In the project I maintain I try to fix any bugs I can find immediately, but probably 80% of bug reports are just 'this doesn't work, fix it', or don't include version number, OS, or any pointer to how to replicate the bug. These kinds of bugs don't get fixed quickly.
The worst kind are the 'this works differntly to how I want it to' bugs, which aren't bugs at all (often they're design decisions made because they have to be, other times I'm trying to move things in a particular direction that require the different functionalty). OTOH if the same thing keeps cropping up I'll generally change it because it's indicative of a useability bug.
If you want to get your bug fixed, then remember that the guy on the other end of the email is probably only working on this in his spare time, may well have had a bad day at work, and doesn't need nagging. A polite description of the problem, giving as much information as possible (it's virtually impossible to give too much information in these circumstances) will go a long way. If your query isn't answered immediately be patient, because the maintainer probably has more important things to do at that moment, and will get around to it when he can.
Actually we do - we call it 'administration' where the receivers take over and try to make the company run at a profit. Failing that they try to sell it as a going concern (there is legal protection that says if you buy a running business you can't sack everyone w/o paying their redundancy). Only then is the company wound up.
This happened with KPNQwest. The problem was the whole telecoms market is in depression due to a glut of bandwidth and nobody wanted to buy it whole - I'm not even sure after they gave up and broke it up that all the pieces were sold.
I think C4 is mostly a mixture of old series (AFAIK they don't show them in order). Sky1 is just beginning to show the series after Daniel Jackson died (Season 5? 6?), intermingled with lots of older stuff, so you have to be careful to check otherwise you get confused.
Actually seeing nudity would have spoiled the fun:-)
I liked lexx series 1+2 (some of series 2 was seriously strange!). Series 3 was in danger of becoming what it was trying to parody - staying on the same planet was a mistake IMHO. Haven't seen series 4 yet.
The biggest problem with Lexx over here is they show it at 4am or something so it gets almost no viewers. Tivos aren't that common (actually, most people don't even know what they are, since you can't actually buy them in shops any more).
It's also a very individual taste... the humour is unique, being originally german. It's not surprising US types don't always get it (don't worry, most of us europeans don't get your style of humour either - is frazier actually supposed to be funny?).
OTOH I've never been able to sit through an episode of Farscape without switching off in boredom (Tried series 1 - muppet show.. Tried a later one (series 3?) - still muppet show. In fact my wife started singing the muppets theme tune about halfway through...)
However you could instruct your ISP to not accept any mail with [ADV] in the header, so it all gets blocked at the SMTP level - much less bandwidth is used that way.
Of course if there are anti-forging regulations and they actually work (a big if, unfortunately) then you can make an RBL of all the spammers (since they're no longer using relays) and block them at the firewall.
> Some Linux install disks give you a shell, but > few utilities other than mount, mknod, cat, etc. > Now, if they gave us ed I wouldn't have to "cat > >>/mnt/etc/fstab" and the like.
Boot knoppix - you get a fully installed KDE desktop... (OK overkill I know).
...and Legend of Mana wasn't released outside the US, requiring European players to use a modchip to play it (neatly getting us back to the original subject:-) )
GPRS is quite nice (browse at your own pace, no paying by the minute, and the amount of data in a WAP page isn't going to go over the basic 0.5GB a month unless you really hammer it).
My next phone will have polyphonic ringtones & Java... Not to bothered with colour/camera but if everyone else gets one then I might have to just to receive their messages! By next year the 'with camera' phones will be given away free anyway (like WAP/GPRS is today).
Hopefully when polyphonic ringtones (just MIDI files really) become widespread those ripoff merchants charging £2.50 per ringtone will all go bust...
Someone at SuSe needs to read a book on UI design... I couldn't make head nor tail of what those dialogs were trying to tell me, and I'm used to Linux. A newbie would probably reformat and install Windows if presented with that.
Hopefully it was just a beta he was looking at and most of those dialogs will be consigned to the trash where they belong.
Re:Wales? c'mon.
on
Wireless Wales
·
· Score: 1, Redundant
No they're not separate countries (much though the scottish would like it to be so) they're separate provinces. Scotland has its own parliament, but shares many of the laws with the rest of the island (basically they get UK law until they decide to override it, although they have no power to override certain laws such as military stuff).
