A court of law is no place for honesty.

24 hours == 8 weeks of a 3x per week course. That's a reasonable amount of time to learn something.

I'll blow my moderation on this post to say: I wrote the "Perl in 24 Hours" books and this is exactly how it started out. I'm not sure how the other 24 Hours authors did things, but this is how I did it. I taught perl in night classes in the late 90's as part of a retraining effort for programmers that used COBOL or something else.

Classes were two nights per week with about 3 hours of effective class time, over a span of 3 weeks (18 hours). The book's chapters, exercises, and examples were right out of the instructional material (that I wrote). About 30+ minutes of lecturing, whiteboarding, and walking through the examples; the remainder of the hour was lab time to do the problems given. (I always did "open lab" during the lectures too, but time was set aside for those that needed to pay close attention.)

The remaining time in the class were "applications" of what was learned in the earlier sections -- writing useful programs to perform a task. The tasks changed as time went by based on interests of the class, industry needs, etc.. and how bright the students were in that bunch. Each edition of the book (there are 3) has a different set of 6 chapters at the end following this same trend.

To write the book was relatively easy: just lift the lesson plan right into the book. Hour by hour, chapter by chapter. The pacing was right, the material distribution was right, everything worked out.

It sold a ton of copies and is still paying enough royalties to take my wife out for a nice dinner every month. :)

I work in payroll software and it's *far* more insane than this. This is just a timed rate change. When bigger stuff happens -- like the dual employer/employee federal withholding change last year or the COBRA credit the year before -- things get crazy.

When last-minute crap like that happens the *IRS* isn't even sure what to do. If a change gets passed, it will take a few days for the IRS to read the law and draft rules about how it'll work: the law is never specific enough and the IRS still needs to interpret it, develop reporting procedures, eligibility rules, etc.. For that entire time the major payroll vendors have frequent conference calls with the IRS for updates and questions so that they can change software to target what the rules will possibly be.

The programmers at payroll services are busy writing code against a spec that's still being written.

I think the grandparent poster won't ever see the humor in it being clouded with prejudices as he seems to be. After I laughed, I tried translating the joke to see if it might carry into another culture. *tries his stand-up Philosophy*

Time: Ancient Rome (say, Late Republic). And the audience would be Roman citizens of the time.

And yeah, the joke still works. The vague instructions from the learned man, the idiot all-too-literal slave, destruction of property, the graphic twist at the end. It's a good joke. In fact, framed this way, it might even be *funnier* to that audience.

Baloney. The breaking is funny too, if it's broken well.

Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die. -- Mel Brooks

Those stupid redneck hunters often have an enormous ability to laugh at themselves that shouldn't be discounted. I haven't hunted in a while (but my NRA membership is still current) and I found the joke quite funny.

Agreed, the article blows on tech details. Between the Gates-bashing and the Linux/Win95 wars in this thread, there's been a severe lack of technical discussion. Then again, it's Slashdot.

In a nutshell, it seems that name space extensions (NSE) allowed you to leverage using the Windows File Explorer to represent things that weren't really files and directories at all. Details here. Perhaps Novell was layering a document management system (or networked document management system) on top of NSE's.

If WP was managing the documents for something like a law or medical office where it's fairly easy to drown in folders and files, this would be a great selling feature and yeah, NSE's might be a good shortcut to that representation. But you'd think that when MS withdrew the feature a clever engineer could just emulate the Explorer's representation of objects that they'd worked so hard to build already to feed to Explorer's NSE. It wouldn't be the first time someone's re-invented that wheel, for sure. Hell, if I were that engineer, it might be something I'd already have around for testing. When you play in someone else's sandbox, you'd better be prepared for them to take their best toys and go home; at least there's always sticks and rocks to play with.

Any way you slice it having something like that sink your word processing software is possible, I guess, but only if you're position was already tenuous.

I'd take a Audubon rendition of a bird to be a reasonable description of a specimen of a species. Not science, but a reliable factual eyewitness account.

Of course, by oath, a Freemason wouldn't be able to confirm or deny if this document contains a description of a Masonic ritual.

*ahem*

ObClassicSimpsons:

    Bob: You wanted to be Krusty's sidekick since you were five! What
              about the buffoon lessons, the four years at clown college?
Cecil: I'll thank you not to refer to Princeton that way.

          -- "The Brother From Another Series"