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Comment Sound absolutely reasonable (Score 1) 948

Years back we needed people for a project involving formatting documents in Word and some scripting. We started out with requesting for peple that know office and did some programming. these people were more expensive and were mediocre at best. We dropped them all, and requested some random people with 'computer literacy', we requested 3 times as much as needed, with the understanding that we would drop 2 thirds within a week.

We did a day training and let them work on the most simple documents, we sifted through a third within 2 day's, most of them just finished students that were looking for a job, but were not able to find a job in their field (mathematician, chemists), and some high school dropouts. At the end of the week we had 10 people we did the project with, a few of them stuck around after the project for several months or years to become projectleaders, surprising programmers and 'MSWord Wizzards'.
The students were afaik able to get a job in their field of choice after working with us.

And the best part: It was a sound business decision.

Comment Re:It's a trap (Score 1) 758

Sorry, i seem to have given the wrong impression. The trap part is to lock developers and by extension users into the Windows environment. Someone else said it better: You can get away with some horrid stuff in .NET and it still looks like you made a nice program. It comes with the my nephew made our website kind of thinking. Programming, like all other creative processes, is part skill, part Art. The tools can sometimes hide or compensate a lack of skill. But at the end it comes down to the Art. For some reason I can not get my head fully around Microsofts programming platform. I like the small tools approach, creating independent (more monolithic) stuff that rests only on the Win32 API. This approach makes it work for all Win32 platforms. The stuff i made from scratch with .NET are not working any more, but my old Delphi stuff is still going.

Comment Re:It's a trap (Score 1) 758

sorry that you think that, mightbe that I’m just a slow learner, I never did enough work in the MS environment to get the hang of it. Somebody else said it much better that i can : .NET lets you make stuff even when you are an horrid programmer. I might be such a horrid programmer, but it never bothered me, or the functioning when I was using Delphi, and as the stuff still works.... but what am I arguing an abusive AC for ?

Comment It's a trap (Score -1, Redundant) 758

I'm still not sure with the whole .NET thing. What I see is that everybody seems to be putting it on their resume, but fail to read a small program. Also it does not really mean anything, what do you mean by .NET ? C++ J# C# VB.NET. I can only see it as a nice marketing trick from Microsoft. I find the library that comes with .NET interesting but rather fickle, it listens to the windows policies way too much. When I code something in my (rather archaic) Delphi environment it works from Win2000 up to 2008R2x64 without a hitch. The stuff I made in .NET needs to be recompiled sometimes when a new platform needs to be supported. The MS compiler is updated and it works again for all designed platforms. I know this is good for business for most .NET devs (keeps them coming back) but I find it a terrible sign of moving goalposts. I still can make stuff quicker in Dephi than with the MS environment.
Classic Games (Games)

Lost Online Games From the Pre-Web Era 186

harrymcc writes "Long before the Web came along, people were playing online games — on BBSes, on services such as Prodigy and CompuServe, and elsewhere. Gaming historian Benj Edwards has rounded up a dozen RPGs, MUDs, and other fascinating curiosities from the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s — and the cool part is: they're all playable on the Web today." What old games were good enough for you to watch them scroll by on your 300 baud modem?
Microsoft

Child Abuse Verdict Held Back By MS Word Glitch 191

An anonymous reader writes "Last week several defendants including one high-profile TV presenter were sentenced in Portugal in what has been known as the Casa Pia scandal. The judges delivered on September 3 a summary of the 2000-page verdict, which would be disclosed in full only three days later. The disclosure of the full verdict has been postponed from September 8 to a yet-to-be-announced date, allegedly because the full document was written in several MS Word files which, when merged together, retained 'computer related annotations which should not be present in any legal document.' (Google translated article.) Microsoft specialists were called in to help the judges sort out the 'text formatting glitch,' while the defendants and their lawyers eagerly wait to access the full text of the verdict."
Television

How High-Tech Gadget Trends Differ By US Region 51

Ant writes in with news of a study revealing differences in gadget preferences by US region. The survey is not rigorous, based as it was on 7,500 online questionnaires submitted to Retrevo, a website for tech shoppers. The company plans to run the survey annually. "...in the smartphone category, the state of Maryland came out on top with 48 percent more households owning at least one such handset than elsewhere in the country. ... In iPad use, the state of New York took top honors. According to the survey, 52 percent more households have at least one iPad in the Empire State. ... Massachusetts beat out the rest of the nation in e-reader adoption..."

