That doesnâ(TM)t sound like a valid analogy to me. âoePay for priorityâ sounds more like allowing some customers to pay $150/mo for gigabit internet largely built with taxpayer dollars while others just canâ(TM)t afford or justify the additional expense.
Net neutrality is more like a making a rule that exclusively allows Honda cars in the âoepay for priorityâ lane because they paid the transportation department off. Few would buy a Kia even if they were amazing because everybody wants to be home earlier and Kias take too long to get there. Furthermore, Kia would never be able to buy there way into that lane because they can never earn quite enough money to afford it. Honda becomes the de facto car and is difficult to unseat from their position of power. To me, thatâ(TM)s net neutrality.
I completely agree that it is now tradition that presidents fire all the attorneys that an opposing predecessor has appointed. I also agree that president Obama did exactly that. It seems natural that a president wants to promote their agenda and attorneys help do that.
I believe you are incorrect about President Trump/ Attorney General Sessions having fired only half of the remaining Obama attorneys. In fact, the 46 asked to resign represented all of the remaining appointees of President Obama. The other 47 had already stepped aside to make way for new picks.
I found your comment about rights very interesting considering I am taking a Philosophy of Human Rights class at the University of Washington.
In our class we identify rights as being primarily "positive", meaning someone has to pay for them. Or as negative, meaning only that people have to refrain from doing something in order to maintain your right.
The easy examples of positive rights are things like voting. In the United States, we pay for polling stations, advertising, accounting, and tallying the votes as citizens. (Not to mention considerably more.) Yet voting is a right, as defined by the U.S. constitution.
Even negative rights have a lot of positive aspects to them. We say freedom of speech is a right that only requires that people don't "take" from you. But there is considerable expense in legislature, police, and our judicial system. There is a lot of cost that is being given to you. (Of course, it is ultimately from your tax dollars, but you may not be paying a proportional amount.)
I realize that your example is more that someone has to give you a thing. I'm guessing in this you mean a tangible article. Most people will tell you that you have a right to sustenance. If you are starving, especially if you have made a valid attempt to find work, I believe that you have a right to be given food. It is an arguable point, though I hope that most people believe that no one should starve.
The students in question are receiving a private education, so I don't think that their right to an education is necessarily being violated here. I would most certainly say that a person has "right" to an education though. Without it, you lack the capability to be a citizen in a democratic society that can truly contribute.
It was JavaScript long before it was ECMAScript. Even Microsoft called their implementation JScript in deference to the original. JavaScript was already a recognizable name for scores of developers and quite a few users. A standardization body that few care about is going to do little to change that. Even now, if I called it ECMAScript at work, there is no doubt that the people at work would think me a newbie.
Mostly importantly though, AEAX sucks as a name.:)
Thanks for that. I like having my actions and efforts being called dumb -- especially by someone who doesn't know all the particulars of my case. I did actually try quite dilligently to make this work well. You forget that I *wanted* to make this work. I'm not just some mac hater that was being beaten with a stick.
It turns out that I'm not exactly new at hardware or compilation either.
Prior to upgrading to a Hitachi 7k60 in my 3 year old laptop, I used a 5400 rpm Toshiba drive which is not entirely unlike the drive that came in the PowerBook. The net difference in the compilation speed when I upgraded drives in my old laptop was about 65 seconds. The 7k60 is regarded as one of the fastest (if not the fastest) hard drives available for laptops.
Though I don't know it for certain, I'm guessing that some time in the last 3 years 2.5" hard drive performance has improved at least a little.
So, by your suggestion, the brand new 5400rpm drive packaged by Apple is not only slower than 3 year old technology, it is SO much slower that it accounts for an additional 120 seconds? Did they have to try to make it this slow?
My guess is slightly different. I'm guessing that either Apple's hardware is slower than the newest Intel-Architecture laptops, or that the Java platform is not as well optimized on Apple's operating system. Perhaps elements of both are present.
I'm sure your post was well-meaning. I'm sorry though, I don't think the difference can be explained by a dismissive comment regarding hard drive performance.
I'm guessing that you want to write something somewhat long. If you didn't, you could use paper more easily. Anything more than paragraph though, and you run into editing problems.
