how would we measure height anyway in one number through all frames of reference?

height in itself is a relative/local definition anyway. because we are spacedust.

i see this much simpler. trillian had a pro version, costed money, and even if it looked hackier, miranda was faster in keeping up. windows geeks chose miranda, and they were the only ones interested in multi-ims anyway.

not to mention the zeitgeist of computing in that era. putting stuff on your desktop which can change its color or appearance was the toy nowadays given to you more commonly in software designs. so while trillian looked cool, miranda could look cool too and worked and had all those badly programmed sad plugins you could try through.

it is kinda similar to the fight between winamp and sonique.

really liked it actually, thank you for flaming a good episode.

hash tables are pretty important, and he almost covered everything quite entertainingly. He definitely makes his students listen, very good teacher.

I agree, MIT and CMU do brilliant stuff too, but I am not sure, if watching the best will help you understand them, especially after reading your comment

I say GIZ would be a nice format for zlibbed gif. it would also ease the use as a verb.

This fall, never before seen in cinema, a new type of hero, the geeky Sophos Patcher, finds himself fighting a virus in corporate HQ: The question of the universe and everything and zombies... Get ready to be patched...

yes, clicking bay links infected my pc too. because they made me download stuff with my bittorrent application and then manually starting something i really really wanted by browsing the directory and finding the exe with a twist.

software is alive and needs constant maintenance.

if you want to win the "company has more income" game, its good for you. if you want to use your energy to create things worthwhile, and you know, you will still earn enough if you do it full heartet, then outsourcing is a danger to your software, since you cannot maintain it, rewrite it or make it better. if somebody is taking part in a softwareproject, he has not to be a programmer, he can even be a manager, and still will know a lot about the software he is participating in.

so it depends, if you already have seen through the momentary "wisdom of the hour" the human race plucks from the tree: business for money is just a global game nobody really wants to play, but work and creativity are necessities of every human being. so if you outsource, you can give other people chances, but if your project is important to you in more ways than money, you should try to be as local as possible.

I disagree partly.

i would not call every framework nowadays just clutter, since frameworks with bad APIs already lost a lot of influence in the last 10 years.

libraries are not written only by single individuals, they have communities behind them.

however, what the typical cluttered "framework" of yesterday was, becomes more and more the "CMS" of any sort. Thats an example, why you should not use php "frameworks" - because they are not frameworks.

django however is well made, you can use it as libraries and set it up as thin framework in nearly every python app, taking your ORM with you anywhere you go. Since I DID do database stuff by myself, I would say: dont think in frameworks, if the project ist PERSONAL. Since in personal projects, your aim is to be creative and learn. frameworks should not be learned, they should be fastly usable.

And thats where I draw the last conclusion: frameworks have improved, because many of them offer a fast "first glimpse" into their apis and coding styles, and do not try to invent a new code style alltogether. e.g. many say prototype is better in its core API than jquery. but jquery is hell of easier to learn, since it does not modify javascript too much.

Use frameworks and libraries as much as you can in your daily work - dont let pride stay in your way, but do not use it for your creative work - dont waste your time learning how to modify something big, if you just want to create something new.

pardon, didnt mean language, i meant framework.

ruby vs. python is another flamewar.

I have this discussion frequently with customers.

If you have people dedicated - use your people to let them use what they think it's best. If they like the adventure, you can also invite them to explore something else. You have to know, do they like the tech because they are geeky about it, or do they fancy the tech, because they are fanbois with big egos? First group I would let convince me of Ruby for the project and give it at least a try, for the second, I would wait until those programmers mature, and consider a choice more on sheer technical reasons - without any personal ones.

Otherwise, if I have to take a toolkit, I will blindly prefer django over RoR for amountless masses of reasons; but I know a lot of projects who stalled because programmers thought django is easy to master - and projects where django was too light weight to get it running in the direction they wanted to go.

