http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/01/05 51238 is the story that is being duped. BOTH stories are about Judge Wells. That story only mentions Kimball to say "A day after Judge Dale Kimball reaffirmed Judge Wells' order tossing most of SCO's case." Keep reading: "Judge Wells has stricken large portions of SCO's expert reports." Oh hey, that's what the current story is about!
Blagojevich spokesman Gerardo Cardenas would not discuss the fee payment beyond saying the state "will comply with any court order." He refused to explain why the administration hasn't complied with the Aug. 9 court order or when it will do so.
Sometimes I think it would be great fun to be a journalist. You could write paragraphs like this about our politicians all the time...
It can tell if you've been gone for more than X minutes, which handles that fine, as well as your getting up for just a second, then unexpectedly getting pulled away.
It's not great though. If you're going to be gone for a while, then it needlessly wastes battery waiting in sleep mode until it hits the threshold. If you're going to be away for not too long and the threshold is too short, then you have to wait for it to come out of hibernate instead of suspend when you get back. If you have it so that if the computer's plugged in it won't hibernate that solves the second problem, but now if you actually want it to hibernate it won't. (This would be important for instance if I actually moved my laptop around. It has absolutely no battery life (if you pull the plug out it dies instantly... it's several years old), so if I wanted it to resume in the same state when I got home I'd need to tell it to hibernate.
These aren't end-of-the-world issues, but IMO the best option is to just present the different choices, or have an option to, because there are enough situations where the human DOES know better than the computer that it makes it worthwhile.
Not if the system does it properly; Joel doesn't go into all the details explicitly, but what should happen is this: You hit the one button, the system goes to lock mode, and begins persisting memory to disk (preparing for hibernate); when that is done, the disk can be powered down, and the system enters "sleep", consuming less power, but ready to wake up in an instant; after some amount of time, it actually enters hibernate, powering down completely. If you pull the plug in mere sleep mode, no problem. Note that what I've described is just my understanding of the default behaviour when closing the lid of various laptop models.
Okay, this is true. For some reason I was thinking "the computer will need to signal the user when it's safe to shut of if you do it that way", but I guess sleep mode would appear more-or-less just as "off" as off does.
Though the OS would have to support possible hardware changes while resuming from hibernate... I don't know how current ones would react to that.
I can't see a Windows box without the need for a "restart" action.
But you could on other OSs?
Re:Vista: An Enigma Wrapped In a Paradox
on
Why Vista Took So Long
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Often on XP, 2000, NT and 95 I would hit control-esc then R for run and type frequently used programs into run
Don't you have a Windows key? Win-R. One chord instead of two, and a less akward stretch than ctrl-esc if you do it with one hand. The Windows key sucks when gaming, and if you're a Model M fan you won't have one, but those are the only two arguments I can think of against it, because it really is useful. I personally use Win-E (open Explorer) and Win-L (Lock) routinely.
Maybe win-r will still work for you in Vista? I don't know.
Re:Take away restart? No, but make usable and pret
on
Why Vista Took So Long
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· Score: 1
I use restart all of the time, not only when installing software. It's easier to do than shut down and power back up because I don' have to press any buttons.
It's also easier on the circuits and mechanics of the computer.
I do think that switch user and lock could be merged while losing nothing. IIRC, XP Home doesn't have a lock option because switch user essentially performs that function, while letting someone else log in at the same time.
Other than that, Joel's blog seems to be a "let's dumb down the computer's function"-fest. Especially the lack of an option to power off:
Why do you want the power off? If you're concerned about power usage, let the power management software worry about that. It's smarter than you are.
Really? The power management software can tell that I'm about to go on a trip and won't be using the computer for a couple hours vs I'm just getting up to use the bathroom?
That type of software suffers from a fundamental limitation: it can only react to what it knows, it can't predict the future, it can't tell what you're going to do.
If you're going to open the box and don't want to get shocked, well, just powering off the system doesn't really completely make it safe to open the box; you have to unplug it anyway.
This is true. But you still have to power it off before you unplug or you risk FS damage. Journals lessen this risk, but it's still there.
I could support an "expert" vs "n00b" mode thet hides some of these, but you can't just get rid of them. And the submenu there acts as a hack to achieve that aim, though it's not a very good one, and the default action isn't as rich as he suggests.
