One thing though: This story is a great demonstration of my maxim that any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word "no". The reason why journalists use that style of headline is that they know the story is probably bollocks, and donâ(TM)t actually have the sources and facts to back it up, but still want to run it.
In other words,
Betteridge's law of headlines describes trolling by the writer or publisher rather than a commenter.
One of the reasons I like OpenBSD is the developers are very forthright about why things can't or won't work. Reading the misc@ mail list is a great way to learn about the issues they face trying to get documentation. There are non-trivial issues with both acpi and efi. The developers reverse engineer what they can.
Instead of asking "Why doesn't OpenBSD have better support for $hardware?" we should be asking "Why don't vendors post more public information about their hardware?"
Anyone who grew up in the 70s and 80s buying electronics probably has very distinct memories of getting schematics and diagrams with their new products (or could order them cheaply). My first cw-band radio came with a full electrical schematic. Now, it's a crap shoot. Some of the blame lies with the industry as a whole. Much lies with the USPTO, or more precisely, the laws governing patentability and duration of patents.
The industry is to blame because it's easier to not to. Even if a retail vendor wanted to release good doc sub-component vendors may refuse to allow them. Why? In part to protect themselves from copycats. In part to protect themselves from patent lawsuits.
Patents are the another aspect of the not-so-secret problem. They're all violating somebody's patent on something (at least in the eyes of the patent holder). Whether it's in the fabrication process, a "method" of calculating or who knows what, someone has a claim. The more a company expose about the inner workings of their devices the more information patent trolls and competitors have for pursuing license (revenue), agreements. The smartphone patent war we're seeing played out in the courts is one example of the problem.
Yet another aspect of the problem is self-serving vendor "standards". EFI began as an Intel initiative. Intel later handed control of the spec over to the UEFI Forum, a non-profit corporation. The goal of EFI isn't so much to fix BIOS as to further vendor interests, whether to protect their "IP" or lock customers into using their devices in vendor "approved" ways.
Contrast that to Open Firmware (OpenBoot) which began as a Sun initiative and later became an IEEE standard. Or LinuxBios (now coreboot) which is an open source replacement replacement for both BIOS and EFI. Coreboot has made some progress but it requires vendor participation to make critical details available for implementation. You can guess how well that's going.
If the OpenBSD project were willing to sign NDAs and/or accept binary blobs there would be better support of technologies like suspend/sleep. But they're not willing to do so. Rather they work with vendors who are willing to share details, reverse engineer where possible and do without when neither option is available.
1) OpenBSD supports tons of hardware. Click on one of the supported platforms. First you'll notice is OpenBSD runs on more than x86. Second, click through. You have to work hard to find a class of hardware that doesn't have some support. Most mainstream hardware is supported with many vendors to select from. When you do find missing hardware it's due to the point 2 below.
2) There may be some truth to the claim that Theo has pissed-off some vendors but it plays a small part. A more significant reason there aren't tons of corporate drivers for OpenBSD is the OpenBSD community won't accept any undocumented code (settings that use magic numbers), binary blobs (other than micro code or firmware) and won't sign NDAs to get the info. For code to go in the base it also has to be licensed under a BSD or ISC license.[1]
Many vendors want us to buy their hardware and trust their giant binary blob won't crash our systems. That's their call. Refusing to buy their hardware is ours.
Because of Theo's and the developer's stand against binary blobs OpenBSD base is one of the freest OSs you'll find. If that means a few missing drivers then so be it. Our systems run fine without them.
[1] The only GPL licensed code in base I can think of is gcc.
I don't think you have to ruin the vehicle to accomplish the goal. In the article I linked above the Google car suffered little damage but it stayed at the location. Why? It's a hit and run otherwise.
I think it'll be pretty easy. The vehicle will have to stop if it detects a collision[1]. So the question is: after bumping the car from any side, how fast can determined thieves get to the GPS (or the communications device), disable it, hook up a tow truck and get away?
I'm betting faster than typical metro police can get to the last reported coordinates.
[1] Google's autonomous car rear-ended a car last year and stayed around for the accident. Apparently the accident was a result of "human error" but still, it stayed put.
They're going to mandate driver-less cars have unique, identifiable license plates? Sounds like a "Steal Me!" badge.
Remember the problem Florida had about 10 years ago where rental cars with clearly-identifiable stickers (Enterprise "E")? The cards were driven mostly by out-of-country tourists. They were being jacked because the bad guys knew they couldn't defend themselves.
