Nice. I was often paranoid when wandering around in the dark that there'd be one sitting on top of one of the light switches as I groped blindly for it. Never did happen, but it always seemed so plausible.
Your car story reminded me of this one: someone had left a window wound slightly down when the car was parked, and a huntsman had wandered in and set up shop hidden behind the driver's sun visor (which was closed, i.e. up against the roof). My dad was driving at the time, down the highway at 110 kph when it decided to go exploring. That was pretty exciting, but at least he didn't crash.:)
I caught a fly for one once, in one of those little plastic eggs you get from those old fashioned vending machines that have crappy toys in them. Shook it and threw it around a bit so it was nice and dazed.
The huntsman was on the wall a metre or two off the floor (unusually low) so I chucked the fly at the wall a little in front of it. The fly managed to grab on to the wall and started wandering around aimlessly. The spider seemed uninterested for a while, then suddenly came to life. Apparently it didn't have a really good understanding of gravity though, since it decided to pounce on the fly. Perhaps it did know what it was doing; it got the fly and they both fell to the floor, then it scurried back up the wall a bit to enjoy its meal.
The huntsman's primary enemy seems to be wasps - the wasp stings the spider to paralyze it, then drags it into its nest (a hole in the ground generally) and locks it in with its young. When they hatch they eat the still alive but paralysed spider. Wasps are assholes. I watched a huntsman and a wasp having a battle once, the huntsman shot up a tree and jumped off a brunch. It eventually lost. Wasps are such assholes.
My worst huntsman experience was waking up in the middle of the night after feeling something on my face. I instinctively "knew" it was a huntsman, so I sat bolt upright while trying to work out what to do. Fortunately that motion catapulted it off of me and onto the floor. I got the light on and there were actually two of them; pretty sure they were doing the business on the ceiling right above my head and one of them happened to fall. That freaked me out a bit. While sitting on my bed waiting for my nerves to calm down, a fly or something flew right into my ear. That was too much for me. Too many bugs. I went and slept in another room.
Generally we didn't mind the huntsman though. We'd leave them alone if they were somewhere reasonable, but if they were in the way we'd catch them by putting a plastic container over them and sliding a sheet of stiff paper underneath, then carry them outside. I had a friend in school who would just pick them up with his bare hands. I was never game to try that.
Good thing you've got plenty of electrons in your body then! They shall give you strength.
A comment further below suggests it's not really as bad as it sounds; "There have been no more than 10 sightings of these spiders here". But ten large spiders looking for better shelter isn't a very exciting story, so now it's an invasion of giant spiders.
You mean Canadian citizens are expected to obey Canadian laws even when not in Canada? Shocked, I am. It's almost as if the laws are a reflection of what is considered acceptable behaviour by the members of a society and those members are expected to maintain those standards at all times. Crazy talk, I say.
I'm not sure I follow. His statement seems to be implying that the RIAA/MPAA is spewing pollution, creating murky air; which is generally considered to be an unpleasant thing to have. Saying that Dr. Geist is "a breath of fresh air" seems to strongly implying support for Dr. Geist's position and views. i.e. fresh air is generally considered more desirable than murky, polluted air.
Adrenaline lets you do things you otherwise couldn't do, or at the very least do them faster
So does a regular workout. If you're fit 'n healthy, you don't need to rely on adrenaline.
If you're fit and healthy, adrenaline will give you a further boost, but you'd still be aided by it. Unless you mean having a regular workout shortly before any potentially life-threatening situations occur so you've already gotten your adrenaline levels up, but that would require a tremendous amount of foresight that most people don't possess. Anyway, not everyone prioritises being "fit 'n healthy" to the same degree that you do, but since that's not the way you live you probably can't see anyone else having another way of life than that.
That last comment was a joke, by the way. Like the last line in my previous post.
Why would you desire or need to avoid death if you weren't afraid of death? Or at the very least, fearful of the consequences your death may have on others?
You may be assigning too much specific emotion to the term. I go to work every day because I'm fearful that if I don't, my standard of living will eventually be degraded. I'm not panicking about it and it has nothing to do with terrorism. It's merely 2: an anxious feeling, and not all that far from 1: an emotion experienced in anticipation of some specific pain or danger. The danger being that if I lose my job, I'll eventually have to get another one, and I don't like applying for jobs.
