I camped on the summit of a 14,000ft peak last night. I've never seen so many shooting stars
Are you sure those are shooting stars? If you're not well acclimated, funny things can happen as low as 10k. Speaking from experience here, although if you hiked up you probably did it slow enough. I had the rather interesting experience of driving up Mt. Evans in Colorado after spending less than a week in Denver, and my home alt. is less than 500 ft. There were no shooting stars as it was broad daylight, just a severe headache and fatigue, and a floater that stayed in my eye and gradually reabsorbed. YMMV. Some lucky people can probably go even higher and not notice anything.
Every Mac you can buy now is nothing but a very well-built standard PC with a custom OS preinstalled.
OK, smarty pants. Go out and try to sell Mac clones, or anything that can boot MacOS and isn't made by Apple. See how far you get before Apple sues you out of existance. Or has that changed recently?
And don't get me started on Quicktime and iTunes (the only commercial trojan that's worse is Real Player). Then there's iPod and "Fairplay". I just can't support a company that behaves like that. They're worse than MS as far as I'm concerned. IBM may have inadvertantly given us the greatest gift--the clonable platform, and Apple is trying as hard as they can to take that away. To reiterate, I just can't support that.
PC hardware is commodity. If you don't like Windows, run Linux. Apple is a holdover from the bad old days when computers first got to the consumer level. We had Ataris, Commodores, Apples, etc. You had to port for all that stuff. Add-ons cards? They had to be designed for the hardware.
I trust Apple about as far as I can throw it. Bitch all you want about MS, but at least you can install some other OS on open, commodity hardware with a well known BIOS interface. If Apple wants my business, they'll have to drop their proprietary hardware model and play fair. I don't think they will though. As long as they can hide behind their proprietary hardware, they don't really have to compete with the gorilla from Redmond. This is probably a smart move on their part, because the gorilla throws some mighty big feces. So. They've got their business from people who don't care about the hardware being closed. Best case scenario? Someone figures out a way to clone the Macs legally, then Mac becomes the new PC and MS has to port Windows to run on Macs natively. But then it's just "full circle". In effect, it would be the same as Apple competing directly with a PC version of their OS.
If anybody can compete with MS, it's Apple, but they won't do it. I understand why; but it's still a shame because it would be a great tech story--much more interesting than the Intel switch.
Anyway, with commodity hardware, a bunch of hackers can rebell against the monopoly. Rebelling against a monopolized proprietary hardware vendor would be much more difficult, and that's why I shun Apple.
During the middle part of the 20th century, many urban "ghettos" in the US, inhabited mainly by Blacks, were leveled. In some cases they were replaced by public housing. For a very brief time, the public housing was better than what came before, but it rapidly deteriorated.
Elenor Roosevelt famously advocated for the demolition of illegal alley dwellings in the District of Columbia. At the time, they were cramped, filthy, areas that attracted vermin and were unpleasant to live in. I don't know exactly where the displaced residents were moved; presumeably cheap subsidized apartments, under what is referred to as the "section 8" program here in the US. Today, there are a few remaining alley dwellings here in DC. They are much sought after as unique spaces that offer shade and a noise barrier from the street. Modern conveniences like air conditioning make them pleasant places to live that don't attract quite so much vermin, although the ever-present rat population is probably more visible there. People put up with this, despite the fact that in some cases the residences are still technicly illegal and could, in theory, be torn down although in this capital of litigation such a move would be very unpopular and end up winding through court for years.
In recent years, the trend has been to demolish ghetos and replace them with renewal projects. Nobody bothers to try and build public housing anymore, because of past problems. The residents are simply displaced.
I prefer the Yahoo service over iTunes. The subscription model is more to my taste than purchasing. A lot of times though, I remember a snatch of lyrics, and you can't search for snippets of lyrics on Yahoo. Where do I turn? Google of course, to find the name of the song and/or band. Then I search to see if Yahoo has them. An integrated "snippet of lyrics" search for Yahoo music would be good. After I post this, I'll have to check to see if somebody has written a plugin that mashups these features into Yahoo music. If it exists, cool, but I've had trouble with Yahoo plugins crapping out. Google should partner with the other services to offer enhanced music search capabilities. It would play to their core competancy.
