And I'm not going to keep a fridge stocked with 30 varieties of soda, flavored waters, juices, and energy drinks. At my best, I'd buy a case of Dr Pepper to set next to my desk, and having anything else involved bartering with coworkers.
That actually sounds great: "I was here when the company-mandated calendar app told me to be." Someone else gets the blame, and you got to skip a meeting. I don't see a downside.
I love my Mint desktop but haven't tried running and apt-get dist-upgrade yet. If a Debian descendant can't manage that, there's something fundamentally broken about it.
If the US/Canadian/NATO governments knew that the crypto could be broken, they wouldn't give RIM certifications:
And those governments are using the exact same server software that they'd sell to you or me?
Maybe BlackBerry is as secure as people claim them to be. I certainly hope so! But I absolutely would not take a proprietary encryption vendor's word for it.
You can set up your own BES and be the sole holder of the encryption key.
And you know this how? I've heard people say that BlackBerry claims that they use only your site-generated key for encrypting traffic, but it's closed source software. Who really has any idea how it works, outside the crypto team at BlackBerry?
Markdown has been my salvation for quickly creating formatted documents. I'd much rather type plaintext into something like iA Writer than labor over WYSIWYG layout in a full-fledged word processor. That doesn't help for opening docs, of course, but it's my new favorite way for creating new content when I'm away from my desktop.
Sure, but there's a lot of difference between letting the system segfault because you've overrun the command line buffer and having it emit an error message like "command line is specified to be 255 characters or less", then exiting with an error code. The former doesn't tell anyone why their request is failing. The latter lets them know exactly what they can do to fix the problem.
Is it possible - maybe not likely, just possible - that the submitter is in the right? The following is completely fictional and I'm making it up entirely for illustrative purposes. None of it ever really happened. Honest. Ahem.
I transferred from one department in a previous company to another, and was assigned to help a Principal Software Engineer polish up some code for release. When I first looked at the code, I thought maybe I was in over my head. I felt stupid. I couldn't understand a thing. I brought this up to my manager, who chided me for nitpicking about coding styles.
So I slaved away to understand how the project worked and how all the pieces fit together. I'd ask questions like "why are we monkey patching standard library classes to alter their behavior" and be told "it's easier this way". I'd ask why we had 9 levels of inheritance and be told it was to keep the abstractions clean (although I couldn't understand why 7 of those 9 layers only had one child class that derived from them). Why are chunks of server code in the client? Because that's how the design diagram works. Why did we invent our own unit test framework? Because the others weren't good enough for us.
The whole mess came crashing down when our boss asked me to add a data validation check on a certain input. It was a stupidly simple check like "if value < 0: raise ValueError('value must be >= 0')" - that kind of thing. It turned out to be impossible. There was a hell's brew of code that handled errors by returning None, code that returned a string with the error message, and code that used exception handling. There was not one single clean codepath between the API layer and the database model.
My boss had been more concerned with my questions over the weeks, but it wasn't until I showed him the code that he really "got it". He flipped. Meetings were called. VPs were summoned. Design and code reviews were scheduled. The original coder became so frustrated with what he saw as "micromanagement" - things like "unit tests must actually pass before deployment" and "don't monkeypatch everything" - that he quit and I was given ownership of the ball of mess. Since then, I've managed to make reliable, vastly simpler (seriously, I've probably reduced line count by 2/3 and call stack depth by 3/4), and understandable. It no longer uses ML for a templating language. You can read a method's code to see how it works instead of running "git grep methodname" to see if another module patches it at runtime. I'm no longer ashamed to be associated with it.
Sorry, submitter, but I don't have any advice for you. I do have advice for the rest of the readers, though: consider the possibility that the submitter was telling the truth. There are silly code style differences that shouldn't get in the way of getting your work done. You like studly capped method names and your coworker likes_under_scores? The sun will still rise tomorrow. But just because someone is senior doesn't mean that their code isn't a fetid ball of fail.
In reality it was a little "meh". RTOSes are amazing when you need them, but those low latencies come at a cost of lower throughput and higher kernel overhead. Basically, context switch counts go through the roof anytime anything interesting at all is going on. The gist of it is that you can't write a big, sophisticated interrupt handler; you have to break it up into tiny evented pieces that can return before the hard deadline expires. That has lots of design implications.
