WTF is this? Religious people not just claiming a factually facist souverenity of all things moral but now also claiming the same about passion, poetry and emotion? WTF, dudes?

Just because I believe in science and reason, in the scientific method and in moral values by what Dawkins calls "intelligent design" - i.e. debating, weighing and reasoning - doesn't mean I'm not passionate. I have a diploma in performing arts, love poetry and music, am pratically addicted to dancing tango (i.e. holding hot cuties in my arms while moving to passionate music ... you'd get addicted too, trust me ...) and indulge in stoic philosophy and mysticisim and enjoy studiing and debating religious philosophy and architecture.

I just don't like some religious facist telling me - or anybody else for that matter - what they are supposed to believe, think, advocate, pray, meditate, celebrate or otherwise do due to some invisible dictator in the sky or some ancient bronce-age myth written in a book most people are to dumb to interpret correctly anyway! Or telling others that they will burn in hell if they don't chop of certain parts of their penis or will go to heaven if they wear certain clothes of blow themselves up with some unbelievers!

If anything I'd say that my likes - I like to call them 'free thinkers' - are *more* passionate about most things than 'religious' people, who simply have found a sad and sorry reason to turn off their brains when it comes to difficult questions.

I'm starting to believe we need a more outspoken movement for reason and gotta go out into the street standing right next to the Salafist handing out free Qurans and the J-Wittnesses with their watchtowers and hand out free copies of Hitchens' 'God is not great' and copies of Seneca and Spinoza.

Religious factions made up of losers are starting to claim to much space in public attention, imho. This is getting out of hand and needs a little counter-action, don't you think?

Yet animationmentor.com works just fine. Why? They offer specific training to a specific field, they teach all around the world, they have scheduled online classes using videochat technology, a tight curriculum with deadlines, they have scheduled mentor sessions with the best exerts in the field and they have anual student meetups and regional group meetups.

What's the lesson?
Don't just throw a bunch of material online and expect magic to happen. You have to take care of your courses and student either way. The only thing that's different is that you can save considerable operation costs on buildings, facilities ans such and can inlcude students from all around the planet without them having to relocate to your school.

My 2 cents.

FYI: Was posted on a tablet with flaky response. Sorry about the typos.

Apple is solidifing their fashion brand appeal, no doubt about it. This is their single largest feat within the last 1,5 decades: They've managed to become the only tech company in the world that factually is a fashion brand in broad perception and a tech brand with a professional reputation. Brilliant, that's what.

Sad thing they've been pissing of us opinion leaders with golden cages and lock-in in recent years. I just bought my first non-apple device in 8 years - a refurbished Lenovo ThinkPad. Couldn't say I'd by an Apple computer again. They're still good, Maveriks, hw integration and all, but having to sigh up just to get the FOSS compilers and all just doesn't scrub the right way with me.

My 2 cents.

Perl is pretty bizar in a hilarious sort of way - almost every aspect of it. PHP, being Perls former template engine, sheds most of that just to add in it's own featureset from wonderland. Both get the job done, PHP a little more so.

Coulnd't say that for Lingo though. As far as regular usage PLs go, Lingo is about as shitty as it gets. 'Please' is an actual Lingo keyword - with no effect other than to make the sourcecode more polite. No joke. And seriously - that is not even its crappiest feature. If you want to kill braincells and a mixture of crystal meth and crack isn't fast enough, check out Lingo. Gladly it's basically gone extinct since the demise of Director, its platform.

Transcript is simular to lingo, without the outlandish crappyness - but still pretty bizar.

TypoScript is Typo3s configuration language. Think of a total programmer n00b learning just enough PHP4 to do turing complete stuff then inmediately trying to implement Basic for his CMS with it and failing one 3rd it but keeping the ruins as main means of configuration. Typoscript is what happens when a guy who can't programm takes psychoactive drugs and then takes a shot at it.... Luckyly there are some good oreillys on it, which makes it bearable. Sort of.

Perhaps the language with the most bizar appearance is Lisp./eLisp. How anyone could come up with that syntax is totally beyond me. It must be realy powerfull if it is still around. ... Then again, emacs is a very strange programmin itself, so no supprise here.

... things that are basically common senseor at least have been for about a century are 'discovered'?

