Seriously, why? Looks like the page orientation is a throw-back to the old Radius monitors, but too small to be of much good for graphic design. Also, laptops tend to have the very low-end of graphic card support, so I wouldn't expect it's much good for LAN parties, unless you're still playing NSNIPES.
Interesting how one Yuan is about 1 eighth of a dollar, since the Yuan (in 1911) was originally based upon the dollar Mex, or Mexico 8 Reales (Piece of 8);-)
This Linux business certainly can't be too popular in Redmond after yesterday's announcement.
Re:At least they follow their own advice.
on
Built For Use
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· Score: 2
THESE guys practice what they preach. Total time starting from
www.humanlogic.com to end of purchase at Barnes and Nobles was less than a minute.
Which is an laudable accomplishment. Ebay has just changed their My Ebay page (see reactions here, sprung on users without any warning and it's awful. Perhaps a copy of this book should be sent their way.
What you would hear 30 minutes before their web development team is fired:
"The network connection to the conference room is down, but we're setting you up with a 56K modem for your presentation."
Art in the Employ of Commerce
on
Built For Use
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· Score: 1
Art, the very concept, is subjective. Simple placement of text can be artful, while the most beautifully rendered animated gif can be the reason users close the browser before receiving the message, because animated, flashing gifs are not merely annoying, but aggrevating (Slashdot, take a hint here!!!)
There were a few very effective pages on Web Pages That Suck which brought how how Art can be highly effective, or a barrier to the target (i.e. don't put 2.5Meg of images on your home page, users on modems will lose interest) I personally dispise Flash homepages and have thus uninstalled it Flash, and good riddance.
Conversely, Linux, if lead by people so dedicated to some technical aspect to the detriment of functionality would make your point, however, I think enough of Open Source and Linux projects have moved beyond that stage, hence Gnome and KDE.
Looking back at software of 10 years ago should bring home that interfaces have gotten much better, though some were great to begin with and the bad ones have just been catching up.
It's usually ok with the US Govt for US corporations to bribe officials of foreign governments. Despite the official line from any government that they are above that sort of thing, you'll know what's up if China suddenly proclaims Linux as evil.
This is exactly what Nintendo, Sega and Atari did when other companies attempted to produce games for their platforms, way back in the 80's, so it's nothing new! Y'all just forgot about it.
Microsoft has indeed learned from their business model. This is in effect a good reason NOT to buy an XBox, but to stick to games for your PC, preserve that market and you'll still have the option to buy games for it in 5 years. You buy games for proprietary game consoles and watch the PC market wither and you'll have been your own worst enemy (and still be pointing the finger at them to blame.)
Anyone who purchases the book receives an unlimited license to use the source code from the
examples on up to ten CPUs. If you have greater needs, other licenses are available. Or just buy
another copy of the book.
Sure, notice that they had search warrants to enter and seize equipment, rather than in some countries where no search warrant == no problem, enter and take anyway.
BTW, if you were one of their neighbors using DSL and wondered why your service sucked so bad for what you were paying, you might be thinking this was a good thing and overdue. Now you can get back to your pr0n viewing, without competing for bandwidth with your unscrupulous neighbors.;-)
Re:6502 microcode bugs...
on
Pet Bugs?
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· Score: 1
[6502 zero page bug]First time I saw it used was in some copy-protection code in the C64 version of Sim City..
C64 used the 6510, some of which had this bug fixed. I recall testing it on mine and it jumped correctly. I think that could be a headache to use for copy protection. One of the assemblers I used had an option to warn on these in compile, can't recall which, though, but it was a sweet compiler. I still have it, along with an interface for controlling a C64 directly from an Apple ][ (ah, the compiler was on the Apple, not running on the C64, it was for C64 development, the card maker eventually made a variation on this called the ISE Pick, for cracking games, but I'm wandering off topic:o)
Assigning value of uninitialized variables
on
Pet Bugs?
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· Score: 2
This was particular to a recent bug a colleague encountered, which I'd noticed sometime before and had an answer for:
A variable is initialized.
Another variable meant to be initialized/assigned by an external process wasn't.
Assign the uninitialized variable to the one already initialized (thus copying the pointer)
Voila the program reports an uninitialized variable, which any fool could plainly see had a value set at the begining of code.
I've seen this happen in a couple languages, including c. The lesson is always assign some value to vars, perticularly when passing between routines, all return values should return with something other than a null pointer (unless of course you're coding for this intentionally.)
1. Poor requirements specification (e.g. specifying the platform and/or the language in the requirements - a big mistake,
especially when the language they specify results in code riddled with buffer overflows)
Generally a lack of standards or enforcement, though one of the great hazzards is idealistic inexperienced (or worse, experienced) people with grand visions of the perfect tool followed by shock, dismay, even anger when users fail to share the author's enthusiasm. Time lost on poor communication is added cost to projects/products.