Besides which, even if I were to concede that yes, you could take potentially life-preserving actions based purely on logical decision making processes... why is that desirable to you? What does it matter if I run from the gunman shooting up the shopping centre because I fear that he's going to shoot me, versus running because I logically conclude based on his pattern of random targeting and fervent firing that if I continue to stay where I am I am likely to get shot?
Further, fear can result in faster decision making, albeit at the cost of some accuracy. In the aforementioned scenario, if I have some kind of irrational fear of gunmen and I see a man with a gun standard in the shopping centre, I might immediately run the fuck away. Maybe it's a toy or he has a perfectly legitimate and undangerous reason for having the gun, and maybe I'll feel silly. But I, and most other people, would prefer to feel silly 100 times or 1,000 times than to die once. Squandering those few precious seconds of potential reaction time in order to obtain enough information to make a logical decision to flee may cost you your life. For example, there's no point running from a man waving a gun around and screaming all the heathens must die before you determine that a) it's a real gun, b) it's loaded, and c) he potentially considers you to be a heretic (or alternatively, that he doesn't have very good aim). Leaving before you know for a fact that you are in danger in fact indicates you fear a potentially upcoming event, as in v 1: be afraid or feel anxious or apprehensive about a possible or probable situation or event.
Finally, fear is a very effective means of producing adrenaline. Adrenaline lets you do things you otherwise couldn't do, or at the very least do them faster. It can also allow you to think quicker, allowing even the most ardent supporter of cold logic to more quickly decide on and implement a course of action.
So I think fear is actually very useful (why else would virtually all animals that have survived this long appear to posses it to at least some degree?) but like any other tool, it is potentially dangerous. Learn to manage it and use it to your advantage though, and I think you'd be way better off than trying to make yourself never be afraid of anything.
IMHO, you sound like you're afraid of being afraid, so maybe you could think about working on that. And that's all I have to say on the subject.;)
If you weren't afraid of something undesirable happening, what possible reason could you have for reacting in the first place?
Replace the term "fear" with something less panic-sounding, like "concern" or "worry" or "a carefully reasoned, rational thought process that concluded there was a very small probability of something bad happening". Fear doesn't necessarily mean you lose all conscious thought and act entirely on instinct.
I don't really get the negativity. So a lot of people saw something that made them uncomfortable, calculated there was a 0.001% chance that a plane was going to fly into their building, and decided to bunk off work for a few hours just in case. What's the big deal?
I bet half the people laughing at those who evacuated would have been saying exactly the opposite had it been a hijacked airliner circling while the newly installed pilot worked out what the hell he was doing, before finally leveling out and coming straight at a building. "I can't believe idiots stayed in the building. It circled times with fucking fighter jets trailing it. How much more warning do you need?!"
I think the real problem is that users shouldn't have to think about a 'sandbox mode'. If it's more secure and allows the applications they want to run to be run, then it should be the default and everything should be run in the sandbox. If some applications won't work in the sandbox, then most legitimate apps will probably request full rights because the developers can't be bothered working out what access is actually needed, and all the illegitimate apps will request full rights and the user will grant it because otherwise they won't get their smilies or free download or whatever.
P.S. It's "ad campaign", not "add campaign". Ad is short for advertisement, not addvertisement.
I think all the telcos here (Australia) lock the phone if you buy it through them. They will unlock it for a fee, and I think they're required to unlock it free of charge once your contract expires. This only applies if your new handset is part of the contract. Most let you buy the phone outright and that should come unlocked.
Even so, if you buy a handset outright from a third party it'll come unlocked, and I've never heard of any of the telcos refusing a phone on their network which you didn't buy from them. I'm with 3 and bought a new phone to replace my N73 (the contract I got that on doesn't expire until September or so) - just put the SIM from my old phone in my new one and it works fine. Better in fact, since my new phone supports HSDPA. This phone isn't actually carried by 3 at all and I suppose is technically not supported by them as a result, but they don't do anything to prevent you using your own phone if you want to.
