It's finally happened...a tech I will not use
on
Hot Or Not — 3D TV
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· Score: 1
I'm in the same boat; 3D gives me splitting headaches almost instantly. It's bad to the point where I simply will not go to see a 3D movie, period. Have fun guys, tell me how it is when you get back.
I've been reading/hearing about all this interest in 3D everywhere and I realize that I'm just not going to go along with this particular tech. Apart from my issues with 3D, where did all this 3D-love come from all of a sudden? It seems this particular tech was relegated to IMAX nature movies at the local science museum, and then all of a sudden Avatar is big news and then every company is talking about 3D TVs, 3D channels...this seems like too well-organized to be just a fad, but, sheesh, I hope it is.
...just like a piece of paper: disposable. It seems that a technology only becomes ubiquitous when it becomes so cheap and common that you're strange if you *don't* have one. Everybody, basically, has a cell phone or access to one. A smart phone, like the iphone or android-anything? Not necessarily, but you can buy an old-fashioned cell phone from vending machines now. Look at the history of "computers", in general, and you see the progression from a few at big companies to grandma posting her kitty pics on Facebook.
A tablet, whether it be from Apple or Microsoft or whomever, needs to be less about being personal and more about being utilitarian; if I perceive that it's not a big deal if the unit breaks or disappears, and I can just get another one relatively easily, then it's a success in my mind. And what would the tablet have to do to be better than a piece of paper? Play video and audio, do basically everything I expect a computer to do but with a simpler interface. As another poster mentioned, a tablet needs to be like the ones everyone seemed to be carrying and passing around on TNG; completely flexible in functionality, and acceptable if I didn't get it back. Maybe that's where cloud computing comes into its own; since it's all "in the cloud", the fact that my tablet fell into the blender while trying to cook something, doesn't faze me very much as I know I haven't lost any data, can replace the tablet cheaply, and only have to explain to the SO why we're ordering take out (again).
A smart phone is a bad place to start with a tablet concept; the whole point of a smart phone is that it's *yours*, it has your number, your contacts, and everything it does is a reflection of your personality and your tastes and interests. With the abilities of a smart phone, there's no need for a tablet if it's billed as simply "a bigger smart phone"; this is, I think, the point Jobs was getting at with the question "what would someone do with a tablet but surf the web in the bathroom?" A tablet needs to have its own place that is not served by a laptop or cell phone, and being an electronic piece of paper, with all the ephemeral-ness of said paper, is likely the winner.
Does equipment ever leave Antarctica? I mean, okay, he left the plane behind, sure, because he didn't need it anymore; does that happen still today? What I mean is, when a building or camp is abandoned, or when a tractor or plane breaks down in an irreparable way, is there any attempt to remove it, or do they just abandon it in place, let the wind and snow take its course, and leave it to archeologists years hence to rediscover it?
It would seem that Antarctica could be, among other things, a pretty cool junkyard. But a junkyard nonetheless.
...but I remember the hype and feelings of expectation my friends and I had about it. We paid full price for "Meet Joe Black" just to see the TPM trailer, then left immediately afterward. There were a lot of other people doing the same thing, to the point everyone was laughing and the ushers were promising the trailer would run again after the movie if everyone stayed.
After we left, we went to have dinner and talked endlessly, dissecting every second of the trailer at length, imagining what the plot would be, how they would eventually get to "New Hope", and then after dinner we went to an arcade and played video games.
I don't care a whit about the actual movie, but for me it'll always be about that evening with friends in New York and how much fun we had in total geek mode. Sadly, I can't say I've had a repeat of that experience since. So for that evening alone, I'll still say thanks to Lucas for making the movie in the first place. But, yeah, the movie itself sucked.
It's my understanding that the average Japanese person is more likely to have a phone than a computer, and that the phone can do pretty much everything a computer can (albeit with a much smaller screen), including playing MMOs, watching TV, etc. While I can see why people might like the bigger screen, does the iPhone have the apps/functionality that the Japanese user wants?