Wales is completely dependent on the mainland. Its 'Assembly' is just a talking shop with no real power.
The separate provinces make up the single country of the UK, or 'Britain'.
Re:Wireless Wales....?
on
Wireless Wales
·
· Score: 4, Informative
The targets are well known. BT even publish information about how well your local exchange is doing.
See http://www.adslguide.org.uk/availability/btprereg. asp?order=reg for the current 'league table'.
I'm also a proprietary developer out to make good software, but when I've just fixed a 'can you make this window look completely crap' bug that took two days and was marked 'critical' even though I know there are half a dozen crashing bugs marked 'minor', I'm generally just glad to get out of the office, and sod the quality (the boss likes to design UIs that look like a cross between DOS and a puking session).
However for the opensource stuff that I do, I can manage the priorities myself so I know which bugs to fix first and which can wait. There's less pressure, so I can work when I'm not tired/burnt out, so fewer bugs in the first place. I care more about the customers because I know who they are and am on good terms with a number of them.
>>>most of us dont need the damn hungarian notation that MS has spreads like gospel truth
>Who said anything about that? And besides, MS now discourages its use.
Got a reference for that? It's shoved down our throats whether we like it or not simply because 'it's the MS way'. It's damned impossible to debug something called 'lpszglname' especially when it isn't even a string any more because it was changed years ago...
The big things wrong for me are the OK/Cancel buttons being the wrong way around (I don't want to have to think about where the buttons are... with gnome I have to pause, read the desktop, then click rather than just click), and the sucky 12 point courier that everything defaults to (even if you try to change it in nautilus half the apps ignore the setting. gnome-terminal looks bloody awful in its default setting). Bring back the control panel too - I'm not a fan of having to search for 20 minutes just to work out how to change the background image (then finding that the option was broken/unimplemented...)
This is a.0 release.. I really liked gnome 1.4 it was clean and functional.... it'd be nice to get back to that level of functionaliy someday but for now I ended up switching to kde until gnome gets itself sorted again.
Over here (UK) we pay by the minute, but SMS is rapidly becoming more popular than voice anyway (at 1p/message it's dirt cheap). The providers are busily trying to get everyone to buy colour phones with cameras so we can send pictures to each other - 'Be the first With a Nokia 7something' (Umm.. if I'm the first who am I supposed to send my pictures to?)
Microsoft are suffering from the same problem... we don't have any customers on XP yet (many of them are still on Win95) and I estimate it'll be 2/3 years before we're ready to start using it - the domain controllers are still NT4 because there are no Win2k drivers for our RAID arrays. We tried putting an active directory machine on the network but it screwed around with the NT4 boxes (about half the developers are still on NT4) and it got pulled (can't see the point anyway it doesn't seem to offer anything over a standard DC in our situation).
Basically, for companies, upgrading is something that happens only rarely, and is planned for months (even years) before it happens. And if the existing solution still works the upgrade will probably never happen - which is why you still come across Novell networks sometimes.
MS are trying to force people to upgrade by refusing support for 'old' versions of software... this has resulted in the wholesale conversion to Linux of not a few companies (and quite a bit of local government over here, until MS relented and agreed a special deal) because of the related hardware costs, etc.
It's more of an issue that the webserver is misconfigured and attempts to send the streams as application/octet-stream. You have to save them to disk first, which is irritating.
Real Media format makes sense for the people who are still on 56k (still the vast majority of computer users). MPEG really requires quite high bandwidth to be useful.
What's a QD then? I actually have one of these... the vendor (who has since disappeared - don't you just love the net?) claimed it was an 8500 - certainly I've never seen it slow down on any game I've thrown at it - but I'm not so sure.
Not that I'm worried, it's far better than the geforce it replaced (having supported drivers rather than that binary junk that crashes every 20 minutes is a great plus) & the 2D performance is quite good... not as good as a Matrox, but usable.
It doesn't make sense to blame Access 97 for not upgrading from Win 3.11 - Access 95 was a 32bit app for Windows 95, and Access 2 would probably run fine even on XP, and it definately works on 95/98.
Slashdot Mirror
And the people who would have to argue this in court would be ....... Lawyers!
And on that day Satan will be skating to work...