Your bizarre "I've got so much memory I'd better use 300 megs to do tasks that could be done in 3 so as not to waste it!" made me laugh, so thank you.
But if you have more than enough RAM to cover all the other tasks along with the torrents you are running why should you care? You seem to be complaining about usage of the system resources that is a pittance in the total pool of available memory and CPU.
You're making the assumption that there is enough RAM to cover all the other tasks, but that's an assumption you're making based on your own usage patterns. Wasting a few hundred megs will reduce the amount of memory you can comfortably allocate to virtual machines, for example. Some software will happily suck up as much memory as it can to improve performance, e.g. database software (maybe he does development against large databases on his machine)? Games can use a lot of memory and are also good candidates for using as much as they can get in order to improve responsiveness in a highly visible manner.
Additionally, while you're correct in that any memory not being used in a given moment is in a way "wasted", in that it can't be saved for later use, you also need to factor in the extreme cases that might occur comparatively rarely. As the person you're replying to said, torrents are considered by many to be a background task. Even when it's finished downloading, it is still doing useful work, and so many people prefer to leave it running all the time. In the case of a developer working on a memory-intensive application, that 300 meg hit to have a bloated torrent client in the background may be too much of a hit to take, resulting in them having to keep stopping and starting it depending on their activity.
This is fair enough and expected for a computer with limited memory -- you can't possibly do everything at once. However if there's no compelling reason for a torrent client to be using 300 megs of memory, why would you want to bother stopping and starting it every time you need to do a bit of heavy lifting? Why not just run a client that uses a tenth or a hundredth the amount of memory and leave it running all the time and never have to worry about it?
The other obvious problem is that most people have more than one application running at a time. What if your torrent client, your instant messenger, your web browser, your music player and your email client all decide to use a few hundred megabytes of memory for no apparent reason? Now you need 2 gigs of memory just to do very basic things. That's a waste of memory, in very real terms, and it's also a waste that's forced on everybody, not just those who choose to overspec their machines "just in case".
Probably not coincidence, but that doesn't mean it's sinister or improper. If you knew of a significant threat that wasn't being addressed, and it was that time when the People In Charge were working out where to spend money (i.e. are actively seeking information and advice on the most effective use of their funds), wouldn't that seem like an ideal time to try to raise awareness of it?
Or would you prefer to wait until there's no money to spend and nobody currently in a position to do anything about it before announcing it?
Not saying it isn't all another scam to get free money, but just because it might be doesn't mean it is.
Yeah, what's worse is that they are planning to privatise this network as well after a few years.
I'm a bit stunned by this announcement, as it's what I thought they should do (and the only sane approach) several years ago. Therefore I never expected it to actually happen.
Fortunately I'm cynical enough to still believe it'll never happen, or if it does happen it'll be ridiculously overpriced and underperformant. At best it'll be great for a short while until the next "think of the children" senator holds a crucial seat and then the government of the day will do their level best to screw the citizens over in order to win their vote on some unrelated legislation. Either that or they'll screw us on behalf of the media cartels.
Well I think the idea is to extend programming away from the keyboard, i.e. you can still be "programming" if you're not the one doing the typing, by thinking about the problem and your solution and how it fits with the rest of the program.
What I've never understood is exactly how this is meant to work. Surely you need to do all the planning stuff before you start writing code, even if you have a buddy to assist. At that point all the pre-programming is done so you're just whacking it into the computer, and it's a bit pointless for the buddy to sit around watching you input it. If the concept isn't known to be sound or its integration with the rest of the program hasn't been fully thought out, why on earth would you be writing it already?
Arguably it's better for someone to stop you half way through coding a module to say it ain't gonna work out then to wait until you're finished, but such realisations ought to come before the typing begins.
(and indeed then have to check that my INSERT actually worked and check for possible returned errors, coding exceptions etc).
So you're one of those "programmers" who doesn't check for errors? So what happens when the disc is full and the insert fails, or someone turned the database server off, or any of the myriad other things that can go wrong goes wrong?
Man, I hate you guys.
-- sincerely, systems admin
My personal favourite at the moment is "retrieving list of products failed: query timed out... pages of more junk... crawl succeeded!" Yeah, except the search now returns no results at all. Nice error handling.
did everyone who runs a server suddenly learn how to become a dba?
