Exactly. Anybody who thinks it's easy to complete a large software project without problems has obviously never worked on real software. Secondly, anybody who asks why it's so hard to develop good software has never worked on a large software project. You can say a lot of stuff about following processes, and doing testing, but until you're working on a large project, with lots of different developers, with time and money constraints, you don't know what you're talking about.
If bridge engineers were as lazy as programmers, bridges would be falling down by the hundreds.
I don't understand why people continually compare programming with building bridges, or cars. Until every programmer has a software engineering degree, and managers actually give them the time and resources to program correctly, then this is not a fair comparison. The reason that software fails so often is that it's rushed out the door before it's ready, or because the programmers are guys who took a 3 month course at a career college and now think they are programmers, and that they know what they are doing. Until the same care is taken designing software as it is to design bridges, they can't be compared. Bad software is not the fault of "lazy programmers", but rather the fault of companies hiring incompetent programmers, or not giving the competent ones the time and resources they need to do the job.
In Canada, the law says they can arrest you for being in "Care and Control" of a vehicle while drunk. I think they can arrest you for just starting the car, so as to stop you before you cause damage. So technically if your car detected you were drunk, then you could already be in trouble. If they see you pulled over on the side of the road, they may have cause to arrest you. Maybe this isn't such a bad idea. I think that cars are dangerous enough without having drunken people driving them. Personally, if I know i'm going to be driving, I try not to drink at all, or at most have 1 or 2. I don't want my reaction time any slower than it has to be with all the other idiots (drunken or not) on the road.
I know Deathcab for Cutie would say otherwise, but don't you keep gloves in your glove compartment? I would take a pair of gloves just incase the thing was malfunctioning. Although if it detects alcohol when there is none, then I don't think gloves will help.
What are you talking about. Those doctors on Grey's Anatomy are constantly talking on their cell phones. If doctors can use cell phones, then they can hook up a wireless network for the kids.
I was saying that downloads work better than netflix for the following reasons. I was saying that netflix could lose out to download services based on the problems that I listed. Anyway, here's some more stuff.
If number 1 isn't available on your list, then they send you number 2, or number 3, whichever is available, either that, or they wait until number 1 is actually available, in which case you have added wait times.
Download could beat netflix in this situation, so my point stands
Zip.ca closes the slot while they try to figure out what happened to the movie. They don't suspend your account, but you lose a slot. So, you still get to rent movies, but instead of having 4 movies, you have 3 movies. It takes 6 days before you're allowed to report it missing, and 21 days while they investigate, which is almost an entire month with one less slot.
Most (>95%) of movies arrived in 1 day, however, sometimes movies would take 4 or 5 days to arrive. Maybe it's the postal system, but that's still part of their business model.
Netfilx may have different policies, hard to say, but it's actually not so much of a problem as all the other junk listed above, as they didn't even have ship ahead when I joined in the first place.
This is just the same problem as before, only people aren't expecting it. A lot of people fell victim to phishing scams (and many still do), using email, because they are stupid. I guess this is a little more advanced, since people expect certain speed-dial numbers to not change. Granted they could probably just have a system where the bank has a password that they have to tell you, so that you can verify that you are actually talking to the bank. This is probably a good idea anyway, as it would be easy to get a 1-800 number similar to a bank, and wait for people to misdial, and then get their information.
I agree with you about Tetris. The best tetris I've been able to find for the PC is the Nintendo tetris, run on a emulator. It's kind of sad that nobody makes a good tetris game for the PC. It's such a simple game, you'd think it would be easy to program it well.
I don't know. This does have some advantages over Netflix. These are a few of the reasons I quit Zip.Ca, The Canadian Netflix.
You get exactly the movie you want, and not some random movie picked from your list.
New releases are never able to be delivered anywhere close to the release date because of such high demand.
You don't have to worry about movies that were "stolen" (AKA Lost in the mail) that never ended up in your mailbox, even though it's a locked mailbox because you live in an apartment building, which causes the slot to be suspended for about a month.
Movies don't get delivered for 5 days even though they are shipping them from the same city you live in.
Stolen (aka lost in the mail) movies mean that you don't get special features such as shipments immediately after you mark a movie as returned.
But I'm not paying to rent a downloadable movie until I can watch it on my home theatre, which hollywood told me to buy, without some complicated wiring set-up. I don't want to run wires from my computer to my TV, because they are in different rooms. I don't want to be required to buy special hardware to get the movie to display on the TV. I already have a DVD burner that can burn movies that will play on my DVD player.
Yes, but then 99.9% of the pages on the internet would not display at all. That sure is one way to get everyone to switch to firefox, have IE stop displaying all the pages. People have become used to being able to put up any old slop and having the browser struggle through displaying it. You can't just expect people to go and recode all their webpages so that they don't have invalid HTML in there. The other thing is that most of the bugs are due to Javascript or ActiveX, and have nothing to do with non-standard coding but how the code that is written, according to spec is handled. Granted, They would have more time to work on security bugs if they didn't have to figure out how to read mangled webpages, but they can't just stop reading mangled pages.
