Me too. I was about to post a message saying, "Okay, that's it, no more Slashdot for me if this is the kind of moronic blather that makes it to the front page," but I figured I'd reply to your post instead to make it clearer that you aren't the only one feeling that way.
The article here is an absurd, petulant diatribe, a waste of valuable keystrokes, and its appearance here is a clear demonstration (as if the rampant spelling and grammar errors weren't evidence enough) that the editors not only have no respect for their readers, but are actually contemptuous of us. Sorry, guys, you no longer get my ad money if you expect me to visit your site for this kind of drivel. Slashdot isn't the only game in town; there are plenty of alternatives that won't insult my intelligence.
Re:press release
on
Photosynth Demo
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I don't get the point of that part either, but keep watching. A couple minutes into it he moves on to the real meat of the demo, and it's pretty astonishing. I won't spoil it except to say that if I'd seen it in a sci-fi movie I'd probably have dismissed it as very cool-looking but totally unrealistic.
Re:Does anyone have an actual video of the demo?
on
Photosynth Demo
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Then you closed the window about 10 seconds before the demo started. Keep watching.
Although boot times would certainly improve, in general OS X appears to have much more intelligent disk caching than Windows does, so once you're up and running I think it wouldn't make nearly as much difference as it does on a Vista or XP system.
Doing any filesystem-intensive work on Windows is downright painful compared to OS X. That's one of the main reasons I have a MBP on my desk now instead of a Windows laptop; when I was working on some platform-independent code, doing a full build on Windows took literally three times as long as it does on OS X. In my experience OS X is still not quite as speedy in the filesystem department as Linux, but it's fast enough to be pleasant most of the time. If a flash-memory disk cache would only have slightly improved filesystem performance in normal operation, then it probably just wasn't worth the added expense. One assumes Apple would have tested it to see if it was worth doing.
Of course, for all I know Apple did include it and just hasn't mentioned it in their press releases so far.
It sounds like you really mean, "Doing big merges at the last minute sucks." But it's more generally the case that doing anything major at the last minute sucks. Merging two weeks before ship date is no different than checking in a big new feature or a substantial refactoring or a fix for a bug in a critical system component two weeks before ship date. If you're doing any of those things, it's a failure of your project management, but that failure has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with merging per se.
Merging or checking in a major new feature six months before your ship date is not any problem at all, and your methodology throws away the advantages of branch-based development during the bulk of the project's lifetime for the sake of a minor additional level of safety (which can be avoided with proper project management anyway) at the very end. If your problem is that "merges happen at the last minute" then honestly you need to look at your development processes as a whole.
Even at the last minute, though, not all merges are major operations. In a development shop that embraces git's "branch often" philosophy, merges tend to be small and frequent, and thus no one of them has much of a chance of breaking the source base. Further, before you merge a feature-development branch into your main source base, you will almost always have done the opposite first, and done a full round of testing at that point. If you do that, the merge is almost a no-op.
Re:There's a difference between GIT and SVN
on
Linus on GIT and SCM
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· Score: 2, Informative
Nothing about git prevents you from establishing a repository and telling all your developers that it's the central integration point for your project. It supports svn-style centralized development just fine. (In fact, it even interoperates bidirectionally with existing svn repositories, though you lose some of the advanced features.) The difference is it doesn't force you into a centralized model.
Or are you too fucking lazy and stupid to do that? Because if you work for me, that will be one of the things I expect from you. [...] You sound like one of those who needs to be shown the door.
No need, I'm sure anyone with half a brain and an ounce of self-respect would have run screaming from such a fabulous work environment long before you had the chance to demonstrate your blindingly self-evident superiority to them.
And we should trust your unsupported assertion more than the educated opinion of the originator and head of one of the most successful large software projects in history because...?
MLB is using copyright laws to enforce their marketing agreements. Whether it's legally sound or not, I guess we'll find out if this gets as far as a court case, but it's certainly not very customer-centric.