It DOES exist to reward artists. What do YOU think it's for?
The purpose, to use the phrase from the US Constitution, is to promote the sciences and useful arts. How does it do this? By making it profitable for artists and such to do what you might call "meta-work": creating a piece of art, producing the plans for a product, rather than producing a physical, tangible piece of matter that you sell. How does it do this? By providing an indirect reward for them.
One of my friends was a dancer for Penn State's Dance Marathon. Basically a couple hundred (? just a guess) people stay up and "dance" (that's a fancy word for "sway back and forth because you're freaking tired") for 48 hours straight at the end of a fundraising drive for the four diamonds fund. She said that sometime during the last 12 hours or so she swears she had a conversation with one of my other friends who had stopped by, but he swears that he was nowhere near there then.
I use it all the freaking time. I don't want to be constantly entering my password. I'm lazy.
Now, granted, my computer doesn't remember my bank password for instance... I enter that each time. (I don't even know it... it's a ~14 character, randomly generated password stored in a PasswordSafe database.) But for sites like/., you betcha that Firefox knows my password.
At the same time, if the doctor says "there's nothing we can find wrong with your leg at the moment, but there's a chance that it will become infected later", I'll wait for it to become infected to amputate...
Criminal cases decide between guilty and not guilty, not innocent.
In fact, I think this "quibble" is far less pedantic than using "innocent" to describe a civil finding (especially given that he was paraphrasing in lay English something that defendant, not the court, was saying) because in what appears at first to be just a difference in terms actually has wrapped in it one of the guiding philosophies of our criminal legal system, which is that you need to be proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Even if the jury thinks that you're guilty, but isn't pretty much convinced of that fact, they will still (usually) not convict you.
Wrong. If Novell can distribute it, then everyone else can. If everyone else can't, then neither can Novell, though for different reasons. (If everyone else can't distribute it because of patent issues, then Novell can't distribute it because the GPL doesn't grant distribution rights if you can't or don't license the patents too.) This means that if MS sues another distro over patent issues, and the offending code is traced to Novell, then everyone ELSE who has code in the kernel can then sue Novell for brach of contract/copyright violation, especially if they continue to distribute the code themselves. (Depending on the outcome of the case mentioned a couple days ago.)
S-expressions, of the sort used in Common Lisp and Scheme, would have been a good alternative. They're simple, use a minimal number of characters, and are very easy to parse. Hell, most Comp Sci grads have written at least once such parser during their education.
This article argues the other side of that point. I'm not sure how convincing it is, but there are at least some benefits to the XML approach. Where the balance falls, I don't know.
A lot of cheap controllers though (including some integrated motherboard ones) do RAID 0+1. At least the last time I looked, the cheapest RAID 5 card I saw was approaching $200.
Considering that the UK's Information Commissioner recently made a lot of noise around the RFID track and trace tech, warning that Britain is 'sleepwalking into a surveillance society'
But just a couple hours ago, there was another article warning that
...the country's oversight agency now puts that figure at $24 billion, and two Members of Parliament say the project is "sleepwalking toward disaster"...
Perhaps someone should look into this sleepwalking. I'm sure there's some kind of treatment.
... Yeah... I am afraid we don't quite see eye to eye on this one.
I do think the former is easier to read. It's not a big difference, but it's still easier.
I also think that a + b is easier to read than a.add(b). If there were a language that didn't support = operators at all, even for primitives, what would you think of it? Just as easy to read as if you went through and changed a.set(b) to a=b everywhere?
The other advantage I see properties having is the following: they let you use standard fields and later change them to be properties without changing any other code. Direct language support. If you want to be able to change representations, do extra processing, everything that using accessor methods gets you in Java, you either need to write it with setters and getters right from the start (and have corresponding code blowup... you're essentially writing the same thing three times; if Java had macros I would regularily use something like #define SG_FIELD(type, name) type name; void set##name(type new##name) { name = new##name; } type get##name() { return name; } to avoid the nonsense of writing the same thing over and over and freaking over again) or you need to use a tool that will automatically refactor the uses of a field to use setters and getters. Incidentally, Eclipse provides such a tool. Eclipse is a wonderful IDE, and was the reason that the work I did with Java a while ago was one of the more plesant programming experiences I've had despite (as you might be able to tell) being a fairly-big anti-fan of Java.