Driver-less cars are chock-a-block with experimental technology, all wrapped-up inside of a $15k - $40k vehicle...with no one to defend them.
No one has tweeted to me that there was a speed trap around the bend.
True. But a lot of people coordinated #SOPA and #PIPA protests via Twitter. @jimmy_wales raised a lot of awareness about the issue with his tweets supporting the protest.
I'll take a speeding ticket any day of the week over SOPA, PIPA and the current outrage, ACTA.
When I studied for my driver's license in the UK I thought it humorous that several study courses recommended putting the handbrake on at stops to in part prevent the brake lights from dazzling the driver behind:
Using the footbrake is also antisocial and can be dangerous because brake lights can dazzle the driver behind, especially at night and in poor weather conditions. Smart Driving[1]
Apparently laser to the eye isn't as anti-social as leaving one's brake lights on at a stop at night.
I bought the Nook Color for the same reason. The Nook Color PDF reader is a very capable viewer. I didn't want the Nook version of Android so I bought one that was already rooted with CyanogenMod.
I'm mostly happy with it for reading PDFs. Like any tablet-sized reader you will have to pan. You can view the pages in portrait mode fully zoomed out but it's hard to read that way. I read in landscape and just pan the document a bit. I'm finding more authors are publishing to PDF using one column. In those cases it just work. Pinch-zooming works but the text rarely (if ever) re-flows the way web pages do in Chrome.
I don't like the Adobe file browser on Android, though. It adds every PDF on the SD card to the master list. It's a giant scrollable list with each folder path as a section separator. I would like the option to toggle between hierarchical folder view and list.
I tried using Calibre to convert some PDFs to ePub. Two-column PDFs have been a disaster. I rarely get anything that's usable. YMMV. I decided to stick with PDFs (or.ps files I convert to PDF).
Using Chrome to read web pages is mostly workable. Strangely, clicking an HTML file in the file manager doesn't launch the regular Chrome browser. Rather you get the "HTML Viewer". It's mostly Chrome but has no open dialog or access to bookmarks (AFAICT).
As an Android device it's quite functional. Most market applications install without a problem. The one I have problems with are those for which the Download button doesn't appear. I haven't chased the issue down yet. Not sure whether it's a Cyanogen issue.
Google Books works great but you have to have internet access to read the books. Just goes to prove Android is really designed to be an always-connected OS. FBReader, on the other hand, just works.
As you can tell, it's no iPad in terms of "It Just Works". In sum, as a PDF reader I'm mostly happy with it. All the other features are bonuses. The issues are mostly irrelevant.
Lastly, if you check E-Bay or B&N's website they sell refurbed Nook Color's for $199. For an extra $50 you can get the extended warranty (if you're into those). For the same $249 for a new one with 1-year warranty you get a unit with a 2-year warranty.
No doubt. Geeks have known this for years. During it's heyday one slashdotter referred to the Pentium 4 as a space heater that emits computational products as a side effect.
Quite possibly. Sony's responsibilities to their customers might not rise to the level of Fiduciary Responsbility but customers do have a reasonable expectation of due care, at least with their credit card information and likely with their account information.
Further, to receive full indemnification from the payment-card industry against claims of fraud, you must be PCI compliant. Were Sony PCI compliant having un-patched software on public-facing servers? Doesn't seem like it. This could potentially open Sony up to all kinds of claims.
Even if Sony somehow manage to escape civil and criminal justice ramifications, carelessness is no way to run a business. Sony's reputation is already tarnished in the tech world. They may finally get the public scrutiny and drop in reputation and market-share they've earned and so well deserve.
That's what I mean... it's like believing that the earth is flat, which was widely held by even scientists centuries ago.
I think you mean geocentrism. The flat earth was never a "widely held" theory. Other than a few wackos today it has rarely ever been seriously held. The thesis that medieval philosophers believed the earth was flat was pretty much invented entirely by Washington Irving who wrote historical fiction presented as fact. Jeffrey Burton Russell debunked the thesis in his book Inventing the Flat Earth (See also this article). Medieval philosophers were very aware of the curvature of the earth from both their own observations and their knowledge of Greek science.
As noted, though, most everyone believed in geocentrism until the time of Galileo and a bit beyond. Aristarchus of Samos was one of the earliest to argue for a heliocentric worldview. The theory was considered many times for almost two-thousand years and was usually set aside because 1) it disagreed with observation — the sun, moon and stars appeared to move around the earth, and 2) the apparent lack of stellar parallax (which would not be observed until the 19th century).
