I have my own preferred formatting and naming styles, and I use them for my own code. When I work for a company, I use the company's preferred style, if they have one (though I'll happily fall back on my own). Anyone who can't cope with that simple logic probably doesn't deserve to be working at your (or any) company. Certainly anyone whose productivity is impaired when they're not working in their own preferred style is probably overpaid.
If any of them have been around long enough to have worked with a body of code that used an arbitrary mish-mash of different styles in different places, chances are very high they'll buy in to something, just to avoid that sort of mess in the future. When some guys are using four-space-tabs and some are using eight-space-tabs and some are indenting with spaces, the result is an unreadable mess whatever you try to use to view it. And, while I don't particularly care about brace placement, having seventeen different styles of brace placement in a single source file will make me tear out my hair and scream.
Consistency is good (in moderation). If the members of your team really can't come to some sort of reasonable agreement, they probably don't belong on the same team, and should all go off and work for some company that loves prima donnas instead.
Of course, Hungarian notation is a separate matter. People who prefer Hungarian notation should simply be shot. Quickly, before they have an opportunity to breed.:) That said, I have held my nose and written code using Hungarian notation simply because rewriting the whole system wasn't an option, and trying to remember which parts use Hungarian and which don't is something I don't want to have to deal with in the future, or force other people to have to deal with. Even something as gawdawful as Hungarian notation is better the nightmares and hair-pulling that randomly inconsistent code can cause.
Just out of curiousity, I posted that into a new email with gmail, saved it to my drafts folder, then went to look, and the "context" ads that appeared are:
Secrets of the Shaolin Rare Chinese Scriptures Translated Released for 1st Time Ever
Try Tai Chi QiGong Live A More Active & Fuller Life, DVD/Videos, Free & Fast Shipping!
Coconut Soup (Tom Kha) Made with Fresh Coconut Milk Loaded with Lemongrass and Galangal
Chi Kung Resources See How Chi Kung Can Empower You. Learn How Today!
BE a Yoga Teacher Teacher Trainings for Women Sip the nectar of Prana in Baja
So, apparently, if you encrypt your data, Google thinks you're speaking some Asian language, but isn't exactly sure which one.:)
If it's being used to cool CPUs, I don't think it needs to be liquid at room temperature, since the area near most modern CPUs is considerably hotter than that! If your CPU is running at room temperature, you probably don't need much cooling (and if you do, you're going to need a much more elaborate system than merely one based on a liquid metal, since a passive heat-sink isn't going to take you anywhere below room temperature).
If the liquid metal you're using for cooling tends to freeze at room temperature, that's going to present a few engineering challenges, but I don't think they're insurmountable, and, given the relative rarity of metals that are liquid at room temperature (and the unpleasant nature of some of them, e.g. mercury) it may well be worth it.
Pure gallium melts at body temperature and is generally considered non-toxic. If it weren't for the expense, it might be a decent option itself. That said, Galinstan does sound like a promising option, though one of its ingredients (indium) is even more expensive than gallium, which could be a problem. Tin's still relatively cheap, though.:)
There's lots and lots and lots of non-technical Firefox users. If you've never met one, it must indicate that your circle of non-technical friends is pretty small, or you live in a small and fairly isolated part of the world. In general, a lot of older Netscape fans have switched to Firefox now that Netscape is more officially dead. I know quite a few people who went netscape4->IE->netscape6->firefox, and the only reason IE was in there at all was the long hiatus between netscape4 and netscape6. The cases where I've been most surprised to find that a non-technical family member or friend is using Firefox have almost all turned out to be related to a remembered fondness for Netscape.
Beyond I know a lot of non-technical people that use Firefox because a recommendation from a technical person (often me), but I also know many who ended up getting Firefox because of a recommendation from another non-technical person. Presumably this chains back to a technical person at some point, but not directly.
There are also a lot of groups that have gone with Firefox for technical reasons without the members of the group being particularly technical. For example, Deadheads have a high percentage of Firefox users, because the Internet Archive, which hosts most of the old Dead recordings, recommends Firefox + the Downloadthemall extension for grabbing all the files in a full concert.