The issue of delegates I agree with to some degree, as it is nice syntactic sugar, but one that is, again, easily done equivalently well through the use of listener interfaces
Not always "easily". If you use interfaces, you have to use the function name provided, you can't give an arbitrary "call this function" construct. You can get around this with inner (and perhaps anonymous) classes, but at the expense of quite a bit more code.
It's Java's lack of delegates that is the reason that they need the nonsense like "you can subclass Thread or implement Runnable", "subclass WindowAdapter or implement WindowListener (oh, which BTW you'll have to implement all 10 methods even if you're only interested in one)", etc.
And, while I am at it - C#'s lack of a "throws" clause on functions is just as annoying.
I'll grant this one to you. Personally, I don't know where I stand with regards to checked exceptions. I'll agree that it can be nice in certain cases, but at the same time, it can be a big pain in the butt in others. One of my friends is doing a class project where they're looking at extending the Java language with something (I don't know exactly what they're doing, but it's something that relates to ensuring that cleanup code is run), and was telling me about a project that someone else worked on where they did a compromise. Basically, they make functions that could be called cross-module (read: package) checked, so you had to declare all possible exceptions that could leave that code. However, private and protected methods do not have to declare the exceptions that could be thrown, so a change to what one function does doesn't necessarily propagate to a zillion others. This to me sounds like a very reasonable compromise.
Of course, then you have C++, where the exception specifications are perhaps the worst-designed feature of the "++" part.;-)
Now, if you are purely in your own code this isn't absolutely terrible, as you can just start digging and figure it out. However, if you are using any microsoft stuff, or any third party dlls, you are pretty much screwed
Okay, third party tools I'll again give you some (maybe most) of the time, but MS stuff? It's documented in the API reference plain as day. It's far easier to find that out than it would be to go through your code! You could make the argument that you don't know for sure that's all you have to deal with, but considering that the MSDN documentation is second to none in terms of quality, I don't think you have much to worry about there.
(Though I'll point out that the Java extension I mentioned above would apparently go a long way to solving your qualms)
Slashdot Mirror
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/01/05 51238 is the story that is being duped. BOTH stories are about Judge Wells. That story only mentions Kimball to say "A day after Judge Dale Kimball reaffirmed Judge Wells' order tossing most of SCO's case." Keep reading: "Judge Wells has stricken large portions of SCO's expert reports." Oh hey, that's what the current story is about!
It is a dupe.
Sometimes I think it would be great fun to be a journalist. You could write paragraphs like this about our politicians all the time...
It can tell if you've been gone for more than X minutes, which handles that fine, as well as your getting up for just a second, then unexpectedly getting pulled away.
It's not great though. If you're going to be gone for a while, then it needlessly wastes battery waiting in sleep mode until it hits the threshold. If you're going to be away for not too long and the threshold is too short, then you have to wait for it to come out of hibernate instead of suspend when you get back. If you have it so that if the computer's plugged in it won't hibernate that solves the second problem, but now if you actually want it to hibernate it won't. (This would be important for instance if I actually moved my laptop around. It has absolutely no battery life (if you pull the plug out it dies instantly... it's several years old), so if I wanted it to resume in the same state when I got home I'd need to tell it to hibernate.
These aren't end-of-the-world issues, but IMO the best option is to just present the different choices, or have an option to, because there are enough situations where the human DOES know better than the computer that it makes it worthwhile.
Not if the system does it properly; Joel doesn't go into all the details explicitly, but what should happen is this: You hit the one button, the system goes to lock mode, and begins persisting memory to disk (preparing for hibernate); when that is done, the disk can be powered down, and the system enters "sleep", consuming less power, but ready to wake up in an instant; after some amount of time, it actually enters hibernate, powering down completely. If you pull the plug in mere sleep mode, no problem. Note that what I've described is just my understanding of the default behaviour when closing the lid of various laptop models.
Okay, this is true. For some reason I was thinking "the computer will need to signal the user when it's safe to shut of if you do it that way", but I guess sleep mode would appear more-or-less just as "off" as off does.