I do -- I listen to podcasts in my car, and since my car CD player will read MP3 files I just stick the latest podcast on the same CD-RW each day and I'm good to go. A single CD-RW lasts me a long time; much better than burning a fresh CD-R each day and throwing it away when I'm done.
Hear hear. git-svn makes Subversion tolerable. The only reason I'd ever choose native Subversion over a newer system like git or Mercurial is if I needed some tool that had builtin Subversion integration and didn't support anything else. Absent that criterion, IMO if you choose Subversion it's a sign you don't really understand version control too well.
It calls into question whether they're putting their morality into the rest of their business.
This is a company whose motto is "Don't be evil." If you are just now questioning whether or not they're putting their morality into their business, you have not been paying any attention at all.
Whether you agree with their morality or not, or agree that the particular decisions they've made are consistent with their openly stated (hell, vigorously publicized) moral code, are other questions entirely. But they have been very clear from day one that morality plays a central role in their business decisions.
Personally I think "Don't promote businesses which serve no purpose other than helping students cheat on their schoolwork" is entirely consistent with "Don't be evil."
That is, I will add, how most of the press censorship actually works in China. While the Chinese government does jail reporters and forcibly shut down newspapers from time to time, direct action like that is rare. Most of the censorship is self-censorship. The key is that there aren't really any written, official rules about what's acceptable to print, so for lack of any concrete guidelines, publishers tend to err on the side of caution. Much more effective to give people a "forbidden" list of vague generalities than to give them a list of specifics that can be circumvented while still obeying the letter of the law.
Business users don't need MP3 and DVD playback. As long as the box will open up a web browser and connect to all the web-based intranet apps their employees need, they're good to go.
I have owned various PalmOS devices for over a decade, and still use my Treo 650 daily, but I'll be happy to see the old OS go. It's unstable (a null pointer access will reboot the whole device), has no OS-level support for multitasking (applications have to hook into timer interrupts to run in the background), the memory management system is a monstrosity to code for, it has no ability to launch apps directly from a removable memory card, and even its strong suit, the UI, has some serious problems (try replying to an SMS message when you're in the middle of doing something else; when you're done sending the message it will take you back to the app launcher rather than to what you were doing.)
A new Linux-based core will solve many of those problems inherently. Plus, one hopes, it will be even more hackable. So I say good riddance to the old OS.
In the USA, many Americans refuse to use public transportation due to class snobbery.
In much the USA, many Americans refuse to use public transportation because they want to get to work in a half-hour rather than spending four hours hopping from bus to bus to train to bus. That is certainly the situation in the San Francisco Bay Area. I am not exaggerating those times, either; a few years ago, I had a contract in Pleasanton, about 35 minutes by car from my home in Sunnyvale. My car needed to be in the shop for a few days so I decided to take public transit. How bad could it be, right? Pretty damned bad, is the answer. (The bus stop at the start of that route is about a 10-minute walk from my house; there are none closer. And note the price, too, though a monthly transit pass would cut that way down for a regular user.)
Who I was sitting next to was not the issue; the issue was that it took so damned long to get to the office that, if I had to do that every day, I'd be doing literally nothing but riding the bus/train, working, and sleeping. That's why you mostly see poor people on the bus: people with enough money to buy and operate a car would rather spend several extra hours a day with their families.
One root cause, in this area at least, is idiotic zoning policy that makes it illegal for most people to live close to where they work. The cities around here are divided into residential areas with the occasional convenience store or restaurant, and industrial/commercial areas with no housing other than the occasional programmer sleeping under his desk after an all-nighter. As a result, there is very little of interest within walking distance from most people's homes. And since those same zoning laws generally prohibit buildings more than a couple floors high even in the commercial areas, everything is spread out so far and wide that it's utterly impossible to design good public transit systems like those of higher-density cities. (Well, you *could* design one, but it would cost so much to operate that people would find it cheaper to drive their own cars.)
And why should it mean shutting down the global economy so that everybody becomes poor and nobody can help anybody else to pay to deal with bad weather?
Who has proposed that? Specifically, I mean, not just "the environmentalists."
Slashdot Mirror
If you collapse an application's profile box, that application's box will stay collapsed on any other profiles you view.