I'm guessing that you won't really be happy with anything you try. Pencil and paper is too slow, and anything short of a laptop won't be fast enough to get your thoughts out.
I'm not saying this to be a troll. If you can type fast enough, there isn't the intermediate step of storing the words in your head while your sluggish right hand tries to spit out words with a pencil or pen.
I've tried a number of solutions. These include an old Windows CE machine with a keyboard, a Palm m505 with an external keyboard, and the same Palm m505 using the "Fitaly" input. In the end, I'm not using any of them.
The problem is that none of them allowed me to express myself with the ease I feel with a keyboard. (No, I'm not saying my writing is fluid or even good -- I'm just saying that I feel fluid.)
I never tried it, but one thing that was suggested to me was to try to learn shorthand. You may have to re-type everything later, but at least you can get the words down quickly.
I recently bought a 12" Powerbook G4. I loved it, but I had to return the thing. It was definitely fast enough for doing daily tasks in the Mac environment, but it was far too slow to complete *my* work.
When I returned it, all the optimization I could do (including increasing the ram to 1.25gig) lead to a clean compile time of 425 seconds. In comparison, my 3 year old toshiba laptop could manage 240 seconds.
I sold it and bought a new Intel Pentium M 770-based machine. My compile time now is 70 seconds.
It isn't an entirely fair comparison, the 12" powerbook is the ultra portable one, but I doubt the 15" would have made much difference.
I loved OS X though, I would buy again if they could get rid of the nagging speed problem.
I know everybody here is talking about native Linux games, but you should't discount emulated games through Cedega/Transgaming too quickly.
My machine is a P4 2.6 with 1 gig of memory. I've been quite happily playing World of Warcraft now for 2 weeks. Right before that I was playing Doom 3. The games just seem to work. I don't have to mess around with a lot of configuration settings.
I haven't been playing games for very long, but their list of supported games is looking quite nice for someone who doesn't know any better.
It seems unlikely. Of Sun's many hardware and software products, I'd argue that Java is the most widely distributed and perhaps even well-known.
While they haven't made a ton of money on Java yet, it's still a valuable asset. If they weren't involved in Java, I won't have a lot of reason to think about them. Yet their stewardship keeps me going to their site. It is easy for a whole bunch of other people, companies, or groups to tell them "give it away". But until they can stop the hemorrhage over at Sun, I think they'll hold on to this one.
IBM is in a totally different situation than Sun. It isn't looking to make money directly on Java. IBM is an enormous (8 in the fortune 100?) company whose income is based on primarily services and traditionally hardware. Java means "Compatibility" to IBM. It means they can promote some of their software (like Websphere), and sell lots of services. I don't doubt that they have plenty of other motives that I can't even comprehend.
I don't think Real has done anything all that bad in the past. They are a company, guys! They are going to have make money to stay in business. Advertisement is one of the common ways a company tries to collect revenue without having to charge the user money. If you disliked this so much, did you ever write them even a single email telling them so? If so, you are part of the problem -- complaining to yourself accomplishes nothing.
I applaud Real's attempt to make a player that is better than the next guy and is attempting to be free. I've worked for a few companies now, and I know that getting everyone to agree on making something GPL is most often laughable. It takes a big culture change. Reward those who make that culture change with kind words, don't be rude!
Consider the guy who was on the fence when these decisions were being made. If he read half of these comments he'd just think that these people just want the software for free, they care about nothing else! (He might even be right.)
All code you write should be 100% about maintainability.
Quick and dirty is never really the way out. But not being "quick and dirty" shouldn't always mean a 10 week programming experiment in order to make the "correct" solution though. There is a happy midpoint that you should be striving for.
Focus on making the code that you write intentional and well-purposed. You should always write the simplest code that gets the job done. Don't make every task an opportunity to show off the big brains. In the end you'll just end up having to maintain the code that you write. By writing the simplest code possible, you'll make your code easier to read and easier to maintain.
Simple means that the code is well laid out. It should use patterns that you should have learned in your free time. It should use the best architecture that you know. Sometimes you will have to venture into unknown territory and try some new algorithms and some patterns that maybe you haven't used. Do that sparingly though. You never want to introduce instability into your system by having too many "unknown variables".