This works really well with some foods. Buy yourself some really good chocolate, then you're good after a couple squares, you don't have to eat very much. If you buy crappy chocolate, you end up eating an entire bar, and still not feeling satisfied.
I'm using low-speed cable. It 1 Mbit, which gives fast (enough) download, but slow upload. I don't really send out a lot of data, so it's not much of a problem. Most cable providers I know of cap even the high speed access to 40 or 50 KBPS (notice the capital B), because they don't want people using their home computers as servers. 15 KBPS isn't really that bad, but when you have a lot of connections going out, it tends to have very slow response times.
It would be a welcome feature to be able to tune my uploads so that I don't kill my connection when downloading over bittorrent. the --max-upload-rate feature seems to make my bittorrent client do an endless recursive loop that ends up crashing the client. I have a very low upload cap, around 15 KBPS, and when it gets maxed, I'd like to be able to limit the connection just a little, to leave room for ACK packets.
I really don't understand the argument that there isn't enough applications for Linux. As a Linux user, I find that there's plenty of applications for Linux. Sure there's a couple specialized applications that don't work, such as Photoshop, Autocad, and others, but for 99% of the people with computers on their work desk, Linux would do just fine. Most of the time, the open source alternative will suffice. Once most of the world is switched, the rest of the applications will follow.
I just thought of something that would make a great patent. A light switch that only stays on for a specified period of time, say 10 minutes. Most of the time, I turn the light on, and often forget to turn it off. I think lots of people just forget. So, if you could just flick the switch, and know it would stay on for 10 minutes, then you wouldn't have to remember to turn it off. Maybe have a special button you press if you want it to stay on for a while. It would be great for just about any room in the house, but especially hall lights, bathrooms, and closets, where you don't really spend too much time.
That 1 second delay + 1 minute warm up time is great in the morning when my eyes haven't adjusted to the light yet. It's a lot easier on your eyes when the light isn't at full brightness right away.
The canadian government has lots of unionized IT employees. Never heard of it in the private sector, but I'm sure some company out there has unionized tech employees.
You could just back them up to regular DVD. Given that BluRay is better quality than DVD, you could probably reencode it to DVD size without losing much over the DVD. You could even use MPEG4 to back it up, and store HD content on the DVD, you would probably have better quality than the DVD. You can't back up to BluRay for a good price, but a back up to DVD is better than no back up at all.
Voice recognition is a stupid way to enter text into a computer. In a cubicle, where your neighbours can hear you it's completely annoying. In your house, where you have the TV on in the background and kids continually talking, I can't imagine it would work that well, Unless you had a silent office where you weren't going to bother other people, I couldn't see this being an advantage. And even then, People don't talk how they write. If most people saw what they said written down on the screen, they wouldn't even be able to understand it. Keyboards work a lot better for entering text.
The difference as I see it is that Google doesn't display sponsored search results like many of the other search engines out there. The results they display are all based on the PageRank algorithm, which is supposed to be a reflection of how relevant the site is to your search terms. It's very deceptive to users who know that google doesn't display sponsored results to display your own stuff first. If you search for maps, it's hard to tell if Google maps is actually the most popular, or just displayed first because Google decided they want their own stuff first. I'm not saying that they are being evil, but I do find it a little odd they fudge the results just for their own good.
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Exactly. Anybody who thinks it's easy to complete a large software project without problems has obviously never worked on real software. Secondly, anybody who asks why it's so hard to develop good software has never worked on a large software project. You can say a lot of stuff about following processes, and doing testing, but until you're working on a large project, with lots of different developers, with time and money constraints, you don't know what you're talking about.
In Canada, the law says they can arrest you for being in "Care and Control" of a vehicle while drunk. I think they can arrest you for just starting the car, so as to stop you before you cause damage. So technically if your car detected you were drunk, then you could already be in trouble. If they see you pulled over on the side of the road, they may have cause to arrest you. Maybe this isn't such a bad idea. I think that cars are dangerous enough without having drunken people driving them. Personally, if I know i'm going to be driving, I try not to drink at all, or at most have 1 or 2. I don't want my reaction time any slower than it has to be with all the other idiots (drunken or not) on the road.
I know Deathcab for Cutie would say otherwise, but don't you keep gloves in your glove compartment? I would take a pair of gloves just incase the thing was malfunctioning. Although if it detects alcohol when there is none, then I don't think gloves will help.
What are you talking about. Those doctors on Grey's Anatomy are constantly talking on their cell phones. If doctors can use cell phones, then they can hook up a wireless network for the kids.
Why not pick a linux distro that supports KDE, Gnome, and others, so that the user can make their own decision.
This is just the same problem as before, only people aren't expecting it. A lot of people fell victim to phishing scams (and many still do), using email, because they are stupid. I guess this is a little more advanced, since people expect certain speed-dial numbers to not change. Granted they could probably just have a system where the bank has a password that they have to tell you, so that you can verify that you are actually talking to the bank. This is probably a good idea anyway, as it would be easy to get a 1-800 number similar to a bank, and wait for people to misdial, and then get their information.