When I was a sophomore in HS, 1984, one of the coaches who taught phys. ed. told us why jogging was bad. I think jogging peaked in the 1970s. When I was in college, I joined the running club and kept at it until I realized my knees weren't cut out for long distance--but nobody in the running club intentionally jogged. We all strived for an efficient, smooth, long-distance pace. Oh, and shoes have become hi-tech marvels compared to what was worn just 30 years ago. I didn't stop exercising, I switched to hiking. On inclines, you get a different kind of workout, but it's no less intense than running if you push it, and it doesn't impact your joints.
The bottom line though, is that anybody who "jogs" today must have been thawed out of a deep-freeze or something. If you spend just a few minutes with even the most amateur runner, they will tell you jogging is bad.
There are many non-Alzheimer's dementias. It will be great if they can cure, or even treat Alzheimer's; but if that's the case, I hope it doesn't cause people to lose interest (and funding) to find treatments/cures for all the other types.
IANAExpertOnThisCrap, but... if the burst lasts less than 12 hours, at least a north-south slice of the planet would be spared. If it's just a few minutes, only half the planet would be "fried", and if the Pacific Ocean happens to be facing it, then it's only bad for the relatively small island population, but if Eurasia is facing it, that's gonna be really really bad.
Of course, that's based on the event being near the plane of the ecliptic. If the event was near a pole, then one of either the North or South hemispheres is fried, the other is spared.
I'm also assuming that the gamma rays aren't powerful enough to turn surface matter into radioactive isotopes that pollute the atmosphere and ocean, or to do that to the atmosphere itself. In that case, it's more proper to say that the Earth is poisoned, not fried.
Duh!!! Blogs started as a convenient way to put up personal web pages for those who didn't want to delve into the technical details. It's only the mass media that latched onto the few blogs that compete as news outlets, and created silly words like "blogosphere", and created the impression among certain ill-informed people that blogs were primarily news outlets.
In a related story, Only a small percent of word processing software is used by journalists. Film at eleven.
I was actually home from school that day, and young enough to be glued to the screen as the images came in slllllowly as thin strips. Young enoug so that I seriously wondered if there would be ruins of ancient Martian cities visible on screen. Alas, no, but it's still a fond memory. Of course this makes me feel old, but hey, at least I was a kid. Wow, if you were an adult when this happened, you must be really old. Yeah. I'll keep telling myself that.
How about taking out, oh... 80% of the batteries, cutting the pure electric range to 50 miles, and using the space and weight that's freed up to install a small IC engine for longer trips?
Aside from that, for those who argue that electric cars just move the problem to the power plant, this is true, but emissions problems are easier to solve at the power plant. Also, grids can choose to shut down plants that use fuels that are temporarily expensive. Grids can transform to new generation technologies without impacting the end users.
...this article exhibited the recurring "text layered on top of text, rendering it unreadable" bug that has plagued Slashdot... ever since it switched over to CSS. AFAIK, the only reason Slashdot switched over is because a bunch of people complained that it wasn't using "standard compliant CSS, blah, blah". The actual functionality of Slashdot is only marginally improved, and the improvements probably could have been done just as easily without the CSS.
"Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes"
I love this quote. It can be read by snobby theorists to justfiy their ignorance of current hardware issues. It can also be read by technicians to justify their disdain for academic theories. At various times and places, both points of view have their value. I'm glad I've learned some theory. I'm also glad I know well enough not to believe anything until I've coded the solution and tested it. A lot of time, theory loses for reasons having to do with hardware, e.g., Quicksort is not the fastest sort in theory (surprised?) but it is used because it runs well on CPUs that use cacheing.
There's a good chance these bacteria are already at work in the ocean. The problem with extracting gold from seawater is pumping all that water in and out of whatever it is you're using to extract it. For the bacteria method to work, every drop of gold-bearing water has to meet up with the bacteria colony long enough for the bacteria to extract the gold. Either you need a really big colony, or a really long time.