If you aren't a good programmer yet, you can learn a lot by reading code -- lots of it. This doesn't mean that other code is better. You'll have to figure out whether it's good by using brainpower. Other code will expose you to ideas you haven't considered yet. Trying a second (or fifteenth) language will help to broaden your horizons. Try taking on a side project at home for a while. If you are a web guy, try doing something with a UI. Diversity will help bring in new ideas.
Read voraciously. Tackle the seminal books on Object-Orientation, Refactoring, and software engineering. Branch out in new directions and read about Aspect-Oriented Programming. Most of all, keep your head screwed on and figure out why to use those technologies.
It is very important to be able to rationalize the decisions you make when you program. When you have a rationalization, make sure you write it down. Put it in comments in the code, but perhaps keep a journal too. I find lots of ideas I had forgotten just sitting in my journal.
Eventually, you may find that you will have to upgrade the algorithms that you originally wrote to be smarter and to take advantage of something you didn't have time to consider originally. This is a good change if you have written good code to begin with.
Finally, work in a place where you believe everybody is smarter than you. Always be the "dumbest guy" and work hard to become the smartest. Working with smart people will challenge you to be your best. Avoid the swagger of a programmer early in your career. There is a lot to learn and just maybe someone else might have something to contribute to your desire for world domination.
How does all this correspond to your question? Maybe nothing. It was hard to tell how much experience you really have -- I just assumed you were new or maybe that you hadn't worked with a lot of good people. Being a good programmer helps to sort these things out in some cases.
While everyone is entitled to an opinion, I find it interesting that several posters are dismissing Mandrake's software as "crap."
I've been a loyal Mandrake user now for a few years now. While Mandrake has put out a few substandard releases, Mandrake has also produced a lot of good work over time. With the latest releases of RedHat and Mandrake, Mandrake still installs okay, Redhat doesn't. Perhaps they are *all* bad.
Also, Mandrake has employed a lot of open source folks over time. If you are using Linux today, chances are you've probably run more than one or two lines of code that were written by someone in that "crappy company."
I'm tired of Mandrake going to the well too. Still, if open source software has a chance, it needs a way to pay people. Sure, we all donate some of our free time, and that's great. Producing a world class distribution isn't *only* a free time affair though. Notice that the most popular distributions are not maintained by a bunch of guys in their living rooms in sweats.
It is fine if you don't want to donate, but I don't see why we need to be "anti-company". Mandrake made some mistakes in the past and they had some bad management. They are trying to pull themselves out of it though. A negative review on Slashdot pulls a lot of weight with some folks. Hopefully when you anyone posts they aren't simply letting their "hurray open source, down with the companies!" mentality get the better of them.
Boy, aren't we all happy that Jane Brody piped in with her two cents? Like many before her, she gives the impression that:
1. Anyone who is fat is eating too much. 2. We are all mindless morons that never bothered to learn squat about nutrition.
After almost 4 years about being 50+ pounds overweight I can tell you more about nutrition labels, fat, and personal training than most people. I might not have a degree, but I've certainly worked hard at finding "the right" information.
I'm tired of people telling me that I eat too many calories (1300 sure seemed low enough to me) and that I don't exercise (5 nights a week sure seems like enough to me) so I decided to try Atkins.
Since July I have lost 36 pounds and 5 inches around my waist. Yes, I am eating fewer calories a day -- it is the only way that anyone loses weight (duh!) but I am not hungry all the time either so I don't feel absolutely punished. Even so, I am only eating about 150 calories less a day. There is no way that calories alone can account for those 36 pounds.
Am I screwing up my body? Well, I haven't done a new cholesterol workup yet, which is soon, but I have been watching my blood pressure. I've dropped from 137/110 to 118/78.
I have more energy than I ever had. The days that I "screw up" and eat far too many carbohydrates are the days I feel down and irritable. I just lay on the couch and don't really want to do anything. Jane Brody asks how we will all do when we add potatoes back into our diets -- why would I want them?
The Atkins diet is extreme in the beginning, but it doesn't stay that way. Reading the book is the only way to know what the diet is really about. I am already to the point where I am introducing plums, honeydew melon, and peaches to my diet. I eat broccoli, kale, salads, and tons of vegetables.
