The only one that was even vaguely plausable to use was Stop Motion Pro - and even then it was expensive. The only caveat that I'd like to add is that it was about 4 years ago.

I ended up using software called MonkeyJam, which even still crashed frequently, and used Adobe's Premiere Pro to join it all together. It was a nightmare.

This article is a basic puff piece on how nice and easy everything is, in particular:

"Young kids can make a film in their room and distribute it and have half a million people view it"

what a load of rubbish. Show me a bunch of stop motion films that a bunch of kids have made in their rooms with over half a million views. Unless it's spectacular nobody is going to view it.