₦airaland Forum

In naija, most people use pirated tools to do their work- or they work for a big company that can afford expensive tools.

As such, the advantages of open source development platforms is lost on most of us.

Also, we don't get sued by people whose closed-source libraries we illegally distribute with our code, even though we use downloaded, cracked versions, so the advantages of having access to free unencumbered open source libraries is lost on us.

Those abroad know that there is a high price to pay for the easy-peasy GUI-driven IDE's, but here they are as free as anything else.

Therefore, prepare to hear people diss PHP and coldfusion and whatever other open dev platform you choose to advocate just because they can install VS dot net for free and do some click-n-drool 'programming'

in short: do not expect to have an informed debate on the subject of programming languages on a site populated by Nigerians like me. In the company where I work, its VS dotnet or die, despite the fact that some of the programmers from recently acquired smaller banks are using open-source tools (and getting great results)

by and large they are being forced to conform to our dotnet mania because

1) we paid good money for it

and

2) click-click, app is ready. The users are used to lightning fast response- proper dev cycles are alien to them.


Personally I'd love to learn PHP, if only to avoid having to use closed source crap whenever we need a thirdparty library, but the time and inclination is just not there.

I heard about this on slashdot a while back. Apparently it is in the *seriously theoretical* stage.

Bending light will be good for making something invisible at a single angle, but how about at multiple angles? There is an almost infinite number of rays of light bouncing off an object at a given point- how do we account for all of them and not just those that will be relevant to a particular viewer?

I imagine that this will be useful in cloaking large, fast-moving objects , such as fighterplanes, from a given viewpoint. for example to conceal photographic evidence of a lowflying attack or a military insertion/extraction. The object will still be 'sort of' visible, but difficult to capture on film. Missiles could also be concealed in this way, not to make them difficult to evade (evasion systems nowadays don't rely on optical confirmation) but simply to enable the responsible government to deny their existence.

They could also be used to conceal the approach of a small team of crack troops from a certain angle- perhaps to allow for a surprise attack from a frontal angle?

really, the only uses I can think of for this tech are military.

and to Bolex- I always thought you were a luddite(anti-technology) , despite your claims to be an engineer, but now you have confirmed my suspicion. By the way, luddite is not meant as an insult, it simply describes your anti-technology stance, which by the way is a valid point of view. Technology has really done a lot of evil things but it has done good things as well. I'd love to have a discussion with you about the pros/cons of technology but am afraid I lack the energy. I do have one negative thing to say though: Why the hell do you choose to be an engineer? I think you would do better in the humanities or studying business/arts. The last thing we need is more engineers that do not believe in their works.

Walmart uses COBOL?

what for?

I can't imagine pos systems being written in cobol? what do they use it for? do they still use dumb terminals and mainframes? how do they set them up in diff. stores?

The idea that fortran is suitable for scientific programming is what is obsolete.

Remember, at the time fortran was invented, imperative languages did not yet exist.

The formula translator was created for scientific use at that time. It just so happened that its style turned out to be so flexible, it practically overshadowed all the other major programming styles. In fact most 'programmers' today dont know anything more than imperative and object oriented programming- and most oo languages are in fact, imperative (even java). Nowadays any imperative language will serve the same purpose much better.

In short, take the advice of people on this forum and grab a modern language.

Seun.

You yourself once spoke of the overly centralized nature of our top-heavy government.

too much govt control over *everything*. How can the private sector survive when there is such a stranglehold over practically all sectors of the economy.

Ask anyone in business. If you don't have govt connections/support/interests you are either screwed, or too small to bother about.

If you use any imperative procedural language, you are already a fortran user!
This applies to people who program in vb (pre dotnet) or c. Or even to pseudo-object oriented languages like c++.
this is because fortran is simply a subset of the lexicon of modern imperative languages- it was the first imperative language created.
thus it is useless in today's world, cimply because it exists in so many advanced forms. Choose one of the advanced forms for practical use, and study fortran as an academic excercise. Fortran is an excellent introduction to procedural programming because, unlike the others, it does not railroad you into a particular way of thinking.


COBOL should, similarly, be the father of declarative languages, but today's declarative languages are so far removed from it that it cannot be approached in the same way. In many ways cobol is obsolete because the things it does are done so much better by today's rdbms packages and pseudo-imperative query languages. However because it is so far removed from modern languages, a lot of legacy code exists in cobol that cannot be trivially rewritten (unlike fortran), so ironically the skill still has some value, in maintaining or updating legacy code.