Though the OS would have to support possible hardware changes while resuming from hibernate... I don't know how current ones would react to that.
I can't see a Windows box without the need for a "restart" action.
But you could on other OSs?
Often on XP, 2000, NT and 95 I would hit control-esc then R for run and type frequently used programs into run
Don't you have a Windows key? Win-R. One chord instead of two, and a less akward stretch than ctrl-esc if you do it with one hand. The Windows key sucks when gaming, and if you're a Model M fan you won't have one, but those are the only two arguments I can think of against it, because it really is useful. I personally use Win-E (open Explorer) and Win-L (Lock) routinely.
Maybe win-r will still work for you in Vista? I don't know.
I use restart all of the time, not only when installing software. It's easier to do than shut down and power back up because I don' have to press any buttons.
It's also easier on the circuits and mechanics of the computer.
Remember, this is from the company that brought you SourceSafe
Other than that, Joel's blog seems to be a "let's dumb down the computer's function"-fest. Especially the lack of an option to power off:
Really? The power management software can tell that I'm about to go on a trip and won't be using the computer for a couple hours vs I'm just getting up to use the bathroom?
That type of software suffers from a fundamental limitation: it can only react to what it knows, it can't predict the future, it can't tell what you're going to do.
This is true. But you still have to power it off before you unplug or you risk FS damage. Journals lessen this risk, but it's still there.
I could support an "expert" vs "n00b" mode thet hides some of these, but you can't just get rid of them. And the submenu there acts as a hack to achieve that aim, though it's not a very good one, and the default action isn't as rich as he suggests.
It DOES exist to reward artists. What do YOU think it's for?
The purpose, to use the phrase from the US Constitution, is to promote the sciences and useful arts. How does it do this? By making it profitable for artists and such to do what you might call "meta-work": creating a piece of art, producing the plans for a product, rather than producing a physical, tangible piece of matter that you sell. How does it do this? By providing an indirect reward for them.
Trying to tie or wrap those nanotypes would be more than futile.
So what you're saying is that friction's resistance would be useless?
One of my friends was a dancer for Penn State's Dance Marathon. Basically a couple hundred (? just a guess) people stay up and "dance" (that's a fancy word for "sway back and forth because you're freaking tired") for 48 hours straight at the end of a fundraising drive for the four diamonds fund. She said that sometime during the last 12 hours or so she swears she had a conversation with one of my other friends who had stopped by, but he swears that he was nowhere near there then.
Considering that patents last 20 years, just looking at the time from 1986 to now they should be on equal footing.
Now, granted, MS probably got far fewer for quite some time, but I doubt that they are really that bad off...
I use it all the freaking time. I don't want to be constantly entering my password. I'm lazy.
/., you betcha that Firefox knows my password.
Now, granted, my computer doesn't remember my bank password for instance... I enter that each time. (I don't even know it... it's a ~14 character, randomly generated password stored in a PasswordSafe database.) But for sites like
At the same time, if the doctor says "there's nothing we can find wrong with your leg at the moment, but there's a chance that it will become infected later", I'll wait for it to become infected to amputate...
RISK
It's RISC! It's not a reduced instruction set komputer!
You want to be pedantic? I can be pedantic too.
Criminal cases decide between guilty and not guilty, not innocent.
In fact, I think this "quibble" is far less pedantic than using "innocent" to describe a civil finding (especially given that he was paraphrasing in lay English something that defendant, not the court, was saying) because in what appears at first to be just a difference in terms actually has wrapped in it one of the guiding philosophies of our criminal legal system, which is that you need to be proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Even if the jury thinks that you're guilty, but isn't pretty much convinced of that fact, they will still (usually) not convict you.
Wrong. If Novell can distribute it, then everyone else can. If everyone else can't, then neither can Novell, though for different reasons. (If everyone else can't distribute it because of patent issues, then Novell can't distribute it because the GPL doesn't grant distribution rights if you can't or don't license the patents too.) This means that if MS sues another distro over patent issues, and the offending code is traced to Novell, then everyone ELSE who has code in the kernel can then sue Novell for brach of contract/copyright violation, especially if they continue to distribute the code themselves. (Depending on the outcome of the case mentioned a couple days ago.)
