Yeah, Joel sometimes has useful things to say; this is not one of them. It's a very knee-jerk "as a manager I like to save money" response, and it isn't helpful.
The Duct-Tape Programmer is the programmer whose work I get paid to come in and fix.
The programmers that do a good job up-front and leave code that's easy to maintain have a real irony to them - they leave the door open to Duct-Tape Programmers. There's not much incentive to write maintainable code at most organizations, especially if you have one of these Duct-Tape types in your organization or looming ahead - because the results to a manager who doesn't ask any questions will always be the same: "The 3 months programmer 1 spent got me 30%, the 3 months Duct Tape spent got me 70%. Duct Tape is my guy." Well he got there by throwing maintainability to the wind and leveraging what that good programmer set out as a foundation.
Unlike this article, what would actually be insightful is legitimate information about the relative maintainability of code at a given point. There's no industry-standard way to assess code for how maintainable a code base is. Perhaps we need one.
The most obvious potential method that comes to mind is to have 10 programmers (probably Duct Tape) attempt to write 10 very small features in a few days. The relative success or failure of this would indicate to you the flexibility of the code as it was when this experiment was begun. This would be a fairly expensive way to assess code, but with 10 programmers actually digging in and having to deliver, you avoid the high-level "barely read the code/have an opinion anyway" opportunity, and you average out a lot of the obviously subjective nature of the results.
You would have to select your 10 small features carefully so that they ideally capture either a broad picture of the code, or a narrow picture around the kind of flexibility your organization cares about/expects to leverage soon. The strength of the results would rest largely on how well you selected the features tested.
In any case, I assure you, the Duct Tape Programmers of the world would get a very low score on any such assessment. It's something the industry could really use - without it it's only logical you'll keep seeing counter-productive opinions from decision-makers like the one stated in this article.
There's probably cheaper ways to do this than paying 10 programmers for 10 days. In Open Source projects you could hold contests with prize money for implementing the 10 features, and see what people gravitate towards and what they avoid - Feature A gets 1000 entries and Feature B gets just 1, and it failed - found a code maintenance problem. But maybe people here have even better ideas, that work for closed and open projects.
Any prepaid with the ability to run Google Maps (besides the iPhone) gets you Google Latitude working, and lets you prevent it from being used as a conventional cellphone. It might also allow you to pick a relatively small device to mitigate burden of always carrying it around.
If you own the account that it reports to then this satisfies all requirements, 1-6, including it working on Linux (it's a web app), working on your phone (as long it's not an iPhone, it has Google Latitude built-in where you can view her location), and being able to turn it off because you just login to "her" account and disable it. Voila.
A lot of people take law and order too seriously and forget that a fully functional Democracy is not complete without individuals standing up to bad laws, or good laws in scenarios where they turn bad.
Put another way, if I exceeded the speed limit on my way to work today, should I write the state a check? In the town I grew up in there's one of those silly laws on the books that says you can't pass through the center of town with a turtle unless you're wearing a veil. Should turtle owners be turning themselves in?
No, and no, and your friend shouldn't be paying anyone either. Stand up for good, rational thought and do what's right. Delete the scam from her computer and install the real thing. And absolutely do not pay the scam artists.
The Intent-based system in Android would be nice for machines of all sizes. You code each screen with the ability to serialize itself out to a very small state, so that the OS can dynamically swap screens of an app (not entire applications, their individual screens!) in and out based on memory needs.
It's a programming nicety built-in to the overall system and happens to provide a lot of other nice advantages - like you could potentially "deep link" from one app to another using the right serialized states, or "bookmark" your place in an app, each with very little additional work.
As for the desktop itself I agree it's probably too simplistic for a larger screen but I imagine that part is easy to replace with something more elaborate... as they say, any[one] can make things bigger [and] more complex... .
Having passed through both international and US customs, the questions you'll get asked will vary as will their expectations, but I've never had them make me show them my photos. The most important thing is to listen carefully and do nothing without them asking - or you'll spook them. For example one agent asked me to take out my laptop, and when I stood there idle they asked me to open it and boot it for them. Once it got a desktop they thanked me and sent me on my way. The next one asked me to take my laptop out so I went to boot it and they dove saying "NOOOOO!!"
