I fairly regularly send things out with USPS. I find that if your just using normal shipping or the lower teir ones, then yes, the tracking is beyond uselss. For priority or first class mail though, it seems to show pretty much every hop the package takes. I don't use UPS enough to have an opinion, but I can't stand DHL. They've managed to loose my package within the service center twice now (at the time, I was living in a college dorm, and it made it difficult to schedule a pickup and meet the guy so I would drive to the service center, and wait an hour to find the package. Although on the other hand, I didn't have this issue with the DHL in NYC when I lived there). I miss Airborne Express; they were so much better :-/
Michael_Casadevall
@Michael_Casadevall
Best posts made by Michael_Casadevall
Latest posts made by Michael_Casadevall
-
RE: USPS Package Tracking
-
RE: Bizarre "Find in Files" fix in VS.NET, 2005, 2008...?
I've worked extensively with both GCC and Visual Studio (and I use Linux both at home and at work), and suspect most people would say the latter is better. GCC on Windows is extremely painful to use, and as you yourself indicadted, it doesn't have full support for the Win32 API (this is a limitation of the w32api headers package vs. GCC itself).
IDEs work well for many people, and frankly, Visual Studio is one of the best products to ever leave Microsft, and its debugger deminates GDB in terms of functionality and speed (as well as ease of use; although Eclipse+GDB is getting better with each release). There is no equivelent to it on any other platform (XCode is alright, but Eclipse+CDT wasn't that great the last time I used it (I always felt there is a disconnect between the IDE and the build system and it was easy for things to go boom ...); I use vim with cmake or automake on Linux). When I ported a Windows based project to Linux, we used CMake to replace VS based system simply on the grounds that CMake intergrates quite nicely with VS (its not perfect, but its better then any other cross- platform build system I ever saw).
@tster said:
@beau29 said:
I remember once I did a project where I implemented serial communication over a single wire. Obviously, things have to be electrically grounded in a certain way to do this. And I had to learn a great deal about RS-232 and other standards. When I was doing this, I really felt like I was learning about the basics of computing, along with some immutable, universal laws about physics. But agonizing over, say, the ASP.NET page life cycle, or how Visual Studio 2008 compiles resources, or WPF dependency properties, just doesn't rise to the same level of learning or excitement for me. It just feels like I'm playing around in Scott Guthrie's underwear drawer, learning a whole lot of otherwise useless details about someone I don't really like anyway.
Funny, worrying about memory de-allocation and low level communication protocols makes me feel like I'm wasting my time. I program to be as productive as possible.
tster is completely right, do you want to handle everything by hand, or let a computer do what its good at and handle the resource management for you. There are times where low level programming such as hand written assembly are apporate, but those times are few and far between, and quite frankly, using Python (which is my perferred choice of doing quick and dirty apps) works because I don't need to think about it, my programs don't need to be optimized to the every last bit, I can finish my work quickly and not worry about having a crash or other bad things due to user error like freeing on a NULL pointer, or having an off by one error.
@beau29 said:
And I don't think I'll ever quit programming because, quite honestly, it gratifies me to earn a good living doing something that my colleagues say I'm bad at. I've been insulted by people who were probably even more stupid and incompetent than you, and my general response has been to go out into the open market and write myself a 20% raise. Believe me, as I sit here doing real-time programming in C++, I'm not a bit worried about the crummy database programmers (like you, probably) who used to run me down at my old jobs. But if it makes you FEEL better you can pretend I'm rotting in the gutter ;)
Quite frakly, your attitude sucks. People don't call your code or method of doing something crap without just cause. Learn to listen to some critism and maybe, just maybe improve yourself a bit. No matter how much of an expert you are on something, there is someone out there who is 10 times the expert, and by ignoring them, all you do is make yourself look like an idiot to those who you could learn something from.
-
RE: I'm all for activation codes, but this is ridiculous
@morbiuswilters said:
@ender said:
...if they didn't have 8:00 - 16:00 weekdays working hours until recently (now they work 8:00 - 20:00 weekdays, which is just a bit better)...
16:00? 20:00?? Hmm.. it looks like the drunk Slovenian (I know, redundant..) who built your country's only clock may have put some extra hours on there. In my country clocks only have 12 hours, but then again I don't live in a third-world country full of miserable alcoholics who are so poor they only have dirt to eat.