Presumably it's ATAPI compatible so will work fine
In the project I maintain I try to fix any bugs I can find immediately, but probably 80% of bug reports are just 'this doesn't work, fix it', or don't include version number, OS, or any pointer to how to replicate the bug. These kinds of bugs don't get fixed quickly.
The worst kind are the 'this works differntly to how I want it to' bugs, which aren't bugs at all (often they're design decisions made because they have to be, other times I'm trying to move things in a particular direction that require the different functionalty). OTOH if the same thing keeps cropping up I'll generally change it because it's indicative of a useability bug.
If you want to get your bug fixed, then remember that the guy on the other end of the email is probably only working on this in his spare time, may well have had a bad day at work, and doesn't need nagging. A polite description of the problem, giving as much information as possible (it's virtually impossible to give too much information in these circumstances) will go a long way. If your query isn't answered immediately be patient, because the maintainer probably has more important things to do at that moment, and will get around to it when he can.
Actually we do - we call it 'administration' where the receivers take over and try to make the company run at a profit. Failing that they try to sell it as a going concern (there is legal protection that says if you buy a running business you can't sack everyone w/o paying their redundancy). Only then is the company wound up.
This happened with KPNQwest. The problem was the whole telecoms market is in depression due to a glut of bandwidth and nobody wanted to buy it whole - I'm not even sure after they gave up and broke it up that all the pieces were sold.
I think C4 is mostly a mixture of old series (AFAIK they don't show them in order). Sky1 is just beginning to show the series after Daniel Jackson died (Season 5? 6?), intermingled with lots of older stuff, so you have to be careful to check otherwise you get confused.
Actually seeing nudity would have spoiled the fun :-)
I liked lexx series 1+2 (some of series 2 was seriously strange!). Series 3 was in danger of becoming what it was trying to parody - staying on the same planet was a mistake IMHO. Haven't seen series 4 yet.
The biggest problem with Lexx over here is they show it at 4am or something so it gets almost no viewers. Tivos aren't that common (actually, most people don't even know what they are, since you can't actually buy them in shops any more).
It's also a very individual taste... the humour is unique, being originally german. It's not surprising US types don't always get it (don't worry, most of us europeans don't get your style of humour either - is frazier actually supposed to be funny?).
OTOH I've never been able to sit through an episode of Farscape without switching off in boredom (Tried series 1 - muppet show.. Tried a later one (series 3?) - still muppet show. In fact my wife started singing the muppets theme tune about halfway through...)
However you could instruct your ISP to not accept any mail with [ADV] in the header, so it all gets blocked at the SMTP level - much less bandwidth is used that way.
Of course if there are anti-forging regulations and they actually work (a big if, unfortunately) then you can make an RBL of all the spammers (since they're no longer using relays) and block them at the firewall.
K9 was cool - he'd laser the badguy in the nuts.
> Some Linux install disks give you a shell, but /mnt/etc/fstab" and the like.
> few utilities other than mount, mknod, cat, etc.
> Now, if they gave us ed I wouldn't have to "cat
> >>
Boot knoppix - you get a fully installed KDE desktop... (OK overkill I know).
Repair a broken filesystem without ls?
echo *
...and Legend of Mana wasn't released outside the US, requiring European players to use a modchip to play it (neatly getting us back to the original subject :-) )
GPRS is quite nice (browse at your own pace, no paying by the minute, and the amount of data in a WAP page isn't going to go over the basic 0.5GB a month unless you really hammer it).
My next phone will have polyphonic ringtones & Java... Not to bothered with colour/camera but if everyone else gets one then I might have to just to receive their messages! By next year the 'with camera' phones will be given away free anyway (like WAP/GPRS is today).
Hopefully when polyphonic ringtones (just MIDI files really) become widespread those ripoff merchants charging £2.50 per ringtone will all go bust...
It's usually from people who have no idea what Tivo actually does... They reinvent the VCR (badly) and say 'as good as tivo'. Sigh.
Someone at SuSe needs to read a book on UI design... I couldn't make head nor tail of what those dialogs were trying to tell me, and I'm used to Linux. A newbie would probably reformat and install Windows if presented with that.
Hopefully it was just a beta he was looking at and most of those dialogs will be consigned to the trash where they belong.
