Posts by sisk

Re: How does Adobe stay in business?

It is rather less painful

Here I have to disagree with you. My server side scripting language of choice, when I'm given a choice, is PHP (for a number of reasons I'll not go into at the moment), but CFML is ludicrously easy to work with. Adobe's implementation of it is in some ways ahead of (Java POI integration) and in some ways behind (CFScript syntax, optimization) Railo, but both are relatively painless ways to get the job done.

Re: How does Adobe stay in business?

How? Because nobody has come up with any real alternative to their products.

Yes, they have.

Sure, there are PS and Illustrator clones out there, so why aren't people using them?

PS and Illustrator are the industry standards. THere's very little PS can do that Gimp can't, but anyone with a design degree in the last 20 years or so has had classes on PS. Ditto for Illustrator and Inkscape.

Also, as far as I know, there NO alternative to Dreamweaver

Kompozer

or Coldfusion

Railo, or BlueDragon.

or Flash

HTML5 + CSS3 or, failing that, it's still possible to use Java applets to do what it does (you know. the things we used before Flash?)

although Flash is fading away now that enough people have the bandwidth for real video and sophisticated interactive can now be done with Java.

You just triggered my pet peeve. Java != JavaScript. They're two totally unrelated languages which just happen to have a similar name. Java was made by Sun about the same time Netscape made the first version of JavaScript.

Re: The media strikes again!

OF COURSE we fear identity theft more than getting shot by a stranger. Identity theft happens all the time. Getting shot by a stranger is incredibly rare, despite that the extreme left wing and mainstream media would have you believe. Look up the statistics and there's a couple orders of magnitude of difference.

As for the perceived increase, well school shootings have increased. They just plain didn't happen before the mid 90s. Other crimes may have decreased (though you wouldn't know it from watching the news), but school shootings are far more common now than when I was in high school.

Re: The end ?!

I saw precious little of Colin Baker, but McCoy was a pretty strong Doctor in my opinion. He was no Tom Baker, but he wasn't bad.

Re: Social skills and techies

if you don't understand people and understand technology enough to properly troubleshoot and fix it, you are not a good support engineer.

That's why the first person you talk to when you call tech support is usually using a flipbook.While it's possible to have excellent people skills and technical skills in the same person it doesn't seem to happen very often.

Re: Eric Raymond's (in)famous quote

Cutting through management waffle is fine. Being derogatory I don't think is necessary.

Indeed. Direct, blunt communication is one thing. Profanity and personal insults are another. The former usually saves trouble. The latter causes problems more often than not and is considered by some to be a sign of immaturity.

Re: Ugh

I live in a town that shares its name with at least 40 other towns in the US, all in different states. Google it and you'll likely get the one in New York first (unless Google happens to detect you're here that is), us second, and then the other 38 further down. It's not at all unusual a phenomenon in the US.

Re: Hooray for Apache!

I moved the last one when the Open SSL mess hit

Which was the first major hole in how many years? And not even an Apache bug at that. IIS could have the same vulnerability if you were running Open SSL on it (though admittedly I can't think of any reason why anyone would run Open SSL on an IIS server - anyone that fanatical about using OSS wouldn't be running IIS in the first place).

and i'm glad I did looking at the latest OSS catastrophe with BASH.

Shellshock? Which was an issue for what, a couple days, tops, before the patch was in every major distro's repository? Debian had it before I'd even HEARD of Shellshock (I was too busy to read the news that week). Compare that to how long IIS bugs stick around. And it's not an Apache bug either.

Yes, Heartbleed and Shellshock were serious vulnerabilities, but they were fixed very quickly and you're fooling yourself if you think IIS' track record is any better.

You misunderstand what a militia is. Militias do not drill. They do not train and they do not have standing membership. The militia is made up of whoever is willing to jump out of bed in the middle of the night, grab their gun, and go fight to defend their homeland, be it against foreign invaders or against a government out of control. That's what the militia the men who wrote that amendment had belonged to was. Just guys who happened to own guns and had the balls to use them. These days there's a mistaken tendency to think of para-military groups as militia, and in a sense they are, but that's not all there is to a militia.

Re: ...except as...

"I Hope You Leave Here And Walk Out And Say, 'What Did He Say?'" - George W Bush

I think about half the audience leaves saying that about every time he makes a speech even to this day. He really is fairly smart, right around the same IQ as the average PHD recipient, but good grief does he sound like a moron when he speaks. Some people just need to confine all their communications to the written word.

Re: good lord

so I'm thinking that running around with a half dozen banana clips and one of the "printed" rifles would be a wonderful example of the law of natural selection

The magazines are probably safe. The stresses exerted on them in real-world use are pretty minimal. Those printed guns though....yeah, I don't want to be at the same range as someone who's shooting one, let alone holding the damn things.

As far as the whole gun control issue, it's a very complex issue and it's not going to be resolved over night, nor is it going to be resolved by penalizing licensed and law abiding people.

Exactly my view on the matter. We don't need rednecks toting around 50 cal sniper rifles or Vulcan cannons, but at the same time you're not going to reduce crime by taking away their hunting rifles.

That being said, I think the immediate, short term focus should be on mental health issues

Lots of us have been saying that for years no. No one seems to be listening.

There is no such thing as an accident with a fire arm.