Me too. I was about to post a message saying, "Okay, that's it, no more Slashdot for me if this is the kind of moronic blather that makes it to the front page," but I figured I'd reply to your post instead to make it clearer that you aren't the only one feeling that way.
The article here is an absurd, petulant diatribe, a waste of valuable keystrokes, and its appearance here is a clear demonstration (as if the rampant spelling and grammar errors weren't evidence enough) that the editors not only have no respect for their readers, but are actually contemptuous of us. Sorry, guys, you no longer get my ad money if you expect me to visit your site for this kind of drivel. Slashdot isn't the only game in town; there are plenty of alternatives that won't insult my intelligence.
I don't get the point of that part either, but keep watching. A couple minutes into it he moves on to the real meat of the demo, and it's pretty astonishing. I won't spoil it except to say that if I'd seen it in a sci-fi movie I'd probably have dismissed it as very cool-looking but totally unrealistic.
Then you closed the window about 10 seconds before the demo started. Keep watching.
A page on "linux.sys-con.com" finds Linux superior to Windows! Pardon me while I climb back onto the chair I just fell out of.
Although boot times would certainly improve, in general OS X appears to have much more intelligent disk caching than Windows does, so once you're up and running I think it wouldn't make nearly as much difference as it does on a Vista or XP system.
Doing any filesystem-intensive work on Windows is downright painful compared to OS X. That's one of the main reasons I have a MBP on my desk now instead of a Windows laptop; when I was working on some platform-independent code, doing a full build on Windows took literally three times as long as it does on OS X. In my experience OS X is still not quite as speedy in the filesystem department as Linux, but it's fast enough to be pleasant most of the time. If a flash-memory disk cache would only have slightly improved filesystem performance in normal operation, then it probably just wasn't worth the added expense. One assumes Apple would have tested it to see if it was worth doing.
Of course, for all I know Apple did include it and just hasn't mentioned it in their press releases so far.
It sounds like you really mean, "Doing big merges at the last minute sucks." But it's more generally the case that doing anything major at the last minute sucks. Merging two weeks before ship date is no different than checking in a big new feature or a substantial refactoring or a fix for a bug in a critical system component two weeks before ship date. If you're doing any of those things, it's a failure of your project management, but that failure has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with merging per se.
Merging or checking in a major new feature six months before your ship date is not any problem at all, and your methodology throws away the advantages of branch-based development during the bulk of the project's lifetime for the sake of a minor additional level of safety (which can be avoided with proper project management anyway) at the very end. If your problem is that "merges happen at the last minute" then honestly you need to look at your development processes as a whole.
Even at the last minute, though, not all merges are major operations. In a development shop that embraces git's "branch often" philosophy, merges tend to be small and frequent, and thus no one of them has much of a chance of breaking the source base. Further, before you merge a feature-development branch into your main source base, you will almost always have done the opposite first, and done a full round of testing at that point. If you do that, the merge is almost a no-op.
Nothing about git prevents you from establishing a repository and telling all your developers that it's the central integration point for your project. It supports svn-style centralized development just fine. (In fact, it even interoperates bidirectionally with existing svn repositories, though you lose some of the advanced features.) The difference is it doesn't force you into a centralized model.
No need, I'm sure anyone with half a brain and an ounce of self-respect would have run screaming from such a fabulous work environment long before you had the chance to demonstrate your blindingly self-evident superiority to them.
And we should trust your unsupported assertion more than the educated opinion of the originator and head of one of the most successful large software projects in history because...?
And of course there are no taxes in the US besides federal income tax. (Hint: Look at the top tax bracket in, say, California or Vermont.)
MLB is using copyright laws to enforce their marketing agreements. Whether it's legally sound or not, I guess we'll find out if this gets as far as a court case, but it's certainly not very customer-centric.
Show them the police report you filed when your computer or mp3 player was stolen?
Yuck. Go visit beautiful downtown Beijing and then we'll talk about what a fabulous idea it is for everyone to own their own little coal plants.