Well anyone who runs a database server is by definition a DBA, just like anyone who drives a car is an automobile pilot. If you don't want to learn what the hell you're doing, then pay someone else to do it for you. You'll only fuck things up otherwise. (Though you probably stand a higher chance of losing data when that happens if you're using MySQL.) Seriously, there's craploads of companies who'll happily run a web and database server for you for a ridiculously low monthly fee.
Doing it yourself has its advantages, but there are some drawbacks too.
Any project of sufficient complexity will likely have multiple release candidates, just because once all the release critical bugs are found and fixed... more will be found.
That doesn't mean a release candidate isn't actually a candidate for release, or at least is supposed to be. An RC is supposed to be, "we think we're done, unless you can show us there's major bugs remaining this is exactly what we're going to release". The final release should be nothing more than the last release candidate with the version strings to say it's a final release rather than an RC.
Vista had one RC, and when it was made available Microsoft made it absolutely clear that the RC was not actually a candidate for release; it did not include a bunch of changes and fixes that were going to be in the actual release. They abuse the term: Microsoft's "release candidates" are actually more like "late betas".
The term "release candidate" is actually entirely self-explanatory and leaves less wiggle room for misrepresenting the status of a project than "alpha" or "beta". The final release should be identical to the last RC. In practice there's often some small changes made or diagnostic/debugging code removed; but any actual changes in functionality or any non-trivial fix should cause another RC to be made. It is a bit of a balancing act between cost/time and thoroughness though.
However, calling something a "release candidate" when you have absolutely no intention that it will actually be the released version is disingenuous. If is not a candidate for release, then it is not a release candidate.
Slashdot Mirror
Nice. I was often paranoid when wandering around in the dark that there'd be one sitting on top of one of the light switches as I groped blindly for it. Never did happen, but it always seemed so plausible.
Your car story reminded me of this one: someone had left a window wound slightly down when the car was parked, and a huntsman had wandered in and set up shop hidden behind the driver's sun visor (which was closed, i.e. up against the roof). My dad was driving at the time, down the highway at 110 kph when it decided to go exploring. That was pretty exciting, but at least he didn't crash. :)
I caught a fly for one once, in one of those little plastic eggs you get from those old fashioned vending machines that have crappy toys in them. Shook it and threw it around a bit so it was nice and dazed.
The huntsman was on the wall a metre or two off the floor (unusually low) so I chucked the fly at the wall a little in front of it. The fly managed to grab on to the wall and started wandering around aimlessly. The spider seemed uninterested for a while, then suddenly came to life. Apparently it didn't have a really good understanding of gravity though, since it decided to pounce on the fly. Perhaps it did know what it was doing; it got the fly and they both fell to the floor, then it scurried back up the wall a bit to enjoy its meal.
The huntsman's primary enemy seems to be wasps - the wasp stings the spider to paralyze it, then drags it into its nest (a hole in the ground generally) and locks it in with its young. When they hatch they eat the still alive but paralysed spider. Wasps are assholes. I watched a huntsman and a wasp having a battle once, the huntsman shot up a tree and jumped off a brunch. It eventually lost. Wasps are such assholes.
My worst huntsman experience was waking up in the middle of the night after feeling something on my face. I instinctively "knew" it was a huntsman, so I sat bolt upright while trying to work out what to do. Fortunately that motion catapulted it off of me and onto the floor. I got the light on and there were actually two of them; pretty sure they were doing the business on the ceiling right above my head and one of them happened to fall. That freaked me out a bit. While sitting on my bed waiting for my nerves to calm down, a fly or something flew right into my ear. That was too much for me. Too many bugs. I went and slept in another room.
Generally we didn't mind the huntsman though. We'd leave them alone if they were somewhere reasonable, but if they were in the way we'd catch them by putting a plastic container over them and sliding a sheet of stiff paper underneath, then carry them outside. I had a friend in school who would just pick them up with his bare hands. I was never game to try that.
Good thing you've got plenty of electrons in your body then! They shall give you strength.