Comment No problem printing to Serious printers (Score 1) 188

I have seen people say it before, but if you buy a more serious barcode printer than a Dymo thermo printer; like an Intermec, Zebra or Monarch they support (their own flavour) of an ascii based printing language. The downside is lock-in. once you got it working for intermac's (IPL) it probably will not run directly on Zebra's (ZPL). These printers are made to Always work, and in general kan handle quite a lot of physical abuse. You can most of the time put in special labels or ink transfers to make the label work in the crasiest of circumstances. These printers most of the time support stuff like Maxicode, PDF417 or Qcode becides some easier codes as Code128 and 3of9. The advanced ones let you even 'print' RFID's Spoolfiles tend to be extreemly small (like 200-400bytes for a label without an image, packed with barcodes) The downside is that you will not get a nice looking GUI, and that creating a label is like creating a dialog in Clipper. (does my age show ?)
The Courts

Submission + - Pirate Bay to buy its own copyright-free country

paulraps writes: Notorious Swedish file-sharing website The Pirate Bay is planning to buy its own nation in an attempt to get around troublesome international copyright laws. The organisation, the world's largest bit torrent tracker, has set its sights on Sealand, a former British naval platform in the North Sea that has been designated a 'micronation' and claims to be outside UK jurisdiction. With a target price of £500m it won't be cheap, but Pirate Bay says contributors will become honorary citizens.
The Internet

Submission + - Firefox 3 Plans and IE8 Speculation

ReadWriteWeb writes: "Information about the next versions of Firefox and Internet Explorer suggest that the two biggest browsers are heading in different directions. Mozilla has published a wiki page detailing its plans for the next version of Firefox, codenamed "Gran Paradiso". Among the mandatory requirements listed for FF3 are improving the add-on experience, providing an extensible bookmarks back-end platform, adding more support for web services "to act as content handlers" — all of which show that Firefox wants to be an independent information broker rather than a simple HTML renderer in its next version. Also in the works is Microsoft's IE8. According to ActiveWin.com, a Microsoft official at CES told them that work has already begun for IE 8 and it may be released as a final product "within 18-24 months". Looking ahead, it's obvious that IE will continue to hook into the advanced functionality that Vista offers.

So while IE7 and Firefox 2 were more alike than different (feature-wise they're practically identical!), with IE8 and FF3 we will likely see the two biggest browsers head off into different directions."
Patents

Submission + - IBM breaks patent record, wants patent reform

An anonymous reader writes: IBM set the record for most patents granted in a year for 2006. At the same time, IBM points out that small companies earn more patents per capita than larger enterprises and pushes for reform to address shortcomings in the process of patenting business methods: "The prevalence of patent applications that are of low quality or poorly written have led to backlogs of historic proportions, and the granting of patents protecting ideas that are not new, are overly broad, or obvious." And it's been committing itself to a new patent policy: "Key tenets of the policy are that patent quality is the responsibility of the applicant; that patent applications should be open to public examination and that patent ownership should be transparent; and that business methods without technical content should not be patentable."
Microsoft

Submission + - UK schools at risk of Microsoft lock-in

Robert writes: UK schools and colleges that have signed up to Microsoft Corp's academic licensing programs face the 'significant potential' of being locked in to the company's software, according to an interim review by the UK government agency responsible for technology in education. The British Educational Communications and Technology Agency report also states that most establishments surveyed do not believe that Microsoft's licensing agreements provide value for money.
It's funny.  Laugh.

Journal Journal: You have been... Goatsed?

About 2,500 people have had a (very) nasty surprise recently when they looked at their MySpace page. Let's just say a small image was replaced by... another small image. Only, the second one was from the infamous "Goatse.cx" (You remember THAT one, don't you?). But what exactly happened? Jason Scott, the owner of textfiles.com explains all -- or is it confesses all?. The email received are hilarious. Well worth a read and a chuckle

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