The release of Firefox 3 made the front page of BBC.com and a lot of other fairly respectable and mainstream news sources. That wouldn't happen if FF were limited to technical people.
I don't think that web apps will ever replace desktop apps for a while.
Boy, there's a commitment to your opinions. Yeah, I agree that they won't ever replace it for a while, if "a while" is defined as at least a week. Beyond that, I dunno.:)
Google maps shrinks to a tiny little box.
As opposed to? Desktop maps? Must have overlooked that app in my searching.
(Google docs doesn't suffer from this problem [... ] I haven't tried either ThinkFree nor Zoho)
So when it comes to actual web equivalents of desktop apps (the thing we're discussing), you think they're ready and/or don't know if they're ready, but when it comes to some other application which doesn't really have a desktop equivalent, you don't like the online version, so you don't think web equivalents of desktop apps are ready, even though you do?
I don't think they're ready yet myself (though they're certainly useful in some special cases), but I have to say that I'm just totally confused by your post, even though I think I maybe agree with your conclusions. Do you think Google docs is ready or not?
Whether or not Sun was legally allowed to release the code they did in the format they did, the fact is that they did release it (and were acting in good faith, which will count for a lot even if this does go to court). Now that it's been released, no matter the circumstances, it means that other SYSV licensees are no longer required to keep SYSV code confidential.
"if information relating to a SOFTWARE PRODUCT subject to this Agreement at any time becomes available without restriction to the general public by acts not attributable to LICENSEE or its employees, LICENSEE'S obligations [to keep the code confidential] shall not apply to such information after such time."
So even if Sun ends up in legal hot water, the genie's out of the bottle at this point, and pretty much any SYSV licensee (e.g. IBM) should be able to make as much of the code public as they want at this point.
Well, as long as we're being picky...you're sort of assuming that it's the same people complaining about spammers as it is complaining about having their torrents hacked.
You're also assuming that torrent == copyvio. Which may be broadly true, but is completely false in some cases, e.g. mine. In fact, slashdot probably has one of the highest percentages of people using torrent solely for legal purposes of just about any community anywhere. Still probably a vanishingly small percentage, but still...:)
If you had an IT Union looking out for your career then you'd be making $25.000 max
Just like members of the MLB Players Union or the NFL Players Union. Everyone knows that baseball players and football players never make more than $25,000 a year.:)
And if you happen to be better than the next guy then, well, tough sh*t, as he will be making exactly as much as you do.
Yup, baseball players all make exactly the same amount of money. The quality of their play is irrelevant to their income. It's all about seniority. And what about the members of the Screen Actors Guild? God only knows that their pay is purely dependent on the number of years they've been in the industry. Doesn't matter how much money your last film grossed, or how much of a superstar you are, if you're a member of SAG, you're getting scale.
Yup, every professional union or guild must be run exactly on the same lines as the average blue-collar union. Professional unions can't be different because...um...because then my irrational hatred and fear of unions would be exposed as utterly foolish.:)
People who are too stupid to figure out gconf like to pretend that it doesn't exist so they can whine about how Gnome doesn't have any options and is designed for stupid people, when exactly the opposite is true.
Gnome is designed to be easy for the newbie, while still remaining flexible enough for the advanced user. Whether it achieves that goal is open to debate, but it's a much better approach, IMO, than KDE's kitchen-sink approach, which is great for the intermediate-level user who knows there are options, but is too ignorant to find them unless they're poking up and getting in the way all the time. It's that last factor which causes my extreme dislike of KDE (not that I'm much of a Gnome fan either).
"Twice since December" is "quite reliable"? I've never rebooted a router. I've had my current one (WRH54G) since Feb, and the previous one (a similar model replaced because it didn't have wireless) ran for over three years without a reboot.
My DSL modem needs to be rebooted every three to six months, but my router(s), so far, never.
I've been using cheap Linksys linux-based routers, which I've never had to reboot. The last time I rebooted one was when I upgraded to a wireless router over six months ago. The time before that was when I moved, over three years ago. I didn't even realize that rebooting routers was something people often need to do till today.
I seriously doubt the problems people are seeing come from BitTorrent, because, although I limit myself to legal torrents (which means fewer peers, I suspect), I tend to leave the torrents running for days, and often have multiple running at once (using btlaunchmany).
