Er, yeah, great, but what does that actually achieve? Who searches the web for the term 'miserable failure' (without actually knowing about the Googlebomb before-hand)? Whose minds is it likely to change, or at least open? What good does it do?
Now, if you searched for the term 'George Bush' and a page came up all about what a 'Miserable Failure' he was, then that actually has an effect outside simple self-congratulation; people are likely to come across it unawares, and it could help to raise awareness of facts or issues. Some political action. It may be harder to achieve, but it does actually achieve something.
Luckily, it's the latter that this story seem to be talking about.
Carbon Copy Cloner is a great tool, and has saved my bacon more than once, but these days most people seem to be recommending SuperDuper!. See here for a detailed comparison of the various backup tools and their limitations.
In particular, SuperDuper! preserves all metadata, while CCC misses BSD flags, creation date, HFS+ extended attributes, the locked flag, and ACLs. It also knows about Spotlight. The free version works fine, but you can also pay to add scheduling, incremental backups, etc.
(Disclaimer: I've no connection other than as a user who's just moved from CCC to SD!.)
Good point, but if we're talking about the same problem (how many people do you have to get before it's likely that two share a birthday), then the number's only 23. Once you reach 40, then the probability of a birthday match is about 90%. More here.
Yep, Sedgewick is well, well worth seeing. I'd never heard of it when I stumbled upon it in a bookshop: it was half an hour or so before I looked up and realised where I was, then I bought it on the spot. Unlike most similar books, I found it interesting to read! Not because it dumbs down or adds jokes, but because it makes the material itself interesting. It has enough detail to demonstrate the point, but not so much that it's hard to read -- so it's not a copy-and-paste sourcebook, but more like a course that gives you the ideas and understanding that you need to go off and write it yourself.
OTOH, Knuth is exhaustive -- in both senses of the word! If it was known about at the time, it'll be in there; but it's hardly bedtime reading. (And not just because if you fell asleep and dropped it, it'd HURT!)
I don't think any of my other favourites are terribly relevant here. Bentley's Programming Pearls and its sequel are very interesting, but are more about intriguing corner cases, gotchas, and useful techniques than about big algorithms. Van der Linden's Deep C Secrets is mostly about C, though there's a lot of OS-level stuff along with it, and the odd bit of C++ too. And Bloch's Effective Java and Java Puzzlers don't have too much to say outside Java, or at least OO languages generally.
(I think what makes these favourites for me is the level of insight; they're all written by people who clearly have a huge understanding of the subject matter, and manage to pack a lot of wisdom into them there words.)
OTOH, I find it hard to recommend Gamma et al. It was tremendously influential, and it's a good work, but it's a bit abstract. I found that I only really understood each listed pattern once I'd already come across a specific implementation or need, by which time the book didn't have much to add. It's good for understanding what patterns are, and why they're useful, and it introduces the standard names for many patterns, but the specifics might best be learned elsewhere.
It certainly was in my case; after using an Atari STE and then a Falcon, I originally chose a Mac because of MagiCMac, which would let my run my Atari software natively on the Mac. As it happened, I never got around to buying MagiCMac, because I quickly found Mac alternatives and workarounds for everything. But it still affected my choice of platform.
However, I'm what you might call a 'power user', and wasn't afraid to explore what the Mac could offer. My worry is that a good number of non-power users will install Boot Camp (or one of the alternatives), and stick to what they know, without ever really seeing much of Mac OS X or discovering its advantages. Don't underestimate the draw of the familiar.
Sorry, but with two separate plural-for-singular errors, my pedant circuits have gone into overdrive! Repeat after me:
One criterion, two criteria!
One bacterium, two bacteria!
Next week we'll move on to phenomena, media, formulae, and other trivia.
(P.S. If I had my way, once words had been in English for a few hundred years, we'd actually accept them as English words, and use proper standard English plurals and stuff...)
But it's not just a matter of attention, is it? Isn't it also import to let people know WHERE YOU ARE???
Personally, I find those blinking lights much, much harder to localise. Instead of the impression of a single, moving object, I just see a succession of stationary ones. Making it almost impossible to accurately judge speed, distance, size, or any of that sort of thing.
Flashing lights in ADDITION to at least one fairly bright, steady one would work quite well. But I'm fed up with stupid cyclists who seem to think that annoyance is a decent substitute for visibility. (Come to that, I'm also fed up with stupid cyclists who think that they have every right to terrorise pedestrians, avoid traffic lights, or perform other highly dangerous acts with impunity. I guess there are stupid people using every form of transport, and I'm sorry that they reflect so badly on you careful cyclists.)
"Charge 'em for the lice
Extra for the mice
Two percent for looking in the mirror twice
Here a little slice
There a little cut
Three percent for sleeping with the window shut"
In Mac OS X, a plist is a property list file that's stored either as an XML file with a certain DTD, or in a binary format. The binary format is now the default, but apps will read either type transparently, and there's a system utility (plutil) which can convert between formats.