I've only been on two diets in my life. The low fat diet, which I was on for nearly 4 years, and Atkins, which I have been on for a little over 2 months. One diet made me tired and depressed. The other made me feel like a new man. I will hate it if I do get kidney stones, but the evidence against Atkins is NOT clear. There is NO damning study that shows that he is wrong or that we are going to die a horrible death from eating less carbs. In the meantime, I've definitely made my decision -- I'll go with happiness and weight loss.
I own one, so I can give you the good and the bad.
On the good side, we have the gesture input. It works flawlessly. There is a copy of the list of gestures on the Fingerworks site, but in short you can do a variety of things with certain finger movements. Examples include cut, paste, scrolling (similar to mouse wheel), cursor movement (similar to using the cursor keys), home, end, and many more. They are simply the best part of the keyboard. I don't have the keyboard at work, and I miss the gestures when I don't have them available.
Also on the good side has been Fingerworks support. I've been a bit of a whiner about a few things since I've gotten the keyboard. Mostly, I have complained about usability issues that I'll mention below. They've always listened to my whining and have come up with great suggestions that are usually quite helpful.
On the not quite as good side, we have the keyboard. To give a bit of background, I use a MS Natural keyboard normally and I really like it. I am used to the "ergonomic" slope of such a keyboard. The TouchStream has the same sort of slope. (It is at a slightly different angle, but it seems ergonomically correct.) I generally type in about the 60-90 WPM range, depending on subject matter. I usually have very few typing errors. (I'd better proofread this post now that I've said that.)
My only problem with the keyboard is making sure my fingers stay on the home row. I have gotten much better over time, but it did take a lot of getting used to. If you buy this keyboard, you cannot assume that you will crack it open and throw away your other keyboard immediately. It has been a few month process to feel at all comfortable with the thing. I have a bit large hands, I've always wondered if this contributes at all to my trouble.
With Windows, you can use a regular PS/2 keyboard and the USB Stealth at the same time without a reboot. In Linux you can probably do the same thing, but the wizard in Mandrake doesn't let me turn on two keyboards at the same time. (I ought to not be so lazy, but I just haven't had the time to tackle the issue yet.)
As an Emacs user, I've also found that making my keystrokes work has been a bit of a hassle. Trying to do a Ctrl-C Ctrl-V Ctrl-C is easy on a regular keyboard but takes some practice to master with the TouchStream.
If you are a patient person who is willing to patiently relearn how to type a bit, you might just love the TouchStream. If you are an instant gratification person who will be unhappy if you can't type correctly in the first 15 minutes, you might just want to see if you can borrow one from a friend first.
Check out the Red Mercury's review of the Color Clie. They explain in detail how the Color Clie will run low-res, high-res, or Power HiRes. Power HiRes apparently tries to convert old applications to the new resolution through software interpolation. Check out the URL below for more details.
I have been programming for a while now. I have seen a lot of ugly code. One thing about that ugly code sticks out at me: it was all ugly. It is remarkably odd. Funny how all *that* code was ugly but mine wasn't.
At this point in my career, I believe quite strongly that the only time you should rewrite is if you are changing to another language. Even then translation is often a good idea.
If it is in the same language, make it better. Is a method too long? Find some lines of code that represent a task and move them into another function. Would this one really big procedure work better as three classes? Peel off a class at a time. Refactor the heck out of it until you are happy. Test often. Code a little, test a little. Before you know it, that Pinto will start to look like a Porsche. At the same time, you'll keep all that knowledge that someone worked so hard to put into that code.
Refactoring isn't a new idea. Martin Fowler wrote a book about it and there are some sites on the internet if you look hard enough. The important thing about the book is that it is liberating. It was the first thing that ever suggested to me that I might try fixing bad code.
Rearchitecting might sound like the best answer, but be brave. Software engineering is often about maturity. Someone who always says "if the company isn't right then find another company" might be missing out on something. If you can help your company success, you just might find yourself succeeding.
Nice to have a windows manager again. I don't know if it had something to do with configuration, but Helix took a bite out of my Enlightenment/Gnome combination and found it tasty. If you are a total newbie, you might want to give this puppy a few more builds before installing.