S-expressions, of the sort used in Common Lisp and Scheme, would have been a good alternative. They're simple, use a minimal number of characters, and are very easy to parse. Hell, most Comp Sci grads have written at least once such parser during their education.
This article argues the other side of that point. I'm not sure how convincing it is, but there are at least some benefits to the XML approach. Where the balance falls, I don't know.
A lot of cheap controllers though (including some integrated motherboard ones) do RAID 0+1. At least the last time I looked, the cheapest RAID 5 card I saw was approaching $200.
I swear, /. moderators can be really weird sometimes.
But just a couple hours ago, there was another article warning that
Perhaps someone should look into this sleepwalking. I'm sure there's some kind of treatment.
more people have flash enabled than javascript
I very seriously doubt this... got a reference?
You don't fill out contact forms of companies you'd email because you don't trust them?
Why the distinction?
Coincidentally, there was an article just a few days ago on how to prevent spam to contact forms.
... Yeah ... I am afraid we don't quite see eye to eye on this one.
;-)
I do think the former is easier to read. It's not a big difference, but it's still easier.
I also think that a + b is easier to read than a.add(b). If there were a language that didn't support = operators at all, even for primitives, what would you think of it? Just as easy to read as if you went through and changed a.set(b) to a=b everywhere?
The other advantage I see properties having is the following: they let you use standard fields and later change them to be properties without changing any other code. Direct language support. If you want to be able to change representations, do extra processing, everything that using accessor methods gets you in Java, you either need to write it with setters and getters right from the start (and have corresponding code blowup... you're essentially writing the same thing three times; if Java had macros I would regularily use something like #define SG_FIELD(type, name) type name; void set##name(type new##name) { name = new##name; } type get##name() { return name; } to avoid the nonsense of writing the same thing over and over and freaking over again) or you need to use a tool that will automatically refactor the uses of a field to use setters and getters. Incidentally, Eclipse provides such a tool. Eclipse is a wonderful IDE, and was the reason that the work I did with Java a while ago was one of the more plesant programming experiences I've had despite (as you might be able to tell) being a fairly-big anti-fan of Java.
The issue of delegates I agree with to some degree, as it is nice syntactic sugar, but one that is, again, easily done equivalently well through the use of listener interfaces
Not always "easily". If you use interfaces, you have to use the function name provided, you can't give an arbitrary "call this function" construct. You can get around this with inner (and perhaps anonymous) classes, but at the expense of quite a bit more code.
It's Java's lack of delegates that is the reason that they need the nonsense like "you can subclass Thread or implement Runnable", "subclass WindowAdapter or implement WindowListener (oh, which BTW you'll have to implement all 10 methods even if you're only interested in one)", etc.
And, while I am at it - C#'s lack of a "throws" clause on functions is just as annoying.
I'll grant this one to you. Personally, I don't know where I stand with regards to checked exceptions. I'll agree that it can be nice in certain cases, but at the same time, it can be a big pain in the butt in others. One of my friends is doing a class project where they're looking at extending the Java language with something (I don't know exactly what they're doing, but it's something that relates to ensuring that cleanup code is run), and was telling me about a project that someone else worked on where they did a compromise. Basically, they make functions that could be called cross-module (read: package) checked, so you had to declare all possible exceptions that could leave that code. However, private and protected methods do not have to declare the exceptions that could be thrown, so a change to what one function does doesn't necessarily propagate to a zillion others. This to me sounds like a very reasonable compromise.
Of course, then you have C++, where the exception specifications are perhaps the worst-designed feature of the "++" part.
Now, if you are purely in your own code this isn't absolutely terrible, as you can just start digging and figure it out. However, if you are using any microsoft stuff, or any third party dlls, you are pretty much screwed
Okay, third party tools I'll again give you some (maybe most) of the time, but MS stuff? It's documented in the API reference plain as day. It's far easier to find that out than it would be to go through your code! You could make the argument that you don't know for sure that's all you have to deal with, but considering that the MSDN documentation is second to none in terms of quality, I don't think you have much to worry about there.
(Though I'll point out that the Java extension I mentioned above would apparently go a long way to solving your qualms)
Exactly. That's what a trial is for. To prove allegations.