I read the FA and thinking back to the state of computers around the time of the Bosnian conflict, and presuming that the military lags behind several generations of technology until it's proven rock-solid, maybe the guys at the company realized that encrypting the signal was a drag on the real time performance that is presumably absolutely-positively crucial to this sort of environment; any lag and your drone is not where you think it is, and your firepower is concentrated not on the bad guys in the small truck, but the bus carrying the puppies and kittens. Plus, back then, who would have thought laptops and other computer tech would be so popular that even irregulars would be using them?
Of course, this is no excuse for the company to not keep up with the tech...they probably figured that it had worked so well for so long that there simply wasn't a need to change things around.
Visual Studio, specifically VC++6, rocked in the days of writing Windows apps. I'm not talking about any specific library or technology (the C++ compiler had incomplete template support, for example), but the editor itself was just awesome. It was solid, never crashed (though I could get the compiler to crash if I just looked at it funny), and was fast fast fast. I may be a weenie, but I actually like the suggestion popups, tool-tips over the code, etc., as I can barely remember my kids names on a good day, let alone the parameters to BitBlt(). The only thing though is that it has to be fast...any delay over 1/2 a second and I'm stopping to look it up on msdn. With VC6, that almost never happened.
Later versions, though, got seriously sluggish, and yes, ultimately it's just a glorified text editor, so why are all these windows sliding in and out at odd times, they rearranged all the project settings (why put the most important line for compiling (include header files) at the top, and then stick the same thing for linking somewhere near the bottom (not even *at* the bottom!)? Plus everything up to VS2008 has just been slow for me...from constant annoyingly-slow to wait-did-it-freeze-up-on-me-oh-no-it-just-came-back slow. Plus I've been able to crash pretty easily all of them to the point where, yes, I really do write a good amount of code in vim, then switch over to VS2008 when I want to compile or check something. It's just that painful.
I have the beta of VS2010 and I actually like it...it feels more solid than all the previous versions, and I dare say it's kind of close to VC6 reliability. I'll be following that development cycle more closely...it'd be nice to have a decent windows dev tool again (well, one that speaks MFC and ATL natively....if I were doing straight or platform-neutral C++, I'd go with Eclipse, which I find rock solid).
I thought pagers used the cell networks a la text messages; indeed, I thought a pager was essentially a dedicated text message device.
I was in NYC on Sept 11 and the only thing that *was* working that day was the Internet...phones, both land line and cell were unavailable. We were trying to contact my brother-in-law who lived in Manhattan (we were in Brooklyn) and every phone we tried, including the pay phone down the street (still had 'em back then...) gave us the "fast busy signal", indicating "We didn't even try to make your call..."
So we spent the rest of the day IM'ing people as that was the only way to verify who was where. Bad times...bad times.
I understand, and like I said, the concept itself is pretty cool. It was specifically ATL that I hated; it was completely overdone for what they were trying to accomplish, plus their interface functionality in the IDL file was just broken....adding a second interface was non-trivial as you had to generate the guid by hand, then copy the syntax from the first interface that was actually generated for you when you created the project (and they gave you no ability to generate a second one....all by hand), and hope you didn't screw up the brackets.
The biggest problem I had with COM/ATL was that, like I said, it was simply in concept, but horrible in execution, which is typical (IMHO) microsoft.
Only Microsoft has the peculiar genius that allows them to take a relatively straightforward concept (reference counting/smart pointers) add a totally over-the-top, incomprehensible library that was designed around the limitations of the broken template support in VC6 (ATL), then totally abandon it for "teh new shiny" because you lost a court case against Sun (.net).
I have written a *lot* of code in ATL, and I regret practically every moment of it; I liked the idea of COM/ActiveX, it's actually a really cool concept, and it even seemed to have an awesome future (all these COM objects that could talk to each other...Excel could control my toaster via my custom ActiveX dll) but suddenly it became all about the web and the era of a component-laden operating system ended before it really ever began. So for that I slogged through a bunch of ATL books, got to the point where I thought I knew how it all worked, and then all Microsoft wanted talk about was C# and.net.