So don't act until they say;)
BUT - you ARE travelling with this laptop, you need to be prepared for the increased risk of loss and theft:
* Bring the CD you reinstall your OS from with you! BRING IT!! A quaint town in Italy is not a good place to buy an English copy of OSX or beg someone to use their dialup and clunky machine to download Ubuntu!
* If you want to encrypt your files in case of theft, go for it. The problem with Full Disk Encryption is it does nothing for a stolen, running machine. I've had a laptop stolen from right under my fingertips - it can happen! I like to keep several TrueCrypt "disks," separated by activity, and only unlock each disk as I need it with a timeout set on TrueCrypt. That way a stolen, running machine is likely to have few or no "disks" unlocked, and it will likely lock itself back up before they come across the files.
* Backup your stuff. My favorite right now is DropBox. It works on Linux, Windows (XP and Vista), and OSX, it's dead-simple, and the first 2gb are free. Put the stuff you'd be saddest to lose most on there. Photos you take abroad, new code you write, that sort of thing. You can even put your TrueCrypt disks in DropBox.
In summary: * Be nice to airline security * Plan for hard drive implosion * Plan for OS failure * Plan for theft (even a running machine)
Strongly disagree. Finding execution environments where.Net 3.5 is ready to go is a tough task. Most clients we come across are on.Net 1.1 or 2.0, or on a host that will do 2.0.
There's not a lot in 3.5 that makes it a must-have either. When 2.0 came out, it was a bit like C# was incomplete until its release. Generics support makes a lot of exciting things possible that prior required (mildly expensive) runtime reflection calls to accomplish, and on the ASP side partial classes and databinding made big leaps. 3.5's biggest strength is an AJAX library that's just Javascript you can write yourself - and much more efficiently by the way.
Add to that that Mono 2.0 can, for lower-load apps, greatly decrease the cost of hosting that execution environment and Mono 2.0 is a great offering.
Bravo to the Mono team!! You're making my life a lot easier. Writing portable desktop AND web apps in.Net is an absolute dream. It means I can keep C#'s elegant closures and delegates and still run on all 3 platforms.
People have better things to do with their lives than learn a new OS. Vista's learning curve from XP sucks but learning most Linux distros from XP is harder. Where's the Control Panel? At least that much carries over in Vista.
People don't "stop learning," they go learn things that are more important to them.
I don't see a bribe here necessarily but THIS decision is more than undesirable - it's just freaking weird. Why did he rule in this very strange way? I think his effort to just get it off his desk is the best argument... because it makes no sense from any well-considered viewpoint.
Bribery is possible. The ruling does favor the RIAA. But I would guess he would be more careful to get things right if he were receiving money rather than this apparently clumsy decision.
Careful, I'd be pretty surprised if a 4670 can do a native 24" without a hiccup. With the settings turned down, sure, but Starcraft 2 is targeted at a very modern market, and Blizzard likes its graphics to be pretty... . What IS the native resolution on your monitor? 2560ish? That's a lot to ask of these little cards in this review.
Having 10 years of experience in technology doesn't necessarily mean you're fresh on whatever's the latest; it might even imply you aren't. Technology is a fast-moving field and more than 5 years of experience means you're probably good at design but you might actually be clueless about the latest version of Java, ASP.Net, Ruby on Rails or whatever it is they're testing you on. Seems like a perfectly valid thing to ask.
Yep, the longer it stays hot the more damage done. The freezer would help. It might also get very tedious.
I find lightly wetting a non-electrical surface gets it down to room temperature fast and usually doesn't require removing it from the charger. If it's hot, you don't need to worry about dripping - that water will vaporize fast.
The heat of a stopped engine is the reason gas hybrids are the majority out there.
To stop/start so easily, a Prius engine uses the Atkinson cycle (the engine guy, not the diet), reducing the start energy needed over a conventional gas engine. That and a couple other smart design choices allow it's stop/start to be relatively cheap (although it does still cost significant electricity).