Here I have to disagree with you. Stuff happens, especially with cheap guns. I've seen a gun go off when the owner pulled the slide to chamber a round. I've also seen one get dropped and go off when the guy holding it had a freak muscle spasm. Fortunately in both cases no one was hurt. Another case I saw a pistol explode as, near as I can tell, every round in the magazine decided it needed to go off at the same time. That person wasn't so fortunate, but lucky for her there happened to be a few paramedics out shooting that day. All three were very cheap guns, which is why I won't buy any brand I've never heard of, but accidents DO happen. Thing about it is though they're exceedingly rare, even with Hi Points (if there's a cheaper brand I don't know it).

The number of people injured, maimed or killed by driving (even if they're licensed) is exponentially more than all of the firearms related deaths combined (excluding military crap).

My dad says the exact same thing, and after 30 years of scraping people off the street and into the back of either an ambulance or a hearse for a living he'd know.

Re: @ A J Stiles

There are times when someone with a firearm handy stops or reduces a crime. There's also many times when someone with a firearm escalates something, or shoots at a legitimate target and misses (see NZ cops killing innocent teenagers), or has their gun taken from then and used either against them or on someone else.

True enuogh, but the fact is that the first one of those outnumbers the latter two massively, especially if you take into account all the times when someone averts a crime simply by HAVING a gun and doesn't have to fire it.

Re: @ A J Stiles

O.K. Name some property that you consider worth more than your life.

Not that I'd consider it property, but my family's safety is worth more to me that my life. Truth is I'd probably let someone steal all the stuff I own before I'd pull the trigger. But give me a reason to think you're a danger to my family and I'll double tap just to make sure.

My family's safety is worth more than some rapist or serial killer's life to me. If you've broken into my house I don't know if you're there for my stuff or if you're a rapist there for my wife, or a pedo freak there for one of my kids, or a serial killer there for any of us. You'll get a chance to leave if I can give you one, but when it comes down to shooting someone or putting my family in harms way I'll shoot someone and deal with having trouble looking in mirrors for a while.

Re: it is rare for civilian US gun owners to use their weapons legally against criminals

I would also point out that by far the most common method of using a gun against criminals is to simply point it their direction, tell them to go away, and not pull the trigger. I've done this myself twice, once with a gun I didn't even have any ammo for (the guy trying to break into my house didn't know that, obviously). It's pretty rare that you actually have to shoot the criminals. Usually you point a gun their direction and they're happy to leave you alone. Those situations probably outnumber the criminals getting shot by 10-1, but they don't show up in the statistics.

Re: Why?

or why they're so desireable.

In my case it's mostly that I grew up shooting DCM with an AR-15. A bit of nostalgia, a bit of familiarity, and that's about it.

Should I ever find myself in the unenviable position of needing a gun to defend myself I'd much rather have a 12ga or a .45 pistol, and I can't think of anything I'd consider hunting with a .223. For deer my weapon of choice is an old M1 Garand that's been around longer than I have and for game birds it's back to the shotgun. There's really nothing else worth hunting here unless you like rabbit (I don't) and I'd opt for a high power pellet gun or a .22 for them if I were going to hunt them. If I were to find myself in need of an actual battlefield-worthy gun I'd want an AK-47 or, if we were going short range, an AA12.

Literally the only place my first choice of guns would be an AR-15 is on a shooting range, and then only if I'm shooting for fun. It's just not a practical gun for much of anything else. Even so if I ever got the chance to get one I'd take it.

Re: From semi-auto to auto

Has anybody tried this? Is there any technical reason why it shouldn't be done?

I haven't tried it, but I have a friend who attempted to turn a semi-automatic .22 rifle into a full automatic (yes, he's an idiot, but he's usually good whenever machines are involved). What he ended up with was a rifle that'd fire 2 rounds and then jam every single time. Judging by his lack of success I'd have to say that the process isn't as easy as you'd think.

On the other hand I have another friend (a gunsmith who actually gets paid to repair guns) who accidentally made a full auto AR-15 once by forgetting to put in a certain spring. (In case you're wondering he took it back to the shop and fixed it after the first unexpected burst.) It stands to reason that there's a significant difference between something that was engineered 'down' from full auto to be semi-auto, like an AR-15, and something that was designed as a semi-auto to begin with, like a pistol.

Plus it would have to be a very heavy but low caliber pistol for anyone but a very experienced shooter to control in full auto. You'd need something that weighed like a Desert Eagle but fired 9mm for it to actually be usable, which is about what a Micro-Uzi is.

Re: Defending against the government in the US

....an adequate rifle is a tool that can help feed the family. Hunting isn't just sport.

That's no joke. Have a thumbs up.

I know multiple families who'd be living off beans and rice if you took away their hunting rifles or deep freezes. You can tell the hunters who consider it a sport from the hunters who consider it a survival technique pretty easily: these guys don't have trophies because they don't have extra money to give a taxidermist. What they do have is chest freezers full of meat they've butchered themselves that needs to last till the next hunting season.

Re: lets look at this in another way..

No, for a start, you can transfer a pic, file, or contact, via Bluetooth¹ to any bugger who's got a non-Apple phone.

Ok....you're kidding, right? iPhone's can't talk via Bluetooth to non-Apple products? My disgust with Apple just rose a couple notches. Believe it or not pushing things around via Bluetooth is something I do all teh time.