I've always been interested in seeing how computers get used in the far-flung parts of the world, and between OLPC and websites showing off pics of tribemen using Linux on laptops to check prices, weather info, etc., it would seem that Linux has made a difference both in the "developed" world as well as the places where computers may not be as prevalent.
Certainly it stands to reason that not everyone needs access to email, say, but everyone would like to know whether it's going to rain tomorrow, and there may not be a local radio or tv station to provide that info, but a computer with some sort of internet access could. So if I'm only going to use a computer once in a blue moon, or if I'm one who provides computers to folks who only need an extremely limited data set, why not be Linux? It's totally dependable and, most importantly, it's free. This is critical when the local economy may rely more on bartering and the exchange of physical goods for services; I can't imagine Microsoft would be willing to sell Windows for a few dozen eggs.
So yes, I'd be behind such an honor; the whole point of the Nobel Peace prize is to award people who have made other lives better, and providing the platform on which anyone, anywhere can build upon to provide anything, at the most local level, I can't see how this *doesn't* qualify.
Now it will incorrectly render my pages twice as fast!
Seriously, IE has become a verb with me and my web developer friends. We even use it in general conversation: "That guy cut me off and I told him to go IE himself."
The ES/9000 that I had contact with was a series of cabinets that were all water-cooled from the outside in...it was a maze of copper pipes all around the edges and back and looked like a fridge. When you opened a cabinet, you could feel a blast of cold air hit you.
It was no trivial feat to do this, they had to install a separate water tank, some generators (I remember one of the operations guys pointing to a Detroit Diesel generator outside in the alley and saying it was just for the computer's water system), moved a bathroom (only water they wanted around the computer was the special chilled stuff), and I can distinctly remember seeing the manuals(!)... 3-inch thick binders with the IBM logo on them, and all they were for was the planning and maintenance of the water system.
No wonder it took almost a year to install the machine.
The granddaddy of WTF comments must come from the original Unix source, written by none other than Dennis Ritchie:/*
* If the new process paused because it was
* swapped out, set the stack level to the last call
* to savu(u_ssav). This means that the return
* which is executed immediately after the call to aretu
* actually returns from the last routine which did
* the savu.
*
* You are not expected to understand this.
*/
if(rp->p_flag&SSWAP) {
rp->p_flag =& ~SSWAP;
aretu(u.u_ssav);
}
So here's an example of a comment that does an excellent (I assume) job of explaining why the code is doing what it's doing, yet the whole thing is so complicated that Ritchie even needed to acknowledge that the comment probably wasn't going to be of much help either with an amusing, and now somewhat famous, statement.
Apple is different in that they do care about the user experience, almost to the detriment of all else. Microsoft is happy to bombard you with prompts, popups and whatnot, and that's just the operating system! Just this morning I get to my computer and I've got a "there are unused icons on your desktop" message that simply will not go away until I click on it, which then starts the "cleanup wizard" that I can cancel. I can prevent this from happening with a registry tweak, you're right, but why do I need to do that at all? If I have something on the desktop, it's because I put it there, regardless of how often it gets used.
I would find it a really weird departure from Apple's general user-focused strategy to suddenly demand they respond to ads; I see it more as a patent land grab that, if anything else, just adds to the number of patents a company can say it has.
That said, if I started to get bombarded with crap from Apple like I do from the various wintel companies, then I will happily take my business elsewhere. I use Apple products because they do what I want without getting in my way...the second either of those tenets are gone, I'm gone.
When they say ice and water, are they talking about the stuff you can fill up your canteen and go, or is there something else in it that would make it undrinkable?
I ask because Mars has its ice caps, but as I understand it's just dry-ice (frozen CO2) that would make for an awesome Halloween party effect, but obviously won't sustain any sort of life.