A comment further below suggests it's not really as bad as it sounds; "There have been no more than 10 sightings of these spiders here". But ten large spiders looking for better shelter isn't a very exciting story, so now it's an invasion of giant spiders.
That particular comment was in response to something posted by a fake Drepper. Check the email address for comment #40.
Yeah, what a douche. Everyone knows Australia is the 51st state. Sheesh.
You mean Canadian citizens are expected to obey Canadian laws even when not in Canada? Shocked, I am. It's almost as if the laws are a reflection of what is considered acceptable behaviour by the members of a society and those members are expected to maintain those standards at all times. Crazy talk, I say.
I'm not sure I follow. His statement seems to be implying that the RIAA/MPAA is spewing pollution, creating murky air; which is generally considered to be an unpleasant thing to have. Saying that Dr. Geist is "a breath of fresh air" seems to strongly implying support for Dr. Geist's position and views. i.e. fresh air is generally considered more desirable than murky, polluted air.
Damn straight, a proper geek would never abuse apostrophes so much.
Do poor students commonly have a fetish for watching women peeling off their skin?
Not sure what other kind of stripping a naked woman would be able to do.
Adrenaline lets you do things you otherwise couldn't do, or at the very least do them faster
So does a regular workout. If you're fit 'n healthy, you don't need to rely on adrenaline.
If you're fit and healthy, adrenaline will give you a further boost, but you'd still be aided by it. Unless you mean having a regular workout shortly before any potentially life-threatening situations occur so you've already gotten your adrenaline levels up, but that would require a tremendous amount of foresight that most people don't possess. Anyway, not everyone prioritises being "fit 'n healthy" to the same degree that you do, but since that's not the way you live you probably can't see anyone else having another way of life than that.
That last comment was a joke, by the way. Like the last line in my previous post.
Why would you desire or need to avoid death if you weren't afraid of death? Or at the very least, fearful of the consequences your death may have on others?
You may be assigning too much specific emotion to the term. I go to work every day because I'm fearful that if I don't, my standard of living will eventually be degraded. I'm not panicking about it and it has nothing to do with terrorism. It's merely 2: an anxious feeling, and not all that far from 1: an emotion experienced in anticipation of some specific pain or danger. The danger being that if I lose my job, I'll eventually have to get another one, and I don't like applying for jobs.
Besides which, even if I were to concede that yes, you could take potentially life-preserving actions based purely on logical decision making processes... why is that desirable to you? What does it matter if I run from the gunman shooting up the shopping centre because I fear that he's going to shoot me, versus running because I logically conclude based on his pattern of random targeting and fervent firing that if I continue to stay where I am I am likely to get shot?
Further, fear can result in faster decision making, albeit at the cost of some accuracy. In the aforementioned scenario, if I have some kind of irrational fear of gunmen and I see a man with a gun standard in the shopping centre, I might immediately run the fuck away. Maybe it's a toy or he has a perfectly legitimate and undangerous reason for having the gun, and maybe I'll feel silly. But I, and most other people, would prefer to feel silly 100 times or 1,000 times than to die once. Squandering those few precious seconds of potential reaction time in order to obtain enough information to make a logical decision to flee may cost you your life. For example, there's no point running from a man waving a gun around and screaming all the heathens must die before you determine that a) it's a real gun, b) it's loaded, and c) he potentially considers you to be a heretic (or alternatively, that he doesn't have very good aim). Leaving before you know for a fact that you are in danger in fact indicates you fear a potentially upcoming event, as in v 1: be afraid or feel anxious or apprehensive about a possible or probable situation or event.
Finally, fear is a very effective means of producing adrenaline. Adrenaline lets you do things you otherwise couldn't do, or at the very least do them faster. It can also allow you to think quicker, allowing even the most ardent supporter of cold logic to more quickly decide on and implement a course of action.
So I think fear is actually very useful (why else would virtually all animals that have survived this long appear to posses it to at least some degree?) but like any other tool, it is potentially dangerous. Learn to manage it and use it to your advantage though, and I think you'd be way better off than trying to make yourself never be afraid of anything.
IMHO, you sound like you're afraid of being afraid, so maybe you could think about working on that. And that's all I have to say on the subject. ;)
If you weren't afraid of something undesirable happening, what possible reason could you have for reacting in the first place?