Contrast with an end user OS where the price of too much latency is that screen refreshes aren't as smooth as they could be. The kernel can wave that away on modern hardware by making timeslices sufficiently small that no app gets to use so much CPU that others are greatly affected.
I have nothing against QNX! It's a great OS for its niche. I have zero desire to use it as a client OS, though, because its advantages aren't significant enough in that problem space to outweight its considerable disadvantages.
Ports in FreeBSD, in my experience, if you follow a production-like attitude, rather than an ADD OH-NOEZ-THIS-PORT-IS-30-SECONDS-OUT-OF-DATE-MUST-UPDATE methodology, works better than any package manager I've seen (rpm, deb, yum, apt).
My only complaint about FreeBSD ports is that, somehow or another, everything you install wants to depend on X.
$ sudo portmaster -a Upgrade foo-ldap-4.3.5_1 to foo-ldap-4.3.9 Install net/openldap24-sasl-client Upgrade postgresql-server-9.1.2 to postgresql-server-9.1.9 Upgrade tcl-8.5.9 to tcl-8.5.11 Upgrade vim-7.3.81 to vim-7.3.897 Install X11/every-damn-thing
===>>> Proceed? y/n [y] n
...followed by bisecting to see which port wants to install the perl-tk package so it can install a config tool you'd never actually run on a production server. It desperately needs a WITHOUT_X11_I_MEAN_IT_DAMMIT=yes option.
...typically using a signed int for pointers so that you don't have to have separate code paths for adding and subtracting from an address. The host itself can address 4GB but the OS may not let individual processes go over 2GB. This is the case in Windows x86, for example.
Most programs still don't need to map more than 2GB (not 4GB; in fact not even quite 2GB) at once, so there's no pressing need for 64-bit pointers.
Perhaps not most, but a whole awful lot of programs want more than that. I'd say the mean for "large" apps on my laptop is 1.5GB, and the resident size distribution is (to my eye) more or less gaussian. That means that few apps want more than 2GB today, but if the average app grew by 33%, about half of them would be over the 31-bit size limit.
You speculate. You have no idea if he was sacked or just got tired or is giving grace time between Microsoft and his next gig, do you?
Actually, I have a pretty good idea. In PR-speak, "quit to spend time with family" is the standard face-saving euphemism for "was given the choice between resigning or being fired, and chose to leave gracefully". It almost always has that second meaning. It doesn't have to, of course - it's possible that he really did quit to stay home and hang out with his wife and kids. I'd do it in a heartbeat if I got tired of my job and could afford to! Still, "quit to spend time with family" is HR jargon that very rarely means what it actually says.
Ever exec that leaves Microsoft will twig the same response.
How many C-level execs has Microsoft fired lately, though? It's possible that "is leaving the company to spend time with his extended family" can be taken at face value, this one time, for the first time in the history of press releases, but it seems more likely that he was asked to resign.
Except, the APIs were not public until AFTER this entire kerfufle came out.
That didn't stop VLC from running fast on the same hardware, though, and I don't think they were privy to any special secret API. And even if they were, Adobe could have examined the open source project to see how it was calling the not-so-secret API.
Ideally, another service will implement GReader's API so that apps can point at the new URL and keep chugging away as usual. If that doesn't happen then I expect the non-standalone apps to vanish overnight. Maybe that's not such a bad thing, though. Kind of the idea of RSS is that you can fetch all the feeds and easily process them on your own machine. It's not something that inherently needs a proxy, any more than you need to subscribe to a web proxy so that you can browse all your pages through it instead of your browser directly fetching them.
Yes, they are. They drove almost all the competition out of business and provided an API to encourage RSS readers to hit their servers directly. As a result, nearly all RSS readers are now just interfaces to Google Reader, so when it dies so do most RSS apps.
Optimistically, I hope this sparks a resurgence in innovation and competition between the remaining few aggregation services and applications. Pessimistically, I think Google might have single-handedly just killed RSS.
Re:So what religion does he belong to?
on
New Pope Selected
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· Score: 1
sentence carries a clear implication that the Dr. considers it likely that the patient is a drug/alcohol abuser.