Experience has taught me enough to ask what the user is actually going to do with it and see past just their "want", because what they need is often considerably different (and usually much simpler.)
I'll generally create prototypes to show users to get feedback on look, ergonomics, and usability. Early communication and feedback are essential to a smooth project and a good product. I'll never know all the answers, so giving users a shot early on saves us both of us headaches down the road. Few things are more painful to a coder than having to completely re-engineer an application when it's about 90% done.
2. Poor requirements confirmation (e.g. Everything anyone asked for goes into the requirements with no review at all to
determine if it's needed, technically possible, or self-contradictory)
This reminds me of so many times meeting with a user to discuss a few changes to an existing application, to find they don't even use it, or use it properly because it was dumped on them or never updated to follow their needs. At some point many just give up on asking for fixes and find another way, particularly when the IT channel has been unresponsive for a long time. Extra time doing work arounds, or cleaning up the mess of users doing short cuts probably doesn't figure into the study, but I've spent enough time and cycles trying to clean up or form links between messy data.
I wonder how compare the costs of software bugs left by the educated, to the costs of errors made by the less educated using it. Nice 309 page study, but seems like you could easily do one based upon the actual cost to the economy of workers taking a day to see Episode II and arrive at another pile of dollars. Useful?
If anyone's interested in the _real_ cost, wait until lawyers weigh in, as I expect they already have somewhere. I know Burroughs used to get sued on a regular basis before joining Sperry Univac and hiding behind a new name.
People will find these markings, and conclude that some energy force drew people to these locations, and thus they were sites
of great power!
'Were' being the word, here. I.e. they were open, they were visited, some exciting thing happened and their obit was printed on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. Probably not so dramatic, but imagine someone doing a drive-by of Arthur Andersen or Enron and pilfering a few online documents...
You're concept also gives me pause to think about all the nuts who hang around old ruins in the world, e.g. Stonehenge, and feel there's some great power eminating from them... most likely they're markers of where (political) power was concentrated and is all used up by now. Ah, well, if they weren't oohing and ahhing and buying into some cult they'd probably be sending spam, too.
So, won't it be interesting to look out your window and find one of these runes on the side of the building across the street...say,
a rival company? There they are, broadcasting their secrets to the world. How convenient, you can just login from the window
near your desk.
Does rather bring back memories of Reg the Blank, of Max Headroom, eh? Corporate giants all over the place and some guy running a tiny network off out of a trailer off in the ruins somewhere.:-)
I think after such a long and painful road, the name 'Merced' carried a stigma, thus something newer, shiny, 'techie' sounding was arrived at to put a bright spin on a project which started out with great intentions but became Frankenstein's monster.
Merced the name of a river flowing out of Yosemite NP, a county and an agricultural town in California's San Joaquin Valley.
Equipped with Longhorn, your PC will
keep track of how you work, whom you talk to, what sites you look at, how you make documents and
whom you share them with, which data on the network are yours--
Yeah, often not for the better, either, but that's always implied, just like this little beauty was only driven by a little old lady on Sundays. But indirectly, due to my lost patience with the company, I will spend more time with Linux and Open Source, and for the great strides their ridiculous attitudes and poor quality have encouraged in the aforementioned, I do thank them.
The Hook -->> making all those things easier.' (It'll make it easier if it would just not crash and diagnostics agreed with what the system is actually doing, or not doing)
At 135 mph around Sears Point Raceway (soon to be renamed (ugh) Infineon raceway.
Up to about 100 years ago this was pretty much the case, they were silver coins, about 90% pure, and refered to as Crowns (at least to english speakers.) An ounce of Silver was an ounce of silver, wherever you went. Merchants in southeast Asia countermarked or "chop marked" coins to guard against counterfeits. The coin of the world for a considerable time was the spanish 8 (ocho) Reales. (Follow the link to learn a little more) Following WW II the crowns of the world were pretty much replaced by paper money, getting away from the problems of fluctuating silver prices, but creating exchange headaches for everyone. Now there Euro and the US $ being employed as the currency of other countries.
Re:Vending Machines - TAKE Sac-a-bux!
on
Greenbacks No More
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· Score: 1
Seriously, I find the Sac-a-bux work great where accepted, and save you the hauling of many quarters and straightening bills (which cost NYC about $165,000 per year a couple years ago.)
It's truly amazing that the US economy pretty much gets by on Cents, Nickels, Dimes and Quarters whereas some countries have had as many as 8 different denominations of coin before the Euro. (Yeah, there's technically a Half Dollar, too, but I think collectors or casinos are the only place to see them anymore, banks don't like to order them as stores don't use them.)
