Hm, where I come from it's considered rude to block public roads. It's also illegal, actually.
People driving down public roads looking at or taking pictures of houses is completely normal and commonplace. (eg. when looking at houses for sale)
Regardless, politeness is essentially a favor. It's doing something extraordinary to be kind to someone else. There's nothing mandatory about it. However, enforcing politeness by mob rule is rude.
Exactly. They're more than welcome to block private citizens from the roads --- IF AND ONLY IF they purchase all of the property and roads therein from the government and make it a gated community. Plenty of rich people do this - heck, even not-so-rich people do this.
Are you seriously claiming you need ownership of everything in a picture, to take that picture?
Not only is that a bizarre standpoint, it's not remotely mirrored by the actual LAWs. Everything in view of public property IS public property to view. Period.
If you don't want a telescope looking into your window, you need to close your blinds. Or live on a private residence with a forest between you and the nearest public property.
All this "OMG BOOGLARS" talk is nonsense too. Pictures of the fronts of houses is "all the legwork to prepare for a robbery"?? I'm no booglar my self, but I'm pretty sure "casing a joint" involves checking all the way around a residence for entry points, exit points, looking in windows to see if there's anything worth stealing, and so on. People drive down public roads seeing the fronts of houses all day every day.
You don't even need to plug it in, actually. Macs are so amazing that it will wirelessly transfer USB devices over bluetooth-firewire-1600 as long as the USB device is within 10 feet of the Mac. Line of sight not required either!
Those are theoretical maximum speeds. Go ahead and look up Real achievable transfer speeds, especially on two systems with vastly different hardware and software. For instance a new mac vs a new HP loaded down with crapware.
Dell is a perfect example. When I look at buying a new Dell for gaming, I usually ended up finding 8 different models of what is essentially identical case+CPU+mobo+hard drive. It's truly overwhelming.
And of course Apple is the opposite extreme, with only 1, *maybe* 2 models of any given case+cpu.
I'd like to think there's somewhere in between, probably closer to Apple's side, where Dell could offer a handful of systems, with the basic configuration options. EVERYTHING in a dell is configurable anyway, so why have 12 different models of the same system?
You seem to have already figured this out, so perhaps you're being rhetorical, but the heirarchy goes like this:
1. Open Format 2. Closed But Free Format 3. Closed But Expensive Format ... 99. Microsoft's Closed Format
Microsoft is worse than other proprietary formats because it has the means (and lack of morals) to crush an ecosystem of competitive products with its own crappy bundled product, which then gets even crappier due to lack of competition.
The OP was just asking for any format besides the Very Worst Format Possible, so yes, that isn't particularly picky.
A lot of people don't know what Firewire is, sure. They buy the cheap laptop thinking it doesn't matter. But then they scratch their heads and complain when it tasks an order of magnitude longer for their files to copy to a device.
By "forcing" people onto higher-end systems, Apple is looking a bit ahead. $500 laptops sell systems now, and those people go and bitch and bitch about all the problems and slowness they experience.
Meanwhile people who buy Apples have better hardware that keeps them happy with the system long term, combined with the psychological effect of wanting to be happy with something that cost so much (the same effect that makes audiophiles pretend their expensive digital cables are better than cheap cables).
To reiterate/summarize mattwarden's point, URLs that select paths/pages with numeric IDs are Very Bad. You gain a modicrum of bandwidth, and lose a huge amount of descriptiveness in the URL.
The same goes for TinyURL. Unless you're writing URLs on paper, it's nonsense.
If someone sends me a link, I don't blindly click on it. I read the link, and sometimes realize I know what it is, or that I don't want to go there. Any miniscule gains from having a short URL are overwhelmed by the benefit of having a user-readable URL.
There have been a Lot of articles lately about how silly prohibition and the War on Drugs are. CNN had an editorial recently that went over all of the negative effects of prohibition.
Unfortunately it didn't at all cover the downside of legalization (hypothetically, increased usage+addiction?) or the way to legalize+regulate drugs such that it's a net gain.
1) You have to forward the BT port through your home router for the p2p to work.
2) p2p takes a bit to ramp up, but it's substantially faster than pulling from Blizzard's servers. I see this every patch because my comp has the port forwarded and my laptop doesn't.
Isn't the auto-generated domain the only way it can update itself? Where do you think all of these compromised computers are going to get the new URL generator from?
And why do they need the URL generator, if they can contact the compromised machines without it?