I will assume your not aware that under federal law emergency services* (you know, the guys who come when you dial 911) , as well as all branches of the US military use 24-hour time notation vs. 12? There are plenty of businesses and various government agencies which use 24hour time over 12.
Guess the United States is now "a third-world country full of miserable alcoholics who are so poor they only have dirt to eat."
* - Under the National Incident Management System (http://www.dhs.gov/xnews/releases/press_release_0367.shtm) requires all agencies adopt specifc proceeduces and response plans for handling emergencies across the board. That being said, I'm not aware of a single agency that used 12 hour time even before NIMS come into affect.
-
RE: Please use one of these browsers
I do use Linux as my desktop OS, and I use Windows at work, and I can say pretty clearly, that Javascript/AJAX/etc. support in Firefox for anything that does not require a plugin is identical (its the same codebase, all the javascript engine code is cross-platform compatible)
Now, I'm not going to pretend and delude myself that most businesses care about making their page work in Linux based web browsers. I would however think that businesses would care abotu firefox compability, simply because firefox's usage ranges anywhere between 10%-30% of current web browser usage. At worst, one in every tenth person uses firefox, at best, that goes up to every 1/3-ish. If I was a business with a few hundred thousand hits per day, I know I don't want to loose a potential 1/10-1/3rd of my userbase just because they don't use IE.
Forcibly checking a UA string to exclude based on platform if a site is using just javascript and html, and no platform specific features (which you likely have to go out of your way to use in Firefox; I'm not even aware of any off hand) just shows poor coding or at least, a dangerous unawareness by the developer.
When you take into account that a vast majority of people using the internet only use IE because that's what comes on the computer, and just thinks IE is "The Internet" and not a program for rendering web documents, I consider those statistics pretty good.
As for flash, I don't have a problem with flash in general (aside from the fact that the current implementation at times is extremely slow and buggy, although Flash 10 on both Windows and Linux seems to be a vast improve). I do however feel that a single company with a properiety product like flash should be taken with caution. Say what will you will about IE or Firefox, but no one can argue that you have to pay or reverse enginneer binary formats to create a web page. Given the fact that SWF spec files until very recently were closed (and the current "open" SWF specs still lack parts to allow someone else beside adobe from implementing the spec fully), I would only use flash if there was no other realstic alternative available. Unfortanately, for many use cases, there is no good alternative.
-
RE: An SQL WTF from the Department of Redundancy Dept.
I consider any language that is turning complete to be a programming language.
Depending on the implementation, SQL may or may not be turning complete (I believe MS-SQL T-SQL and Oracle's PL/SQL are turning complete, while MySQL isn't).
That being said, I can't see HTML being a programming language, it is by defintion a markup language, but JavaScript is since it is turning complete.
-
RE: Moderator Thread: Revisited #2
As Alex has closed the banned thread, and there isn't much point to this one, I'velocked both of them for now. If people want them reopened, hitme up on IRC or send me a PM, and I'll reopen
-
RE: Moderator Thread: Revisited #2
I don't have any intention of getting involved with this thread, but first I would like to clear up some things.
I was the one who unlocked the old thread; I had intended to merge the two together, but the forums bombed out with an error when I put in the thread ids to be merged.
Second, Jeff S is correct in his claim that he has not deleted any posts from this thread; every post deleted is archived in staff-only forum called Deleted Posts and there are no posts from this thread in there. I'd be willing to provide screenshots of this forum to prove posts haven't been deleted. MPS: if you wish, I can also post screenshots of any posts from the thread you said they were deleted from.
Finally,while CS does allow post removal without sending the email notification, it does require we type in a log entry, and its logged into the administrative control panel.Alex can check this if you aren't stasified.
-
RE: US DMV WTF
I'm not really suprised considering the trainwreck of beuraracy that powers the DMV (and the US government in general). Not all states are quite this bad, but I know New York and New Jersey often have some of the worse DMV services, requiring to make multiple phone calls and get shunted from department to department, or fill out three or four forms with at the branch office.
On the flip side, the Massachusetts and Flodira DMVs didn't seem quite so bad during the times I lived there, so it pretty much varies from state to state (and in some cases, office to office, since some are seemingly working towards streamlining the process). -
RE: All tags need to be closed
How the fuck do you screw up <stdio.h> and such O_O;
Even copy and paste code should have that right.
I'm not sure what the bigger WTF is; that horrible horrible include exists, or it compiles ....