Primary reason for not upgrading
on
Version Fatigue
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· Score: 1
I'm still on Win98 on my laptop with no real intention of "upgrading" I've got so much to keep track of (passwords for 50 different things, how many more clean pairs of socks, how much masala sauce left, is today Thursday or Wednesday, etc.) I've become highly resistant to adding any more complications (i.e. things to remember) to my repetoire.
Even though I'm a subscriber to some shareware I haven't upgraded much of that in years, either, simply because it does what I need, I don't see serious problems, so don't change what works (if it ain't broke, don't fix it.)
I imagine this is creating some serious inertia against upgrading to yet another version of Windows, Office, or other Microsoft Pork, which is why they (Microsoft) have been so involved in other strategies to get their lucre.
Well, if you're confused, you probably ought to take in instance on it's own merits. I.e. Walmarts evil, when they displace mom&pop stores, but not so evil when they displace WinTel boxen with Lindows and Mandrake boxen.
Hard to say who sounds more redneck, Joe Sixpack or the author. Back in the day, K-mart held the same esteem that Walmart does now, but everyone shopped there for something anyway. i.e. you live in Santa Cruz county, you make big money, you pay most of it rent/mortgage, you shop at Costco and Kmart, just like alleged rednecks.
I expect most Joe Sixpacks are just looking to get on the web, do some email/chat with Darleen DeCups, and some word/photo processing to their bargain inkjet printers (which won't be such a bargain once the ink runs out) As long as it does those things, I think they'll be happy as any J. P. Gotrockets.
Slashdot Mirror
6Kg, also, a bit of a boat anchor.
Seriously, why? Looks like the page orientation is a throw-back to the old Radius monitors, but too small to be of much good for graphic design. Also, laptops tend to have the very low-end of graphic card support, so I wouldn't expect it's much good for LAN parties, unless you're still playing NSNIPES.
This Linux business certainly can't be too popular in Redmond after yesterday's announcement.
Which is an laudable accomplishment. Ebay has just changed their My Ebay page (see reactions here, sprung on users without any warning and it's awful. Perhaps a copy of this book should be sent their way.
What you would hear 30 minutes before their web development team is fired:
There were a few very effective pages on Web Pages That Suck which brought how how Art can be highly effective, or a barrier to the target (i.e. don't put 2.5Meg of images on your home page, users on modems will lose interest) I personally dispise Flash homepages and have thus uninstalled it Flash, and good riddance.
Conversely, Linux, if lead by people so dedicated to some technical aspect to the detriment of functionality would make your point, however, I think enough of Open Source and Linux projects have moved beyond that stage, hence Gnome and KDE. Looking back at software of 10 years ago should bring home that interfaces have gotten much better, though some were great to begin with and the bad ones have just been catching up.
It's usually ok with the US Govt for US corporations to bribe officials of foreign governments. Despite the official line from any government that they are above that sort of thing, you'll know what's up if China suddenly proclaims Linux as evil.
Microsoft has indeed learned from their business model. This is in effect a good reason NOT to buy an XBox, but to stick to games for your PC, preserve that market and you'll still have the option to buy games for it in 5 years. You buy games for proprietary game consoles and watch the PC market wither and you'll have been your own worst enemy (and still be pointing the finger at them to blame.)
Lends new meaning to "Software Library", eh?
Anyone who purchases the book receives an unlimited license to use the source code from the examples on up to ten CPUs. If you have greater needs, other licenses are available. Or just buy another copy of the book.
Sure, notice that they had search warrants to enter and seize equipment, rather than in some countries where no search warrant == no problem, enter and take anyway.
BTW, if you were one of their neighbors using DSL and wondered why your service sucked so bad for what you were paying, you might be thinking this was a good thing and overdue. Now you can get back to your pr0n viewing, without competing for bandwidth with your unscrupulous neighbors. ;-)
C64 used the 6510, some of which had this bug fixed. I recall testing it on mine and it jumped correctly. I think that could be a headache to use for copy protection. One of the assemblers I used had an option to warn on these in compile, can't recall which, though, but it was a sweet compiler. I still have it, along with an interface for controlling a C64 directly from an Apple ][ (ah, the compiler was on the Apple, not running on the C64, it was for C64 development, the card maker eventually made a variation on this called the ISE Pick, for cracking games, but I'm wandering off topic :o)
A variable is initialized.
Another variable meant to be initialized/assigned by an external process wasn't.
Assign the uninitialized variable to the one already initialized (thus copying the pointer)
Voila the program reports an uninitialized variable, which any fool could plainly see had a value set at the begining of code.
I've seen this happen in a couple languages, including c. The lesson is always assign some value to vars, perticularly when passing between routines, all return values should return with something other than a null pointer (unless of course you're coding for this intentionally.)
