Craiggybear

He's right. Best stuff I've ever done involved zero noise and distraction. But really, I'm just antisocial.

There is something seriously wrong with human civilisation.

Building a Death Star out of steel is probably as good an idea as building it out of wood.

What? SQL is virtually plain English and is efficient across a range of database architectures for moderate-to-complex join situations. Its just an implementation of Boolean Algebra with a thin abstraction layer that uses words like SELECT, JOIN, FROM, WHERE, etc.

If you have performance issues, its invariably because the structure of your data is less than optimal or you have many linked external tables. Or -- you are really bad at efficient query design. Even highly experienced SQL-ers always look at old queries and realise that they could be three times faster and half as big, and if there is a performance issue then that's the first thing they'll review.

Humans have been 'understanding' SQL very well for nearly forty years -- without modern refinements like graphical query designers, either.

Not all data is a suitable candidate for an RDBMS solution, I am the first to agree, but there's not actually much wrong with SQL when what you need is a relational table store.

There are a few bad implementations of it, though, it is true, and a lot of people who can't seem to grasp SQL for what it is.

Edit: I am myself a huge fan of NoSQL solutions and always seek to rationally justify a non-relational datastore solution where practical or possible. NoSQL isn't a replacement for SQL (with all its imperfections) for the kind of slicing and dicing where it is needed.

Neither do I.

I think just because you can do something to prolong someone's life, there used to be a time when a good doctor knew this didn't automatically mean you should.

I know my grandparents didn't fear or refuse to believe in death in the same way as people do now (and they had seen a lot of it). I hope I'm strong enough and happy enough with myself that I will gladly relinquish my hold on the reins of life when its properly time to do so, and not fear it or be sad.

Also agreed.

"Quantum computing could be five years away"

They said this fifteen years ago on a radio broadcast. I was sitting there. I heard it.

Now, for the last time, where is my jetpack?

I think I recall Paul Irish once saying even closing tags of certain types (<li>, <p> etc) were also unnecessary. The start of the next tag should also signal the close of the previous one (unless you want to nest stuff) -- so whether the </p> or </li> tag or whatever is there or not makes no difference.

HTML parsers cope quite well with that (and have done for a while) but I don't do it. Although I am guilty of not bothering with the type declaration in scripts that are JavaScript <script src="..." />

I know I'm just plain lazy and wrong.

"Excuse me ... but which one of us has a penis".

I have in fact been in the room when someone has actually said this. It was intended as a joke and the lady to whom he was addressing his query (who just happened to be his boss) was also in fact highly amused by it.

All the other men just sat there with their mouths literally hanging open.

LOVE IT!

Your interface has to be a metaphore for a real-world process. If it isn't then you are a) doing it wrong or b) there is no direct mapping to a real-world process.

Sources?

Good question. I can't see this just yet, but it will happen. Probably by 10.9 which won't even have a command prompt -- or at least not one you can access easily without invalidating warranty or some such nonsense.

Yeah, I'm still with Leopard 10.5.8 ... I don't like the direction they're taking with OS X but I'd seen this coming for a while.

I can see the next release after this being effectively a completely walled garden desktop OS without even a command prompt.

Oh no, not ominous at all ... look for this list of three choices being reduced to the first two. Coming soon.

Already?

Soooooo ... why are they telling everyone? Forewarned = forearmed and all, yo. Won't work. Unless they have something totally different planned and this is a simple misdirection.

Very nice effects well rendered! Image quality was fine.

Ugh. Its a licence to sleaze with ease. And no comeback. Deplorable. Makes one's flesh literally creep.

Absolutely shocking story. It must have been gut-wrenching.

This sort of shit is like a red rag to a bull for me. I would have went ahead and called their bluff and let them get it into court; I would have hoped against the odds that with all the evidence you had the judge would have thrown it out and it would have cost those bringing the action dear.

Of course, reason might not have triumphed and you would have lived to regret it.

But that's just me, and I'm an idiot. Though, I like to think, an idiot with principles.

Fair enough.

"But more importantly, the problems I'm solving can't be more easily solved using another stack."

Its a sweeping statement to say the least.

I know the VS IDE and such often prevent you doing dumb things/shooting yourself in the foot and its great!

But are you saying that in the entire development universe there is no solution adequate to any serious problem that didn't come from the MS stack? You'll have never done anything like massively parallel computing or big/complex data sets then. Or AI development.

Air Traffic Control system in .Net, for example? Nah.

.Net is a just a general-purpose tool for writing certain kinds of software. That's all. And it is telling that none of Microsoft's core products (the ones that earn lots of cash) are even remotely going to ever be converted to .Net or managed code.

No. He'll pass a law requiring us all to be cyber-converted. Whether the tech is mature or not.

See this all the time. Its astounding what some of these people get away with.

Oh I have worked with codebases (in large financial institutions and in engineering applications) that are meant to be contiguously maintained for more than a decade. They have been working nicely 16+ years and are easy to maintain with no downtime. Obviously, none of it involves the CLR or .Net. On the other hand, I've also seen seriously big projects ruined by .Net with no handover or documentation. But worst, no accountability. I've also seen a few successful ones but I would expect that culture to deliver continuous quality -- but it surely hasn't.

That's why I am saying that most of these claims people bandy around about enterprise computing are nonsense.

Well, I don't ... and it isn't just me who thinks claims made about the "enterprise" are pure marketing BS.

I no longer do .Net development and leaving it all behind was a breath of fresh air. It was ridiculous.

I find it monstrously overblown and while its proponents/fans call it elegant I think its a horrible inelegant mess. Great if all you do is Windows, no doubt.

Plus I don't trust Microsoft on Mono (which at one time I thought was a neat idea) and I don't trust them not to dump their existing .Net devs like they did with VB6 sometime down the line and without warning as soon as they and their marketing department decide the next shiny-shiny programming paradigm has arrived. There are plenty of rumours about this and I frankly don't discount any of them as being too far-fetched.

Ah. That figures. Frameworks. Geez, there must be a whole raft of new ones in there now.

Thanks for the info.

Really? Glad in many ways I am still using 10.5 then. I've no problem with stability. As you mention it seems quite rock solid.

I had no idea that the memory requirement for 10.6 or 10.7 was so high (I've heard anecdotal comments from non-tech friends). But then I'd also heard the official Apple line that 10.6 was meant to be better at memory management and slightly faster than 10.5 because the binaries were no longer dual PPC and Intel -- just Intel.

So, in God's name, why are the later versions so resource hungry?