Most people I know don't buy a laptop concerned about opening it up and poking around inside. If I were making the GP statement about Mac laptop chassis, it'd be referring to:
1) Better keyboards than most laptops (this is partially due to better software, but still important)
2) Smaller + lighter
3) Better port positioning. No having to close the lid or lean way over to try to plug things into the back.
4) The trackpad+scrolling (again, partially software-solution with the scrolling, at least it's a lot better than my dell laptop's wonky attempt at having a separate scroll area on the side of the trackpad)
5) The latches and power connector (the magnetic power connector is very handy, and the power brick+extension too, as long as you didnt get the one revision that was huge and super-hot)
I've never needed to open up my mac laptops beyond removing the sony exploding battery to put in the free replacement.
Even so, I wouldn't expect a mac laptop to be as easy to get around inside as a HP or Dell that's twice as big. I'm also not sure I would call a laptop twice as big and heavy "simply better engineered", but I guess it depends on what your priorities are.
You might have a better idea than others about this then - my first thought seeing this "random" update, shortly after the battle.net account release, is that Blizzard is working on their own Steam.
A desktop app with cross-game communication, perhaps queueing for BGs/instances outside of the game (maybe even with multiple toons at the same time, and play with whoever one pops for? maybe im dreaming here). They even mention "store" in the battle.net press release, so what are the odds they aren't going to release a Blizzard-owned+maintained addon "store" (even if its free)? Automatic updates without running a 3rd party tool like Curse or WOWMatrix offer.
Exactly, jellomizer. From what I've seen at bigger companies, guys like Josh don't exist when there are enough coworkers around to call him out as a dumbass who codes first and designs later (resulting in the convulted illegible code that is their hallmark).
Re: the grandparent post's comment of: "It is equally amazing how programmers of average ability insist on branding brilliant code they have trouble understanding as convoluted and obscure."
Code that is overcomplicated, convulted, and obscure is also unmaintainable, undebuggable, and all-around worthless.
Errors go up with code complexity, as does the time and effort required to debug said code. If no one else on the team can work with the code, it's that much worse.
If he can't design the code beforehand to be simple and well-documented (or self-documenting) then it isn't good code, and he isn't a good coder.
"he would just blaze out this huge complicated mess of code that frankly WAS brilliant"
What line of work are you in where there are problems that warrant "huge complicated messes of code"? Every huge complicated mess of code I've ever seen, period, has been a bad one, that someone could have done more readable, more maintainable, and usually in half as much code to boot.
re: Planning, the claim here and perpetuated by the article is that there are OMG RIGHT THIS INSTANT problems in programming. There aren't, unless you're a small programming shop that doesn't follow relatively basic practices like version control and QA'd releases.
re: Managers, I would advocate firing anyone who hired a Josh. And if I came into a company, I'd also advocate firing any managers who let a Josh stick around pulling this kind of crap. In my experience having Joshes around depends on having clueless managers who believe the kind of bullshit a Josh spouts. Or, even worse, a Josh got promoted to manager and likes to hire more Joshes (i've seen this first-hand)
One of the problem's with these Lone Coders is that no matter how hard they work, and how much code they churn out, odds are they aren't even solving the right problem. To solve the right problem you have to talk to the business.
More often than not once you get a real development team with competent leadership, the Lone Coder's work is going to be almost entirely replaced over time by refactoring. And note that I said refactoring, not trying to rewrite a massive app in one fell swoop while the business continues ramming its head for months (or years) against all of the problems "unworthy" of the Lone Coder's time to fix.
It's unfortunate that a lot of companies let engineers get away with "speaking engineer" and claiming themselves to be Rodney McKay-esque geniuses doing the impossible and not having time to document or explain it to anyone.
It always ends badly. I'd bet a lot of these companies go under before they figure out how much more productive they would have been with engineers who could work well on a team and document+QA their work.
I've seen a lot of examples play out where the "lone genius coder" finally gets forced to have a bunch of underlings hired to work with him. And that's when the underlings start realizing that the guy isn't a "genius", he's just a jerk who treats people like crap, writes bad code, and doesn't understand the most basic good software practices. Like testing - of any sort.
Either the organization is structured such that the underlings can get across the Lone Genius's stupidity and get him fired (or demoted to a position where he's forced to work well). Or the organization is structured such that the underlings all get frustrated and quit.