If you drive a Prius long enough on local roads you'll learn that heat management is the #1 impediment to your getting 100+ mpg - the gas engine will switch on periodically even when the battery is charged and you're doing very little, because the engine is getting cold, and by extension, the catalytic converter is getting cold, meaning it's losing its ability to clean exhausted air.
In a diesel the power requirements for starting it are already astronomical compared to a gas engine (for example, the fuel pumps heat the diesel on its way in so it can even ignite!), and as I mentioned the Prius had significant design choices made to get a gas engine working in a frequent stop/start vehicle. Doing this in a diesel is probably an amazing feat of engineering. I'm going to guess it would involve a thermos design like that in the Prius, that sucks hot fluid out of the engine to an insulated container every time the engine stops, then uses it to heat the fuel on restart (the Prius does this only when you turn the car off, resulting in a pumping sound that causes new owners to wonder if the car is alive). But it seems a serious, daunting problem of engineering.
It looks like Volkswagen is going to take a first swing at this for consumer cars, and some city bus fleets feature trivial diesel hybrids. I'm looking forward to VW turning even one of their lineup over from vaporware, and reading the engineering discussions about it - I expect they'll be fascinating... or disappointing if the hybrids end up being mild to cut costs.
The main resource you would need to share in a browser is the core Javascript set of "classes" or prototypes or whatever you want to refer to them as nowadays. Core DOM element code etc.
Chrome is wasteful in this regard by making a full copy into each process of this set of objects and code.
This design is simpler, especially when you consider that the core Javascript classes allow you to modify them, meaning Tab 1 might modify Object.toString() to one implementation, and Tab 2 to another. Using a shared instance of the core classes in this scenario isn't just a threading issue, but a serious design problem (to be solved with the Facade or Flyweight pattern, etc).
As someone who leans Democrat, or at least, away from Republican, I can say the 2006 vote very well may have had some hacking involved. Checkout Hacking Democracy if you haven't yet - it'll blow you away with its conclusions, but it points out that in some parts of the country it's Democrats giving money to (paying off) Diebold (who renamed themselves Premiere). Both political parties have dirty hands, at least judging by money trail. And these machines are so easy to hack, it's hard to imagine them not getting hacked by somebody!
But sadly they've replaced it with something much simpler and less informative. Perhaps the Wayback Machine is in order.
In any case, most laptop users sit there with the laptop battery attached and the laptop plugged in 99% of the time they use the laptop. The old page pointed out this is the ideal way to kill your battery and shorten its lifespan to 2-3 years.
If you're sitting in place, either:
A) Ideally, detach your battery and use the laptop plugged in. On newer Macs this is a massive burden both because the battery removal is difficult to do without it falling to the floor, and because the MagSafe power connector helps ensure you accidentally disconnect the power and switch the laptop off. But other types of connectors and battery combos can make this pretty reasonable - like Thinkpads for example.
B) If detaching the battery is unreasonable, at least use the laptop without being plugged in for half the time, and try to hover between 10-40%.
The 2 main killers for LiIon are heat and charge level. The longest living LiIon battery is used in cool temps, and is rarely charged above 40% capacity. Using it plugged in endlessly trickle charges the battery causing the battery to heat it up due to resistance to the incoming charge. It also means it is constantly at 100%, where it will lose life at the fastest rate.
Solution A removes the trickle charge heat, and whatever heat is transferred to the battery by the laptop itself. Depending on how full it was when you disconnected it, it can also remove the 100% condition.
Solution B removes the trickle charge heat that occurs at 100%, although it replaces it with the heat of cycling the battery, which, depending on how much internal resistance there is, may be greater. It also removes the 100% condition.
I disagree on free advertising. Consider these 2 headlines:
A) Data Recovery Company Recovers Data
B) Data Recovery Companies Fail Basic Data Recovery Challenge
The first one will never get written. That's like publishing an exciting article about Google successfully returning a search page. It isn't news. But the second one is negative AND notable. So a Data Recovery company has absolutely nothing to gain by this poorly conceived contest.