And on top of that, just try writing a query for hierarchical data! You'll have sub-selects for each level of hierarchy. This means in order to to something relatively simple, like KPCOFGS of species classifications, you'll need a select and 6 sub-selects. At least that one is well defined to . If its not, you just don't know how many, and you have to write a recursive function to generate your select query, or process the results from it. Either way, you repeatedly consider 99% useless records at every level. True, you can cheat at this because there are always 7 levels. But that is not true for most other trees.
This is true if you use the Agency List Model for hierarchical data. Nested Set Models are a better solution to storing hierarchical data and are extremely fast and efficient for selecting arbitrarily deep nested data without tons of sub-selects. Though inserts are slow in theory (because you have to re-balance the tree) there are practical ways of inserting data so performance doesn't suffer.
See the MySQL site for their discussion of the Nested Set Model, this article on the same topic by Joe Celko and a question about insert performance in which Celko responds.
Notice how the girls were charged with trespassing (usually a misdemeanor) and fined? No jail time or apparently even suspension. While I hope it would be the same here, my guess is our "zero-tolerance" laws would have the child booted from school for the rest of the year and brought up on a felony charge of criminal trespassing and aggravated privacy violations.
Interesting to note that the article calls them a "pair of mischievous Swedish schoolgirls" and this from a Fox affiliate. When did we forget about mischief?
Roundabouts (aka "Traffic Circles") are the one true solution to the problem of running red lights because it replaces an inefficient, mechanically stupid solution with an efficient, self-regulating solution. Traffic lights at their core are an impediment to traffic flow. Every x minutes traffic flow is halted so that (mostly) perpendicular traffic can begin moving again. So all these cars moving at 20 - 50 MPH are brought to a complete stand still. Sometimes (often in some areas) where there's no cross traffic waiting. Regardless, the dumb timer has no choice but to stop traffic.
Enter the Roundabout. Traffic for the most part constantly flows. Yes, there drivers have to slow down a bit to enter and leave, and sometimes even slows to a stop, but stopping as timed requirement all but comes to an end. (There are some massive roundabouts that do have red lights attached to them).
One of the biggest benefits is that t-bone collisions are all but eliminated. If the roundabout is designed correctly that is.
One major objection frequently thrown up against roundabouts is "American's will never learn to use them". Wrong. Here in Houston the City has built several. From what I know we've had more collisions with the light-rail trains than with other automobiles in the roundabouts.
If cities want to get serious about improving safety they should look at proven solutions. And as a bonus we'll all get home more quickly and find we never stand at 2am red light on a deserted road again.
Well played, sir! Well played indeed. Best orthogonal quote I've seen of late.
I also agree with the other commenters. "Blink" was one of the best Dr Who episodes ever. In 2007 fans voted it 2nd best episode behind Peter Davison's final episode, "The Caves of Androzani". Not bad for an episode in which the Dr is seen almost entirely in snippets from a pre-recorded message.
And Saint Attila raised the hand grenade up on high, saying, "O Lord, bless this Thy hand grenade that with it Thou mayest blow Thine enemies to tiny bits, in Thy mercy."
But it took 3.5 billion people 22 years to figure it out, which means that it was a pretty effective secret. That sounds a lot more effective than just plain "obscurity."
No. In 22 years only one person in 3.5 billion cracked GSM encryption and published his findings. According to the article others have cracked the encryption but haven't published.
What we now know is that it's crackable based purely on data analysis. That tells us everything worth knowing about GSM encryption. Anyone with a need for secure communications now has to treat GSM encryption as if it has been cracked by everyone they want to secure the communications against. To do otherwise would be about the only thing worse than security through obscurity.
Hacker paradox: anyone who can write: "I keep my resume as a big lisp data structure which Emacs can use to emit into any markup language I care to write an emitter for..." doesn't need a resume but if you hadn't done it you'd still need a resume.
Only if the manager stays late to 1) eliminate external distractions, 2) order meals, 3) test, or 4) write macros, scripts or other shippable elements, if the product supports such features.
Hanging around just to make sure developers stays put or focused implies the developers aren't professionals or the manager isn't doing his job (item 1 above). If true, then it's the manager's fault for hiring or keeping the developer around and no amount of babysitting is going to deliver quality code. If not true, then an insulting hindrance and is quite likely to hinder or prevent delivery of quality code.