In particular the Y2k crisis required the work of several cobol programmers before it was smoothly averted.

As the world moves towards automation, fossil fuels generate more of the energy used than food.

As such, agriculture can never be as valuable as oil

As long as Nigeria has oil, it will be the region's primary export.

(As the world's energy crisis grows worse, all we can do is pray that we do not end up like iraq)

African-american is a term only used when it is neccesary to distinguish americans based on skin-colour, just like chinese-americans and so on. At the end of the day, they are AMERICANS.

White africans deserve no less. Skin colour should not determine a person's heritage. she was born and raised by peopple who wereborn and raised in Africa, so she is African. She has an African passport, and she swears allegiance to an African Nation. If war were to break out, she would be conscripted to and African army. She is African in every sense of the word. She ceases to be African when she decides to accept citizenship of another country, and denounce her African citizenship.

Do unto others. I'm sure if there was an isreal-palestine debate over here many of those calling for theron's head would be on the side of the Isrealis. If you can support them, why not support white Africans?

White south Africans are Africans.

Resenting them because of Apartheid is just sour grapes. The fact is that her ancestors have lived here too long to call anywhere else home. skin colour is a moot point. or will u say that all the yellow yellow boys and girls that u all drool over are not african, afterall they are yellow, not black

I have no beef with smokers/drinkers, in fact 2 of my best friends are into that stuff. However, I dont have to deal with the results of their drunkenness, nor do I have to inhale their secondary smoke.

A permanent roommate with those habits is a completely different idea, dot dot dot,

but then again she'll have to put up with my obsessive Quake-tanning! tit for tat, ne?

To those hoping charlize and genevive act in the same movie:


she has already acted in a movie with not just one, but TWO nigerian actresses! (or at least actresses with Nigerian Ancestry)

Sophie Okenedo and Chioma Chikezie

edit: chioma chikezie should be Caroline Chikezie. sorry!


The movie is Aeon Flux.

lol! u wont have to. Just last week I had to swap it out for my old 9200. I'm not sure what happened to it, but it became unstable- I noticed it began after a nepa spike but at the moment I have many suspicions as to what is causing its crazy behaviour

with luck, in 2 weeks time I'll have a geforce 6800 which has similar power requirements and then I can do some testing- il prolly need a new case, new psu, or reduice my number of harddisks. If i can determine that the 9800 is still alive, I'll gladly sell it to you at a nice bargain price- otherwise it'll be headed for the bin!

Ive heard major props going to that riddick game, and am interested, but at the moment i have too many games siting there that i havent had time to play, cant go adding yet another one! and an FPS no doubt,

anyway that 6800 may be the last gaming-orientd upgrade I get for my computer. I may soon turn to console gaming instead, cos it seems the gamepad is easier on the wrists than the mouse+keyboard, and all the mouse FPS gurus seem to have vanished, so the fun of fragging is gone!

my answer to this is:

like and like must marry.


however that does NOT translate to 'same religion must marry'.

it translates to

tolerant X tolerant   or intolerant X intolerant

the intolerant should marry someone of like mind (this implies a same-religion-union)

the tolerant must NOT MARRY AN INTOLERANT PERSON or they will regret it. same religion or not!

look for someone as openminded as you are and have a happy married life

1. nine, versus the nine ringwraiths.
2. He stole it from Gollum in the Goblins' cave, this was told in the hobbit. It was my favourote part of the book, save the battle fof the races at the end
3. He eavesdropped on secret matters, and so got himself caught up. However I seem to recall him begging to be allowed to go in the movie? someone pls help
4. merry and pippin (peregrine took and merriam brandybuck)
5. elendil, I think. The heir to anduril. However my mind is muddled up since I dont remember elendil being the guy that was killed in the rivers when the ring fell off his finger,
6. He didn't betray gandalf. He had sold his soul to sauron a long time ago, and had always regarded gandalf as an enemy since then. No trust to betray between the two. Note that saruman and gandalf never fought in the book.
7. The black riders and their Nazgul are the witch-king and the other eight mortal men that were given rings of power, once great kings. They have become sauron's hatchet men, and they aim to recover the one ring for sauron, as it is the source of his power. You probably know about the rings of power:

three rings for the elvenkings under the sky
seven rings for the dwarflords in their halls of stone
nine rings for mortal men doomed to die
one ring for the dark lord on his dark throne

the seven dwarf-rings were lost in the wars of extermination that devastated the dwarven civilizations in ancient times. of the three elf rings, galadriel has one, elrond another and gandalf the third. The nine rings for mortal men created the black riders, and of course the one ring is the lord of the rings (duuuh)

8. My memory is unclear but I would imagine it to be Arwen, daughter of elrond, nonwetheless a friend off mine said it was someone else, thyat event did not happen in the books, so the mythology is not at my fingertips. In the book, Glorfindel rescued him.