I think whoever's put this contest together is trying to put a contest together on the cheap, and - big surprise - it isn't working. Slashdot has listed a lot of contests suffering from this condition, like NASA's ultra cheap prizes for things that would cost massive amounts of money to accomplish. They'll always fail.
While I was using it a few years ago, I recall that the Hiptop (which T-Mobile rebrands as the Sidekick) was a cool way for younger blind users to get into using mobile phones. The interface is highly responsive and easy for a blind user to use. The keyboard was innovative when it was released and blind users loved it.
However that's exclusive to T-Mobile, and in most areas, T-Mobile coverage is abysmal (if this user is in Boston however, I can say it's excellent in that specific area).
An AT&T phone that might do well is the BlackJack II. It's a Windows Mobile phone with no touchscreen (good for blind users), and a full keyboard. Windows Mobile 6 comes with a long list of voice options - you can do the obvious like call people by saying a name, but you can also load up apps or even run custom commands by speaking into it. The list of apps available for it is quite long (for example, Google Maps which you could load, do a local search in, then press a button to call the first result).
My two reservations about this phone for the blind:
1) If you are unfortunate enough to get one with even one half-dead key (which is common), typing on it is going to frustrate a blind user endlessly since the only way of knowing the key signal didn't make it is going to be visual. A reliable keyboard is essential and this may end up taking a few return cycles to get.
2) It doesn't have a screenreader, although I'm not aware of any cellphone with that technology.
SSDs are a really interesting market to watch - they seem like the easiest place to look today if one wonders what would have happened with the electric car before the industry canned the idea.
SSDs are somewhat untested - they're in MP3 players and thumb drives but these new ones are a bit different and more critical data is expected to sit on them. And they're a trade of faster and less energy usage - better for the environment - in exchange for a smaller size.
Electric cars were "untested," but only partly so because it's an electric CAR - certainly big electric motors had been in use for decades; and they were shorter ranged. On the upside they were more efficient and better for the environment.
So it's interesting to see SSDs being successful at their rapidly falling price points. The rate they're being bought and the demographic buying them (casual users not storing anything too critical I suspect...) is an interesting glance at where the electric car may have gone - or maybe where cars like Tesla will go. Granted, a car is a much bigger purchase (about 10x in cost) and has a much bigger impact on your life - but the analogy is there.
Exactly. How did we get a functional FCC out of this administration? We've got a DoJ that's hiring based on whether you're a Republican and prosecuting Democrats on false charges, an FDA that's corrupt, and yet the FCC seems to not only have things figured out, they're standing up for themselves. I guess we got lucky someone good at their job slipped through the cracks and made it in.
One console would harm competition though. For example, Sony briefly was deluded into thinking that Blu-Ray and the PS3 were going to conquer all. As part of the Blu-Ray standard at the time, there were serious, serious limitations on existing HDTVs when playing Blu-Ray content - basically you got near-SD picture because you had an unapproved device. It sucked, and HD-DVD could thump it for that. Just before the PS3 was released, Sony dropped that limitation.
Without that competition that wouldn't have happened. Without competition, Sony would probably be doing much worse DRM things to gamers. And we gamers could all stand there and say, "Good thing there's only one next gen console I have to buy. Too bad it sucks." Competition gets DRM providers to get rid of their stupid DRM - it's happened here, and it's happening in the online music industry right now. You've got to have multiple consoles if you want to keep gaming and video playback reasonable for the consumer.
I'm told the cheapest model lacks a power cable, which you need to go out and buy separately. Pretty cruel. If so, you won't be bringing that home and playing it right away... .
I remember a manager bragging to us about having estimated a project "literally on the back of a napkin" and that he could "turn up the faucet on development" if a deal required it. The ideal makes sense to want, but it sure didn't work.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, Joel sometimes has useful things to say; this is not one of them. It's a very knee-jerk "as a manager I like to save money" response, and it isn't helpful.
The Duct-Tape Programmer is the programmer whose work I get paid to come in and fix.