I remember reading that Multics was going to be the OS used to provide computing-as-utility; everyone was just going to be able to use it. Did this plan ever pan out (was Tymnet and Telenet Multics-based?) Who, then, were the Multics customers and what, if anything, spawned from it (other than Unix and VisiCalc, as mentioned in TFA)?
I'm guessing that, since the actual kernel is open source that they are doing some additional check further up the chain in a non-open source module. Otherwise wouldn't it be trivial to do a diff, search for the code that checks for the stepping, and if it's an Atom, call exit(0)?
As I remember it (and I could be remembering it wrong), Sirrus and XM were allowed to merge because the likelihood of both companies continuing without a merger were essentially nil.
Would the EU perform a similar analysis on Sun and figure that, given its situation, the option is either merge with Oracle or go bankrupt, in which case the situation is, conceptually, the same because either way Sun ceases to be a player. Or do they not consider this and simply line up the bullet points, see too much overlap, say no to the merger (which is not the same as an objection, I realize), and just hope that Sun can pull it together by itself?
...if you want to interact with Oracle products. I tried really hard to use it, even using it as both a Java IDE and a PL/SQL IDE and, while yes, it does work, I found it too slow and clunky to just "bang out some code" when you need to write up a throwaway program really really fast.
But, like I said, if you want total interaction with your database or app server (assuming that app server is oc4j), then I suppose, if you have to use only a single tool, I guess, well, shrug, I guess it's better than nothing...I guess.
I have 3 airport express', one in the bedroom, one in the dining room, and the other in the kitchen. They all work wonderfully and it has replaced our stereo to the point where we simply don't use anything else. That was great, but the thing that kicked it into overdrive was the remote control app; with the iphone or ipod touch, I can control everything wherever I am. Absolutely brilliant setup!
I assume there are other setups like this, but I don't know of them.
(I know I am likely setting myself up for a lot of responses that will be posted +5 funny, but what the heck...)
Am I smart developer? I had the program I'm supposed to write explained to me in painful detail via a 100+ page spec. It pretty much was the blueprint for everything I had to do. Am I smart because I know the programming language? I seem to spend a lot of time googling around to find the name of a method or a bit of code that someone else wrote that takes care of a particularly tricky bit of logic. Am I smart because the program worked? The testing team found a lot of bugs that I had to fix. When I came across a strange situation, back to Google I went to see if anyone else had ever seen a similar situation. Rinse-and-repeat until the testing team said it was ready to go, and off into production it went. It works well and I was told by the boss how smart I was to get this program up and running.
This is all tongue-and-cheek of course (uh, of course it is...right..), but what does it really take to be "smart" these days, where so much is seemingly done for you. If I wanted to brush up on a subject to *seem* smart, I could, theoretically, read the Wikipedia article a half-dozen times and, assuming I am just smart enough to be not seem like I'm reciting some fact from memory, appear to be well versed in the topic.
And, likewise, what about being "smart" about the wrong things? Say I know every possible thing to know about a Model T car. I know how to coax better performance out of it, I know how to fix the suspension by the side of the road, I not only know *how*, but I can also tell you *why*. But, in the 21st century, does any of that knowledge make me smart?
I've seen Panasonic Toughbooks in police cars, fire trucks, and in the vehicles of industrial companies, but I guess I don't get why; the laptops are well protected in the car or truck, and it's not like a cop is going to use it as a shield in a shoot out, or a fireman is going to be typing something inside a burning building. When a plumber came over to fix some pipes, he brought with him a battered Compaq laptop that was missing several keys, looked like it'd gone through hell, but was still working and wasn't "ruggedized" in any way I could tell.
This is pure ignorance on my part...I can appreciate there is very likely a need, or they wouldn't make them, but I really don't know what that need is; especially, under what circumstances would it be possible to get my laptop run over by a truck as part of a normal day?
That said, they definitely *look* cool and wouldn't mind having one myself, especially if I thought I'd need to check my email outside, in a snowstorm, in the Sierra Madre.:)
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I'm in the same boat; 3D gives me splitting headaches almost instantly. It's bad to the point where I simply will not go to see a 3D movie, period. Have fun guys, tell me how it is when you get back.