Lastly, there's always the question "Why are developers staying late anyway?" and whose fault is it. If it's the manager's fault, and it always is unless we're talking about developers who work night shifts, then hanging around to make sure developers get work done the manager caused or should have prevented is likely to cause resentment. Tread lightly and focus on items 1 - 4 above.
Slashdot Mirror
It's always no.
In other words, Betteridge's law of headlines describes trolling by the writer or publisher rather than a commenter.
One of the reasons I like OpenBSD is the developers are very forthright about why things can't or won't work. Reading the misc@ mail list is a great way to learn about the issues they face trying to get documentation. There are non-trivial issues with both acpi and efi. The developers reverse engineer what they can.
Instead of asking "Why doesn't OpenBSD have better support for $hardware?" we should be asking "Why don't vendors post more public information about their hardware?"
Anyone who grew up in the 70s and 80s buying electronics probably has very distinct memories of getting schematics and diagrams with their new products (or could order them cheaply). My first cw-band radio came with a full electrical schematic. Now, it's a crap shoot. Some of the blame lies with the industry as a whole. Much lies with the USPTO, or more precisely, the laws governing patentability and duration of patents.
The industry is to blame because it's easier to not to. Even if a retail vendor wanted to release good doc sub-component vendors may refuse to allow them. Why? In part to protect themselves from copycats. In part to protect themselves from patent lawsuits.
Patents are the another aspect of the not-so-secret problem. They're all violating somebody's patent on something (at least in the eyes of the patent holder). Whether it's in the fabrication process, a "method" of calculating or who knows what, someone has a claim. The more a company expose about the inner workings of their devices the more information patent trolls and competitors have for pursuing license (revenue), agreements. The smartphone patent war we're seeing played out in the courts is one example of the problem.
Yet another aspect of the problem is self-serving vendor "standards". EFI began as an Intel initiative. Intel later handed control of the spec over to the UEFI Forum, a non-profit corporation. The goal of EFI isn't so much to fix BIOS as to further vendor interests, whether to protect their "IP" or lock customers into using their devices in vendor "approved" ways.
Contrast that to Open Firmware (OpenBoot) which began as a Sun initiative and later became an IEEE standard. Or LinuxBios (now coreboot) which is an open source replacement replacement for both BIOS and EFI. Coreboot has made some progress but it requires vendor participation to make critical details available for implementation. You can guess how well that's going.
If the OpenBSD project were willing to sign NDAs and/or accept binary blobs there would be better support of technologies like suspend/sleep. But they're not willing to do so. Rather they work with vendors who are willing to share details, reverse engineer where possible and do without when neither option is available.
There are two replies to this:
1) OpenBSD supports tons of hardware. Click on one of the supported platforms. First you'll notice is OpenBSD runs on more than x86. Second, click through. You have to work hard to find a class of hardware that doesn't have some support. Most mainstream hardware is supported with many vendors to select from. When you do find missing hardware it's due to the point 2 below.
2) There may be some truth to the claim that Theo has pissed-off some vendors but it plays a small part. A more significant reason there aren't tons of corporate drivers for OpenBSD is the OpenBSD community won't accept any undocumented code (settings that use magic numbers), binary blobs (other than micro code or firmware) and won't sign NDAs to get the info. For code to go in the base it also has to be licensed under a BSD or ISC license.[1]
Many vendors want us to buy their hardware and trust their giant binary blob won't crash our systems. That's their call. Refusing to buy their hardware is ours.
Because of Theo's and the developer's stand against binary blobs OpenBSD base is one of the freest OSs you'll find. If that means a few missing drivers then so be it. Our systems run fine without them.
[1] The only GPL licensed code in base I can think of is gcc.
So you're going to block comments by userids above 1459? ;-)
I keep reading each side's position in terms of movie quotes:
I don't think you have to ruin the vehicle to accomplish the goal. In the article I linked above the Google car suffered little damage but it stayed at the location. Why? It's a hit and run otherwise.
I think it'll be pretty easy. The vehicle will have to stop if it detects a collision[1]. So the question is: after bumping the car from any side, how fast can determined thieves get to the GPS (or the communications device), disable it, hook up a tow truck and get away?
I'm betting faster than typical metro police can get to the last reported coordinates.
[1] Google's autonomous car rear-ended a car last year and stayed around for the accident. Apparently the accident was a result of "human error" but still, it stayed put.