The programmers that do a good job up-front and leave code that's easy to maintain have a real irony to them - they leave the door open to Duct-Tape Programmers. There's not much incentive to write maintainable code at most organizations, especially if you have one of these Duct-Tape types in your organization or looming ahead - because the results to a manager who doesn't ask any questions will always be the same: "The 3 months programmer 1 spent got me 30%, the 3 months Duct Tape spent got me 70%. Duct Tape is my guy." Well he got there by throwing maintainability to the wind and leveraging what that good programmer set out as a foundation.
Unlike this article, what would actually be insightful is legitimate information about the relative maintainability of code at a given point. There's no industry-standard way to assess code for how maintainable a code base is. Perhaps we need one.
The most obvious potential method that comes to mind is to have 10 programmers (probably Duct Tape) attempt to write 10 very small features in a few days. The relative success or failure of this would indicate to you the flexibility of the code as it was when this experiment was begun. This would be a fairly expensive way to assess code, but with 10 programmers actually digging in and having to deliver, you avoid the high-level "barely read the code/have an opinion anyway" opportunity, and you average out a lot of the obviously subjective nature of the results.
You would have to select your 10 small features carefully so that they ideally capture either a broad picture of the code, or a narrow picture around the kind of flexibility your organization cares about/expects to leverage soon. The strength of the results would rest largely on how well you selected the features tested.
In any case, I assure you, the Duct Tape Programmers of the world would get a very low score on any such assessment. It's something the industry could really use - without it it's only logical you'll keep seeing counter-productive opinions from decision-makers like the one stated in this article.
There's probably cheaper ways to do this than paying 10 programmers for 10 days. In Open Source projects you could hold contests with prize money for implementing the 10 features, and see what people gravitate towards and what they avoid - Feature A gets 1000 entries and Feature B gets just 1, and it failed - found a code maintenance problem. But maybe people here have even better ideas, that work for closed and open projects.
Mod parent up. This is the best solution.
Any prepaid with the ability to run Google Maps (besides the iPhone) gets you Google Latitude working, and lets you prevent it from being used as a conventional cellphone. It might also allow you to pick a relatively small device to mitigate burden of always carrying it around.
If you own the account that it reports to then this satisfies all requirements, 1-6, including it working on Linux (it's a web app), working on your phone (as long it's not an iPhone, it has Google Latitude built-in where you can view her location), and being able to turn it off because you just login to "her" account and disable it. Voila.
A lot of people take law and order too seriously and forget that a fully functional Democracy is not complete without individuals standing up to bad laws, or good laws in scenarios where they turn bad.
Put another way, if I exceeded the speed limit on my way to work today, should I write the state a check? In the town I grew up in there's one of those silly laws on the books that says you can't pass through the center of town with a turtle unless you're wearing a veil. Should turtle owners be turning themselves in?
No, and no, and your friend shouldn't be paying anyone either. Stand up for good, rational thought and do what's right. Delete the scam from her computer and install the real thing. And absolutely do not pay the scam artists.
The Intent-based system in Android would be nice for machines of all sizes. You code each screen with the ability to serialize itself out to a very small state, so that the OS can dynamically swap screens of an app (not entire applications, their individual screens!) in and out based on memory needs.
It's a programming nicety built-in to the overall system and happens to provide a lot of other nice advantages - like you could potentially "deep link" from one app to another using the right serialized states, or "bookmark" your place in an app, each with very little additional work.
As for the desktop itself I agree it's probably too simplistic for a larger screen but I imagine that part is easy to replace with something more elaborate... as they say, any[one] can make things bigger [and] more complex... .
Does your company have a website? Link? Sounds fictional... .
Buggy offline access via Google Gears helps alleviate the internet connection issue - it might also alleviate what downtime actually occurs.
Having passed through both international and US customs, the questions you'll get asked will vary as will their expectations, but I've never had them make me show them my photos. The most important thing is to listen carefully and do nothing without them asking - or you'll spook them. For example one agent asked me to take out my laptop, and when I stood there idle they asked me to open it and boot it for them. Once it got a desktop they thanked me and sent me on my way. The next one asked me to take my laptop out so I went to boot it and they dove saying "NOOOOO!!"