I've been reading/hearing about all this interest in 3D everywhere and I realize that I'm just not going to go along with this particular tech. Apart from my issues with 3D, where did all this 3D-love come from all of a sudden? It seems this particular tech was relegated to IMAX nature movies at the local science museum, and then all of a sudden Avatar is big news and then every company is talking about 3D TVs, 3D channels...this seems like too well-organized to be just a fad, but, sheesh, I hope it is.
...just like a piece of paper: disposable. It seems that a technology only becomes ubiquitous when it becomes so cheap and common that you're strange if you *don't* have one. Everybody, basically, has a cell phone or access to one. A smart phone, like the iphone or android-anything? Not necessarily, but you can buy an old-fashioned cell phone from vending machines now. Look at the history of "computers", in general, and you see the progression from a few at big companies to grandma posting her kitty pics on Facebook.
A tablet, whether it be from Apple or Microsoft or whomever, needs to be less about being personal and more about being utilitarian; if I perceive that it's not a big deal if the unit breaks or disappears, and I can just get another one relatively easily, then it's a success in my mind. And what would the tablet have to do to be better than a piece of paper? Play video and audio, do basically everything I expect a computer to do but with a simpler interface. As another poster mentioned, a tablet needs to be like the ones everyone seemed to be carrying and passing around on TNG; completely flexible in functionality, and acceptable if I didn't get it back. Maybe that's where cloud computing comes into its own; since it's all "in the cloud", the fact that my tablet fell into the blender while trying to cook something, doesn't faze me very much as I know I haven't lost any data, can replace the tablet cheaply, and only have to explain to the SO why we're ordering take out (again).
A smart phone is a bad place to start with a tablet concept; the whole point of a smart phone is that it's *yours*, it has your number, your contacts, and everything it does is a reflection of your personality and your tastes and interests. With the abilities of a smart phone, there's no need for a tablet if it's billed as simply "a bigger smart phone"; this is, I think, the point Jobs was getting at with the question "what would someone do with a tablet but surf the web in the bathroom?" A tablet needs to have its own place that is not served by a laptop or cell phone, and being an electronic piece of paper, with all the ephemeral-ness of said paper, is likely the winner.
Does equipment ever leave Antarctica? I mean, okay, he left the plane behind, sure, because he didn't need it anymore; does that happen still today? What I mean is, when a building or camp is abandoned, or when a tractor or plane breaks down in an irreparable way, is there any attempt to remove it, or do they just abandon it in place, let the wind and snow take its course, and leave it to archeologists years hence to rediscover it?
It would seem that Antarctica could be, among other things, a pretty cool junkyard. But a junkyard nonetheless.
...but I remember the hype and feelings of expectation my friends and I had about it. We paid full price for "Meet Joe Black" just to see the TPM trailer, then left immediately afterward. There were a lot of other people doing the same thing, to the point everyone was laughing and the ushers were promising the trailer would run again after the movie if everyone stayed.
After we left, we went to have dinner and talked endlessly, dissecting every second of the trailer at length, imagining what the plot would be, how they would eventually get to "New Hope", and then after dinner we went to an arcade and played video games.
I don't care a whit about the actual movie, but for me it'll always be about that evening with friends in New York and how much fun we had in total geek mode. Sadly, I can't say I've had a repeat of that experience since. So for that evening alone, I'll still say thanks to Lucas for making the movie in the first place. But, yeah, the movie itself sucked.
It's my understanding that the average Japanese person is more likely to have a phone than a computer, and that the phone can do pretty much everything a computer can (albeit with a much smaller screen), including playing MMOs, watching TV, etc. While I can see why people might like the bigger screen, does the iPhone have the apps/functionality that the Japanese user wants?