They're going to mandate driver-less cars have unique, identifiable license plates? Sounds like a "Steal Me!" badge.
Remember the problem Florida had about 10 years ago where rental cars with clearly-identifiable stickers (Enterprise "E")? The cards were driven mostly by out-of-country tourists. They were being jacked because the bad guys knew they couldn't defend themselves.
Driver-less cars are chock-a-block with experimental technology, all wrapped-up inside of a $15k - $40k vehicle...with no one to defend them.
What could go wrong?
At least until they get lasers.
True. But a lot of people coordinated #SOPA and #PIPA protests via Twitter. @jimmy_wales raised a lot of awareness about the issue with his tweets supporting the protest.
I'll take a speeding ticket any day of the week over SOPA, PIPA and the current outrage, ACTA.
When I studied for my driver's license in the UK I thought it humorous that several study courses recommended putting the handbrake on at stops to in part prevent the brake lights from dazzling the driver behind:
Apparently laser to the eye isn't as anti-social as leaving one's brake lights on at a stop at night.
[1] And that's not the only example.
I bought the Nook Color for the same reason. The Nook Color PDF reader is a very capable viewer. I didn't want the Nook version of Android so I bought one that was already rooted with CyanogenMod.
I'm mostly happy with it for reading PDFs. Like any tablet-sized reader you will have to pan. You can view the pages in portrait mode fully zoomed out but it's hard to read that way. I read in landscape and just pan the document a bit. I'm finding more authors are publishing to PDF using one column. In those cases it just work. Pinch-zooming works but the text rarely (if ever) re-flows the way web pages do in Chrome.
I don't like the Adobe file browser on Android, though. It adds every PDF on the SD card to the master list. It's a giant scrollable list with each folder path as a section separator. I would like the option to toggle between hierarchical folder view and list.
I tried using Calibre to convert some PDFs to ePub. Two-column PDFs have been a disaster. I rarely get anything that's usable. YMMV. I decided to stick with PDFs (or .ps files I convert to PDF).
Using Chrome to read web pages is mostly workable. Strangely, clicking an HTML file in the file manager doesn't launch the regular Chrome browser. Rather you get the "HTML Viewer". It's mostly Chrome but has no open dialog or access to bookmarks (AFAICT).
As an Android device it's quite functional. Most market applications install without a problem. The one I have problems with are those for which the Download button doesn't appear. I haven't chased the issue down yet. Not sure whether it's a Cyanogen issue.
Google Books works great but you have to have internet access to read the books. Just goes to prove Android is really designed to be an always-connected OS. FBReader, on the other hand, just works.
As you can tell, it's no iPad in terms of "It Just Works". In sum, as a PDF reader I'm mostly happy with it. All the other features are bonuses. The issues are mostly irrelevant.
Lastly, if you check E-Bay or B&N's website they sell refurbed Nook Color's for $199. For an extra $50 you can get the extended warranty (if you're into those). For the same $249 for a new one with 1-year warranty you get a unit with a 2-year warranty.
No doubt. Geeks have known this for years. During it's heyday one slashdotter referred to the Pentium 4 as a space heater that emits computational products as a side effect.
Quite possibly. Sony's responsibilities to their customers might not rise to the level of Fiduciary Responsbility but customers do have a reasonable expectation of due care, at least with their credit card information and likely with their account information.
Further, to receive full indemnification from the payment-card industry against claims of fraud, you must be PCI compliant. Were Sony PCI compliant having un-patched software on public-facing servers? Doesn't seem like it. This could potentially open Sony up to all kinds of claims.
Even if Sony somehow manage to escape civil and criminal justice ramifications, carelessness is no way to run a business. Sony's reputation is already tarnished in the tech world. They may finally get the public scrutiny and drop in reputation and market-share they've earned and so well deserve.
I think you mean geocentrism. The flat earth was never a "widely held" theory. Other than a few wackos today it has rarely ever been seriously held. The thesis that medieval philosophers believed the earth was flat was pretty much invented entirely by Washington Irving who wrote historical fiction presented as fact. Jeffrey Burton Russell debunked the thesis in his book Inventing the Flat Earth (See also this article). Medieval philosophers were very aware of the curvature of the earth from both their own observations and their knowledge of Greek science.