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That doesnâ(TM)t sound like a valid analogy to me. âoePay for priorityâ sounds more like allowing some customers to pay $150/mo for gigabit internet largely built with taxpayer dollars while others just canâ(TM)t afford or justify the additional expense.
Net neutrality is more like a making a rule that exclusively allows Honda cars in the âoepay for priorityâ lane because they paid the transportation department off. Few would buy a Kia even if they were amazing because everybody wants to be home earlier and Kias take too long to get there. Furthermore, Kia would never be able to buy there way into that lane because they can never earn quite enough money to afford it. Honda becomes the de facto car and is difficult to unseat from their position of power. To me, thatâ(TM)s net neutrality.
I completely agree that it is now tradition that presidents fire all the attorneys that an opposing predecessor has appointed. I also agree that president Obama did exactly that. It seems natural that a president wants to promote their agenda and attorneys help do that.
I believe you are incorrect about President Trump/ Attorney General Sessions having fired only half of the remaining Obama attorneys. In fact, the 46 asked to resign represented all of the remaining appointees of President Obama. The other 47 had already stepped aside to make way for new picks.
If your urine is that color, you might want to see a doctor -- or at least drink more fluids. :)
I found your comment about rights very interesting considering I am taking a Philosophy of Human Rights class at the University of Washington.
In our class we identify rights as being primarily "positive", meaning someone has to pay for them. Or as negative, meaning only that people have to refrain from doing something in order to maintain your right.
The easy examples of positive rights are things like voting. In the United States, we pay for polling stations, advertising, accounting, and tallying the votes as citizens. (Not to mention considerably more.) Yet voting is a right, as defined by the U.S. constitution.
Even negative rights have a lot of positive aspects to them. We say freedom of speech is a right that only requires that people don't "take" from you. But there is considerable expense in legislature, police, and our judicial system. There is a lot of cost that is being given to you. (Of course, it is ultimately from your tax dollars, but you may not be paying a proportional amount.)
I realize that your example is more that someone has to give you a thing. I'm guessing in this you mean a tangible article. Most people will tell you that you have a right to sustenance. If you are starving, especially if you have made a valid attempt to find work, I believe that you have a right to be given food. It is an arguable point, though I hope that most people believe that no one should starve.
The students in question are receiving a private education, so I don't think that their right to an education is necessarily being violated here. I would most certainly say that a person has "right" to an education though. Without it, you lack the capability to be a citizen in a democratic society that can truly contribute.
-M
It was JavaScript long before it was ECMAScript. Even Microsoft called their implementation JScript in deference to the original. JavaScript was already a recognizable name for scores of developers and quite a few users. A standardization body that few care about is going to do little to change that. Even now, if I called it ECMAScript at work, there is no doubt that the people at work would think me a newbie.
:)
Mostly importantly though, AEAX sucks as a name.
Thanks for that. I like having my actions and efforts being called dumb -- especially by someone who doesn't know all the particulars of my case. I did actually try quite dilligently to make this work well. You forget that I *wanted* to make this work. I'm not just some mac hater that was being beaten with a stick.
It turns out that I'm not exactly new at hardware or compilation either.
Prior to upgrading to a Hitachi 7k60 in my 3 year old laptop, I used a 5400 rpm Toshiba drive which is not entirely unlike the drive that came in the PowerBook. The net difference in the compilation speed when I upgraded drives in my old laptop was about 65 seconds. The 7k60 is regarded as one of the fastest (if not the fastest) hard drives available for laptops.
Though I don't know it for certain, I'm guessing that some time in the last 3 years 2.5" hard drive performance has improved at least a little.
So, by your suggestion, the brand new 5400rpm drive packaged by Apple is not only slower than 3 year old technology, it is SO much slower that it accounts for an additional 120 seconds? Did they have to try to make it this slow?
My guess is slightly different. I'm guessing that either Apple's hardware is slower than the newest Intel-Architecture laptops, or that the Java platform is not as well optimized on Apple's operating system. Perhaps elements of both are present.
I'm sure your post was well-meaning. I'm sorry though, I don't think the difference can be explained by a dismissive comment regarding hard drive performance.
I'm guessing that you want to write something somewhat long. If you didn't, you could use paper more easily. Anything more than paragraph though, and you run into editing problems.