I read the FA and thinking back to the state of computers around the time of the Bosnian conflict, and presuming that the military lags behind several generations of technology until it's proven rock-solid, maybe the guys at the company realized that encrypting the signal was a drag on the real time performance that is presumably absolutely-positively crucial to this sort of environment; any lag and your drone is not where you think it is, and your firepower is concentrated not on the bad guys in the small truck, but the bus carrying the puppies and kittens. Plus, back then, who would have thought laptops and other computer tech would be so popular that even irregulars would be using them?
Of course, this is no excuse for the company to not keep up with the tech...they probably figured that it had worked so well for so long that there simply wasn't a need to change things around.
Visual Studio, specifically VC++6, rocked in the days of writing Windows apps. I'm not talking about any specific library or technology (the C++ compiler had incomplete template support, for example), but the editor itself was just awesome. It was solid, never crashed (though I could get the compiler to crash if I just looked at it funny), and was fast fast fast. I may be a weenie, but I actually like the suggestion popups, tool-tips over the code, etc., as I can barely remember my kids names on a good day, let alone the parameters to BitBlt(). The only thing though is that it has to be fast...any delay over 1/2 a second and I'm stopping to look it up on msdn. With VC6, that almost never happened.
Later versions, though, got seriously sluggish, and yes, ultimately it's just a glorified text editor, so why are all these windows sliding in and out at odd times, they rearranged all the project settings (why put the most important line for compiling (include header files) at the top, and then stick the same thing for linking somewhere near the bottom (not even *at* the bottom!)? Plus everything up to VS2008 has just been slow for me...from constant annoyingly-slow to wait-did-it-freeze-up-on-me-oh-no-it-just-came-back slow. Plus I've been able to crash pretty easily all of them to the point where, yes, I really do write a good amount of code in vim, then switch over to VS2008 when I want to compile or check something. It's just that painful.
I have the beta of VS2010 and I actually like it...it feels more solid than all the previous versions, and I dare say it's kind of close to VC6 reliability. I'll be following that development cycle more closely...it'd be nice to have a decent windows dev tool again (well, one that speaks MFC and ATL natively....if I were doing straight or platform-neutral C++, I'd go with Eclipse, which I find rock solid).
I thought pagers used the cell networks a la text messages; indeed, I thought a pager was essentially a dedicated text message device.
I was in NYC on Sept 11 and the only thing that *was* working that day was the Internet...phones, both land line and cell were unavailable. We were trying to contact my brother-in-law who lived in Manhattan (we were in Brooklyn) and every phone we tried, including the pay phone down the street (still had 'em back then...) gave us the "fast busy signal", indicating "We didn't even try to make your call..."
So we spent the rest of the day IM'ing people as that was the only way to verify who was where. Bad times...bad times.
I understand, and like I said, the concept itself is pretty cool. It was specifically ATL that I hated; it was completely overdone for what they were trying to accomplish, plus their interface functionality in the IDL file was just broken....adding a second interface was non-trivial as you had to generate the guid by hand, then copy the syntax from the first interface that was actually generated for you when you created the project (and they gave you no ability to generate a second one....all by hand), and hope you didn't screw up the brackets.
The biggest problem I had with COM/ATL was that, like I said, it was simply in concept, but horrible in execution, which is typical (IMHO) microsoft.
...thank God.
Only Microsoft has the peculiar genius that allows them to take a relatively straightforward concept (reference counting/smart pointers) add a totally over-the-top, incomprehensible library that was designed around the limitations of the broken template support in VC6 (ATL), then totally abandon it for "teh new shiny" because you lost a court case against Sun (.net).
I have written a *lot* of code in ATL, and I regret practically every moment of it; I liked the idea of COM/ActiveX, it's actually a really cool concept, and it even seemed to have an awesome future (all these COM objects that could talk to each other...Excel could control my toaster via my custom ActiveX dll) but suddenly it became all about the web and the era of a component-laden operating system ended before it really ever began. So for that I slogged through a bunch of ATL books, got to the point where I thought I knew how it all worked, and then all Microsoft wanted talk about was C# and .net.