Yes, but the records aren't in English: they're in jargon. There's a world of difference. Consider a common IT phrase "click the OK button". Although the words appear to be standard English, the sentence most certainly is not. There is no "small disk or knob" sewn to the computer screen. You are not causing the "button" to "make a short, sharp sound". Instead, you're moving a mouse (not a mammal) to reposition a cursor (not a piece of a slide rule) on the screen (not a room-dividing partition) until it's over an icon (not religious) that reads "OK". Think of how much fun we'd have if non-geeks interpreted every single word we say at work in the literal sense. "You're writing on pythons? Like, with a Sharpie?"
"Patient denies" has a well established legal meaning in the context of medical records. The patient's interpretation of that phrase as plain English is irrelevant, because it's not plain English.
Let me give you a real-life example of what doctors are bracing themselves for. My wife saw a patient, and that patient later requested a copy of her medical records. No problem; my wife's office gave them to her. I personally witnessed this exchange afterward while I was picking up my wife from work:
Patient, storming into office: I WANT TO SEE DR. MRS. JUST SOME GUY!
My wife: Hi! What's wrong?
Patient: You slandered me and you're going to Fix. It. Right. Now!
Wife: What... what did I say?
Patient: You called me a drug abuser!
Wife: No, I did not!
Patient: It's right here! shows everyone who will look a highlighted section from her chart
SOAP NOTE FOR PATIENT X
SUBJECTIVE: PATIENT DENIES EXCESSIVE DRINKING, TOBACCO, AND DRUG USE.
Wife: Right...
Patient: I told you I didn't do that, and you said I'm in denial about it! If you don't fix that, I'll sue.
Wife: But that's not what we mean by "deny".
Patient: FIX IT OR I'LL SUE!
I swear that's not an exaggeration or misrepresentation. The patient was threatening to sue for defamation of character because my wife wrote "patient denies excessive drinking, tobacco, and drug use." That's medical jargon for "I asked the patient if she did this stuff and she said no" and is the industry standard way of documenting a "no" answer to a question.
Of course patients deserve complete access to their records, but I fully understand doctors who'd just as soon disarm a hand grenade as to hand over records to people who aren't trained in their interpretation.
Slashdot Mirror
And I'm not going to keep a fridge stocked with 30 varieties of soda, flavored waters, juices, and energy drinks. At my best, I'd buy a case of Dr Pepper to set next to my desk, and having anything else involved bartering with coworkers.
That actually sounds great: "I was here when the company-mandated calendar app told me to be." Someone else gets the blame, and you got to skip a meeting. I don't see a downside.
I love my Mint desktop but haven't tried running and apt-get dist-upgrade yet. If a Debian descendant can't manage that, there's something fundamentally broken about it.
If the US/Canadian/NATO governments knew that the crypto could be broken, they wouldn't give RIM certifications:
And those governments are using the exact same server software that they'd sell to you or me?
Maybe BlackBerry is as secure as people claim them to be. I certainly hope so! But I absolutely would not take a proprietary encryption vendor's word for it.
You can set up your own BES and be the sole holder of the encryption key.
And you know this how? I've heard people say that BlackBerry claims that they use only your site-generated key for encrypting traffic, but it's closed source software. Who really has any idea how it works, outside the crypto team at BlackBerry?
Markdown has been my salvation for quickly creating formatted documents. I'd much rather type plaintext into something like iA Writer than labor over WYSIWYG layout in a full-fledged word processor. That doesn't help for opening docs, of course, but it's my new favorite way for creating new content when I'm away from my desktop.
Sure, but there's a lot of difference between letting the system segfault because you've overrun the command line buffer and having it emit an error message like "command line is specified to be 255 characters or less", then exiting with an error code. The former doesn't tell anyone why their request is failing. The latter lets them know exactly what they can do to fix the problem.
Is it possible - maybe not likely, just possible - that the submitter is in the right? The following is completely fictional and I'm making it up entirely for illustrative purposes. None of it ever really happened. Honest. Ahem.
I transferred from one department in a previous company to another, and was assigned to help a Principal Software Engineer polish up some code for release. When I first looked at the code, I thought maybe I was in over my head. I felt stupid. I couldn't understand a thing. I brought this up to my manager, who chided me for nitpicking about coding styles.