Since the price of gold has spiked lately, I've wondered about the cost of some of these alternative mining methods. Everybody says they're expensive, but they don't say how expensive so we can't really say when they would become competitive with conventional mining.
Interesting side note: The US has been slowly decreasing its monetary gold reserves for decades, but still has the largest reserve of any nation. If the price of gold hit $30,000/oz, the US national debt could be paid off with our reserves. Something tells me that the world financial community won't let it get to that point, since income-producing bonds are a better long term investment than a metal that has limited industrial use. Approximately 80% of the annual gold production is for jewelry.
In the Smithsonian's technology exhibit, I saw a graph that marked the rise of television in the 1950s. It was a saturation curve, rising very quickly at the 40 to 50 percent level, and then flattening and gradually moving up at, IIRC, 70 to 80 percent. I'm sure the transition to color and solid state provided some turnover, as will the hi-def transition we are in now.
The lesson though, is that PCs will saturate too. They can surf the web and play DVDs. They can do word processing, spreadsheets, and most of the other "killer apps" people need. There's no more reason for turnover, and those that want 'em got 'em. I was looking out for this, and figured the real saturation started in the late 90s. For years, the state of the art PC was "about $2000", and then suddenly, very capable machines dropped through the $1000 floor. The vendors must have seen the curve flattening, so they had to reach into that lower price market to drive sales. That was the beginning of the end.
It was neither sarcastic nor serious in the sense that you describe. I thought everybody would understand that I was referring to Line-of-sight signals, which required the Moon to be visible. In the future, I suppose I should dumb it down for people who have user numbers higher than mine. Now *that's* sarcasm.
I live in DC, and although I didn't check out the archives, I'm pretty sure that if I walked into any building downtown and just took stuff, I'd be busted. When DC is "shutdown", this translates to "superfluous cops ar guarding every road block in the small area that's off limits". Besides, what thief would be able to identify this stuff, and even if they could, why would they take it, and why would you RENT A TRUCK and attempt to pull of this job when the profit margin on a simple smash-n-grab or auto theft is so much more reliable?
Maybe the Moon was only visible from Australia during the landing, and they never bothered to cart the hi-fi versions across the Pacific. If the signal had to be relayed from Australia to the US, it was probably downsampled in real time. Just a wild guess. Anybody really know?
There was an Australian observatory scene in The Right Stuff, and this reminds me of that.
I automaticly screen out companies that don't answer questions about salaries and options. I only want to work for companies that are passionate about compensating me.
...how can I prevent my ads from being served by spyware? How about a clause in my contract with the advertising company that says "Ads served by provider and any subcontractor will not be served by pop-up, and will only be served as the result of a user willfully navigating to a web page which serves ads, and may not be served as the result of any additional software installed on the user's computer. The definition of 'pop-up', 'willfully navigating' and 'installed' remains at the discretion of the customer, and we reserve the right to terminate this contract if the advertising agency is unable to assure us that it meets these criteria."
For some small business this wouldn't work too well, but if big companies started doing it, and it became standard operating procedure for corporations, it would help a lot. Suddenly, other advertisers will just stop dealing with these guys.
Nailing down the definitions is a bit tricky, and IIRC there was a case where some company sued over being designated as malware, so this approach isn't a cure-all. Going after the actual technical definition of something is a bit more effort, but it quashes the arguments of companies that might complain they are being singled out prejudicially.
Also, pornographers and other shady businesses will always do stuff like this, but at least we'll maintain the association of sleaziness with pop-ups and spyware, which is where it belongs.
Think again. Of course you have to enforce a consistant environment for releases; but then you are back to having "one indent to rule them all". I guess you could say that's an incentive for developers to not produce bugs, because if they produce a bug they have to debug it with the release settings, and if they don't like those settings it's more of a hassle. Generally though, we don't want to hassle people.