So don't act until they say ;)
BUT - you ARE travelling with this laptop, you need to be prepared for the increased risk of loss and theft:
* Bring the CD you reinstall your OS from with you! BRING IT!! A quaint town in Italy is not a good place to buy an English copy of OSX or beg someone to use their dialup and clunky machine to download Ubuntu!
* If you want to encrypt your files in case of theft, go for it. The problem with Full Disk Encryption is it does nothing for a stolen, running machine. I've had a laptop stolen from right under my fingertips - it can happen! I like to keep several TrueCrypt "disks," separated by activity, and only unlock each disk as I need it with a timeout set on TrueCrypt. That way a stolen, running machine is likely to have few or no "disks" unlocked, and it will likely lock itself back up before they come across the files.
* Backup your stuff. My favorite right now is DropBox. It works on Linux, Windows (XP and Vista), and OSX, it's dead-simple, and the first 2gb are free. Put the stuff you'd be saddest to lose most on there. Photos you take abroad, new code you write, that sort of thing. You can even put your TrueCrypt disks in DropBox.
In summary:
* Be nice to airline security
* Plan for hard drive implosion
* Plan for OS failure
* Plan for theft (even a running machine)
Strongly disagree. Finding execution environments where .Net 3.5 is ready to go is a tough task. Most clients we come across are on .Net 1.1 or 2.0, or on a host that will do 2.0.
There's not a lot in 3.5 that makes it a must-have either. When 2.0 came out, it was a bit like C# was incomplete until its release. Generics support makes a lot of exciting things possible that prior required (mildly expensive) runtime reflection calls to accomplish, and on the ASP side partial classes and databinding made big leaps. 3.5's biggest strength is an AJAX library that's just Javascript you can write yourself - and much more efficiently by the way.
Add to that that Mono 2.0 can, for lower-load apps, greatly decrease the cost of hosting that execution environment and Mono 2.0 is a great offering.
Bravo to the Mono team!! You're making my life a lot easier. Writing portable desktop AND web apps in .Net is an absolute dream. It means I can keep C#'s elegant closures and delegates and still run on all 3 platforms.
What part of that was humble?
People have better things to do with their lives than learn a new OS. Vista's learning curve from XP sucks but learning most Linux distros from XP is harder. Where's the Control Panel? At least that much carries over in Vista.
People don't "stop learning," they go learn things that are more important to them.
I don't see a bribe here necessarily but THIS decision is more than undesirable - it's just freaking weird. Why did he rule in this very strange way? I think his effort to just get it off his desk is the best argument... because it makes no sense from any well-considered viewpoint.
Bribery is possible. The ruling does favor the RIAA. But I would guess he would be more careful to get things right if he were receiving money rather than this apparently clumsy decision.
Careful, I'd be pretty surprised if a 4670 can do a native 24" without a hiccup. With the settings turned down, sure, but Starcraft 2 is targeted at a very modern market, and Blizzard likes its graphics to be pretty... . What IS the native resolution on your monitor? 2560ish? That's a lot to ask of these little cards in this review.
Copy and paste. No smartphone can legitimately hold the title without this most basic feature.
Having 10 years of experience in technology doesn't necessarily mean you're fresh on whatever's the latest; it might even imply you aren't. Technology is a fast-moving field and more than 5 years of experience means you're probably good at design but you might actually be clueless about the latest version of Java, ASP.Net, Ruby on Rails or whatever it is they're testing you on. Seems like a perfectly valid thing to ask.
Yep, the longer it stays hot the more damage done. The freezer would help. It might also get very tedious.
I find lightly wetting a non-electrical surface gets it down to room temperature fast and usually doesn't require removing it from the charger. If it's hot, you don't need to worry about dripping - that water will vaporize fast.
The heat of a stopped engine is the reason gas hybrids are the majority out there.