I'm guessing that you won't really be happy with anything you try. Pencil and paper is too slow, and anything short of a laptop won't be fast enough to get your thoughts out.
I'm not saying this to be a troll. If you can type fast enough, there isn't the intermediate step of storing the words in your head while your sluggish right hand tries to spit out words with a pencil or pen.
I've tried a number of solutions. These include an old Windows CE machine with a keyboard, a Palm m505 with an external keyboard, and the same Palm m505 using the "Fitaly" input. In the end, I'm not using any of them.
The problem is that none of them allowed me to express myself with the ease I feel with a keyboard. (No, I'm not saying my writing is fluid or even good -- I'm just saying that I feel fluid.)
I never tried it, but one thing that was suggested to me was to try to learn shorthand. You may have to re-type everything later, but at least you can get the words down quickly.
I recently bought a 12" Powerbook G4. I loved it, but I had to return the thing. It was definitely fast enough for doing daily tasks in the Mac environment, but it was far too slow to complete *my* work.
When I returned it, all the optimization I could do (including increasing the ram to 1.25gig) lead to a clean compile time of 425 seconds. In comparison, my 3 year old toshiba laptop could manage 240 seconds.
I sold it and bought a new Intel Pentium M 770-based machine. My compile time now is 70 seconds.
It isn't an entirely fair comparison, the 12" powerbook is the ultra portable one, but I doubt the 15" would have made much difference.
I loved OS X though, I would buy again if they could get rid of the nagging speed problem.
-M
I know everybody here is talking about native Linux games, but you should't discount emulated games through Cedega/Transgaming too quickly.
My machine is a P4 2.6 with 1 gig of memory. I've been quite happily playing World of Warcraft now for 2 weeks. Right before that I was playing Doom 3. The games just seem to work. I don't have to mess around with a lot of configuration settings.
I haven't been playing games for very long, but their list of supported games is looking quite nice for someone who doesn't know any better.
It seems unlikely. Of Sun's many hardware and software products, I'd argue that Java is the most widely distributed and perhaps even well-known.
While they haven't made a ton of money on Java yet, it's still a valuable asset. If they weren't involved in Java, I won't have a lot of reason to think about them. Yet their stewardship keeps me going to their site. It is easy for a whole bunch of other people, companies, or groups to tell them "give it away". But until they can stop the hemorrhage over at Sun, I think they'll hold on to this one.
IBM is in a totally different situation than Sun. It isn't looking to make money directly on Java. IBM is an enormous (8 in the fortune 100?) company whose income is based on primarily services and traditionally hardware. Java means "Compatibility" to IBM. It means they can promote some of their software (like Websphere), and sell lots of services. I don't doubt that they have plenty of other motives that I can't even comprehend.
I don't think Real has done anything all that bad in the past. They are a company, guys! They are going to have make money to stay in business. Advertisement is one of the common ways a company tries to collect revenue without having to charge the user money. If you disliked this so much, did you ever write them even a single email telling them so? If so, you are part of the problem -- complaining to yourself accomplishes nothing.
I applaud Real's attempt to make a player that is better than the next guy and is attempting to be free. I've worked for a few companies now, and I know that getting everyone to agree on making something GPL is most often laughable. It takes a big culture change. Reward those who make that culture change with kind words, don't be rude!
Consider the guy who was on the fence when these decisions were being made. If he read half of these comments he'd just think that these people just want the software for free, they care about nothing else! (He might even be right.)
All code you write should be 100% about maintainability.
Quick and dirty is never really the way out. But not being "quick and dirty" shouldn't always mean a 10 week programming experiment in order to make the "correct" solution though. There is a happy midpoint that you should be striving for.
Focus on making the code that you write intentional and well-purposed. You should always write the simplest code that gets the job done. Don't make every task an opportunity to show off the big brains. In the end you'll just end up having to maintain the code that you write. By writing the simplest code possible, you'll make your code easier to read and easier to maintain.
Simple means that the code is well laid out. It should use patterns that you should have learned in your free time. It should use the best architecture that you know. Sometimes you will have to venture into unknown territory and try some new algorithms and some patterns that maybe you haven't used. Do that sparingly though. You never want to introduce instability into your system by having too many "unknown variables".