I recall somebody here mentioning once that he worked at a place where CVS was setup to automaticly run indent on checkin and checkout. This seemed ideal to me--each coder would get to work in their own preferred style. Then I realized the problems it would cause with certain things. In most of my code, when I return an integer error, I use a macro that munges in a number for the file, a semantic error code (e.g., file not found) and--here's the problem--the __LINE__ directive. The beauty of this system is that since all the integers are compile-time constants, I get a lot of information in my error codes for no more runtime expense than returning something less informative (e.g., -1, or a simple EFOOBAR define).
The downside would be that if such errors were generated by sources compiled by different checkouts, with different styles, then reported errors won't match up on the same __LINE__. This could be resolved by eliminating the __LINE__ from the macro, but then you'd have to come up with a unique ID for each error, manually. That's tedious, miserable work. We could chose to have a single style for *compiling* the source as opposed to editing, but then you are right back to the same problem: there can be only one compiling/debugging style.
I guess, in lieu of __LINE__ I could use a manually enterred "random" number, and use a pre-processing stage to make sure that the number was unique--use the same number in the same file, and CPP fails, but this requires a hack to CPP.
FWIW, I use tabs becaues I figure that "presentation" is the editor's problem. I meant to tab in. If your editor is set to 8 spaces, that's your editor's problem, not mine. What's nasty is when stuff like MSVC converts tabs to spaces during copy-paste operations. My text has tabs in it. COPY-PASTE MY TEXT. DON'T CONVERT IT!!!
Of course then I end up with a "mixed" source code, and I can't tell what's happened unless I actually cursor back. Now, I know all you space guys are saying that if I just used 4 spaces I'd be fine, but then if my source is loaded by somebody who preferrs 2 spaces, or 8 spaces, they are SOL. They are slaved to my editor preference, and that's plainly wrong. In the long run, tabs are the only workable way to solve that problem, because they are, in a sense, "source" whereas spaces are the result you get when the text is "compiled" by the editor.
Slashdot Mirror
I camped on the summit of a 14,000ft peak last night. I've never seen so many shooting stars
Are you sure those are shooting stars? If you're not well acclimated, funny things can happen as low as 10k. Speaking from experience here, although if you hiked up you probably did it slow enough. I had the rather interesting experience of driving up Mt. Evans in Colorado after spending less than a week in Denver, and my home alt. is less than 500 ft. There were no shooting stars as it was broad daylight, just a severe headache and fatigue, and a floater that stayed in my eye and gradually reabsorbed. YMMV. Some lucky people can probably go even higher and not notice anything.
Every Mac you can buy now is nothing but a very well-built standard PC with a custom OS preinstalled.
OK, smarty pants. Go out and try to sell Mac clones, or anything that can boot MacOS and isn't made by Apple. See how far you get before Apple sues you out of existance. Or has that changed recently?
And don't get me started on Quicktime and iTunes (the only commercial trojan that's worse is Real Player). Then there's iPod and "Fairplay". I just can't support a company that behaves like that. They're worse than MS as far as I'm concerned. IBM may have inadvertantly given us the greatest gift--the clonable platform, and Apple is trying as hard as they can to take that away. To reiterate, I just can't support that.
PC hardware is commodity. If you don't like Windows, run Linux. Apple is a holdover from the bad old days when computers first got to the consumer level. We had Ataris, Commodores, Apples, etc. You had to port for all that stuff. Add-ons cards? They had to be designed for the hardware.
I trust Apple about as far as I can throw it. Bitch all you want about MS, but at least you can install some other OS on open, commodity hardware with a well known BIOS interface. If Apple wants my business, they'll have to drop their proprietary hardware model and play fair. I don't think they will though. As long as they can hide behind their proprietary hardware, they don't really have to compete with the gorilla from Redmond. This is probably a smart move on their part, because the gorilla throws some mighty big feces. So. They've got their business from people who don't care about the hardware being closed. Best case scenario? Someone figures out a way to clone the Macs legally, then Mac becomes the new PC and MS has to port Windows to run on Macs natively. But then it's just "full circle". In effect, it would be the same as Apple competing directly with a PC version of their OS.