As noted, though, most everyone believed in geocentrism until the time of Galileo and a bit beyond. Aristarchus of Samos was one of the earliest to argue for a heliocentric worldview. The theory was considered many times for almost two-thousand years and was usually set aside because 1) it disagreed with observation — the sun, moon and stars appeared to move around the earth, and 2) the apparent lack of stellar parallax (which would not be observed until the 19th century).
Many US companies are praying for relief in patent cases. ;-)
Sadly, that's not what the parent meant by "prayer for relief".
Haha! You're right, I did.
Thanks!
This is true if you use the Agency List Model for hierarchical data. Nested Set Models are a better solution to storing hierarchical data and are extremely fast and efficient for selecting arbitrarily deep nested data without tons of sub-selects. Though inserts are slow in theory (because you have to re-balance the tree) there are practical ways of inserting data so performance doesn't suffer.
See the MySQL site for their discussion of the Nested Set Model, this article on the same topic by Joe Celko and a question about insert performance in which Celko responds.
Notice how the girls were charged with trespassing (usually a misdemeanor) and fined? No jail time or apparently even suspension. While I hope it would be the same here, my guess is our "zero-tolerance" laws would have the child booted from school for the rest of the year and brought up on a felony charge of criminal trespassing and aggravated privacy violations.
Interesting to note that the article calls them a "pair of mischievous Swedish schoolgirls" and this from a Fox affiliate. When did we forget about mischief?
Roundabouts (aka "Traffic Circles") are the one true solution to the problem of running red lights because it replaces an inefficient, mechanically stupid solution with an efficient, self-regulating solution. Traffic lights at their core are an impediment to traffic flow. Every x minutes traffic flow is halted so that (mostly) perpendicular traffic can begin moving again. So all these cars moving at 20 - 50 MPH are brought to a complete stand still. Sometimes (often in some areas) where there's no cross traffic waiting. Regardless, the dumb timer has no choice but to stop traffic.
Enter the Roundabout. Traffic for the most part constantly flows. Yes, there drivers have to slow down a bit to enter and leave, and sometimes even slows to a stop, but stopping as timed requirement all but comes to an end. (There are some massive roundabouts that do have red lights attached to them).
One of the biggest benefits is that t-bone collisions are all but eliminated. If the roundabout is designed correctly that is.
One major objection frequently thrown up against roundabouts is "American's will never learn to use them". Wrong. Here in Houston the City has built several. From what I know we've had more collisions with the light-rail trains than with other automobiles in the roundabouts.
If cities want to get serious about improving safety they should look at proven solutions. And as a bonus we'll all get home more quickly and find we never stand at 2am red light on a deserted road again.
Well played, sir! Well played indeed. Best orthogonal quote I've seen of late.
I also agree with the other commenters. "Blink" was one of the best Dr Who episodes ever. In 2007 fans voted it 2nd best episode behind Peter Davison's final episode, "The Caves of Androzani". Not bad for an episode in which the Dr is seen almost entirely in snippets from a pre-recorded message.
Book of Armaments, Chapter 2, verses 9-21
No. In 22 years only one person in 3.5 billion cracked GSM encryption and published his findings. According to the article others have cracked the encryption but haven't published.
What we now know is that it's crackable based purely on data analysis. That tells us everything worth knowing about GSM encryption. Anyone with a need for secure communications now has to treat GSM encryption as if it has been cracked by everyone they want to secure the communications against. To do otherwise would be about the only thing worse than security through obscurity.
Hacker paradox: anyone who can write: "I keep my resume as a big lisp data structure which Emacs can use to emit into any markup language I care to write an emitter for..." doesn't need a resume but if you hadn't done it you'd still need a resume.
— From another emacs geek.
Only if the manager stays late to 1) eliminate external distractions, 2) order meals, 3) test, or 4) write macros, scripts or other shippable elements, if the product supports such features.
Hanging around just to make sure developers stays put or focused implies the developers aren't professionals or the manager isn't doing his job (item 1 above). If true, then it's the manager's fault for hiring or keeping the developer around and no amount of babysitting is going to deliver quality code. If not true, then an insulting hindrance and is quite likely to hinder or prevent delivery of quality code.
Lastly, there's always the question "Why are developers staying late anyway?" and whose fault is it. If it's the manager's fault, and it always is unless we're talking about developers who work night shifts, then hanging around to make sure developers get work done the manager caused or should have prevented is likely to cause resentment. Tread lightly and focus on items 1 - 4 above.
just sniffed and said: "I love the smell of class-action lawsuits in the morning. It smells like stale cigarette smoke and filthy lucre."