If you aren't a good programmer yet, you can learn a lot by reading code -- lots of it. This doesn't mean that other code is better. You'll have to figure out whether it's good by using brainpower. Other code will expose you to ideas you haven't considered yet. Trying a second (or fifteenth) language will help to broaden your horizons. Try taking on a side project at home for a while. If you are a web guy, try doing something with a UI. Diversity will help bring in new ideas.
Read voraciously. Tackle the seminal books on Object-Orientation, Refactoring, and software engineering. Branch out in new directions and read about Aspect-Oriented Programming. Most of all, keep your head screwed on and figure out why to use those technologies.
It is very important to be able to rationalize the decisions you make when you program. When you have a rationalization, make sure you write it down. Put it in comments in the code, but perhaps keep a journal too. I find lots of ideas I had forgotten just sitting in my journal.
Eventually, you may find that you will have to upgrade the algorithms that you originally wrote to be smarter and to take advantage of something you didn't have time to consider originally. This is a good change if you have written good code to begin with.
Finally, work in a place where you believe everybody is smarter than you. Always be the "dumbest guy" and work hard to become the smartest. Working with smart people will challenge you to be your best. Avoid the swagger of a programmer early in your career. There is a lot to learn and just maybe someone else might have something to contribute to your desire for world domination.
How does all this correspond to your question? Maybe nothing. It was hard to tell how much experience you really have -- I just assumed you were new or maybe that you hadn't worked with a lot of good people. Being a good programmer helps to sort these things out in some cases.
While everyone is entitled to an opinion, I find it interesting that several posters are dismissing Mandrake's software as "crap."
I've been a loyal Mandrake user now for a few years now. While Mandrake has put out a few substandard releases, Mandrake has also produced a lot of good work over time. With the latest releases of RedHat and Mandrake, Mandrake still installs okay, Redhat doesn't. Perhaps they are *all* bad.
Also, Mandrake has employed a lot of open source folks over time. If you are using Linux today, chances are you've probably run more than one or two lines of code that were written by someone in that "crappy company."
I'm tired of Mandrake going to the well too. Still, if open source software has a chance, it needs a way to pay people. Sure, we all donate some of our free time, and that's great. Producing a world class distribution isn't *only* a free time affair though. Notice that the most popular distributions are not maintained by a bunch of guys in their living rooms in sweats.
It is fine if you don't want to donate, but I don't see why we need to be "anti-company". Mandrake made some mistakes in the past and they had some bad management. They are trying to pull themselves out of it though. A negative review on Slashdot pulls a lot of weight with some folks. Hopefully when you anyone posts they aren't simply letting their "hurray open source, down with the companies!" mentality get the better of them.
-M
Boy, aren't we all happy that Jane Brody piped in with her two cents? Like many before her, she gives the impression that:
1. Anyone who is fat is eating too much.
2. We are all mindless morons that never bothered to learn squat about nutrition.
After almost 4 years about being 50+ pounds overweight I can tell you more about nutrition labels, fat, and personal training than most people. I might not have a degree, but I've certainly worked hard at finding "the right" information.
I'm tired of people telling me that I eat too many calories (1300 sure seemed low enough to me) and that I don't exercise (5 nights a week sure seems like enough to me) so I decided to try Atkins.
Since July I have lost 36 pounds and 5 inches around my waist. Yes, I am eating fewer calories a day -- it is the only way that anyone loses weight (duh!) but I am not hungry all the time either so I don't feel absolutely punished. Even so, I am only eating about 150 calories less a day. There is no way that calories alone can account for those 36 pounds.
Am I screwing up my body? Well, I haven't done a new cholesterol workup yet, which is soon, but I have been watching my blood pressure. I've dropped from 137/110 to 118/78.
I have more energy than I ever had. The days that I "screw up" and eat far too many carbohydrates are the days I feel down and irritable. I just lay on the couch and don't really want to do anything. Jane Brody asks how we will all do when we add potatoes back into our diets -- why would I want them?
The Atkins diet is extreme in the beginning, but it doesn't stay that way. Reading the book is the only way to know what the diet is really about. I am already to the point where I am introducing plums, honeydew melon, and peaches to my diet. I eat broccoli, kale, salads, and tons of vegetables.
