(There were also people who thought that a block should only have one exit. Thankfully these folks did not prevail, since functions representing decision trees often have one entry but multiple exit points.)
I have to profoundly disagree here. I am one of the 'non-prevailers' referred to, and I absolutely believe that a block should have only one exit.
If you've started to structure something in a certain way (a while loop, a function...whatever) then abide by the implications of that structure. It makes the code flow better - a coder coming in doesn't start staring at the bottom of the loop without realising you actually bailed out at the top. And if I call a function, it should return - return, not exit somewhere half-way through. The only exception being the function exit of course...
That's the beast I have in mind. Didn't know it had a model number yet.
The reason I'm not interested in the current Athlon one is the lack of an AGP slot and the non-support of ATA-133. One of my primary uses will be to bung in a DVD recorder and use it as a video production machine, so a fast drive is important to me.
I'd love an Nforce chipset based Athlon miniPC with matching 15" LCD that could be thrown in a duffel bag.
This is what I'm waiting for too - I understood that Shuttle were suppoed to be bringing out an Athlon version of their recent P4 release.
Not that I'm a platform fan as such - I don't mind about the Intel/Athlon wars and I'm not a PC gamer either so the nForce graphics are just nice to have. However, the current Shuttle P4 offering won't run Linux, whereas an nForce-based machine ought to be fine.
I'm on both lists, and I was surprised at how effective these were. I used to be called most Sundays, now I'm never called. I used to receive an absolute torrent of junk mail, now it's barely a trickle.
Quick tip: when registering for the Mailing Preference Service, don't forget to register common misspellings of your name, your partner's name, your children's name, anyone who lived their previously for whom you still receive mail...you get the idea.
Whenever I see a business man "working" on a flight he is usually just trying to look cool
Yep.
A really good way to annoy them is to get out your laptop, which for preference should either be or at least appear to be better specified than theirs, and then just relax, chill out and start watching a film on the DVD player. Added bonus points if the battery can outlast theirs as well.
Works every time on the trains I take between London and Sheffield.
Cheers,
Ian
(Don't miss my new bestseller: "Businessmen Baiting for Fun & Profit", available from Amazon real soon now)
My brother and I used to play these games to settle everything from arguments to where to head out on Friday nights...
When I was at University, the house a few of us were renting had no telephone. There was a box a hundred yards or so down the street, but this was Morecambe in north-west England, which means it was raining an awful lot of the time.
Consequently the three of us used to play tournaments of Dynablaster on the Amiga, later reborn and renamed as Bomber Man on various platforms, to decide who had to troop out, get soaked and use the phone to order pizza.
I fear that for linux to enter a business market on the desktop, there's still quite a long way to go in terms of user friendlyness.
Absolutely agreed. However, until someone tries to put it out on the desktop, the situation will always stay that way.
One of the early open-source mantras was "release early, release often". Actually, that doesn't have to be confined to open-source stuff - far back in the mists of time my freeware Startupfrills was written like that. It's no longer developed, but eight years or so ago it did very well for itself by getting a wide distrubtion and lots of feedback from users. Though its basic premise was set, its features and interface were shaped by user requests and bug reports.
A Linux desktop distro needs to do that now. It needs to be released to a large group and then torn apart by real live users, who will berate it mercilessly. Only by listening to them, and implementing requests whilst staying true to the overall premise, will a genuinely good desktop distribution appear.
Oh, and personally my first step would be to concentrate on what to cut out, not what to put in. A thousand calculater programs, three web browsers and fourteen office suites might well be available, but that's no reason to overwhelm my machine with them. Pick your defaults, one app and one only for each area of functionality, then stick with 'em. Users advanced enough to both know of and also care about the alternatives are also advanced enough to install things themselves.
I would love to move over to a Mac, but software holds me back.
No UK Quicken. Essential for me - I run both my home accounts and my one-man business off it. I have data stretching back seven years.
No standards-compliant video conferencing. This one might change - I've heard rumours that it's being worked on.