Everything said here reads exactly like a bona fide copy of what alternative educational - i.e. non-mainstream one-dimensional eductation - methods have been preaching since the dawn of broad public schooling, right down to the insights into the development and function of the human brain. So diversity in education helps the brain and soul develop better? Wow, what an insight. ... No wonder our culture is in such a sad state.

One single drug run^h^h^h^hdive and the thing has paid for itself.

How long can it dive? What mods does this thing need to lengthen the dive+travel time to a few days or even a week or two, depending on its speed? Extra Oxygen, toilet substitutes, extra battery packs, stronger motors to tug the drugs, etc.

Could maybe be done, but it's not easy. Truth is, I think by now it's actually more feasible for the cartells to get their hands on decomissioned subs and their former crew. Or something along those lines.

... consider this:

How many people and projects use PHP? How many use another PL? How many fixes and updates would be in line for that other PL if it would have the same userbase. ... When did Ruby finally become UTF8 safe again?

Make it work, then make it beautiful.

If any PL incorporates this philosophy, it's PHP.
And AFAICT they're doing pretty well following it, don't you think?

My 2 cents.

With good reason. It's obvious by this that Wikipedia isn't doing enough to attract women to contribute. Such a small representation among women is shameful and certainly something must be done to address this glaring example of gender bias.

I'd say Wikipedia isn't good enough for *anybody* with more than two braincells to rub together to contribute to. Pseudoexperts deleting content without any explaination at all just because it was posted by anons, flat out wrong content, political scirmishes, lack of seperation of concerns and distribution of power, etc.

Wikipedia might be useful, but it is measurably worse than it needs to be. Try to do some useful contribution as anonymous to see what I mean.
I've stopped contributing to Wikipedia about 10 years ago.

Java combines the wonderfull readability of C++ with the blazing speed of smalltalk. C# is an innovative language from Microsoft that takes those two features of Java and adds in the portability of Visual Basic.

... so Agile can fuck off, yeah?

It's bad enough having to put up with all the "agile" bullshit at work, from their utterly pointless daily stand-up meetings to their fucking little cards on the wall everywhere (managers of the world: WE USE ELECTRONIC TRACKING SYSTEMS NOW). Add to that the unbearable Friday "retrospective" meetings (yeah, the last fucking thing I want to do on a Friday is sit in another pointless meeting talking about our problems) and then the Monday three hour meetings where we waste time voting on how long it should take other people to do their job instead of just fucking doing it.

I suppose you're talking about Scrum. As a Scrum Master, maybe I should give some hints.

Let me fill you in on some details:

1.) You're supposed to stand at dailies, so you are eager to finish them fast and so you're quick to move your cards on the board. That's why Scrums are timeboxed (with me it's 15mins max) and limitied to what you can discuss about. If the team doens't get through, no matter. Scrums over. Move your remaining cards and get coding. Be more brief tomorrow. It's that simple.

2.) After trying various electronic tracking systems we moved to cards on a wall. The crew gets away from their PCs and are forced to communicate with each other. And even the secretary and the sales team can use a pinboard without futher explaination, and when they join a Scrum they don't feel like standing in a room full of antisocial douchebags just typing away at their desks. Plus, when you are using it, everyone is watching, which helps you stick to the method. That's why I advocate pinboards for scrum tasking ever since. For huge amount of tasks managed in backlog software, printing the cards might be an option - we did that once - but a Pinboard it should be. People get their coffee or water and meet at the pinboard, not at the watercooler or the kitchen. Does wonders to project awareness and awareness of what others are doing.

3.) Backlog assembly meeting (BAM) - apparently your Monday 3 hour thing (makes me sleepy just thinking of it) - should be done by those who need to do it you don't need the entire team for BAM, especially if 300 tasks need to be judged. You do need the team for assigning complexitiy points, but that can be done if there's something the BAM team has no clue of. BAM task-complexity is temporary anyway, as is the setup of the team. If there's only editing and no programming to be done for the next 4 weeks, it's beyond pointless having a progger do BAM - unless you've got nobody else to do it and the programmer has some spare time. And only in Sprint Planning is complexity set in stone. And Sprint Planning / Sprint Assembly is a different meeting, also timeboxed (1 hour with me, Fridays (I've got weekly sprints)).