To stop/start so easily, a Prius engine uses the Atkinson cycle (the engine guy, not the diet), reducing the start energy needed over a conventional gas engine. That and a couple other smart design choices allow it's stop/start to be relatively cheap (although it does still cost significant electricity).
If you drive a Prius long enough on local roads you'll learn that heat management is the #1 impediment to your getting 100+ mpg - the gas engine will switch on periodically even when the battery is charged and you're doing very little, because the engine is getting cold, and by extension, the catalytic converter is getting cold, meaning it's losing its ability to clean exhausted air.
In a diesel the power requirements for starting it are already astronomical compared to a gas engine (for example, the fuel pumps heat the diesel on its way in so it can even ignite!), and as I mentioned the Prius had significant design choices made to get a gas engine working in a frequent stop/start vehicle. Doing this in a diesel is probably an amazing feat of engineering. I'm going to guess it would involve a thermos design like that in the Prius, that sucks hot fluid out of the engine to an insulated container every time the engine stops, then uses it to heat the fuel on restart (the Prius does this only when you turn the car off, resulting in a pumping sound that causes new owners to wonder if the car is alive). But it seems a serious, daunting problem of engineering.
It looks like Volkswagen is going to take a first swing at this for consumer cars, and some city bus fleets feature trivial diesel hybrids. I'm looking forward to VW turning even one of their lineup over from vaporware, and reading the engineering discussions about it - I expect they'll be fascinating... or disappointing if the hybrids end up being mild to cut costs.
The main resource you would need to share in a browser is the core Javascript set of "classes" or prototypes or whatever you want to refer to them as nowadays. Core DOM element code etc.
Chrome is wasteful in this regard by making a full copy into each process of this set of objects and code.
This design is simpler, especially when you consider that the core Javascript classes allow you to modify them, meaning Tab 1 might modify Object.toString() to one implementation, and Tab 2 to another. Using a shared instance of the core classes in this scenario isn't just a threading issue, but a serious design problem (to be solved with the Facade or Flyweight pattern, etc).
As someone who leans Democrat, or at least, away from Republican, I can say the 2006 vote very well may have had some hacking involved. Checkout Hacking Democracy if you haven't yet - it'll blow you away with its conclusions, but it points out that in some parts of the country it's Democrats giving money to (paying off) Diebold (who renamed themselves Premiere). Both political parties have dirty hands, at least judging by money trail. And these machines are so easy to hack, it's hard to imagine them not getting hacked by somebody!
Apple used to have a great explanation of this eventuality here:
http://www.apple.com/batteries/
But sadly they've replaced it with something much simpler and less informative. Perhaps the Wayback Machine is in order.
In any case, most laptop users sit there with the laptop battery attached and the laptop plugged in 99% of the time they use the laptop. The old page pointed out this is the ideal way to kill your battery and shorten its lifespan to 2-3 years.
If you're sitting in place, either:
A) Ideally, detach your battery and use the laptop plugged in. On newer Macs this is a massive burden both because the battery removal is difficult to do without it falling to the floor, and because the MagSafe power connector helps ensure you accidentally disconnect the power and switch the laptop off. But other types of connectors and battery combos can make this pretty reasonable - like Thinkpads for example.
B) If detaching the battery is unreasonable, at least use the laptop without being plugged in for half the time, and try to hover between 10-40%.
The 2 main killers for LiIon are heat and charge level. The longest living LiIon battery is used in cool temps, and is rarely charged above 40% capacity. Using it plugged in endlessly trickle charges the battery causing the battery to heat it up due to resistance to the incoming charge. It also means it is constantly at 100%, where it will lose life at the fastest rate.
Solution A removes the trickle charge heat, and whatever heat is transferred to the battery by the laptop itself. Depending on how full it was when you disconnected it, it can also remove the 100% condition.
Solution B removes the trickle charge heat that occurs at 100%, although it replaces it with the heat of cycling the battery, which, depending on how much internal resistance there is, may be greater. It also removes the 100% condition.