That's it. Whilst I can temporarily live without the video conferencing, I consider the lack of an accounts package on a home machine to be a truly serious ommission. I realise this doesn't affect the US, but in the UK it kills the thing dead as a home machine. Virtual PC won't do by the way - if I'm switching environments I'm switching environments and don't want to run half and half.
Please Intuit. Please. You have an OS X-native Quicken, and you ave a UK Quicken for Windows. Surely it can't be beyond the wit of mankind to combine these products and produce a native UK Quicken?
Maybe there are people out there who bought Macs because, or partly because, they were infatuated with the iPod -- but I haven't seen any of them.
True, neither have I. However, I know people who are now extremely interested in the Mac platform whereas before they wouldn't realy have thought about it. So the iPod produced positive press if nothing else, and I suspect it did lead to a few sales although I have no proof of that.
Face it, the iPod isn't that much better than its competition.
Ah well, here we must disagree. For my usage pattern, which isn't that unusual, the iPod has no competitors. The form factor is key, not the storage. These Nomad thingies that everyone brings up are far too large to be used on the move. I use the iPod on the Tube (London underground railway), so the ability to fit into a pocket is a primary concern.
The FAT versus HFS decision was made by engineers, not marketeers.
Yes, I'd agree with that. I'd also agree they didn't start on FAT before finishing HFS+. Where I disagree is that the implications of this weren't understood. Bear in mind that these are physical units depending on a component (the HD) in fairly limited supply - Apple didn't have enough units to satisfy everyone, so they chose to produce for their own customers first.
working on both versions in tandem would have meant hiring more people
Here I again we must disagree. The FAT filesystem is a well understood thing, and their core OS is BSD anyway now which means they must have an implementation of FAT lying around. I run my iPod under Windows, and followed the XPlay beta program to get things working. On there, there were plenty of people who accidently formatted their iPod as FAT and yet still reported that it worked fine. I don't see the filesystem change as a major departure. In fact, I think it would probably make more sense for them to go 100% FAT.
Anyway, to sum up I take your point about the increased sales, though I would counter by pointing to increased interest. The othe two points, that the iPod is not much better than competitors and that moving to FAT was major development work I'm afraid we must respectively disagree on.
No, not the film with the more depressing ending, but the stageplay. Don't know about the book - I haven't read it.
The stageplay's ending has Alex settling down at the end, and makes the point that the ultraviolence is just a phase he's going through.
Now, whilst not exactly in the Clockwork Orange league, I can certainly relate to this. I'm 30 now - not old, but possibly closer towards the middle than I'd normally like to admit, and I've been playing computer games for about 21 years. My attitudes towards violence in gaming have changed a lot. I'm not outraged - far from it. Rather I now find ultra-accurate, 'you can see the gore oosing out'-type violence to be just tedious. Seen it all before, just not with anti-aliased fog or whatever the current graphic trick is.
I've been turned off PC gaming for exactly this reason - everything seems to be a war-based resource management game, a violent FPS or some combination of the two. There are exceptions to prove the rule, but mostly that holds true. Sport-based games would be one catagory of exception, but I don't have any interest in sports beyond the odd driving title.
To wrap up the meandering (forgive an old man...), I would suggest that violence in gaming will probably decrease as the gaming population gets older. It will always be there - in my opinion the main demographic will always be under twenty-fives, maybe even under twenties. However, once you've shot someone in the head and watched blood spurt out in one game, you've shot someone in the head and watched the blood spurt out in every game and you end up just wanting a bit of fun back.
Now where did I put my copy of Super Monkey Ball....?
IMHO I think they could have sold more units by offering it to the windows market.
I agree, but in the beginning they didn't have more units to sell. Production was soaked up entirely by demand from Mac users. Well, Mac users and me that is - I went the XPlay beta route in order to use it on Windows.
When demand slackened a little, they introduced the Windows compatibility to expand the number of people they could sell to.