So yes, launchd uses a plist, which is either XML or can be trivially made so.
Actually, its genus is probably quite a bit higher than that. If a rabbit's biology is anything like mine, it has other holes going through it: from one nostril to the other, from the nostrils to the mouth, eustation tubes from mouth to ears, and probably many more I'm not aware of. So a rabbit is topologically equivalent to a sphere with at least five handles.
It's a good article, worth a read. But it wasn't so much against having power cables at all, so much as the plethora of different and incompatible adapters (wall warts), cables, and connectors we seem to need.
There's common stuff running at 4.5V, 6V, 9V, 12V, and some in between; some stuff can get away with a 300mA sources, while others need 1.5A or in between. There are several different low-voltage connectors, and even then you need to worry about the polarity. How much simpler things would be if there was a single standard DC voltage, and a single connector. You could share transformers between devices, and maybe have DC power points, and -- well, DNA put it far better than I can, so read the original!
Don't forget that MS got where they are by fear. They fear everyone and everything: they're aware that any competitor could potentially grow to threaten them, any format or protocol could endanger their stranglehold, any app could draw people away from them. And as a result, we fear them.
MS is a bully at heart, and all bullies are, ultimately cowards. Deep down, you bet they're afraid.
(Whether they're especially afraid of Apple because of what's just happened is another question, of course. But at the very least, I'm sure Apple's got their firm attention.)
IKWYM. I don't mind too much, though, coz Desktop Manager is so good. Fast, simple, can work in several ways (pager shown on desktop, pager shown in menu bar, switch desktops with hotkeys and/or by moving to the edge), has some useful transitions. My only complaint is that it's hard to move windows between desktops.
I've posted before about comments. And I'd heartily agree that the sort of comments you show are worse than useless -- they actively make the code harder to follow!
In that situation, I'd ask why all those comments are needed. If the answer isn't "To make the code easier to understand", then I'd refuse. And if that is the answer, then I'd point out that no half-way competent developer would have the remotest trouble getting all that straight from the code, so none of that is achieving the state aim. If they disagree, question their competence:)
Yeah, I've been very impressed with some of the stuff that FindBugs finds: loads of localised sillinesses, of course, but also some deep high-level stuff like problems with threading, security, or OO design. On that showing, maybe analysing at bytecode rather than source level is the way to go.
Not that source-level analysis is useless, of course; there's a lot of low-level style that it can check. But IME, it can be more trouble than it's worth, because it doesn't understand that there are times when it's worth breaking some of the rules. For example, you might want to keep all of your lines to a max of 80 characters; but in big a block of similar lines, going a few characters over might still be easier to read than breaking it up. It's a matter of juggling priorities. There are justifiable exceptions to quite a few other rules, too -- and while you can explain that in a human code review, the machine is implacable!
Erm... there is plastic on top of the foil, isn't there? It's just much much thinner than that underneath. Because of that, I suspect it's also much more affected by the usual variations in thickness. In any case, discs are indeed much more susceptible to damage on the top than underneath.
I don't know any particularly good solutions to this. Stick-on labels might help to prevent scratches and similar damage, but ISTR hearing that in the long term, labelled CDRs lasted less well, possibly because as the label ages it starts to pull the top layer off the disc. Keeping them in jewel cases is good advice, of course; I don't know of anything else worth recommending. (Other than ripping them to HD and not touching them thereafter!)
Slashdot Mirror
Now, if you searched for the term 'George Bush' and a page came up all about what a 'Miserable Failure' he was, then that actually has an effect outside simple self-congratulation; people are likely to come across it unawares, and it could help to raise awareness of facts or issues. Some political action. It may be harder to achieve, but it does actually achieve something.
Luckily, it's the latter that this story seem to be talking about.
In particular, SuperDuper! preserves all metadata, while CCC misses BSD flags, creation date, HFS+ extended attributes, the locked flag, and ACLs. It also knows about Spotlight. The free version works fine, but you can also pay to add scheduling, incremental backups, etc.
(Disclaimer: I've no connection other than as a user who's just moved from CCC to SD!.)
Good point, but if we're talking about the same problem (how many people do you have to get before it's likely that two share a birthday), then the number's only 23. Once you reach 40, then the probability of a birthday match is about 90%. More here.
Micrøsøft once bit my sister...
OTOH, Knuth is exhaustive -- in both senses of the word! If it was known about at the time, it'll be in there; but it's hardly bedtime reading. (And not just because if you fell asleep and dropped it, it'd HURT!)
I don't think any of my other favourites are terribly relevant here. Bentley's Programming Pearls and its sequel are very interesting, but are more about intriguing corner cases, gotchas, and useful techniques than about big algorithms. Van der Linden's Deep C Secrets is mostly about C, though there's a lot of OS-level stuff along with it, and the odd bit of C++ too. And Bloch's Effective Java and Java Puzzlers don't have too much to say outside Java, or at least OO languages generally.