No they're not separate countries (much though the scottish would like it to be so) they're separate provinces. Scotland has its own parliament, but shares many of the laws with the rest of the island (basically they get UK law until they decide to override it, although they have no power to override certain laws such as military stuff).
Wales is completely dependent on the mainland. Its 'Assembly' is just a talking shop with no real power.
The separate provinces make up the single country of the UK, or 'Britain'.
The targets are well known. BT even publish information about how well your local exchange is doing.
. asp?order=reg
See http://www.adslguide.org.uk/availability/btprereg
for the current 'league table'.
I'm also a proprietary developer out to make good software, but when I've just fixed a 'can you make this window look completely crap' bug that took two days and was marked 'critical' even though I know there are half a dozen crashing bugs marked 'minor', I'm generally just glad to get out of the office, and sod the quality (the boss likes to design UIs that look like a cross between DOS and a puking session).
However for the opensource stuff that I do, I can manage the priorities myself so I know which bugs to fix first and which can wait. There's less pressure, so I can work when I'm not tired/burnt out, so fewer bugs in the first place. I care more about the customers because I know who they are and am on good terms with a number of them.
>>>most of us dont need the damn hungarian notation that MS has spreads like gospel truth
>Who said anything about that? And besides, MS now discourages its use.
Got a reference for that? It's shoved down our throats whether we like it or not simply because 'it's the MS way'. It's damned impossible to debug something called 'lpszglname' especially when it isn't even a string any more because it was changed years ago...
The big things wrong for me are the OK/Cancel buttons being the wrong way around (I don't want to have to think about where the buttons are... with gnome I have to pause, read the desktop, then click rather than just click), and the sucky 12 point courier that everything defaults to (even if you try to change it in nautilus half the apps ignore the setting. gnome-terminal looks bloody awful in its default setting). Bring back the control panel too - I'm not a fan of having to search for 20 minutes just to work out how to change the background image (then finding that the option was broken/unimplemented...)
.0 release.. I really liked gnome 1.4 it was clean and functional.... it'd be nice to get back to that level of functionaliy someday but for now I ended up switching to kde until gnome gets itself sorted again.
This is a
Over here (UK) we pay by the minute, but SMS is rapidly becoming more popular than voice anyway (at 1p/message it's dirt cheap). The providers are busily trying to get everyone to buy colour phones with cameras so we can send pictures to each other - 'Be the first With a Nokia 7something' (Umm.. if I'm the first who am I supposed to send my pictures to?)
Microsoft are suffering from the same problem... we don't have any customers on XP yet (many of them are still on Win95) and I estimate it'll be 2/3 years before we're ready to start using it - the domain controllers are still NT4 because there are no Win2k drivers for our RAID arrays. We tried putting an active directory machine on the network but it screwed around with the NT4 boxes (about half the developers are still on NT4) and it got pulled (can't see the point anyway it doesn't seem to offer anything over a standard DC in our situation).
Basically, for companies, upgrading is something that happens only rarely, and is planned for months (even years) before it happens. And if the existing solution still works the upgrade will probably never happen - which is why you still come across Novell networks sometimes.
MS are trying to force people to upgrade by refusing support for 'old' versions of software... this has resulted in the wholesale conversion to Linux of not a few companies (and quite a bit of local government over here, until MS relented and agreed a special deal) because of the related hardware costs, etc.
It's more of an issue that the webserver is misconfigured and attempts to send the streams as application/octet-stream. You have to save them to disk first, which is irritating.
Real Media format makes sense for the people who are still on 56k (still the vast majority of computer users). MPEG really requires quite high bandwidth to be useful.
The roof is probably made of lead...
I'd reckon you have a better chance trying to get through the brick.
What's a QD then? I actually have one of these... the vendor (who has since disappeared - don't you just love the net?) claimed it was an 8500 - certainly I've never seen it slow down on any game I've thrown at it - but I'm not so sure.
Not that I'm worried, it's far better than the geforce it replaced (having supported drivers rather than that binary junk that crashes every 20 minutes is a great plus) & the 2D performance is quite good... not as good as a Matrox, but usable.
It doesn't make sense to blame Access 97 for not upgrading from Win 3.11 - Access 95 was a 32bit app for Windows 95, and Access 2 would probably run fine even on XP, and it definately works on 95/98.