If anybody can compete with MS, it's Apple, but they won't do it. I understand why; but it's still a shame because it would be a great tech story--much more interesting than the Intel switch.
Anyway, with commodity hardware, a bunch of hackers can rebell against the monopoly. Rebelling against a monopolized proprietary hardware vendor would be much more difficult, and that's why I shun Apple.
During the middle part of the 20th century, many urban "ghettos" in the US, inhabited mainly by Blacks, were leveled. In some cases they were replaced by public housing. For a very brief time, the public housing was better than what came before, but it rapidly deteriorated.
Elenor Roosevelt famously advocated for the demolition of illegal alley dwellings in the District of Columbia. At the time, they were cramped, filthy, areas that attracted vermin and were unpleasant to live in. I don't know exactly where the displaced residents were moved; presumeably cheap subsidized apartments, under what is referred to as the "section 8" program here in the US. Today, there are a few remaining alley dwellings here in DC. They are much sought after as unique spaces that offer shade and a noise barrier from the street. Modern conveniences like air conditioning make them pleasant places to live that don't attract quite so much vermin, although the ever-present rat population is probably more visible there. People put up with this, despite the fact that in some cases the residences are still technicly illegal and could, in theory, be torn down although in this capital of litigation such a move would be very unpopular and end up winding through court for years.
In recent years, the trend has been to demolish ghetos and replace them with renewal projects. Nobody bothers to try and build public housing anymore, because of past problems. The residents are simply displaced.
I prefer the Yahoo service over iTunes. The subscription model is more to my taste than purchasing. A lot of times though, I remember a snatch of lyrics, and you can't search for snippets of lyrics on Yahoo. Where do I turn? Google of course, to find the name of the song and/or band. Then I search to see if Yahoo has them. An integrated "snippet of lyrics" search for Yahoo music would be good. After I post this, I'll have to check to see if somebody has written a plugin that mashups these features into Yahoo music. If it exists, cool, but I've had trouble with Yahoo plugins crapping out. Google should partner with the other services to offer enhanced music search capabilities. It would play to their core competancy.
When I was a sophomore in HS, 1984, one of the coaches who taught phys. ed. told us why jogging was bad. I think jogging peaked in the 1970s. When I was in college, I joined the running club and kept at it until I realized my knees weren't cut out for long distance--but nobody in the running club intentionally jogged. We all strived for an efficient, smooth, long-distance pace. Oh, and shoes have become hi-tech marvels compared to what was worn just 30 years ago. I didn't stop exercising, I switched to hiking. On inclines, you get a different kind of workout, but it's no less intense than running if you push it, and it doesn't impact your joints.
The bottom line though, is that anybody who "jogs" today must have been thawed out of a deep-freeze or something. If you spend just a few minutes with even the most amateur runner, they will tell you jogging is bad.
On the way home, I realized I was wrong. It's the square of "dot ate". I can't believe nobody caught me!
It's the square of ate.
There are many non-Alzheimer's dementias. It will be great if they can cure, or even treat Alzheimer's; but if that's the case, I hope it doesn't cause people to lose interest (and funding) to find treatments/cures for all the other types.
IANAExpertOnThisCrap, but... if the burst lasts less than 12 hours, at least a north-south slice of the planet would be spared. If it's just a few minutes, only half the planet would be "fried", and if the Pacific Ocean happens to be facing it, then it's only bad for the relatively small island population, but if Eurasia is facing it, that's gonna be really really bad.
Of course, that's based on the event being near the plane of the ecliptic. If the event was near a pole, then one of either the North or South hemispheres is fried, the other is spared.
I'm also assuming that the gamma rays aren't powerful enough to turn surface matter into radioactive isotopes that pollute the atmosphere and ocean, or to do that to the atmosphere itself. In that case, it's more proper to say that the Earth is poisoned, not fried.
Duh!!! Blogs started as a convenient way to put up personal web pages for those who didn't want to delve into the technical details. It's only the mass media that latched onto the few blogs that compete as news outlets, and created silly words like "blogosphere", and created the impression among certain ill-informed people that blogs were primarily news outlets.