So I slaved away to understand how the project worked and how all the pieces fit together. I'd ask questions like "why are we monkey patching standard library classes to alter their behavior" and be told "it's easier this way". I'd ask why we had 9 levels of inheritance and be told it was to keep the abstractions clean (although I couldn't understand why 7 of those 9 layers only had one child class that derived from them). Why are chunks of server code in the client? Because that's how the design diagram works. Why did we invent our own unit test framework? Because the others weren't good enough for us.
The whole mess came crashing down when our boss asked me to add a data validation check on a certain input. It was a stupidly simple check like "if value < 0: raise ValueError('value must be >= 0')" - that kind of thing. It turned out to be impossible. There was a hell's brew of code that handled errors by returning None, code that returned a string with the error message, and code that used exception handling. There was not one single clean codepath between the API layer and the database model.
My boss had been more concerned with my questions over the weeks, but it wasn't until I showed him the code that he really "got it". He flipped. Meetings were called. VPs were summoned. Design and code reviews were scheduled. The original coder became so frustrated with what he saw as "micromanagement" - things like "unit tests must actually pass before deployment" and "don't monkeypatch everything" - that he quit and I was given ownership of the ball of mess. Since then, I've managed to make reliable, vastly simpler (seriously, I've probably reduced line count by 2/3 and call stack depth by 3/4), and understandable. It no longer uses ML for a templating language. You can read a method's code to see how it works instead of running "git grep methodname" to see if another module patches it at runtime. I'm no longer ashamed to be associated with it.
Sorry, submitter, but I don't have any advice for you. I do have advice for the rest of the readers, though: consider the possibility that the submitter was telling the truth. There are silly code style differences that shouldn't get in the way of getting your work done. You like studly capped method names and your coworker likes_under_scores? The sun will still rise tomorrow. But just because someone is senior doesn't mean that their code isn't a fetid ball of fail.
On paper and in source code QNX is amazing.
In reality it was a little "meh". RTOSes are amazing when you need them, but those low latencies come at a cost of lower throughput and higher kernel overhead. Basically, context switch counts go through the roof anytime anything interesting at all is going on. The gist of it is that you can't write a big, sophisticated interrupt handler; you have to break it up into tiny evented pieces that can return before the hard deadline expires. That has lots of design implications.
Contrast with an end user OS where the price of too much latency is that screen refreshes aren't as smooth as they could be. The kernel can wave that away on modern hardware by making timeslices sufficiently small that no app gets to use so much CPU that others are greatly affected.
I have nothing against QNX! It's a great OS for its niche. I have zero desire to use it as a client OS, though, because its advantages aren't significant enough in that problem space to outweight its considerable disadvantages.
Yeah, but that doesn't work nearly as effectively as the name would imply. I still end up with X11 trying to sneak its way in.
Ports in FreeBSD, in my experience, if you follow a production-like attitude, rather than an ADD OH-NOEZ-THIS-PORT-IS-30-SECONDS-OUT-OF-DATE-MUST-UPDATE methodology, works better than any package manager I've seen (rpm, deb, yum, apt).
My only complaint about FreeBSD ports is that, somehow or another, everything you install wants to depend on X.
...followed by bisecting to see which port wants to install the perl-tk package so it can install a config tool you'd never actually run on a production server. It desperately needs a WITHOUT_X11_I_MEAN_IT_DAMMIT=yes option.
...typically using a signed int for pointers so that you don't have to have separate code paths for adding and subtracting from an address. The host itself can address 4GB but the OS may not let individual processes go over 2GB. This is the case in Windows x86, for example.
Most programs still don't need to map more than 2GB (not 4GB; in fact not even quite 2GB) at once, so there's no pressing need for 64-bit pointers.
Perhaps not most, but a whole awful lot of programs want more than that. I'd say the mean for "large" apps on my laptop is 1.5GB, and the resident size distribution is (to my eye) more or less gaussian. That means that few apps want more than 2GB today, but if the average app grew by 33%, about half of them would be over the 31-bit size limit.
You speculate. You have no idea if he was sacked or just got tired or is giving grace time between Microsoft and his next gig, do you?