Replace the term "fear" with something less panic-sounding, like "concern" or "worry" or "a carefully reasoned, rational thought process that concluded there was a very small probability of something bad happening". Fear doesn't necessarily mean you lose all conscious thought and act entirely on instinct.
I don't really get the negativity. So a lot of people saw something that made them uncomfortable, calculated there was a 0.001% chance that a plane was going to fly into their building, and decided to bunk off work for a few hours just in case. What's the big deal?
I bet half the people laughing at those who evacuated would have been saying exactly the opposite had it been a hijacked airliner circling while the newly installed pilot worked out what the hell he was doing, before finally leveling out and coming straight at a building. "I can't believe idiots stayed in the building. It circled times with fucking fighter jets trailing it. How much more warning do you need?!"
I think the real problem is that users shouldn't have to think about a 'sandbox mode'. If it's more secure and allows the applications they want to run to be run, then it should be the default and everything should be run in the sandbox. If some applications won't work in the sandbox, then most legitimate apps will probably request full rights because the developers can't be bothered working out what access is actually needed, and all the illegitimate apps will request full rights and the user will grant it because otherwise they won't get their smilies or free download or whatever.
P.S. It's "ad campaign", not "add campaign". Ad is short for advertisement, not addvertisement.
Couldn't be bothered reading the rest of the paragraph before replying, eh? :)
I think all the telcos here (Australia) lock the phone if you buy it through them. They will unlock it for a fee, and I think they're required to unlock it free of charge once your contract expires. This only applies if your new handset is part of the contract. Most let you buy the phone outright and that should come unlocked.
Even so, if you buy a handset outright from a third party it'll come unlocked, and I've never heard of any of the telcos refusing a phone on their network which you didn't buy from them. I'm with 3 and bought a new phone to replace my N73 (the contract I got that on doesn't expire until September or so) - just put the SIM from my old phone in my new one and it works fine. Better in fact, since my new phone supports HSDPA. This phone isn't actually carried by 3 at all and I suppose is technically not supported by them as a result, but they don't do anything to prevent you using your own phone if you want to.
Your bizarre "I've got so much memory I'd better use 300 megs to do tasks that could be done in 3 so as not to waste it!" made me laugh, so thank you.
But if you have more than enough RAM to cover all the other tasks along with the torrents you are running why should you care? You seem to be complaining about usage of the system resources that is a pittance in the total pool of available memory and CPU.
You're making the assumption that there is enough RAM to cover all the other tasks, but that's an assumption you're making based on your own usage patterns. Wasting a few hundred megs will reduce the amount of memory you can comfortably allocate to virtual machines, for example. Some software will happily suck up as much memory as it can to improve performance, e.g. database software (maybe he does development against large databases on his machine)? Games can use a lot of memory and are also good candidates for using as much as they can get in order to improve responsiveness in a highly visible manner.
Additionally, while you're correct in that any memory not being used in a given moment is in a way "wasted", in that it can't be saved for later use, you also need to factor in the extreme cases that might occur comparatively rarely. As the person you're replying to said, torrents are considered by many to be a background task. Even when it's finished downloading, it is still doing useful work, and so many people prefer to leave it running all the time. In the case of a developer working on a memory-intensive application, that 300 meg hit to have a bloated torrent client in the background may be too much of a hit to take, resulting in them having to keep stopping and starting it depending on their activity.
This is fair enough and expected for a computer with limited memory -- you can't possibly do everything at once. However if there's no compelling reason for a torrent client to be using 300 megs of memory, why would you want to bother stopping and starting it every time you need to do a bit of heavy lifting? Why not just run a client that uses a tenth or a hundredth the amount of memory and leave it running all the time and never have to worry about it?
The other obvious problem is that most people have more than one application running at a time. What if your torrent client, your instant messenger, your web browser, your music player and your email client all decide to use a few hundred megabytes of memory for no apparent reason? Now you need 2 gigs of memory just to do very basic things. That's a waste of memory, in very real terms, and it's also a waste that's forced on everybody, not just those who choose to overspec their machines "just in case".
