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User: MrBlack

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  1. Good Work Tom's on AMD And THG update · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I say good work to 'em. It seems THG was correct all along, but I couldn't detect the faintest sense of gloating or grandstanding in their article. They've pointed out a fairly big problem with some of AMD's chips, AMD have responded with new info to MOBO manufacturers (who will no doubt consider this new feature fairly important after the attention the orriginal article on THG received). Great. No threats of legal action by either side (AFAIK), no finger pointing, no FUD. Now if everyone could behave like this......

  2. Re:Mind maps ? on Tools and Techniques for Improving your Memory? · · Score: 2

    Mind Maps rock. I use them all the time, and they're invaluable, but that is because I'm a very visual person. I think the most important think in improving your memory is to understand yourself better, and figure out what type of learner you are. There are lots of books on figuring out what sort of learner you are, and techniques that different types of learners can use to maximise their retention/input speed. Learning is fun, but learning really quickly is more fun.

  3. Re:yes, and most programmers suck on Open Source Programmers Stink At Error Handling · · Score: 2

    I love the term "Legacy Development Models" - I'm gonna try and use that one today at our meeting.

  4. Re:It's probably over... on Macromedia Sues Adobe, Claims Photoshop Infringes Patent · · Score: 2

    AFAIK, there isn't a product that offers the exact same functionality of Photoshop for less than 1/10 of the price
    Think about it....if there _was_ would anyone buy photoshop? Of course not! If you want to save money try the GIMP, you can't beat the price.

  5. Re:Exactly on IBM Patents Web Page Templates · · Score: 2

    Try here or this or better yet just look it up for yourself using google

  6. Re:The writing's on the wall for Microsoft on Microsoft: The Gatekeeper of the Internet · · Score: 2

    I _like_ this analogy, but it's not even really like that. Imagine that the car industry was dominated by one manufacturer, who had a reputation for making cars that had a lot of safety problems, and where the hood was welded shut. Imagine also that you couldn't re-sell the car once you bought it, that it came with no warranty of any kind. Now we image this magical new process that means cars could be manufactured for free. Sure, you still have to put petrol in them (but you had to before right?), you still need to get them serviced if they have problems (these new cars are easier to service because you or your mechanic can look inside and figure out how they work, of course when they first come out there are not that many people who understand them but the number slowly grows while at the same time the cars become easier to fix!) But they are free!! On reading this analogy I can't even really understand why I use windows. Better go home and remove that NTFS partition.

  7. Exactly on IBM Patents Web Page Templates · · Score: 5, Insightful

    IBM seem to be pretty good about this. Remember both IBM and Unisys held patents on LZW compression (IBM's application was filed 3 weeks BEFORE Unisys), but it is Unisys that tried to extract all the money from it. IIRR IBM have released may of their patents to the public domain.

  8. J# vs. C# on J# · · Score: 3, Informative

    Java and C# are already pretty similar...how am I going to know at a glance which one I'm looking at. Surely the differences between the two (which are subtle, but certainly there) will catch people up all the time.

  9. TAOCP? Nah on Programming Books for Non-Programmers? · · Score: 3, Informative

    Although I haven't read it, I've heard this book on python (Learn to Program Using Python) is useful. It is an expanded version of this web tutorial. Although it's hard to see things from a newbie perspecitve when you've been programming for a while, python does have a reputation for being easy to learn. The syntax is nice and clean, not too verbose, and the language is coherent and well designed. And the best thing is you don't have to throw it away when you graduate from newbiehood. Save the Knuths for later on in their programming journey.

  10. Re:Who modded this "offtopic?" on British Researchers Say Fusion Is Close · · Score: 2

    I had a huge flame for you....something like "fucking _YES_ I did read more than the subject line"...and then I read yours. Thanks. It's good to know someone else thought it was at least a little bit on-topic.

  11. Re:Missing the point on Open Source Bug Tracking for Visual SourceSafe? · · Score: 2
    Visual Intercept does integrate with VSS, so obviously someone thinks this is a good idea. I can see the value of being able to look at your bugs (or "incidents" as Visual Intercept calls them) and say "we had this bug in version 1.x, it disappeared in 1.y but reappeared in 1.z", but how do bugs/"incidents" get attributed to an individual file?

    Certainly if a system was automatically reporting it's own bugs you could have code that said "Error in module XYZ", but presumable most bugs might come via e-mails/calls from beta testers/users/testers. In my experience many "bugs" are more to do with the GUI (since this is the part of the system the user interacts with directly), which an automated error-logging system would have a hard/impossible time finding.


    Is there something cool you can do with a system like this that I'm not getting here?
    Does anyone have experience integrating bug tracking and version control? Does the quality of data generated offset the implementation difficulties?

  12. Re:ten years == we don't really know on British Researchers Say Fusion Is Close · · Score: 4, Funny
    Predicting timelines is best left to engineers

    Just not software engineers! ;^)

  13. DMCA for power industry on British Researchers Say Fusion Is Close · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    The way the law is going, I can see a "DCMA for the energy industry" whereby fusion would be made illegal. It's a shame the article doesn't have more details on the MAST system they are building....the only details were "it's like JET but smaller".