Actually, I have a pretty good idea. In PR-speak, "quit to spend time with family" is the standard face-saving euphemism for "was given the choice between resigning or being fired, and chose to leave gracefully". It almost always has that second meaning. It doesn't have to, of course - it's possible that he really did quit to stay home and hang out with his wife and kids. I'd do it in a heartbeat if I got tired of my job and could afford to! Still, "quit to spend time with family" is HR jargon that very rarely means what it actually says.
Ever exec that leaves Microsoft will twig the same response.
How many C-level execs has Microsoft fired lately, though? It's possible that "is leaving the company to spend time with his extended family" can be taken at face value, this one time, for the first time in the history of press releases, but it seems more likely that he was asked to resign.
HOE. LEE. SHIT. Slash accepts unicode now?
So why would they want a device that runs the same software and has the same capabilities, but doesn't have cellular data, sms, or voice?
Apple sold about 4 million iPod Touches in Q1 2013. As it turns out, there's a pretty decent market for exactly the device you're describing.
If what I wrote up there sounds pretty ridiculous, I agree.
Adria agrees with your satirical position, non-satirically:
Except, the APIs were not public until AFTER this entire kerfufle came out.
That didn't stop VLC from running fast on the same hardware, though, and I don't think they were privy to any special secret API. And even if they were, Adobe could have examined the open source project to see how it was calling the not-so-secret API.
No, Flash was dog slow on its own merits.
Ideally, another service will implement GReader's API so that apps can point at the new URL and keep chugging away as usual. If that doesn't happen then I expect the non-standalone apps to vanish overnight. Maybe that's not such a bad thing, though. Kind of the idea of RSS is that you can fetch all the feeds and easily process them on your own machine. It's not something that inherently needs a proxy, any more than you need to subscribe to a web proxy so that you can browse all your pages through it instead of your browser directly fetching them.
Yes, they are. They drove almost all the competition out of business and provided an API to encourage RSS readers to hit their servers directly. As a result, nearly all RSS readers are now just interfaces to Google Reader, so when it dies so do most RSS apps.
Optimistically, I hope this sparks a resurgence in innovation and competition between the remaining few aggregation services and applications. Pessimistically, I think Google might have single-handedly just killed RSS.
Sublime.
I can say with some certitude that kids don't walk to school these days.
Mine do. At our neighborhood school, dropped-off kids are the exception.
sentence carries a clear implication that the Dr. considers it likely that the patient is a drug/alcohol abuser.
Yes, but the records aren't in English: they're in jargon. There's a world of difference. Consider a common IT phrase "click the OK button". Although the words appear to be standard English, the sentence most certainly is not. There is no "small disk or knob" sewn to the computer screen. You are not causing the "button" to "make a short, sharp sound". Instead, you're moving a mouse (not a mammal) to reposition a cursor (not a piece of a slide rule) on the screen (not a room-dividing partition) until it's over an icon (not religious) that reads "OK". Think of how much fun we'd have if non-geeks interpreted every single word we say at work in the literal sense. "You're writing on pythons? Like, with a Sharpie?"
"Patient denies" has a well established legal meaning in the context of medical records. The patient's interpretation of that phrase as plain English is irrelevant, because it's not plain English.
Let me give you a real-life example of what doctors are bracing themselves for. My wife saw a patient, and that patient later requested a copy of her medical records. No problem; my wife's office gave them to her. I personally witnessed this exchange afterward while I was picking up my wife from work:
Patient, storming into office: I WANT TO SEE DR. MRS. JUST SOME GUY!
My wife: Hi! What's wrong?
Patient: You slandered me and you're going to Fix. It. Right. Now!
Wife: What... what did I say?
Patient: You called me a drug abuser!
Wife: No, I did not!
Patient: It's right here! shows everyone who will look a highlighted section from her chart
Wife: Right...
Patient: I told you I didn't do that, and you said I'm in denial about it! If you don't fix that, I'll sue.
Wife: But that's not what we mean by "deny".
Patient: FIX IT OR I'LL SUE!
I swear that's not an exaggeration or misrepresentation. The patient was threatening to sue for defamation of character because my wife wrote "patient denies excessive drinking, tobacco, and drug use." That's medical jargon for "I asked the patient if she did this stuff and she said no" and is the industry standard way of documenting a "no" answer to a question.
Of course patients deserve complete access to their records, but I fully understand doctors who'd just as soon disarm a hand grenade as to hand over records to people who aren't trained in their interpretation.