I'm also somewhat dubious about the claims that it's dhcp-related, because, even though most of the systems here have static IP, we do have two or three using dhcp services.
On the other hand, we have a static external IP, so my router's dhcp client has never, ever, been used. Maybe that's where the problem is?
They're saying that signing the package isn't good enough
That's why Debian doesn't sign packages; they sign repositories. (Actually, they sign a list of md5sums of all avaiable packages.) You can actually argue that signing a package is counterproductive--it means that an insecure package out in the wild will still have a valid signature.
When you sign the repository, then an attacker has to freeze their whole repository if they want to keep the insecure package available. For Debian Unstable, people will get very suspicious if more than two days go by without any updates. And for Debian Stable, well, the security repository isn't mirrored, so owning an "official" mirror won't help you there. (The security repository could be vulnerable to a MITM attack, but then so could MS's system.)
So, while the attack vector they mention for Debian seems superficially plausible, in practice, it's unlikely to be as effective as they suggest.
You joke, but I've actually built gcc with a C interpreter, and used that to build gcc binaries. We did it primarily as a stress-test of the interpreter, but it was nice see that the resulting gcc binaries were the same as those built with a compiled gcc.
I don't know if you're a troll or an idiot, but the end result is the same. This is utter and complete bullshit.
My company wouldn't have several dozen fully-paid-up RHEL server licenses if we weren't damn sure who was accountable. We'd slap CentOS or something similar up and save a few bucks.
And if Linux isn't good enough for you, you go with something solid and reliable like Solaris or maybe AIX or possibly (depending on the application) a stripped-down high-reliablility embedded OS. You don't go with some rinky-dink toy like Windows. That's bordering on negligence right there. You can't sue Lego if you rebuild your car's chassis using their plastic bricks, and then get in a auto accident and discover you have no crumple zone. It's not Lego's fault you tried to do something insanely stupid. Using Windows for any sort of critical app where people's lives may be at risk is nearly as stupid and negligent as driving around with nothing but small plastic bricks between you and the SUV in the next lane.
Lucky SOB! I'm a county music writer, christian filmmaker and minor league baseball player. Any one of those would be enough for me to want to put a shotgun in my mouth and pull the trigger, just to improve the gene pool, if not to wipe out the shame.
I would kill to be an insect biologist, photographer, painter, author, Australian rugby player, and pretty good looking.:)
please, providing millions of people with an anti-virus for free is not exactly "slimey"
No, but spamming the web in a way that costs thousands or millions of dollars to hapless site owners is. Doing one nice thing doesn't magically make all your other activities nice. Each action you take has to be judged on its own merits.
if you want the definition of Slimey see Symantec/Mcafee/MicrosoftOneCare
Those would be a different kind of slimey. Those companies may even be more slimey (a highly debatable point which I'll ignore for the nonce, since I don't use Windows and am not qualified to judge the relative slimeyness of vendors whose products I don't use or need), but even if AVG is "less slimey", that's still different from being not-slimey.
It's possible (even probable) that this all came about because the makers of AVG are simply ignorant or stupid. But is that really a recommendation for their product?
Attempting is the operative word here. Someone with limited bandwidth may consider the fact that their browser is attempting to download several dozen web pages simultaneously to be somewhat less than helpful. Not to mention, someone who is at or near their ISP's (stated or unstated) bandwidth caps may find this to be pretty obnoxious too.
A user will click on only one.
At most one. It's highly possible that a user will click on none.
My sympathies for Windows users and the contortions they have to go through to avoid being infected/invaded/p0wned is generally pretty minimal, but this is just over the top. Talk about a cure that's worse than the disease!
Slashdot Mirror
I have my own preferred formatting and naming styles, and I use them for my own code. When I work for a company, I use the company's preferred style, if they have one (though I'll happily fall back on my own). Anyone who can't cope with that simple logic probably doesn't deserve to be working at your (or any) company. Certainly anyone whose productivity is impaired when they're not working in their own preferred style is probably overpaid.