I've always been interested in seeing how computers get used in the far-flung parts of the world, and between OLPC and websites showing off pics of tribemen using Linux on laptops to check prices, weather info, etc., it would seem that Linux has made a difference both in the "developed" world as well as the places where computers may not be as prevalent.
Certainly it stands to reason that not everyone needs access to email, say, but everyone would like to know whether it's going to rain tomorrow, and there may not be a local radio or tv station to provide that info, but a computer with some sort of internet access could. So if I'm only going to use a computer once in a blue moon, or if I'm one who provides computers to folks who only need an extremely limited data set, why not be Linux? It's totally dependable and, most importantly, it's free. This is critical when the local economy may rely more on bartering and the exchange of physical goods for services; I can't imagine Microsoft would be willing to sell Windows for a few dozen eggs.
So yes, I'd be behind such an honor; the whole point of the Nobel Peace prize is to award people who have made other lives better, and providing the platform on which anyone, anywhere can build upon to provide anything, at the most local level, I can't see how this *doesn't* qualify.
Now it will incorrectly render my pages twice as fast!
Seriously, IE has become a verb with me and my web developer friends. We even use it in general conversation: "That guy cut me off and I told him to go IE himself."
The ES/9000 that I had contact with was a series of cabinets that were all water-cooled from the outside in...it was a maze of copper pipes all around the edges and back and looked like a fridge. When you opened a cabinet, you could feel a blast of cold air hit you.
It was no trivial feat to do this, they had to install a separate water tank, some generators (I remember one of the operations guys pointing to a Detroit Diesel generator outside in the alley and saying it was just for the computer's water system), moved a bathroom (only water they wanted around the computer was the special chilled stuff), and I can distinctly remember seeing the manuals(!)... 3-inch thick binders with the IBM logo on them, and all they were for was the planning and maintenance of the water system.
No wonder it took almost a year to install the machine.
Dennis Ritchie has a whole page of comments in the Unix source code, and what information they convey.
The granddaddy of WTF comments must come from the original Unix source, written by none other than Dennis Ritchie: /*
* If the new process paused because it was
* swapped out, set the stack level to the last call
* to savu(u_ssav). This means that the return
* which is executed immediately after the call to aretu
* actually returns from the last routine which did
* the savu.
*
* You are not expected to understand this.
*/
if(rp->p_flag&SSWAP) {
rp->p_flag =& ~SSWAP;
aretu(u.u_ssav);
}
So here's an example of a comment that does an excellent (I assume) job of explaining why the code is doing what it's doing, yet the whole thing is so complicated that Ritchie even needed to acknowledge that the comment probably wasn't going to be of much help either with an amusing, and now somewhat famous, statement.
Apple is different in that they do care about the user experience, almost to the detriment of all else. Microsoft is happy to bombard you with prompts, popups and whatnot, and that's just the operating system! Just this morning I get to my computer and I've got a "there are unused icons on your desktop" message that simply will not go away until I click on it, which then starts the "cleanup wizard" that I can cancel. I can prevent this from happening with a registry tweak, you're right, but why do I need to do that at all? If I have something on the desktop, it's because I put it there, regardless of how often it gets used.
I would find it a really weird departure from Apple's general user-focused strategy to suddenly demand they respond to ads; I see it more as a patent land grab that, if anything else, just adds to the number of patents a company can say it has.
That said, if I started to get bombarded with crap from Apple like I do from the various wintel companies, then I will happily take my business elsewhere. I use Apple products because they do what I want without getting in my way...the second either of those tenets are gone, I'm gone.
When they say ice and water, are they talking about the stuff you can fill up your canteen and go, or is there something else in it that would make it undrinkable?
I ask because Mars has its ice caps, but as I understand it's just dry-ice (frozen CO2) that would make for an awesome Halloween party effect, but obviously won't sustain any sort of life.