I do -- I listen to podcasts in my car, and since my car CD player will read MP3 files I just stick the latest podcast on the same CD-RW each day and I'm good to go. A single CD-RW lasts me a long time; much better than burning a fresh CD-R each day and throwing it away when I'm done.
Hear hear. git-svn makes Subversion tolerable. The only reason I'd ever choose native Subversion over a newer system like git or Mercurial is if I needed some tool that had builtin Subversion integration and didn't support anything else. Absent that criterion, IMO if you choose Subversion it's a sign you don't really understand version control too well.
Are you absolutely sure about that last point? The actual numbers suggest that if we want a low crime rate, we should kick the non-immigrants out of the country.
This is a company whose motto is "Don't be evil." If you are just now questioning whether or not they're putting their morality into their business, you have not been paying any attention at all.
Whether you agree with their morality or not, or agree that the particular decisions they've made are consistent with their openly stated (hell, vigorously publicized) moral code, are other questions entirely. But they have been very clear from day one that morality plays a central role in their business decisions.
Personally I think "Don't promote businesses which serve no purpose other than helping students cheat on their schoolwork" is entirely consistent with "Don't be evil."
That is, I will add, how most of the press censorship actually works in China. While the Chinese government does jail reporters and forcibly shut down newspapers from time to time, direct action like that is rare. Most of the censorship is self-censorship. The key is that there aren't really any written, official rules about what's acceptable to print, so for lack of any concrete guidelines, publishers tend to err on the side of caution. Much more effective to give people a "forbidden" list of vague generalities than to give them a list of specifics that can be circumvented while still obeying the letter of the law.
Are you sure it didn't install a little launcher app to main memory?
Business users don't need MP3 and DVD playback. As long as the box will open up a web browser and connect to all the web-based intranet apps their employees need, they're good to go.
I have owned various PalmOS devices for over a decade, and still use my Treo 650 daily, but I'll be happy to see the old OS go. It's unstable (a null pointer access will reboot the whole device), has no OS-level support for multitasking (applications have to hook into timer interrupts to run in the background), the memory management system is a monstrosity to code for, it has no ability to launch apps directly from a removable memory card, and even its strong suit, the UI, has some serious problems (try replying to an SMS message when you're in the middle of doing something else; when you're done sending the message it will take you back to the app launcher rather than to what you were doing.)
A new Linux-based core will solve many of those problems inherently. Plus, one hopes, it will be even more hackable. So I say good riddance to the old OS.
In much the USA, many Americans refuse to use public transportation because they want to get to work in a half-hour rather than spending four hours hopping from bus to bus to train to bus. That is certainly the situation in the San Francisco Bay Area. I am not exaggerating those times, either; a few years ago, I had a contract in Pleasanton, about 35 minutes by car from my home in Sunnyvale. My car needed to be in the shop for a few days so I decided to take public transit. How bad could it be, right? Pretty damned bad, is the answer. (The bus stop at the start of that route is about a 10-minute walk from my house; there are none closer. And note the price, too, though a monthly transit pass would cut that way down for a regular user.)
Who I was sitting next to was not the issue; the issue was that it took so damned long to get to the office that, if I had to do that every day, I'd be doing literally nothing but riding the bus/train, working, and sleeping. That's why you mostly see poor people on the bus: people with enough money to buy and operate a car would rather spend several extra hours a day with their families.
One root cause, in this area at least, is idiotic zoning policy that makes it illegal for most people to live close to where they work. The cities around here are divided into residential areas with the occasional convenience store or restaurant, and industrial/commercial areas with no housing other than the occasional programmer sleeping under his desk after an all-nighter. As a result, there is very little of interest within walking distance from most people's homes. And since those same zoning laws generally prohibit buildings more than a couple floors high even in the commercial areas, everything is spread out so far and wide that it's utterly impossible to design good public transit systems like those of higher-density cities. (Well, you *could* design one, but it would cost so much to operate that people would find it cheaper to drive their own cars.)
Operator precedence. Legal precedent.
English: learn it and love it!
Who has proposed that? Specifically, I mean, not just "the environmentalists."