If any of them have been around long enough to have worked with a body of code that used an arbitrary mish-mash of different styles in different places, chances are very high they'll buy in to something, just to avoid that sort of mess in the future. When some guys are using four-space-tabs and some are using eight-space-tabs and some are indenting with spaces, the result is an unreadable mess whatever you try to use to view it. And, while I don't particularly care about brace placement, having seventeen different styles of brace placement in a single source file will make me tear out my hair and scream.
Consistency is good (in moderation). If the members of your team really can't come to some sort of reasonable agreement, they probably don't belong on the same team, and should all go off and work for some company that loves prima donnas instead.
Of course, Hungarian notation is a separate matter. People who prefer Hungarian notation should simply be shot. Quickly, before they have an opportunity to breed. :) That said, I have held my nose and written code using Hungarian notation simply because rewriting the whole system wasn't an option, and trying to remember which parts use Hungarian and which don't is something I don't want to have to deal with in the future, or force other people to have to deal with. Even something as gawdawful as Hungarian notation is better the nightmares and hair-pulling that randomly inconsistent code can cause.
jub arrqf nyy gung penc? Whfg hfr guvf xvpx-nff rapelcgvba zrgubq gung abobql pbhyq rire svther bhg!
Just out of curiousity, I posted that into a new email with gmail, saved it to my drafts folder, then went to look, and the "context" ads that appeared are:
Secrets of the Shaolin
Rare Chinese Scriptures Translated Released for 1st Time Ever
Try Tai Chi QiGong
Live A More Active & Fuller Life, DVD/Videos, Free & Fast Shipping!
Coconut Soup (Tom Kha)
Made with Fresh Coconut Milk Loaded with Lemongrass and Galangal
Chi Kung Resources
See How Chi Kung Can Empower You. Learn How Today!
BE a Yoga Teacher
Teacher Trainings for Women Sip the nectar of Prana in Baja
So, apparently, if you encrypt your data, Google thinks you're speaking some Asian language, but isn't exactly sure which one. :)
I think that was the point. Why would Ford complain if they were using a Ford?
If it's being used to cool CPUs, I don't think it needs to be liquid at room temperature, since the area near most modern CPUs is considerably hotter than that! If your CPU is running at room temperature, you probably don't need much cooling (and if you do, you're going to need a much more elaborate system than merely one based on a liquid metal, since a passive heat-sink isn't going to take you anywhere below room temperature).
If the liquid metal you're using for cooling tends to freeze at room temperature, that's going to present a few engineering challenges, but I don't think they're insurmountable, and, given the relative rarity of metals that are liquid at room temperature (and the unpleasant nature of some of them, e.g. mercury) it may well be worth it.
Pure gallium melts at body temperature and is generally considered non-toxic. If it weren't for the expense, it might be a decent option itself. That said, Galinstan does sound like a promising option, though one of its ingredients (indium) is even more expensive than gallium, which could be a problem. Tin's still relatively cheap, though. :)
There's lots and lots and lots of non-technical Firefox users. If you've never met one, it must indicate that your circle of non-technical friends is pretty small, or you live in a small and fairly isolated part of the world. In general, a lot of older Netscape fans have switched to Firefox now that Netscape is more officially dead. I know quite a few people who went netscape4->IE->netscape6->firefox, and the only reason IE was in there at all was the long hiatus between netscape4 and netscape6. The cases where I've been most surprised to find that a non-technical family member or friend is using Firefox have almost all turned out to be related to a remembered fondness for Netscape.
Beyond I know a lot of non-technical people that use Firefox because a recommendation from a technical person (often me), but I also know many who ended up getting Firefox because of a recommendation from another non-technical person. Presumably this chains back to a technical person at some point, but not directly.
There are also a lot of groups that have gone with Firefox for technical reasons without the members of the group being particularly technical. For example, Deadheads have a high percentage of Firefox users, because the Internet Archive, which hosts most of the old Dead recordings, recommends Firefox + the Downloadthemall extension for grabbing all the files in a full concert.
The release of Firefox 3 made the front page of BBC.com and a lot of other fairly respectable and mainstream news sources. That wouldn't happen if FF were limited to technical people.
I don't think that web apps will ever replace desktop apps for a while.