In a related story, Only a small percent of word processing software is used by journalists. Film at eleven.
I was actually home from school that day, and young enough to be glued to the screen as the images came in slllllowly as thin strips. Young enoug so that I seriously wondered if there would be ruins of ancient Martian cities visible on screen. Alas, no, but it's still a fond memory. Of course this makes me feel old, but hey, at least I was a kid. Wow, if you were an adult when this happened, you must be really old. Yeah. I'll keep telling myself that.
How about taking out, oh... 80% of the batteries, cutting the pure electric range to 50 miles, and using the space and weight that's freed up to install a small IC engine for longer trips?
Aside from that, for those who argue that electric cars just move the problem to the power plant, this is true, but emissions problems are easier to solve at the power plant. Also, grids can choose to shut down plants that use fuels that are temporarily expensive. Grids can transform to new generation technologies without impacting the end users.
...this article exhibited the recurring "text layered on top of text, rendering it unreadable" bug that has plagued Slashdot... ever since it switched over to CSS. AFAIK, the only reason Slashdot switched over is because a bunch of people complained that it wasn't using "standard compliant CSS, blah, blah". The actual functionality of Slashdot is only marginally improved, and the improvements probably could have been done just as easily without the CSS.
"Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes"
I love this quote. It can be read by snobby theorists to justfiy their ignorance of current hardware issues. It can also be read by technicians to justify their disdain for academic theories. At various times and places, both points of view have their value. I'm glad I've learned some theory. I'm also glad I know well enough not to believe anything until I've coded the solution and tested it. A lot of time, theory loses for reasons having to do with hardware, e.g., Quicksort is not the fastest sort in theory (surprised?) but it is used because it runs well on CPUs that use cacheing.
There's a good chance these bacteria are already at work in the ocean. The problem with extracting gold from seawater is pumping all that water in and out of whatever it is you're using to extract it. For the bacteria method to work, every drop of gold-bearing water has to meet up with the bacteria colony long enough for the bacteria to extract the gold. Either you need a really big colony, or a really long time.
Since the price of gold has spiked lately, I've wondered about the cost of some of these alternative mining methods. Everybody says they're expensive, but they don't say how expensive so we can't really say when they would become competitive with conventional mining.
Interesting side note: The US has been slowly decreasing its monetary gold reserves for decades, but still has the largest reserve of any nation. If the price of gold hit $30,000/oz, the US national debt could be paid off with our reserves. Something tells me that the world financial community won't let it get to that point, since income-producing bonds are a better long term investment than a metal that has limited industrial use. Approximately 80% of the annual gold production is for jewelry.
Yes. We should definitely do that. It would be the best thing for--Oooh! Look! Shiny Things!
By the time your maintanable app is on the market, the Shiny Things have beat you.
In the Smithsonian's technology exhibit, I saw a graph that marked the rise of television in the 1950s. It was a saturation curve, rising very quickly at the 40 to 50 percent level, and then flattening and gradually moving up at, IIRC, 70 to 80 percent. I'm sure the transition to color and solid state provided some turnover, as will the hi-def transition we are in now.
The lesson though, is that PCs will saturate too. They can surf the web and play DVDs. They can do word processing, spreadsheets, and most of the other "killer apps" people need. There's no more reason for turnover, and those that want 'em got 'em. I was looking out for this, and figured the real saturation started in the late 90s. For years, the state of the art PC was "about $2000", and then suddenly, very capable machines dropped through the $1000 floor. The vendors must have seen the curve flattening, so they had to reach into that lower price market to drive sales. That was the beginning of the end.
It was neither sarcastic nor serious in the sense that you describe. I thought everybody would understand that I was referring to Line-of-sight signals, which required the Moon to be visible. In the future, I suppose I should dumb it down for people who have user numbers higher than mine. Now *that's* sarcasm.