Probably not coincidence, but that doesn't mean it's sinister or improper. If you knew of a significant threat that wasn't being addressed, and it was that time when the People In Charge were working out where to spend money (i.e. are actively seeking information and advice on the most effective use of their funds), wouldn't that seem like an ideal time to try to raise awareness of it?
Or would you prefer to wait until there's no money to spend and nobody currently in a position to do anything about it before announcing it?
Not saying it isn't all another scam to get free money, but just because it might be doesn't mean it is.
Yeah, what's worse is that they are planning to privatise this network as well after a few years.
I'm a bit stunned by this announcement, as it's what I thought they should do (and the only sane approach) several years ago. Therefore I never expected it to actually happen.
Fortunately I'm cynical enough to still believe it'll never happen, or if it does happen it'll be ridiculously overpriced and underperformant. At best it'll be great for a short while until the next "think of the children" senator holds a crucial seat and then the government of the day will do their level best to screw the citizens over in order to win their vote on some unrelated legislation. Either that or they'll screw us on behalf of the media cartels.
Well I think the idea is to extend programming away from the keyboard, i.e. you can still be "programming" if you're not the one doing the typing, by thinking about the problem and your solution and how it fits with the rest of the program.
What I've never understood is exactly how this is meant to work. Surely you need to do all the planning stuff before you start writing code, even if you have a buddy to assist. At that point all the pre-programming is done so you're just whacking it into the computer, and it's a bit pointless for the buddy to sit around watching you input it. If the concept isn't known to be sound or its integration with the rest of the program hasn't been fully thought out, why on earth would you be writing it already?
Arguably it's better for someone to stop you half way through coding a module to say it ain't gonna work out then to wait until you're finished, but such realisations ought to come before the typing begins.
Perhaps, but you're the one yelling at your TV!
You do realise that the time shown is your local time, right? That's why there's no timezone there to qualify it.
For me it says,
Posted by kdawson on Wednesday April 01, @04:28AM
from the fruits-of-competition dept.
Also kdawson is a douchebag. Not for this article, but just in general.
(and indeed then have to check that my INSERT actually worked and check for possible returned errors, coding exceptions etc).
So you're one of those "programmers" who doesn't check for errors? So what happens when the disc is full and the insert fails, or someone turned the database server off, or any of the myriad other things that can go wrong goes wrong?
Man, I hate you guys.
-- sincerely, systems admin
My personal favourite at the moment is "retrieving list of products failed: query timed out ... pages of more junk ... crawl succeeded!" Yeah, except the search now returns no results at all. Nice error handling.
did everyone who runs a server suddenly learn how to become a dba?
Well anyone who runs a database server is by definition a DBA, just like anyone who drives a car is an automobile pilot. If you don't want to learn what the hell you're doing, then pay someone else to do it for you. You'll only fuck things up otherwise. (Though you probably stand a higher chance of losing data when that happens if you're using MySQL.) Seriously, there's craploads of companies who'll happily run a web and database server for you for a ridiculously low monthly fee.
Doing it yourself has its advantages, but there are some drawbacks too.
Any project of sufficient complexity will likely have multiple release candidates, just because once all the release critical bugs are found and fixed... more will be found.
That doesn't mean a release candidate isn't actually a candidate for release, or at least is supposed to be. An RC is supposed to be, "we think we're done, unless you can show us there's major bugs remaining this is exactly what we're going to release". The final release should be nothing more than the last release candidate with the version strings to say it's a final release rather than an RC.
Vista had one RC, and when it was made available Microsoft made it absolutely clear that the RC was not actually a candidate for release; it did not include a bunch of changes and fixes that were going to be in the actual release. They abuse the term: Microsoft's "release candidates" are actually more like "late betas".
The term "release candidate" is actually entirely self-explanatory and leaves less wiggle room for misrepresenting the status of a project than "alpha" or "beta". The final release should be identical to the last RC. In practice there's often some small changes made or diagnostic/debugging code removed; but any actual changes in functionality or any non-trivial fix should cause another RC to be made. It is a bit of a balancing act between cost/time and thoroughness though.
However, calling something a "release candidate" when you have absolutely no intention that it will actually be the released version is disingenuous. If is not a candidate for release, then it is not a release candidate.