Boy, there's a commitment to your opinions. Yeah, I agree that they won't ever replace it for a while, if "a while" is defined as at least a week. Beyond that, I dunno. :)
Google maps shrinks to a tiny little box.
As opposed to? Desktop maps? Must have overlooked that app in my searching.
(Google docs doesn't suffer from this problem [... ] I haven't tried either ThinkFree nor Zoho)
So when it comes to actual web equivalents of desktop apps (the thing we're discussing), you think they're ready and/or don't know if they're ready, but when it comes to some other application which doesn't really have a desktop equivalent, you don't like the online version, so you don't think web equivalents of desktop apps are ready, even though you do?
I don't think they're ready yet myself (though they're certainly useful in some special cases), but I have to say that I'm just totally confused by your post, even though I think I maybe agree with your conclusions. Do you think Google docs is ready or not?
Yup, and so does "conversion". From the law.com legal dictionary:
Whether or not Sun was legally allowed to release the code they did in the format they did, the fact is that they did release it (and were acting in good faith, which will count for a lot even if this does go to court). Now that it's been released, no matter the circumstances, it means that other SYSV licensees are no longer required to keep SYSV code confidential.
From the standard SYSV licensing agreement, section 7.06(a):
"if information relating to a SOFTWARE PRODUCT subject to this Agreement at any time becomes available without restriction to the general public by acts not attributable to LICENSEE or its employees, LICENSEE'S obligations [to keep the code confidential] shall not apply to such information after such time."
So even if Sun ends up in legal hot water, the genie's out of the bottle at this point, and pretty much any SYSV licensee (e.g. IBM) should be able to make as much of the code public as they want at this point.
Well, as long as we're being picky...you're sort of assuming that it's the same people complaining about spammers as it is complaining about having their torrents hacked.
You're also assuming that torrent == copyvio. Which may be broadly true, but is completely false in some cases, e.g. mine. In fact, slashdot probably has one of the highest percentages of people using torrent solely for legal purposes of just about any community anywhere. Still probably a vanishingly small percentage, but still... :)
If you had an IT Union looking out for your career then you'd be making $25.000 max
Just like members of the MLB Players Union or the NFL Players Union. Everyone knows that baseball players and football players never make more than $25,000 a year. :)
And if you happen to be better than the next guy then, well, tough sh*t, as he will be making exactly as much as you do.
Yup, baseball players all make exactly the same amount of money. The quality of their play is irrelevant to their income. It's all about seniority. And what about the members of the Screen Actors Guild? God only knows that their pay is purely dependent on the number of years they've been in the industry. Doesn't matter how much money your last film grossed, or how much of a superstar you are, if you're a member of SAG, you're getting scale.
Yup, every professional union or guild must be run exactly on the same lines as the average blue-collar union. Professional unions can't be different because...um...because then my irrational hatred and fear of unions would be exposed as utterly foolish. :)
It's people like you who've made it easier for people like me to not RTFA, at least in this case. So thanks for that. :)
People who are too stupid to figure out gconf like to pretend that it doesn't exist so they can whine about how Gnome doesn't have any options and is designed for stupid people, when exactly the opposite is true.
Gnome is designed to be easy for the newbie, while still remaining flexible enough for the advanced user. Whether it achieves that goal is open to debate, but it's a much better approach, IMO, than KDE's kitchen-sink approach, which is great for the intermediate-level user who knows there are options, but is too ignorant to find them unless they're poking up and getting in the way all the time. It's that last factor which causes my extreme dislike of KDE (not that I'm much of a Gnome fan either).
Maybe I'm just lucky, but I'm on my second router with all three. :p
(Only replaced the first one because I finally wanted wireless.)
(My Linux-based computers are also a strong counter-example to your apothegm.)
Contrariwise, I do use Torrent (often with launchmany) and have never ever had to reboot a router.
"Twice since December" is "quite reliable"? I've never rebooted a router. I've had my current one (WRH54G) since Feb, and the previous one (a similar model replaced because it didn't have wireless) ran for over three years without a reboot.
My DSL modem needs to be rebooted every three to six months, but my router(s), so far, never.
