Munich, Germany goes Kubuntu!

[SteveRiley]

FoxPro

The only thing I remember about FoxPro is going to their developer conference in 1998 in Toledo, Ohio, where I got smashed on lime jello vodka shots and then called my soon-to-be wife to say hi.

[xennex81]

You called Qqmike a "bully" for describing the way things are in the open source world and for explaining that actions count for more than words when users have certain desires about their software.

I called him a bully for being a bully. That's different ;-). And how come if someone is being a bully, we can't say it? :P.

He basically fed me back everything I had said before, as a way of proving it? . I told everyone how small contributions are not rewarded, and then he goes and tells me that small contributions are not rewarded. In a really mean way. I already knew everything he told me, that's why I said it, and then he proves it to me.

It's like saying "I don't like how people from <<town>> are always hostile towards me" and then a person from that town comes along and says "Well, rightly so."

I KNOW the rhetoric okay of "actions count more than words" I was DESCRIBING that. And I was describing what's wrong with it. And then someone comes along and repeats that sentiment verbatim. Like pushing a button. Garbage can opens.

Hate flows out.

Sometimes in life I admire myself for getting myself in trouble that I suggested to the other person, and the other person goes and gives me what I suggested to him. And If I hadn't suggested it, he wouldn't have thought of it. Just the other day I was asking someone for permission to leave the place I am in. Because I posed it as a questionable thing, it suddenly became one, until I got myself together and turned it into a statement "I'm leaving." Then the response was "oh, okay". Sometimes I hear my words repeated to me verbatim. As if it was the other person's idea. And I get my own words or descriptions thrown back at me. And the other person actually thinks it was his idea and it was handed to him on a platter.

Your own confidence or lack thereof is often mirrored in the responses by and of other people. Doing something with utmost confidence will always cause other people to fall in line, because they will not longer question in their mind that what you want is right; how else could you be as confident about it.

In this case I guess I invited my own demise by complaining about something and then that something happens.

I was complaining about insensitivity and then insensitivity happened.

Like, I was *also* describing how thing are in the open source world and that action count more than words, but I was saying it as a negative thing ;-). Then someone comes along and repeats my words to me as a matter of fact or status quo and that it is right that it is so.

He was the bully that I sought out, apparently. Got what I deserved, or wanted.

Perhaps pointing at "flaws" is not the best thing to do if you want to avoid triggering those "flaws" in people. Giving attention to the negative can only cause the negative to pour forth, since you have put the focus light on that.

Zooming in on negative qualities or aspects; oops, I am suddenly surrounded by it. Well, it was my own doing.

Like wise giving attention to the positive would cause the positive to pour forth. And you are suddenly surrounded by it. Maybe I should try that out some time ;-).

Maybe we just get what we choose to see in people. See the good, and you get the good.

So I want to say that Mr. Mike is a very qualitative person to write about software and many of his remarks and statements attest to years of experience and relate of a balanced judgement.

[xennex81]

In 1993 the NE adept of Revenue adopted FoxPro and followed it through all of its iterations until VFP 6.0 in 2002, at which time MS turned to .NET and moved VFP their back burner, where it died a slow death. I was tasked with finding a new GUI RAD tool. Rather than .NET I looked at and tested a variety of C, JavaScript, Java, Python, PHP and C+ tools. I chose Qt. I tried to convince TPTB to switch to PostgrSQL, but they wouldn't buy a free DBM because of "no support" since they assumed open source support forums would be worthless. They purchased Oracle. Taxpayers have paid through the nose for it and Oracle's support is so notoriously poor that they rely on the open source forum. In the last ten year millions of dollars could have been saved with no sacrifice in functionality.

You know what the funny thing is. That money went somewhere and it was again spent in the economy. I don't really believe in "savings" of that kind ;-). People got fed by it and not for the worst work. I think usually what we should be after is for money to be spent on useful things, and whether it was wasted is not determined by whether it was spent, but by what it was spent on. Of course, If you feel that the Oracle product was a bad product then it was spent on bad things, but in the same vein, maybe the same money should then simply have been spent on support contracts, in that way, (for PostgreSQL), the money would still have been spent, but it would have contributed to the evolvement of that software. I personally feel if you (as a government organisation) can form well-made ties with such support contract workers (organisations) that it can become a kind of symbiotic relationship that furthers a form of in-house knowledge build-up or development. These contractors are then well-trusted suppliers as a form of perhaps an in-house department or subsidiary. Then they would have become better off in all respects mostly. I would personally have vouched for something like that (not knowing anything about it, of course).

[xennex81]

It wasn't able to, but I was so mad at Microsoft I preferred to move to another product if I was going to have to recode anyway. Plus, REALbasic offered the ability to compile for both Macintosh and Linux. Alas, I never got to the level of skill in it that I had with Visual BASIC, so I mostly just kept coding in VB until Microsoft's newer versions of Windows obsoleted even that. I'm lamenting my decision to learn Visual BASIC instead of C++, as those skills would still serve me now. If anyone had any question as to why I have tremendous disdain for Microsoft, that should answer it. There are other reasons, but that's one of the big ones.

What were your reasons to not go with VB.NET? Personally I have just not had a feeling that I wanted to be married to that kind of thing. I was not objected to developing for the windows platform (I worked in Delphi for quite some time) but when it went .NET I kinda chose for a more open source alternative in that I wanted to keep my eye on simply Java (maybe not open source but cross platform) and I must say I have missed some skill in developing or compiling Windows programs, I am kinda handicapped there currently, for quite some time already.

I also didn't want to get tied to PowerShell for the same reason. These developments have caused me to turn away from the Windows platform as a place for me to develop.

My proficience in shell scripting in Linux currently far far succeeds anything I can do with Windows. As much as I may have complained about Linux here on the forum, when you give me a VI editor and a shell script, I am in heaven. I know ways to improve my shell experience, I might need Python for that. Or at least some ncurses I think. Perl has bindings for that.

There are very few system maintenance tasks (such as file moving/editing/manipulating) that I do in the GUI. Even the plain old Konqueror gives me a better experience than Dolphin. I surely wish to contribute, I would love to do a lot of work. But I still can't. This what I am doing here is all I can do currently. I am writing (Steve, this is what I called a small contribution, which I believe is welcomed here on this forum). And I am grateful that I can write here, to do at least something about my love for Linux.