Complexity assignment should be done with planning poker, and shouldn't cover microtasking. It should only cover sellable features and one tasklayer below that. Also, BAMs should take place when you need them, not on a fixed date. That's a recipe for timewasting. That aside, planning poker is fun and lets you walk through droves of tasks in no time. You get to judge effort and requirements and *everybody* on the team has an impression of what's coming up in the next few weeks. That is *very* important. ... This should happen in sprint planning the latest. Very often people of a certain field notice things that have been forgotten by management, long before the task is even due. Also very helpful and a big plus of a formalised method such as scrum.

4.) Yes, Scrum has an overhead, just like any other method. Quit whining. The job of Scrum is to keep the overhead to an *absolute* minimum while keeping everything else tightly organised and flexible on a sprint to sprint basis at the same time. If that doesn't happen, you or your Scrum Master is doing it wrong.

5.) Scrum gives your Scrum Master the power to tell you boss "Leave my guy alone, we're full up with tasks, unless you want me to bust this sprint and push everything ahead for the amount of sprintdays left." Keeping the bosses at bay is one big upside of scrum and one of the many tasks of work-organisation. ... Imagine what that would be like if it weren't for the method. ...

Thinking of it, maybe your Scrum Master should take you out of the team and hand you over to your boss and his sales team as their personal coding monkey for a few weeks - maybe that would change your mind. I'd do that. You'll come back loving Scrum and Agile so much, you'll want children from it. :-)

My 2 cents.

Idiots in charge. The Mayor is complaining that it took weeks to get email on his smartphone. That certainly is not a Linux problem. And if their groupware is still based on Exchange that needs some bizar mobile setup, it's quite a stupid idea to switch to Linux in the first place, if you aren't ready to switch your groupware aswell.

This is awesome. I bet he's very thoughful about it - you don't do this sort of thing on a whim. Truth is, his boys will have a lesson for life and are very likely to end up way more useful to themselves and society than the average couch potato that plays CoD and doesn't think once about how much of a war simulator it may be.

If I'd have a son that would be into CoD or other warfare simulators and would have the time and resources, I'd do the same. I'd like to take my daughter and her friends to visit the sweatshops in Bangladesh, where the Primark clothes are made. Sadly, I don't have the time or resources. ... But she was in malasia for half a year. Indian family where girls/women are second-class citizens and slave-servants sleeping on the floor and all. She did learn her share.

My 2 cents.

Applications and confidentials are usually built by people who don't have a clue. That's the norm these days and you should know that by now. The non-sense I've seen in the last 15 years in this area is bizar beyond words, both in type and amount, and I'm sure every slashdotter here has an evening full of stories to contribute on that subject.

I personally wouldn't even fill out such an application. If I can't talk to the team beforehand to evaluate - for both sides - that an application would make sense, I don't even bother. And a short 2-liner E-Mail is enough to lead up to such a phonecall.

My 2 cents.

COBOL was better than JavaScript.

Yeah, right. ...
Dude, give me a break, you're being silly.

Sure, JS it's a tad more ambiguous than PLs from back when we used punchcards, but, come on!
So, yeah, JS has lose typing. Newsflash: That is a *feature*. You have to know how to handle it though (hint: COBOL style isn't going to get you anywhere here).
So it would be tricking writing ERP, because JS has more rope with which you can hang yourself - so, yes, you do actually have to watch out what you are doing in different way nowadays. And yes, there are a lot of non-programmers out there today writing code - I'm trying to write an extension for Typo3, so tell me about it.

So JS uses Protoyping instead of Classes - that's a feature too - get with the programm.

I don't like the syntax of JS either, it's ancient by todays standards and I'd prefer Python. But I can test my JS on the nearest computer, because the runtime is everywhere.

Truth is, JS runs everywhere nowadays, and allthough you should expect callback hell when writing larger serverside apps, that's actually an encouragement to do things unix-style for non-trivial projects. That's why so many people use it. Even those that can't programm. ... Yeah, that's anoying, but repairing their shite earns us the bucks, so go figure.

I suggest you sit your ass down, take a deep breath and get yourself aquainted with some non-amature JS code. There's a nice Oreilly called "JavaScript - The Good Parts" to get you started nice and easy.

But don't forget to chase the kids of your law before.

My 2 cents.