(I think what makes these favourites for me is the level of insight; they're all written by people who clearly have a huge understanding of the subject matter, and manage to pack a lot of wisdom into them there words.)
OTOH, I find it hard to recommend Gamma et al. It was tremendously influential, and it's a good work, but it's a bit abstract. I found that I only really understood each listed pattern once I'd already come across a specific implementation or need, by which time the book didn't have much to add. It's good for understanding what patterns are, and why they're useful, and it introduces the standard names for many patterns, but the specifics might best be learned elsewhere.
I think you missed the "...but this margin is too small to contain it." bit.
It certainly was in my case; after using an Atari STE and then a Falcon, I originally chose a Mac because of MagiCMac, which would let my run my Atari software natively on the Mac. As it happened, I never got around to buying MagiCMac, because I quickly found Mac alternatives and workarounds for everything. But it still affected my choice of platform.
However, I'm what you might call a 'power user', and wasn't afraid to explore what the Mac could offer. My worry is that a good number of non-power users will install Boot Camp (or one of the alternatives), and stick to what they know, without ever really seeing much of Mac OS X or discovering its advantages. Don't underestimate the draw of the familiar.
One criterion, two criteria!
One bacterium, two bacteria!
Next week we'll move on to phenomena, media, formulae, and other trivia.
(P.S. If I had my way, once words had been in English for a few hundred years, we'd actually accept them as English words, and use proper standard English plurals and stuff...)
Personally, I find those blinking lights much, much harder to localise. Instead of the impression of a single, moving object, I just see a succession of stationary ones. Making it almost impossible to accurately judge speed, distance, size, or any of that sort of thing.
Flashing lights in ADDITION to at least one fairly bright, steady one would work quite well. But I'm fed up with stupid cyclists who seem to think that annoyance is a decent substitute for visibility. (Come to that, I'm also fed up with stupid cyclists who think that they have every right to terrorise pedestrians, avoid traffic lights, or perform other highly dangerous acts with impunity. I guess there are stupid people using every form of transport, and I'm sorry that they reflect so badly on you careful cyclists.)
Erm... I don't think that it would be false to say that there wasn't any possibility of failing to misunderstand that double negative.
Extra for the mice
Two percent for looking in the mirror twice
Here a little slice
There a little cut
Three percent for sleeping with the window shut"
(P.S. While we're correcting each other, I think you mean old-fashioned.)
Oh, you want the long answer?
In Mac OS X, a plist is a property list file that's stored either as an XML file with a certain DTD, or in a binary format. The binary format is now the default, but apps will read either type transparently, and there's a system utility (plutil) which can convert between formats.
So yes, launchd uses a plist, which is either XML or can be trivially made so.
Nice idea, but someone's already thought of using that name for an album.
There's common stuff running at 4.5V, 6V, 9V, 12V, and some in between; some stuff can get away with a 300mA sources, while others need 1.5A or in between. There are several different low-voltage connectors, and even then you need to worry about the polarity. How much simpler things would be if there was a single standard DC voltage, and a single connector. You could share transformers between devices, and maybe have DC power points, and -- well, DNA put it far better than I can, so read the original!
Can't it use the versions of Python and Java that get installed with OS X? Or were you talking about the Windows version?
MS is a bully at heart, and all bullies are, ultimately cowards. Deep down, you bet they're afraid.
(Whether they're especially afraid of Apple because of what's just happened is another question, of course. But at the very least, I'm sure Apple's got their firm attention.)
IKWYM. I don't mind too much, though, coz Desktop Manager is so good. Fast, simple, can work in several ways (pager shown on desktop, pager shown in menu bar, switch desktops with hotkeys and/or by moving to the edge), has some useful transitions. My only complaint is that it's hard to move windows between desktops.
In that situation, I'd ask why all those comments are needed. If the answer isn't "To make the code easier to understand", then I'd refuse. And if that is the answer, then I'd point out that no half-way competent developer would have the remotest trouble getting all that straight from the code, so none of that is achieving the state aim. If they disagree, question their competence :)
Not that source-level analysis is useless, of course; there's a lot of low-level style that it can check. But IME, it can be more trouble than it's worth, because it doesn't understand that there are times when it's worth breaking some of the rules. For example, you might want to keep all of your lines to a max of 80 characters; but in big a block of similar lines, going a few characters over might still be easier to read than breaking it up. It's a matter of juggling priorities. There are justifiable exceptions to quite a few other rules, too -- and while you can explain that in a human code review, the machine is implacable!
I don't know any particularly good solutions to this. Stick-on labels might help to prevent scratches and similar damage, but ISTR hearing that in the long term, labelled CDRs lasted less well, possibly because as the label ages it starts to pull the top layer off the disc. Keeping them in jewel cases is good advice, of course; I don't know of anything else worth recommending. (Other than ripping them to HD and not touching them thereafter!)