The Sansa Clip is 1.35" x 2.7" x.65". 2.36 cubic inches. The new Shuffle is 0.3" x 1.8" x 0.7". 0.38 cubic inches.
The Clip is bigger than the LAST generation of the shuffle. It's 8 times bigger than this generation of the shuffle. Not really what I would call "similar size".
It seems like the shuffle has always been targeted at people uninterested in fine-tuned track selection, to whom having a tiny music player is paramount. Is it better to have wacky morse code controls available than to make those things impossible? Hard to say. I imagine very few people buying this Shuffle will learn and remember anything beyond "double click to go forward".
Are you joking? You're comparing a 2.3 cubic inch device with a clunky 1-word "screen" to a 0.3 cubic inch device with a no-eyes-required audio interface.
The Sansa Clip is almost 8 times bigger than the Shuffle. And that screen? That's a "feature"? The Sansa has 7 buttons plus some kind of radial ipod-ripoff pad. You want to be squinting at that screen pressing those buttons while jogging down the sidewalk?
It's certainly a valid question to ask whether the Shuffle's size and interface are worth $20 to you, over having a clunky device with a bad interface. But you're pretending the Sansa Clip is "more features for less dollars". It certainly is not, unless you start with the assumption that size and interface are worthless.
I don't personally have a need for a tiny jogging-targeted music player, but that's no reason to get on a high horse and act all indignant because Apple is making one. You may as well be saying HURRR TRUCKS ARE DUMB CAUSE SEDANS GET BETTER GAS MILEAGE AND ARE CHEAPER. Yeah, if you don't care about the extra features of a truck, don't get one. Duh.
It doesn't count when your "neighboring country" is closer to you than most states are to each other in the US.
Most latency seems to come from changing networks. I'll have 5 ping to a comcast network on the other side of the United States, and 80 ping to another server that's 1 state away but on a different network.
On comcast I've always (for over a decade) had sub-10 pings to numerous servers. Often the lowest ping servers would be in Germany or France. And I can assure you I'm a hell of a lot further from Germany or France than they are from each other.
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Hm, where I come from it's considered rude to block public roads. It's also illegal, actually.
People driving down public roads looking at or taking pictures of houses is completely normal and commonplace. (eg. when looking at houses for sale)
Regardless, politeness is essentially a favor. It's doing something extraordinary to be kind to someone else. There's nothing mandatory about it. However, enforcing politeness by mob rule is rude.
Exactly. They're more than welcome to block private citizens from the roads --- IF AND ONLY IF they purchase all of the property and roads therein from the government and make it a gated community. Plenty of rich people do this - heck, even not-so-rich people do this.
Are you seriously claiming you need ownership of everything in a picture, to take that picture?
Not only is that a bizarre standpoint, it's not remotely mirrored by the actual LAWs. Everything in view of public property IS public property to view. Period.
If you don't want a telescope looking into your window, you need to close your blinds. Or live on a private residence with a forest between you and the nearest public property.
All this "OMG BOOGLARS" talk is nonsense too. Pictures of the fronts of houses is "all the legwork to prepare for a robbery"?? I'm no booglar my self, but I'm pretty sure "casing a joint" involves checking all the way around a residence for entry points, exit points, looking in windows to see if there's anything worth stealing, and so on. People drive down public roads seeing the fronts of houses all day every day.
You don't even need to plug it in, actually. Macs are so amazing that it will wirelessly transfer USB devices over bluetooth-firewire-1600 as long as the USB device is within 10 feet of the Mac. Line of sight not required either!
Those are theoretical maximum speeds. Go ahead and look up Real achievable transfer speeds, especially on two systems with vastly different hardware and software. For instance a new mac vs a new HP loaded down with crapware.
Truth.
Dell is a perfect example. When I look at buying a new Dell for gaming, I usually ended up finding 8 different models of what is essentially identical case+CPU+mobo+hard drive. It's truly overwhelming.
And of course Apple is the opposite extreme, with only 1, *maybe* 2 models of any given case+cpu.
I'd like to think there's somewhere in between, probably closer to Apple's side, where Dell could offer a handful of systems, with the basic configuration options. EVERYTHING in a dell is configurable anyway, so why have 12 different models of the same system?
You seem to have already figured this out, so perhaps you're being rhetorical, but the heirarchy goes like this:
1. Open Format
...