  14. No Net == Productivity Disaster? on Worms/Viruses - Is Blocking Internet Access an Overreaction? · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Sometimes I wonder how programmers worked before widespread use of the internet. Currently if I have a problem with something that I cannot solve myself a couple of minutes searching google + newsgroups will usually reveal the answer, or a viable alternative. The wealth of information is staggering (even if the signal to noise is a sometimes a bit low - you have to learn to be selective). On the flip-side I've noticed I can sometimes loose chunks of time posting stuff to slashdot, surfing the web etc that is not really work related. It seems obvious to me that the answer is better security and configuration of firewalls etc, but then I'm not a manager.

    Other than outlining the common sense arguments against blocking the net in your question, I cannot think of any arguments except to try it for a week/fortnight/however long you need to get sensible data. Then measure your current productivity against your productivity when you had net access.

  15. Re:Does do MS Visual SourceSafe on CVS vs. Commercial Source Control? · · Score: 2

    I've never seen any of that happen, and we _did_ use labels a lot at my last job, but it wouldn't really surprise me. VSS is a dodgy. I hope they've made significant changes in VS.NET. There's no reason why SQL Server or Web Storage System couldn't be used as a good back-end for VSS (which might make it a half decent system if the re-wrote the UI too).

  16. Re:Does do MS Visual SourceSafe on CVS vs. Commercial Source Control? · · Score: 2

    I have no love of VSS (you hear me? _no_love!) but how is setting labels hard. Load up VSS. Right click on what you want to label, select label from the menu, type in a name for the label, and a comment if you wish and select O.K.. How is that hard? It can be done programatically. Is there something 31337 you're doing I don't know about? If you're going to bitch about source-safe bitch about the crap non-standard UI, the poor,contradictory documentation, and probably the most concerning of all(as you point out) the data corruption issue.

  17. should hit sometime in the next couple of days? on Flare Sends A Gigaton Of Solar Detritus Toward Earth · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Shouldn't we be able to calculate time of impact a little more precisely than this?

  18. Re:when you've got a hammer... on Web Application Architecture · · Score: 2

    That's a bit harsh. They sounded like quite competent developers who had a lot of good tools at their disposal and were given the freedom to choose the one they thought was best (which is a bit of a rarity). Also, it is not clear from the article that they had 2 tries in Java. It seems like they had one try in Java, ditched it for zope, and then finally switched to python. It can read about stacks of people going the JSP/EJB/JDBC route (which either attests to it's effectiveness or the effectiveness of it's marketting). It's nice to read about someone doing something a little differently.

  19. Re:M$ user FUD. on Why The U.S. Surrendered To Microsoft · · Score: 2

    Sorry....I must have missed something between the part where you agree with me that Win2K can run well on fairly modest hardware and you said I didn't know what I was talking about?

  20. Re:M$ user FUD. on Why The U.S. Surrendered To Microsoft · · Score: 2
    W2k won't even boot with 300mhz .

    I guess I must have been halucinating when I saw Win2K running quite fine on my brother's PII 266 w/ 64 Meg of ram (hey - I never said super fast). My PII 300 with 256 Meg of ram runs win2k quite well thanks very much. I agree that Linux can be stripped down to be lighter and faster but there's no point spreading crap like this.

  21. Re:What oughta be there on What Features Do You Look For in a SDK? · · Score: 2

    Couldn't agree more. Examples of varied lengths are good. I find it frustrating when SDK demos try to make the product/API look good by glossing over the things that are more difficult to do using a give product/API *cough* Microsoft *cough*. I'd like to know about any gotchas and sharp edges up front. To echo what others have said good docs + good demos = good sdk.

  22. Re:I've been doing this for a long time. on Simplicity In the Age Of The GUI · · Score: 2

    What were windows users doing in your red hat class? Were they lost? Seriously though..I'm a windows user and I often have multiple vt220 terminal emulators open to various *nix boxes (I love that retro green-screen look! - I even have a windows theme to make all my windows apps look like that too!) It's not rocket science. I'm sure your experience in your red hat class had more to do with the individuals than any operating system idioms they may have picked up. (hey - admitting that you went to a red hat class doesn't make you sound very 1337 btw either! - unless you were the instructor).

  23. avoid proprietary extensions to standards on Avoiding Microsoft Lock-ins? · · Score: 2

    This obviously applies mainly to applicatin development but it is important if you are developing things for use in-house. Microsoft always adds a bit on here and there to all the "standards" they addopt (embrace, extend - you know the deal). Try and find out where the standards stop and where Microsoft's extensions start. For example make sure web applications developed for internal use will run on IE and Mozilla/Konqueror. Use a subset of SQL that is supported by SQL Server, Postgres, Interbase and SAPDB (or make sure you can convert easily from one to another). If it isn't possible to avoid proprietary extensions (or the extensions solve a problem in a way that it would be crazy to ignore them) at least encapsulate them in a single area.
    Another area I've seen lock-in is using windows integrated authentication in ASP applications, which locks you in to using windows clients (I don't think SAMBA overcomes this but I could be wrong). I think the web has great potential for un-shackling people from M$, but so many times I see them tighten the manacles by accepting browser compatability only with IE etc. etc.

  24. Read the Article on Exploiting and Protecting 802.11b Networks · · Score: 2

    There are some tips there. Extreme Tech also ran an article a couple of days ago on the basics of securing wlans.Here is the link

  25. Re:Never got addicted to it on 1st Cup Of Coffee: Hardening Your Arteries · · Score: 2

    I always try to stay off it until I need it. I can go for weeks without and then put in an all-nighter and need the extra stimulation. Best thing is when you're been off it for a while your tolerance is way down and it can feel more like speed than caffeine.