I disagree on free advertising. Consider these 2 headlines:
A) Data Recovery Company Recovers Data
B) Data Recovery Companies Fail Basic Data Recovery Challenge
The first one will never get written. That's like publishing an exciting article about Google successfully returning a search page. It isn't news. But the second one is negative AND notable. So a Data Recovery company has absolutely nothing to gain by this poorly conceived contest.
I think whoever's put this contest together is trying to put a contest together on the cheap, and - big surprise - it isn't working. Slashdot has listed a lot of contests suffering from this condition, like NASA's ultra cheap prizes for things that would cost massive amounts of money to accomplish. They'll always fail.
While I was using it a few years ago, I recall that the Hiptop (which T-Mobile rebrands as the Sidekick) was a cool way for younger blind users to get into using mobile phones. The interface is highly responsive and easy for a blind user to use. The keyboard was innovative when it was released and blind users loved it.
However that's exclusive to T-Mobile, and in most areas, T-Mobile coverage is abysmal (if this user is in Boston however, I can say it's excellent in that specific area).
An AT&T phone that might do well is the BlackJack II. It's a Windows Mobile phone with no touchscreen (good for blind users), and a full keyboard. Windows Mobile 6 comes with a long list of voice options - you can do the obvious like call people by saying a name, but you can also load up apps or even run custom commands by speaking into it. The list of apps available for it is quite long (for example, Google Maps which you could load, do a local search in, then press a button to call the first result).
My two reservations about this phone for the blind:
1) If you are unfortunate enough to get one with even one half-dead key (which is common), typing on it is going to frustrate a blind user endlessly since the only way of knowing the key signal didn't make it is going to be visual. A reliable keyboard is essential and this may end up taking a few return cycles to get.
2) It doesn't have a screenreader, although I'm not aware of any cellphone with that technology.
SSDs are a really interesting market to watch - they seem like the easiest place to look today if one wonders what would have happened with the electric car before the industry canned the idea.
SSDs are somewhat untested - they're in MP3 players and thumb drives but these new ones are a bit different and more critical data is expected to sit on them. And they're a trade of faster and less energy usage - better for the environment - in exchange for a smaller size.
Electric cars were "untested," but only partly so because it's an electric CAR - certainly big electric motors had been in use for decades; and they were shorter ranged. On the upside they were more efficient and better for the environment.
So it's interesting to see SSDs being successful at their rapidly falling price points. The rate they're being bought and the demographic buying them (casual users not storing anything too critical I suspect...) is an interesting glance at where the electric car may have gone - or maybe where cars like Tesla will go. Granted, a car is a much bigger purchase (about 10x in cost) and has a much bigger impact on your life - but the analogy is there.
Exactly. How did we get a functional FCC out of this administration? We've got a DoJ that's hiring based on whether you're a Republican and prosecuting Democrats on false charges, an FDA that's corrupt, and yet the FCC seems to not only have things figured out, they're standing up for themselves. I guess we got lucky someone good at their job slipped through the cracks and made it in.
One console would harm competition though. For example, Sony briefly was deluded into thinking that Blu-Ray and the PS3 were going to conquer all. As part of the Blu-Ray standard at the time, there were serious, serious limitations on existing HDTVs when playing Blu-Ray content - basically you got near-SD picture because you had an unapproved device. It sucked, and HD-DVD could thump it for that. Just before the PS3 was released, Sony dropped that limitation.
Without that competition that wouldn't have happened. Without competition, Sony would probably be doing much worse DRM things to gamers. And we gamers could all stand there and say, "Good thing there's only one next gen console I have to buy. Too bad it sucks." Competition gets DRM providers to get rid of their stupid DRM - it's happened here, and it's happening in the online music industry right now. You've got to have multiple consoles if you want to keep gaming and video playback reasonable for the consumer.
I'm told the cheapest model lacks a power cable, which you need to go out and buy separately. Pretty cruel. If so, you won't be bringing that home and playing it right away... .
I remember a manager bragging to us about having estimated a project "literally on the back of a napkin" and that he could "turn up the faucet on development" if a deal required it. The ideal makes sense to want, but it sure didn't work.