I live in DC, and although I didn't check out the archives, I'm pretty sure that if I walked into any building downtown and just took stuff, I'd be busted. When DC is "shutdown", this translates to "superfluous cops ar guarding every road block in the small area that's off limits". Besides, what thief would be able to identify this stuff, and even if they could, why would they take it, and why would you RENT A TRUCK and attempt to pull of this job when the profit margin on a simple smash-n-grab or auto theft is so much more reliable?
Maybe the Moon was only visible from Australia during the landing, and they never bothered to cart the hi-fi versions across the Pacific. If the signal had to be relayed from Australia to the US, it was probably downsampled in real time. Just a wild guess. Anybody really know?
There was an Australian observatory scene in The Right Stuff, and this reminds me of that.
I automaticly screen out companies that don't answer questions about salaries and options. I only want to work for companies that are passionate about compensating me.
...how can I prevent my ads from being served by spyware? How about a clause in my contract with the advertising company that says "Ads served by provider and any subcontractor will not be served by pop-up, and will only be served as the result of a user willfully navigating to a web page which serves ads, and may not be served as the result of any additional software installed on the user's computer. The definition of 'pop-up', 'willfully navigating' and 'installed' remains at the discretion of the customer, and we reserve the right to terminate this contract if the advertising agency is unable to assure us that it meets these criteria."
For some small business this wouldn't work too well, but if big companies started doing it, and it became standard operating procedure for corporations, it would help a lot. Suddenly, other advertisers will just stop dealing with these guys.
Nailing down the definitions is a bit tricky, and IIRC there was a case where some company sued over being designated as malware, so this approach isn't a cure-all. Going after the actual technical definition of something is a bit more effort, but it quashes the arguments of companies that might complain they are being singled out prejudicially.
Also, pornographers and other shady businesses will always do stuff like this, but at least we'll maintain the association of sleaziness with pop-ups and spyware, which is where it belongs.
Think again. Of course you have to enforce a consistant environment for releases; but then you are back to having "one indent to rule them all". I guess you could say that's an incentive for developers to not produce bugs, because if they produce a bug they have to debug it with the release settings, and if they don't like those settings it's more of a hassle. Generally though, we don't want to hassle people.
I recall somebody here mentioning once that he worked at a place where CVS was setup to automaticly run indent on checkin and checkout. This seemed ideal to me--each coder would get to work in their own preferred style. Then I realized the problems it would cause with certain things. In most of my code, when I return an integer error, I use a macro that munges in a number for the file, a semantic error code (e.g., file not found) and--here's the problem--the __LINE__ directive. The beauty of this system is that since all the integers are compile-time constants, I get a lot of information in my error codes for no more runtime expense than returning something less informative (e.g., -1, or a simple EFOOBAR define).
The downside would be that if such errors were generated by sources compiled by different checkouts, with different styles, then reported errors won't match up on the same __LINE__. This could be resolved by eliminating the __LINE__ from the macro, but then you'd have to come up with a unique ID for each error, manually. That's tedious, miserable work. We could chose to have a single style for *compiling* the source as opposed to editing, but then you are right back to the same problem: there can be only one compiling/debugging style.
I guess, in lieu of __LINE__ I could use a manually enterred "random" number, and use a pre-processing stage to make sure that the number was unique--use the same number in the same file, and CPP fails, but this requires a hack to CPP.
FWIW, I use tabs becaues I figure that "presentation" is the editor's problem. I meant to tab in. If your editor is set to 8 spaces, that's your editor's problem, not mine. What's nasty is when stuff like MSVC converts tabs to spaces during copy-paste operations. My text has tabs in it. COPY-PASTE MY TEXT. DON'T CONVERT IT!!!
Of course then I end up with a "mixed" source code, and I can't tell what's happened unless I actually cursor back. Now, I know all you space guys are saying that if I just used 4 spaces I'd be fine, but then if my source is loaded by somebody who preferrs 2 spaces, or 8 spaces, they are SOL. They are slaved to my editor preference, and that's plainly wrong. In the long run, tabs are the only workable way to solve that problem, because they are, in a sense, "source" whereas spaces are the result you get when the text is "compiled" by the editor.