I remember reading that Multics was going to be the OS used to provide computing-as-utility; everyone was just going to be able to use it. Did this plan ever pan out (was Tymnet and Telenet Multics-based?) Who, then, were the Multics customers and what, if anything, spawned from it (other than Unix and VisiCalc, as mentioned in TFA)?
I'm guessing that, since the actual kernel is open source that they are doing some additional check further up the chain in a non-open source module. Otherwise wouldn't it be trivial to do a diff, search for the code that checks for the stepping, and if it's an Atom, call exit(0)?
As I remember it (and I could be remembering it wrong), Sirrus and XM were allowed to merge because the likelihood of both companies continuing without a merger were essentially nil.
Would the EU perform a similar analysis on Sun and figure that, given its situation, the option is either merge with Oracle or go bankrupt, in which case the situation is, conceptually, the same because either way Sun ceases to be a player. Or do they not consider this and simply line up the bullet points, see too much overlap, say no to the merger (which is not the same as an objection, I realize), and just hope that Sun can pull it together by itself?
...if you want to interact with Oracle products. I tried really hard to use it, even using it as both a Java IDE and a PL/SQL IDE and, while yes, it does work, I found it too slow and clunky to just "bang out some code" when you need to write up a throwaway program really really fast.
But, like I said, if you want total interaction with your database or app server (assuming that app server is oc4j), then I suppose, if you have to use only a single tool, I guess, well, shrug, I guess it's better than nothing...I guess.
I have 3 airport express', one in the bedroom, one in the dining room, and the other in the kitchen. They all work wonderfully and it has replaced our stereo to the point where we simply don't use anything else. That was great, but the thing that kicked it into overdrive was the remote control app; with the iphone or ipod touch, I can control everything wherever I am. Absolutely brilliant setup!
I assume there are other setups like this, but I don't know of them.
He seem to know how the machine works.
(I know I am likely setting myself up for a lot of responses that will be posted +5 funny, but what the heck...)
Am I smart developer? I had the program I'm supposed to write explained to me in painful detail via a 100+ page spec. It pretty much was the blueprint for everything I had to do. Am I smart because I know the programming language? I seem to spend a lot of time googling around to find the name of a method or a bit of code that someone else wrote that takes care of a particularly tricky bit of logic. Am I smart because the program worked? The testing team found a lot of bugs that I had to fix. When I came across a strange situation, back to Google I went to see if anyone else had ever seen a similar situation. Rinse-and-repeat until the testing team said it was ready to go, and off into production it went. It works well and I was told by the boss how smart I was to get this program up and running.
This is all tongue-and-cheek of course (uh, of course it is...right..), but what does it really take to be "smart" these days, where so much is seemingly done for you. If I wanted to brush up on a subject to *seem* smart, I could, theoretically, read the Wikipedia article a half-dozen times and, assuming I am just smart enough to be not seem like I'm reciting some fact from memory, appear to be well versed in the topic.
And, likewise, what about being "smart" about the wrong things? Say I know every possible thing to know about a Model T car. I know how to coax better performance out of it, I know how to fix the suspension by the side of the road, I not only know *how*, but I can also tell you *why*. But, in the 21st century, does any of that knowledge make me smart?
I've seen Panasonic Toughbooks in police cars, fire trucks, and in the vehicles of industrial companies, but I guess I don't get why; the laptops are well protected in the car or truck, and it's not like a cop is going to use it as a shield in a shoot out, or a fireman is going to be typing something inside a burning building. When a plumber came over to fix some pipes, he brought with him a battered Compaq laptop that was missing several keys, looked like it'd gone through hell, but was still working and wasn't "ruggedized" in any way I could tell.
This is pure ignorance on my part...I can appreciate there is very likely a need, or they wouldn't make them, but I really don't know what that need is; especially, under what circumstances would it be possible to get my laptop run over by a truck as part of a normal day?
That said, they definitely *look* cool and wouldn't mind having one myself, especially if I thought I'd need to check my email outside, in a snowstorm, in the Sierra Madre. :)