How much can be stored in total depends on the model, but you will definitely be able to fit your book on there.
I have a 5Gig model, and compressed the BBC's Lord of the Rings series (13 hours) using 96 bit rate MP3 - the whole thing fitted fine. Mind you, I eventually chose to just keep three episodes on at a time - after all I was unlikely to listen to the whole thing straight through without pause.
Don't make the iPod mistake, make this thing Win compatible...
Err....mistake? From whose viewpoint? Apple got to service their customers first, got a cool product to entice the OS-agnostic to their machines for a while, and then once demand had died down a bit they added Win compatibility and now have access to that market too.
I don't see much in the way of a mistake being made there.
has already banned smoking in air-conditioned public places for a long time, and has recently banned the use of handphones in cinemas as well.
There are also places where eating that damned fruit in public is illegal too. Err....durian I think it's called. For those who haven't smelt this thing, don't knock the law until you've been stuck inside a lift that's had people eating durian inside it. You can smell the thing for miles. Literally.
MS wasn't just being generous -- they wanted people to write web pages with embedded fonts, thus increasing users' dependence on Internet Explorer.
That's interesting. For argument's sake then, would a good way to distribute these fonts simply be to create a web page that embeds the lot? A mechanism in a browser which then offered to cache the fonts for you would then have effectively installed them for you.
Contrast: Keywords do not make a business, friend. I don't hire a "C, C++, and Java" programmer; I hire someone who can create an order invoice system (for instance).
with: I'm onsite at a client's office right now, doing freelance PHP consulting -- that's what I do for a living.
Notice a discrepancy? PHP consulting for a living, but don't sell on the keywords?
They're not ficticious... I really have had webpages I've built beta tested by a blind user to check for compliance.
I do try and make sites navigable by text alone. Go to my homepage in Lynx and you'll find it's as navigable as possible (obviously the image archives and video clips won't work...).
Also notice that the site layout is different - since I used only CSS for layout rather than tables or frames, the text-only navigation is quite clean. Again, excepting the image archives.
Slashdot Mirror
I have to profoundly disagree here. I am one of the 'non-prevailers' referred to, and I absolutely believe that a block should have only one exit.
If you've started to structure something in a certain way (a while loop, a function...whatever) then abide by the implications of that structure. It makes the code flow better - a coder coming in doesn't start staring at the bottom of the loop without realising you actually bailed out at the top. And if I call a function, it should return - return, not exit somewhere half-way through. The only exception being the function exit of course...
Cheers,
Ian
That's the beast I have in mind. Didn't know it had a model number yet.
The reason I'm not interested in the current Athlon one is the lack of an AGP slot and the non-support of ATA-133. One of my primary uses will be to bung in a DVD recorder and use it as a video production machine, so a fast drive is important to me.
Cheers,
Ian
This is what I'm waiting for too - I understood that Shuttle were suppoed to be bringing out an Athlon version of their recent P4 release.
Not that I'm a platform fan as such - I don't mind about the Intel/Athlon wars and I'm not a PC gamer either so the nForce graphics are just nice to have. However, the current Shuttle P4 offering won't run Linux, whereas an nForce-based machine ought to be fine.
At least, so I believe. Anyone know better?
Cheers,
Ian
To get rid of junk telephone calls and most junk mail in the UK:
I'm on both lists, and I was surprised at how effective these were. I used to be called most Sundays, now I'm never called. I used to receive an absolute torrent of junk mail, now it's barely a trickle.
Quick tip: when registering for the Mailing Preference Service, don't forget to register common misspellings of your name, your partner's name, your children's name, anyone who lived their previously for whom you still receive mail...you get the idea.
Cheers,
Ian
Yep.
A really good way to annoy them is to get out your laptop, which for preference should either be or at least appear to be better specified than theirs, and then just relax, chill out and start watching a film on the DVD player. Added bonus points if the battery can outlast theirs as well.
Works every time on the trains I take between London and Sheffield.