2. Closed But Free Format
3. Closed But Expensive Format
99. Microsoft's Closed Format
Microsoft is worse than other proprietary formats because it has the means (and lack of morals) to crush an ecosystem of competitive products with its own crappy bundled product, which then gets even crappier due to lack of competition.
The OP was just asking for any format besides the Very Worst Format Possible, so yes, that isn't particularly picky.
A lot of people don't know what Firewire is, sure. They buy the cheap laptop thinking it doesn't matter. But then they scratch their heads and complain when it tasks an order of magnitude longer for their files to copy to a device.
By "forcing" people onto higher-end systems, Apple is looking a bit ahead. $500 laptops sell systems now, and those people go and bitch and bitch about all the problems and slowness they experience.
Meanwhile people who buy Apples have better hardware that keeps them happy with the system long term, combined with the psychological effect of wanting to be happy with something that cost so much (the same effect that makes audiophiles pretend their expensive digital cables are better than cheap cables).
There should be a law, like Occam's Razor, about this.
Multiple anything by a big enough number, and you end up with a big number.
To reiterate/summarize mattwarden's point, URLs that select paths/pages with numeric IDs are Very Bad. You gain a modicrum of bandwidth, and lose a huge amount of descriptiveness in the URL.
The same goes for TinyURL. Unless you're writing URLs on paper, it's nonsense.
If someone sends me a link, I don't blindly click on it. I read the link, and sometimes realize I know what it is, or that I don't want to go there. Any miniscule gains from having a short URL are overwhelmed by the benefit of having a user-readable URL.
There have been a Lot of articles lately about how silly prohibition and the War on Drugs are. CNN had an editorial recently that went over all of the negative effects of prohibition.
Unfortunately it didn't at all cover the downside of legalization (hypothetically, increased usage+addiction?) or the way to legalize+regulate drugs such that it's a net gain.
Couple tips:
1) You have to forward the BT port through your home router for the p2p to work.
2) p2p takes a bit to ramp up, but it's substantially faster than pulling from Blizzard's servers. I see this every patch because my comp has the port forwarded and my laptop doesn't.
Isn't the auto-generated domain the only way it can update itself? Where do you think all of these compromised computers are going to get the new URL generator from?
And why do they need the URL generator, if they can contact the compromised machines without it?
Most people I know don't buy a laptop concerned about opening it up and poking around inside. If I were making the GP statement about Mac laptop chassis, it'd be referring to:
1) Better keyboards than most laptops (this is partially due to better software, but still important)
2) Smaller + lighter
3) Better port positioning. No having to close the lid or lean way over to try to plug things into the back.
4) The trackpad+scrolling (again, partially software-solution with the scrolling, at least it's a lot better than my dell laptop's wonky attempt at having a separate scroll area on the side of the trackpad)
5) The latches and power connector (the magnetic power connector is very handy, and the power brick+extension too, as long as you didnt get the one revision that was huge and super-hot)
I've never needed to open up my mac laptops beyond removing the sony exploding battery to put in the free replacement.
Even so, I wouldn't expect a mac laptop to be as easy to get around inside as a HP or Dell that's twice as big. I'm also not sure I would call a laptop twice as big and heavy "simply better engineered", but I guess it depends on what your priorities are.
You might have a better idea than others about this then - my first thought seeing this "random" update, shortly after the battle.net account release, is that Blizzard is working on their own Steam.
A desktop app with cross-game communication, perhaps queueing for BGs/instances outside of the game (maybe even with multiple toons at the same time, and play with whoever one pops for? maybe im dreaming here). They even mention "store" in the battle.net press release, so what are the odds they aren't going to release a Blizzard-owned+maintained addon "store" (even if its free)? Automatic updates without running a 3rd party tool like Curse or WOWMatrix offer.
Interesting coincidence, at the very least!
Exactly, jellomizer. From what I've seen at bigger companies, guys like Josh don't exist when there are enough coworkers around to call him out as a dumbass who codes first and designs later (resulting in the convulted illegible code that is their hallmark).
Re: the grandparent post's comment of: "It is equally amazing how programmers of average ability insist on branding brilliant code they have trouble understanding as convoluted and obscure."
Code that is overcomplicated, convulted, and obscure is also unmaintainable, undebuggable, and all-around worthless.
Errors go up with code complexity, as does the time and effort required to debug said code. If no one else on the team can work with the code, it's that much worse.
If he can't design the code beforehand to be simple and well-documented (or self-documenting) then it isn't good code, and he isn't a good coder.