I've been using cheap Linksys linux-based routers, which I've never had to reboot. The last time I rebooted one was when I upgraded to a wireless router over six months ago. The time before that was when I moved, over three years ago. I didn't even realize that rebooting routers was something people often need to do till today.
I seriously doubt the problems people are seeing come from BitTorrent, because, although I limit myself to legal torrents (which means fewer peers, I suspect), I tend to leave the torrents running for days, and often have multiple running at once (using btlaunchmany).
I'm also somewhat dubious about the claims that it's dhcp-related, because, even though most of the systems here have static IP, we do have two or three using dhcp services.
On the other hand, we have a static external IP, so my router's dhcp client has never, ever, been used. Maybe that's where the problem is?
That's insulting. To assholes. :)
They're saying that signing the package isn't good enough
That's why Debian doesn't sign packages; they sign repositories. (Actually, they sign a list of md5sums of all avaiable packages.) You can actually argue that signing a package is counterproductive--it means that an insecure package out in the wild will still have a valid signature.
When you sign the repository, then an attacker has to freeze their whole repository if they want to keep the insecure package available. For Debian Unstable, people will get very suspicious if more than two days go by without any updates. And for Debian Stable, well, the security repository isn't mirrored, so owning an "official" mirror won't help you there. (The security repository could be vulnerable to a MITM attack, but then so could MS's system.)
So, while the attack vector they mention for Debian seems superficially plausible, in practice, it's unlikely to be as effective as they suggest.
You joke, but I've actually built gcc with a C interpreter, and used that to build gcc binaries. We did it primarily as a stress-test of the interpreter, but it was nice see that the resulting gcc binaries were the same as those built with a compiled gcc.
With Linux there is no accountability.
I don't know if you're a troll or an idiot, but the end result is the same. This is utter and complete bullshit.
My company wouldn't have several dozen fully-paid-up RHEL server licenses if we weren't damn sure who was accountable. We'd slap CentOS or something similar up and save a few bucks.
And if Linux isn't good enough for you, you go with something solid and reliable like Solaris or maybe AIX or possibly (depending on the application) a stripped-down high-reliablility embedded OS. You don't go with some rinky-dink toy like Windows. That's bordering on negligence right there. You can't sue Lego if you rebuild your car's chassis using their plastic bricks, and then get in a auto accident and discover you have no crumple zone. It's not Lego's fault you tried to do something insanely stupid. Using Windows for any sort of critical app where people's lives may be at risk is nearly as stupid and negligent as driving around with nothing but small plastic bricks between you and the SUV in the next lane.
(This story so obviously needed a car analogy.) :)
Lucky SOB! I'm a county music writer, christian filmmaker and minor league baseball player. Any one of those would be enough for me to want to put a shotgun in my mouth and pull the trigger, just to improve the gene pool, if not to wipe out the shame.
I would kill to be an insect biologist, photographer, painter, author, Australian rugby player, and pretty good looking. :)
No, but spamming the web in a way that costs thousands or millions of dollars to hapless site owners is. Doing one nice thing doesn't magically make all your other activities nice. Each action you take has to be judged on its own merits.
if you want the definition of Slimey see Symantec/Mcafee/MicrosoftOneCare
Those would be a different kind of slimey. Those companies may even be more slimey (a highly debatable point which I'll ignore for the nonce, since I don't use Windows and am not qualified to judge the relative slimeyness of vendors whose products I don't use or need), but even if AVG is "less slimey", that's still different from being not-slimey.
It's possible (even probable) that this all came about because the makers of AVG are simply ignorant or stupid. But is that really a recommendation for their product?
They are attempting to help their customers
Attempting is the operative word here. Someone with limited bandwidth may consider the fact that their browser is attempting to download several dozen web pages simultaneously to be somewhat less than helpful. Not to mention, someone who is at or near their ISP's (stated or unstated) bandwidth caps may find this to be pretty obnoxious too.
A user will click on only one.
At most one. It's highly possible that a user will click on none.
My sympathies for Windows users and the contortions they have to go through to avoid being infected/invaded/p0wned is generally pretty minimal, but this is just over the top. Talk about a cure that's worse than the disease!
Seems reasonable to me. There are five networks. Each has a median age of live viewer. The average of those five medians is (was) 50.
Am I missing something?