Generally a lack of standards or enforcement, though one of the great hazzards is idealistic inexperienced (or worse, experienced) people with grand visions of the perfect tool followed by shock, dismay, even anger when users fail to share the author's enthusiasm. Time lost on poor communication is added cost to projects/products.
Experience has taught me enough to ask what the user is actually going to do with it and see past just their "want", because what they need is often considerably different (and usually much simpler.)
I'll generally create prototypes to show users to get feedback on look, ergonomics, and usability. Early communication and feedback are essential to a smooth project and a good product. I'll never know all the answers, so giving users a shot early on saves us both of us headaches down the road. Few things are more painful to a coder than having to completely re-engineer an application when it's about 90% done.
This reminds me of so many times meeting with a user to discuss a few changes to an existing application, to find they don't even use it, or use it properly because it was dumped on them or never updated to follow their needs. At some point many just give up on asking for fixes and find another way, particularly when the IT channel has been unresponsive for a long time. Extra time doing work arounds, or cleaning up the mess of users doing short cuts probably doesn't figure into the study, but I've spent enough time and cycles trying to clean up or form links between messy data.
If anyone's interested in the _real_ cost, wait until lawyers weigh in, as I expect they already have somewhere. I know Burroughs used to get sued on a regular basis before joining Sperry Univac and hiding behind a new name.
'Were' being the word, here. I.e. they were open, they were visited, some exciting thing happened and their obit was printed on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. Probably not so dramatic, but imagine someone doing a drive-by of Arthur Andersen or Enron and pilfering a few online documents...
You're concept also gives me pause to think about all the nuts who hang around old ruins in the world, e.g. Stonehenge, and feel there's some great power eminating from them... most likely they're markers of where (political) power was concentrated and is all used up by now. Ah, well, if they weren't oohing and ahhing and buying into some cult they'd probably be sending spam, too.
Does rather bring back memories of Reg the Blank, of Max Headroom, eh? Corporate giants all over the place and some guy running a tiny network off out of a trailer off in the ruins somewhere. :-)
I was so shocked by this insinuation that I nearly dropped a handfull of beans!
Next Battleground: Freedom of Speech! Do I have the right to shout on a crowded street, 'Kynance, open node, 1-5' ?
Merced the name of a river flowing out of Yosemite NP, a county and an agricultural town in California's San Joaquin Valley.
Apparently you haven't been following the Itanium saga.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me over and over and over and I'll become a customer, obsessed over your every word.
Yeah, often not for the better, either, but that's always implied, just like this little beauty was only driven by a little old lady on Sundays. But indirectly, due to my lost patience with the company, I will spend more time with Linux and Open Source, and for the great strides their ridiculous attitudes and poor quality have encouraged in the aforementioned, I do thank them.
The Hook -->> making all those things easier.' (It'll make it easier if it would just not crash and diagnostics agreed with what the system is actually doing, or not doing)
At 135 mph around Sears Point Raceway (soon to be renamed (ugh) Infineon raceway.
Up to about 100 years ago this was pretty much the case, they were silver coins, about 90% pure, and refered to as Crowns (at least to english speakers.) An ounce of Silver was an ounce of silver, wherever you went. Merchants in southeast Asia countermarked or "chop marked" coins to guard against counterfeits. The coin of the world for a considerable time was the spanish 8 (ocho) Reales. (Follow the link to learn a little more) Following WW II the crowns of the world were pretty much replaced by paper money, getting away from the problems of fluctuating silver prices, but creating exchange headaches for everyone. Now there Euro and the US $ being employed as the currency of other countries.
It's truly amazing that the US economy pretty much gets by on Cents, Nickels, Dimes and Quarters whereas some countries have had as many as 8 different denominations of coin before the Euro. (Yeah, there's technically a Half Dollar, too, but I think collectors or casinos are the only place to see them anymore, banks don't like to order them as stores don't use them.)
Even though I'm a subscriber to some shareware I haven't upgraded much of that in years, either, simply because it does what I need, I don't see serious problems, so don't change what works (if it ain't broke, don't fix it.)
I imagine this is creating some serious inertia against upgrading to yet another version of Windows, Office, or other Microsoft Pork, which is why they (Microsoft) have been so involved in other strategies to get their lucre.
It's called, taking your victories where you can.
Wal-mart carries "Big Game Hunter for Linux"..
Hard to say who sounds more redneck, Joe Sixpack or the author. Back in the day, K-mart held the same esteem that Walmart does now, but everyone shopped there for something anyway. i.e. you live in Santa Cruz county, you make big money, you pay most of it rent/mortgage, you shop at Costco and Kmart, just like alleged rednecks.
I expect most Joe Sixpacks are just looking to get on the web, do some email/chat with Darleen DeCups, and some word/photo processing to their bargain inkjet printers (which won't be such a bargain once the ink runs out) As long as it does those things, I think they'll be happy as any J. P. Gotrockets.