9. Balrog
10. Mordor is the dark lord's domain. Gondor is the largest and most powerful city of Mortal Men, ruled by denethor, lord of the west

ore no rig: (my rig!)

p4 2.26ghz
764 MB ram
ati radeon 9800 pro (this is the big enabler!)

i followed chankast for a while but it soon got boring, what with all the controversy and idiotic refusals to support certain types of disc. The days when id go all out searching fo a 1plus gig ISO of soulcalibur are loooong gone, too.

U can run ut2004? sweet! maybe one day we organise a nairaland LAN party so we can see who da frag-bait and who da gunnerz are.

ps3 is too frickin expensive. Plus, bluray means pira games will be impossible to find. methiks it is a complete waste of time for us niger-areans.

xbox 360 is a better idea but still too costly. Nintendo's console will bve 250 dollars! PLUS it already appears much better than the boring ps3.

ps2 emulation: I was trying not to repeat the epistles I have wrote in the past on this subject. try explaining certain things to the crowds of users expecting to just pop-in a dvd into their computers and have a happy day, you will understand the meaning of headache. Better to just give it to em straight: ps2 emulation is not yet at a stage where it is trivially playable. As long as emulation requires much tweaking and big iron hardware, I always tell the masses that the answer is "it does not work"

by the way final fantasy x runs at like 1 frame per second on my system. Just so you know.

Its like what kurunmi said.

No-one will help the man to heal.

he's supposed to be the strong one, so if he reveals he was hurt before, the girl will lose respect for him. Its like saying "How can I save you when I can't even save myself?"

Big shishi is simply taking the path of least resistance, which I have to confess I have been forced into in the past. If we bury our emotions and do not fall in love, we will actually be more attractive, get laid a lot more. You girls should explain why you always find it easier to sleep with men that obivously do NOT love you!

The day we start to show emotion again, and something happens that reminds us of the terrible experience of heartbreak, well, we rebound.

I, personally, have gotten tired of the run-n-gun lifestyle, as all it has achieved for me is a serious dampening of the urge to have sex (it has become boring). I wish I could fall in love again, but the experience has been horrible. *shrug* perhaps men are *not* supposed to fall in love. I know for sure that I am level-headed enough to ensure that the woman I choose to have my children will feel as if she is loved. Its very easy! :-)

But I can only trust myself to do that effectively when my head is not swimming in the oceans of luuuurve

Well, I think it has to do with the level of self-control required.

A girl in love tends to feel happy and safe with her man.

However any guy, even in love, has to fight against his animal instinct to pounce on the next girl he sees *every day*

It is very hard, so when a relationship is over, it comes with a profound sense of regret and a feeling of having been a sucker (mugu).

Similarly, it is difficult to choose. Believe it or not, women, it is possible for a man to love more than one woman. Choosing to stick with one means giving up all the others- and guys are afraid of making a mistake.

Also there is the tendency of a girl to transform once she has 'caught' a guy. Sometimes it is so fast it makes your head spin. Then it is guilt and conscience that causes you to remain with her. when you finally leave, there are only bad feelings and, yes, regret.

All these point to one thing: it is hard for guys to stomach a closed relationship, especially one in which they were emotionally invested, and it is difficult to repeat something you regret having done before.

Finally, a person in love, male OR female is a very weak and vulnerable creature. This seems to be ok for women, but our crazy society expects men to be PILLARS OF STRENGTH AND FORTITUDE, which is at odds with this. Sometimes the woman herself may despise the man for being such a pathetic weakling and lose respect for him. Men are terrified of this (being percieved as weak)

I see the flaming religious bigots have not yet found this topic. Either that, or NL has become a very tolerant community! That's nice

I can certainly marry someone that does not believe in God. Ive always said that belief in God is a spiritual matter, which is personal. All the social hullabaloo just leads to hate and bigotry. If she can find fulfilment for her soul in some other way that doesnt make her unattractive to me, then good for her!


offtopic:
Now if the question was "can you marry someone that believes in X god", I'd have to think, depending on what X god says she should do in his/her holy book. If she is a follower of sokpana and needs to sacrifice a young adolescent virgin male every full moon then I think not!!!!!!