Cheers,
Ian
(Don't miss my new bestseller: "Businessmen Baiting for Fun & Profit", available from Amazon real soon now)
Naah. Would never get there by 10:00am the next morning.
Cheers,
Ian
When I was at University, the house a few of us were renting had no telephone. There was a box a hundred yards or so down the street, but this was Morecambe in north-west England, which means it was raining an awful lot of the time.
Consequently the three of us used to play tournaments of Dynablaster on the Amiga, later reborn and renamed as Bomber Man on various platforms, to decide who had to troop out, get soaked and use the phone to order pizza.
We all got very good at Bomber Man...
Cheers,
Ian
Absolutely agreed. However, until someone tries to put it out on the desktop, the situation will always stay that way.
One of the early open-source mantras was "release early, release often". Actually, that doesn't have to be confined to open-source stuff - far back in the mists of time my freeware Startupfrills was written like that. It's no longer developed, but eight years or so ago it did very well for itself by getting a wide distrubtion and lots of feedback from users. Though its basic premise was set, its features and interface were shaped by user requests and bug reports.
A Linux desktop distro needs to do that now. It needs to be released to a large group and then torn apart by real live users, who will berate it mercilessly. Only by listening to them, and implementing requests whilst staying true to the overall premise, will a genuinely good desktop distribution appear.
Oh, and personally my first step would be to concentrate on what to cut out, not what to put in. A thousand calculater programs, three web browsers and fourteen office suites might well be available, but that's no reason to overwhelm my machine with them. Pick your defaults, one app and one only for each area of functionality, then stick with 'em. Users advanced enough to both know of and also care about the alternatives are also advanced enough to install things themselves.
Cheers,
Ian
That's it. Whilst I can temporarily live without the video conferencing, I consider the lack of an accounts package on a home machine to be a truly serious ommission. I realise this doesn't affect the US, but in the UK it kills the thing dead as a home machine. Virtual PC won't do by the way - if I'm switching environments I'm switching environments and don't want to run half and half.
Please Intuit. Please. You have an OS X-native Quicken, and you ave a UK Quicken for Windows. Surely it can't be beyond the wit of mankind to combine these products and produce a native UK Quicken?
Cheers,
Ian
True, neither have I. However, I know people who are now extremely interested in the Mac platform whereas before they wouldn't realy have thought about it. So the iPod produced positive press if nothing else, and I suspect it did lead to a few sales although I have no proof of that.
Face it, the iPod isn't that much better than its competition.
Ah well, here we must disagree. For my usage pattern, which isn't that unusual, the iPod has no competitors. The form factor is key, not the storage. These Nomad thingies that everyone brings up are far too large to be used on the move. I use the iPod on the Tube (London underground railway), so the ability to fit into a pocket is a primary concern.
The FAT versus HFS decision was made by engineers, not marketeers.
Yes, I'd agree with that. I'd also agree they didn't start on FAT before finishing HFS+. Where I disagree is that the implications of this weren't understood. Bear in mind that these are physical units depending on a component (the HD) in fairly limited supply - Apple didn't have enough units to satisfy everyone, so they chose to produce for their own customers first.
working on both versions in tandem would have meant hiring more people
Here I again we must disagree. The FAT filesystem is a well understood thing, and their core OS is BSD anyway now which means they must have an implementation of FAT lying around. I run my iPod under Windows, and followed the XPlay beta program to get things working. On there, there were plenty of people who accidently formatted their iPod as FAT and yet still reported that it worked fine. I don't see the filesystem change as a major departure. In fact, I think it would probably make more sense for them to go 100% FAT.
Anyway, to sum up I take your point about the increased sales, though I would counter by pointing to increased interest. The othe two points, that the iPod is not much better than competitors and that moving to FAT was major development work I'm afraid we must respectively disagree on.
Cheers,
Ian
Cheers,
Ian
(also in England)
If your sysadmins are that nasty, then you have my deepest sympathy...