I agree with you about Tetris. The best tetris I've been able to find for the PC is the Nintendo tetris, run on a emulator. It's kind of sad that nobody makes a good tetris game for the PC. It's such a simple game, you'd think it would be easy to program it well.
But I'm not paying to rent a downloadable movie until I can watch it on my home theatre, which hollywood told me to buy, without some complicated wiring set-up. I don't want to run wires from my computer to my TV, because they are in different rooms. I don't want to be required to buy special hardware to get the movie to display on the TV. I already have a DVD burner that can burn movies that will play on my DVD player.
Yes, but then 99.9% of the pages on the internet would not display at all. That sure is one way to get everyone to switch to firefox, have IE stop displaying all the pages. People have become used to being able to put up any old slop and having the browser struggle through displaying it. You can't just expect people to go and recode all their webpages so that they don't have invalid HTML in there. The other thing is that most of the bugs are due to Javascript or ActiveX, and have nothing to do with non-standard coding but how the code that is written, according to spec is handled. Granted, They would have more time to work on security bugs if they didn't have to figure out how to read mangled webpages, but they can't just stop reading mangled pages.
This works really well with some foods. Buy yourself some really good chocolate, then you're good after a couple squares, you don't have to eat very much. If you buy crappy chocolate, you end up eating an entire bar, and still not feeling satisfied.
I use the official bittorent client, bittorrent-curses. And it does contain the problem I speak of. It also happens with bittorrent-console.
I'm using low-speed cable. It 1 Mbit, which gives fast (enough) download, but slow upload. I don't really send out a lot of data, so it's not much of a problem. Most cable providers I know of cap even the high speed access to 40 or 50 KBPS (notice the capital B), because they don't want people using their home computers as servers. 15 KBPS isn't really that bad, but when you have a lot of connections going out, it tends to have very slow response times.
It would be a welcome feature to be able to tune my uploads so that I don't kill my connection when downloading over bittorrent. the --max-upload-rate feature seems to make my bittorrent client do an endless recursive loop that ends up crashing the client. I have a very low upload cap, around 15 KBPS, and when it gets maxed, I'd like to be able to limit the connection just a little, to leave room for ACK packets.
My ISP cut off it's newsgroup server, saying there wasn't enough people using it. Do you know of any public newsgroup servers that offer good speeds?
I really don't understand the argument that there isn't enough applications for Linux. As a Linux user, I find that there's plenty of applications for Linux. Sure there's a couple specialized applications that don't work, such as Photoshop, Autocad, and others, but for 99% of the people with computers on their work desk, Linux would do just fine. Most of the time, the open source alternative will suffice. Once most of the world is switched, the rest of the applications will follow.
I just thought of something that would make a great patent. A light switch that only stays on for a specified period of time, say 10 minutes. Most of the time, I turn the light on, and often forget to turn it off. I think lots of people just forget. So, if you could just flick the switch, and know it would stay on for 10 minutes, then you wouldn't have to remember to turn it off. Maybe have a special button you press if you want it to stay on for a while. It would be great for just about any room in the house, but especially hall lights, bathrooms, and closets, where you don't really spend too much time.
That 1 second delay + 1 minute warm up time is great in the morning when my eyes haven't adjusted to the light yet. It's a lot easier on your eyes when the light isn't at full brightness right away.
The canadian government has lots of unionized IT employees. Never heard of it in the private sector, but I'm sure some company out there has unionized tech employees.
You could just back them up to regular DVD. Given that BluRay is better quality than DVD, you could probably reencode it to DVD size without losing much over the DVD. You could even use MPEG4 to back it up, and store HD content on the DVD, you would probably have better quality than the DVD. You can't back up to BluRay for a good price, but a back up to DVD is better than no back up at all.
Voice recognition is a stupid way to enter text into a computer. In a cubicle, where your neighbours can hear you it's completely annoying. In your house, where you have the TV on in the background and kids continually talking, I can't imagine it would work that well, Unless you had a silent office where you weren't going to bother other people, I couldn't see this being an advantage. And even then, People don't talk how they write. If most people saw what they said written down on the screen, they wouldn't even be able to understand it. Keyboards work a lot better for entering text.
They didn't need any lunar dust the first time they went to the moon. Why do they need this stuff now. Just to crank up the budget?
The difference as I see it is that Google doesn't display sponsored search results like many of the other search engines out there. The results they display are all based on the PageRank algorithm, which is supposed to be a reflection of how relevant the site is to your search terms. It's very deceptive to users who know that google doesn't display sponsored results to display your own stuff first. If you search for maps, it's hard to tell if Google maps is actually the most popular, or just displayed first because Google decided they want their own stuff first. I'm not saying that they are being evil, but I do find it a little odd they fudge the results just for their own good.