I am a freak for django nowadays, but I learned about it quite early, and needed the db stuff personally for some small project you do if you should actually do other stuff, I would have never thought anybody else than some individuals will ever use it. With rails it was always more about being in a peer group, than liking the language objectively, so I say, do not ignore taste, for it shows insight, but also dont rely on blind fanatism in this decision, it's still a technical one (meaning: depending on your project setup).

your resumée sounds like mine. you just chose drupal over django, a choice i never would have made. php is over, really. it was only popular as long ASP and JSP were feared to become mainstream, now we have serious tools in the web, php is just the cheap aftertaste of the 90s.
also, with php you are basicly locked into the web business.

it does not matter how you are educated and which papers you have, getting a job is
  1. look who needs you and what is to do
  2. know what you want to do
  3. pick.

unfortunately, it depends on your country how you answer these question, it does not garantuee good salary to do what you love to, and lastly: sometimes it takes time. long time. life is up and down. so in the meantime, look that you can survive, and use your free time to conceive your own projects.

ah, last advice: people always advice. while you should take out compliments and critics of advices to consider, you should never think, anybody else than you can know whats best for your life. i think this is the best advice i ever got, just takes a bit to get it.

the word amateur indicates not being professional. however, it does not reveal knowledge, intelligence, dedication, insight, or anything else around whatever you do being an amateur, it only says, you dont do it for material exchange or have not seeked out renown terran academies where other people write you papers about what you can and cant do. Therefore the word "amateur" is a very peculiar word and should be as it was arrested in apostrophes.

The walk along the achievements of any terran who did not follow procedure in becoming professional, still is the only day, this word may leave its cell, parading with the victory, as a glimpse of hope to the non-achievers, a sign of shame or slight ridicule to others who own no papes, and at least maybe a slap in the face for any terran who sleeps on those papers he got.

Fascinating how a word divides us, shows us desires to work and achieve and be recognized in the system with titles and money, and still expresses our hate against it, as we start to look behind its condemning walls while we get older, harboring the hope the hipocrisy might end some day.

Or it simply reminds us of mass population pornography.

not to mention, I do understand, that the Xserver architecture and the Xprotocol were safe, and applications are a domain below that.

But we have to note, that although win95A did not ship "stable" at all in many layers, especially not the kernel and the drivers, linux did not perform well in all of the shipped layers either, so we have to stay with the conclusion: the linux kernel was stable back then, as were tested and trusted core systems. But windows had at least a very mature application interface in the API, and did some nice tricks integrating multimedia with directx later. Both of these technologies will backfire in the early 2000s, but for 1995, linux is generally not comparable yet.

On the stable core layers, linux was not alone, to mention. Also DOS based alternatives had a run until linux completely squashed their domains, except SAP.

true, but in windows 95A, the first incarnation of 95, the DOS layer itself was possible to be run on itself, even allowing using win95 dos only on machines which did not support 95A. This way, 95A however was sometimes shipped as an update to existing machines with 311&DOS6.

So basically, with 95B the whole game changed, since the underlying DOS was only a bootloader, but the 95A version was not.

I ran a 386 back then, built from scratch parts, with 95A DOS and win32s and norton commander, pascal&delphi, and all my dos games.

The change into wide adoption of pentiums in the population around in central europe was caused by 95B, which did not run anymore on 486 very well. So it could be, that through the effects of technological delay in my backwaters, I remember the small steps better, because central europe really had a late start in general computer interest, while I happened to grow up in accountant surroundings, where a win311 machine was de facto standard for years.

I just know, all that happened pretty pretty fast. 94->97 was a big change.

I was a heavy user when I switched to X in the late 90s, and I only got the aftertaste. Yes, video drivers were the first issue, which prevented me a long time to try linux on my machines, but I still remember various X restarts on GUI application based exceptions for a long time.

running stable in the linux world means that the kernel does not fry. Linux is very well in that. But the Desktop layer, which also involves multimedia nowadays, and at least 2d graphics back then, had always issues for a long time. So I call upon "myth" or at least "comparing pinguins to jelly beans".