Cheers,
Ian
Snap. So I downloaded Vim for SPARC/Solaris, installed it in my home directory, altered the path and aliased 'vi' to 'vim'.
Works like a charm.
Cheers,
Ian
Cool!
Is it faster than the 2x I've currently got in my desktop, or the 4x in my laptop? It is? Well then, maybe this review is useful to me after all...
Cheers,
Ian
Yep, agree with you all the way.
Cheers,
Ian
The stageplay's ending has Alex settling down at the end, and makes the point that the ultraviolence is just a phase he's going through.
Now, whilst not exactly in the Clockwork Orange league, I can certainly relate to this. I'm 30 now - not old, but possibly closer towards the middle than I'd normally like to admit, and I've been playing computer games for about 21 years. My attitudes towards violence in gaming have changed a lot. I'm not outraged - far from it. Rather I now find ultra-accurate, 'you can see the gore oosing out'-type violence to be just tedious. Seen it all before, just not with anti-aliased fog or whatever the current graphic trick is.
I've been turned off PC gaming for exactly this reason - everything seems to be a war-based resource management game, a violent FPS or some combination of the two. There are exceptions to prove the rule, but mostly that holds true. Sport-based games would be one catagory of exception, but I don't have any interest in sports beyond the odd driving title.
To wrap up the meandering (forgive an old man...), I would suggest that violence in gaming will probably decrease as the gaming population gets older. It will always be there - in my opinion the main demographic will always be under twenty-fives, maybe even under twenties. However, once you've shot someone in the head and watched blood spurt out in one game, you've shot someone in the head and watched the blood spurt out in every game and you end up just wanting a bit of fun back.
Now where did I put my copy of Super Monkey Ball....?
Cheers,
Ian
I agree, but in the beginning they didn't have more units to sell. Production was soaked up entirely by demand from Mac users. Well, Mac users and me that is - I went the XPlay beta route in order to use it on Windows.
When demand slackened a little, they introduced the Windows compatibility to expand the number of people they could sell to.
Cheers,
Ian
I have a 5Gig model, and compressed the BBC's Lord of the Rings series (13 hours) using 96 bit rate MP3 - the whole thing fitted fine. Mind you, I eventually chose to just keep three episodes on at a time - after all I was unlikely to listen to the whole thing straight through without pause.
Cheers,
Ian
Err....mistake? From whose viewpoint? Apple got to service their customers first, got a cool product to entice the OS-agnostic to their machines for a while, and then once demand had died down a bit they added Win compatibility and now have access to that market too.
I don't see much in the way of a mistake being made there.
Cheers,
Ian
There are also places where eating that damned fruit in public is illegal too. Err....durian I think it's called. For those who haven't smelt this thing, don't knock the law until you've been stuck inside a lift that's had people eating durian inside it. You can smell the thing for miles. Literally.
Cheers,
Ian
That's interesting. For argument's sake then, would a good way to distribute these fonts simply be to create a web page that embeds the lot? A mechanism in a browser which then offered to cache the fonts for you would then have effectively installed them for you.
Just a thought.
Cheers,
Ian
Keywords do not make a business, friend. I don't hire a "C, C++, and Java" programmer; I hire someone who can create an order invoice system (for instance).
with:
I'm onsite at a client's office right now, doing freelance PHP consulting -- that's what I do for a living.
Notice a discrepancy? PHP consulting for a living, but don't sell on the keywords?
Cheers,
Ian
I do try and make sites navigable by text alone. Go to my homepage in Lynx and you'll find it's as navigable as possible (obviously the image archives and video clips won't work...).
Also notice that the site layout is different - since I used only CSS for layout rather than tables or frames, the text-only navigation is quite clean. Again, excepting the image archives.
Cheers,
Ian
That's what Flash is for...
(ducks, runs...)
Cheers,
Ian
Well...there are also blind web surfers. Both CSS and HTML explicitly support markup and styling for non-graphical browsers.
Cheers,
Ian