Seriously now -
"he would just blaze out this huge complicated mess of code that frankly WAS brilliant"
What line of work are you in where there are problems that warrant "huge complicated messes of code"? Every huge complicated mess of code I've ever seen, period, has been a bad one, that someone could have done more readable, more maintainable, and usually in half as much code to boot.
re: Planning, the claim here and perpetuated by the article is that there are OMG RIGHT THIS INSTANT problems in programming. There aren't, unless you're a small programming shop that doesn't follow relatively basic practices like version control and QA'd releases.
re: Managers, I would advocate firing anyone who hired a Josh. And if I came into a company, I'd also advocate firing any managers who let a Josh stick around pulling this kind of crap. In my experience having Joshes around depends on having clueless managers who believe the kind of bullshit a Josh spouts. Or, even worse, a Josh got promoted to manager and likes to hire more Joshes (i've seen this first-hand)
Exactly.
One of the problem's with these Lone Coders is that no matter how hard they work, and how much code they churn out, odds are they aren't even solving the right problem. To solve the right problem you have to talk to the business.
More often than not once you get a real development team with competent leadership, the Lone Coder's work is going to be almost entirely replaced over time by refactoring. And note that I said refactoring, not trying to rewrite a massive app in one fell swoop while the business continues ramming its head for months (or years) against all of the problems "unworthy" of the Lone Coder's time to fix.
It's unfortunate that a lot of companies let engineers get away with "speaking engineer" and claiming themselves to be Rodney McKay-esque geniuses doing the impossible and not having time to document or explain it to anyone.
It always ends badly. I'd bet a lot of these companies go under before they figure out how much more productive they would have been with engineers who could work well on a team and document+QA their work.
I've seen a lot of examples play out where the "lone genius coder" finally gets forced to have a bunch of underlings hired to work with him. And that's when the underlings start realizing that the guy isn't a "genius", he's just a jerk who treats people like crap, writes bad code, and doesn't understand the most basic good software practices. Like testing - of any sort.
Either the organization is structured such that the underlings can get across the Lone Genius's stupidity and get him fired (or demoted to a position where he's forced to work well). Or the organization is structured such that the underlings all get frustrated and quit.
The Sansa Clip is 1.35" x 2.7" x .65". 2.36 cubic inches.
The new Shuffle is 0.3" x 1.8" x 0.7". 0.38 cubic inches.
The Clip is bigger than the LAST generation of the shuffle. It's 8 times bigger than this generation of the shuffle. Not really what I would call "similar size".
It seems like the shuffle has always been targeted at people uninterested in fine-tuned track selection, to whom having a tiny music player is paramount. Is it better to have wacky morse code controls available than to make those things impossible? Hard to say. I imagine very few people buying this Shuffle will learn and remember anything beyond "double click to go forward".
Are you joking? You're comparing a 2.3 cubic inch device with a clunky 1-word "screen" to a 0.3 cubic inch device with a no-eyes-required audio interface.
The Sansa Clip is almost 8 times bigger than the Shuffle. And that screen? That's a "feature"? The Sansa has 7 buttons plus some kind of radial ipod-ripoff pad. You want to be squinting at that screen pressing those buttons while jogging down the sidewalk?
It's certainly a valid question to ask whether the Shuffle's size and interface are worth $20 to you, over having a clunky device with a bad interface. But you're pretending the Sansa Clip is "more features for less dollars". It certainly is not, unless you start with the assumption that size and interface are worthless.
I don't personally have a need for a tiny jogging-targeted music player, but that's no reason to get on a high horse and act all indignant because Apple is making one. You may as well be saying HURRR TRUCKS ARE DUMB CAUSE SEDANS GET BETTER GAS MILEAGE AND ARE CHEAPER. Yeah, if you don't care about the extra features of a truck, don't get one. Duh.
The quote is recommending an app-specific database, not an OS-wide database for storing everything about both the OS and applications.
The difference is not insignificant.
It doesn't count when your "neighboring country" is closer to you than most states are to each other in the US.
Most latency seems to come from changing networks. I'll have 5 ping to a comcast network on the other side of the United States, and 80 ping to another server that's 1 state away but on a different network.
On comcast I've always (for over a decade) had sub-10 pings to numerous servers. Often the lowest ping servers would be in Germany or France. And I can assure you I'm a hell of a lot further from Germany or France than they are from each other.