Give them time. I'm sure they have a crack legal team coming up with a means of circumventing prior art as we speak. Hey, maybe that new round headquarters in Cupertino is just a front for apple legal's new time machine. Maybe THAT'S how they've gotten so many of these patents! I'm sure the "rounded rectangle" was legitimately patentable in 3000BC :)

Don't forget their patents on fonts, typesetting, electricity and I think respiration (odds are you're violating at least one of these right now!).

This is Microsoft after all. You just know it's going to end up being something just as simple and evocative as Metro. You know, something like "Typeface-centric Orthagonal Monocolor Tiles Version 8.3". Then to add insult to injury some marketing jackass will then condense it down to "TOM T 8.3" you know, because it rhymes and that's clever!

A LOT. Hell, a lot of the time I use recursion with static variables (searching a nodal structure for the highest value springs to mind). Pretty much any time you're working with nodal data, you probably should be using a recursive function, just sayin'. I can't tell you how many times I've been told that the depth of the data will not be more than X. Yeah right. Hope for X, implement for N I always say.

This is easy! I propose we rename them "File Slash" \ and "Web Slash" / just to piss off the UNIX guys :) :cool:

I've gotten to the point where I simply exclude any results from MSDN. It's worthless. I think the thing I hate the most is their "samples" which generally don't compile and more often than not have absolutely no relevance to what you're looking up. My favorite though is when you hit F1 over a method of a .net class like say Page.LoadControl and instead of outlining the parameters for LoadControl instead it just coughs up the general Call() help article. Because I was unaware that I was calling a function? Bastards!

Yes, there will be lots of chain stores that are consistent from coast to coast this is no different than the ubiquity of Tesco stores in the UK. Regional differences can be very stark. New England is VERY different from the midwest which is in turn different from the Pacific Northwest. The cultural differences tend to be more regional than state-centric. You can easily hit 15 states in the midwest and be struck by their similarity (not picking on the midwest, just sayin') then go to Maine and it's like a different country. Cuisine in New England is primarily driven by locally owned one-off restaurants, in Florida it's hard NOT to end up at a Chili's or Applebees. Work. There's an interesting topic. It runs the gamut. Some places will treat you like family (largely smaller companies) most like a fungible commodity. Employment is mostly at will. In other words, they can fire you without reason and you have no recourse. Many companies expect 60 hours from you for the salary that is of course based on 40 hours of pay. Likewise most companies expect you to be contactable when you are vacation and some actually frown upon those who have the temerity to take vacation.

my normal means of disposal is an 8mm rifle round. what remains of the platters gets sucked out the exit hole in a shower of metallized confetti.

Just don't. No good can come of it. All you'll get from MSDN is an impeneterable generic entry, nonfunctional "example" code and a restatement of the parameters that you already got from intellisense. Do yourself a favor, search with google and open the first NON-MSDN link returned. The only thing I ever got from MSDN was hypertesion and a nervous tick.

The universe is random fundamentally, but emergently ordered macroscopically because it is bounded by probability. What I mean by that is that at the quantum level there's nothing to stop a particle from ceasing to be here and spontaneously appear over there, it's just very unlikely. In fact quarks and anti-quarks spontaneously appear and anhillate each other all the time. We like to think of an electron as a point. A solid particle. It's not. It's a fuzzy potential field around an atom. Everything in this universe is probability nothing more.

With just about anyoneone else's API I'd just dig in and figure it out. The enterprise API is not the sort of beast you take on without any documentation. I had initially thought that they had purposely obfuscated the API as a security measure or maybe simple meanspiritedness, but then I remembered an old maxim; Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence, apathy or both. My money's on incompetence at this point. :mad:

I'm not even sure where to post this. I'd previously thought that Crystal couldn't get any worse and that Business Objects was the absolute bottom of the barrel in terms of product support. Unfortunately I was mistaken, the purchase by SAP seems to have taken a nearly worthless service and taken it to a whole new plane of worthlessness. Anyone who has ever had the misfortune of needing to deal with crystal support knows that the first four times that you call them you will simply end up with some clueless asshat reading a "knowlege"-base article at you. Lest you think that you wasted all that money on a support contract, it's an internal knowlegebase, the external one seems to have nothing but marketing materials in it. It's also probably hoplessly out of date as they seem to enjoy radically modifying their API on a weekly basis. Seriously, I've encountered major changes to the API after applying hotfixes. :wtf: Generally it required a threatening call to the sales rep to get someone with an IQ higher than 40 on the phone to hammer out a solution. That was then, this is now. With the addition of SAP to the mix they seem to have decided that rather than offering apocryphal "support" they just won't offer any. There doesn't appear to be any way to login anymore. Don't get me wrong, they go through the motions; first demanding a certificate that they haven't assigned, then failing that a login that they haven't supplied credentials for. A call to the sales rep resulted in our DBA getting a login to the SAP site, but there doesn't appear to be anything crystal related on it. :wtf: I need a code sample (or failing that a roadmap of the objects itnvolved) that addresses the process of extracting a list of reports from the enterpise server in a specified folder and opening a selected report in the viewer control. I don't care if it's through the API or through the webservices, it just needs to work. Where the hell can I find that sort of information?

Here's the thing. Web development has become fad driven. Being a web developer is like working in marketing (what's the new black today). Languages and frameworks spring up on a daily basis, most only partially realized before they are cast aside in favor of some other new technology. Pyhon, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Iron Python what's that? Oh you want me code it in F#, sure, whatever. In many cases these languages are designed to solve a specific problem the problem of course is that everyone is off partially implementing their own thing rather than producing a cohesive set of technologies that everyone can learn, use and expand. It would be really nice if someone would decide what language and technologies are going to power the web and stick to it. Hell, I'd like it enforced at the router level. If your code isn't up to snuff, you can't be on the internet, that simple.

As I noted above, there is a distinct difference between Republicans and Democrats. While Republicans actually remove those people guilty of corruption, Democrats promote them. I mean...The FBI has a freakin' videotape of Jefferson accepting bribes. I couldn't agree more! Like the way they did with DeLay. Oh wait... That's right, they tried to RELAX ethics rules just for him. :rolleyes: As for Frist, he wasn't removed by the republican establishment for ethical lapses he was widely viewed by republicans as ineffective as majority leader. His heavy involvement in the 2006 Elections and the Drubbing they recieved didn't help his cause any either. To address the issue of Jackson I don't know that there's much that can be done. He won't resign and the democrates can't make him. Hell he was re-elected while the investigation was ongoing. It's not much different than Cornyn who stayed till he was convicted. The party doesn't decide who stays and who goes. It's up to the individual congress member.