I've only been on two diets in my life. The low fat diet, which I was on for nearly 4 years, and Atkins, which I have been on for a little over 2 months. One diet made me tired and depressed. The other made me feel like a new man. I will hate it if I do get kidney stones, but the evidence against Atkins is NOT clear. There is NO damning study that shows that he is wrong or that we are going to die a horrible death from eating less carbs. In the meantime, I've definitely made my decision -- I'll go with happiness and weight loss.
I own one, so I can give you the good and the bad.
On the good side, we have the gesture input. It works flawlessly. There is a copy of the list of gestures on the Fingerworks site, but in short you can do a variety of things with certain finger movements. Examples include cut, paste, scrolling (similar to mouse wheel), cursor movement (similar to using the cursor keys), home, end, and many more. They are simply the best part of the keyboard. I don't have the keyboard at work, and I miss the gestures when I don't have them available.
Also on the good side has been Fingerworks support. I've been a bit of a whiner about a few things since I've gotten the keyboard. Mostly, I have complained about usability issues that I'll mention below. They've always listened to my whining and have come up with great suggestions that are usually quite helpful.
On the not quite as good side, we have the keyboard. To give a bit of background, I use a MS Natural keyboard normally and I really like it. I am used to the "ergonomic" slope of such a keyboard. The TouchStream has the same sort of slope. (It is at a slightly different angle, but it seems ergonomically correct.) I generally type in about the 60-90 WPM range, depending on subject matter. I usually have very few typing errors. (I'd better proofread this post now that I've said that.)
My only problem with the keyboard is making sure my fingers stay on the home row. I have gotten much better over time, but it did take a lot of getting used to. If you buy this keyboard, you cannot assume that you will crack it open and throw away your other keyboard immediately. It has been a few month process to feel at all comfortable with the thing. I have a bit large hands, I've always wondered if this contributes at all to my trouble.
With Windows, you can use a regular PS/2 keyboard and the USB Stealth at the same time without a reboot. In Linux you can probably do the same thing, but the wizard in Mandrake doesn't let me turn on two keyboards at the same time. (I ought to not be so lazy, but I just haven't had the time to tackle the issue yet.)
As an Emacs user, I've also found that making my keystrokes work has been a bit of a hassle. Trying to do a Ctrl-C Ctrl-V Ctrl-C is easy on a regular keyboard but takes some practice to master with the TouchStream.
If you are a patient person who is willing to patiently relearn how to type a bit, you might just love the TouchStream. If you are an instant gratification person who will be unhappy if you can't type correctly in the first 15 minutes, you might just want to see if you can borrow one from a friend first.
Check out the Red Mercury's review of the Color Clie. They explain in detail how the Color Clie will run low-res, high-res, or Power HiRes. Power HiRes apparently tries to convert old applications to the new resolution through software interpolation. Check out the URL below for more details.
http://www.red-mercury.com/N710Ctech.html
I have been programming for a while now. I have seen a lot of ugly code. One thing about that ugly code sticks out at me: it was all ugly. It is remarkably odd. Funny how all *that* code was ugly but mine wasn't.
At this point in my career, I believe quite strongly that the only time you should rewrite is if you are changing to another language. Even then translation is often a good idea.
If it is in the same language, make it better. Is a method too long? Find some lines of code that represent a task and move them into another function. Would this one really big procedure work better as three classes? Peel off a class at a time. Refactor the heck out of it until you are happy. Test often. Code a little, test a little. Before you know it, that Pinto will start to look like a Porsche. At the same time, you'll keep all that knowledge that someone worked so hard to put into that code.
Refactoring isn't a new idea. Martin Fowler wrote a book about it and there are some sites on the internet if you look hard enough. The important thing about the book is that it is liberating. It was the first thing that ever suggested to me that I might try fixing bad code.
Rearchitecting might sound like the best answer, but be brave. Software engineering is often about maturity. Someone who always says "if the company isn't right then find another company" might be missing out on something. If you can help your company success, you just might find yourself succeeding.
Nice to have a windows manager again. I don't know if it had something to do with configuration, but Helix took a bite out of my Enlightenment/Gnome combination and found it tasty. If you are a total newbie, you might want to give this puppy a few more builds before installing.