I've often wondered about deleting all of my social networking messages older than [$time_frame], say 6 months. Social networking like Twitter and Facebook is usually very time-critical: you post something relevant for the moment, but that doesn't really make sense to store for very long (unlike, say, a blog post). After a few days your post will be so far down your contacts' streams that it will probably never be seen again by a human anyway.
So why leave it up for machines to harvest your data? Why keep posts you did when you were younger and which could possibly be embarrassing later? Why leave open the possibility that through some security failure or site policy change your data suddenly becomes public?
The problem is doing the deleting itself. Going over each post and deleting them manually is a bore. Facebook, G+ and Twitter are obviously not going to help you automate it -- they'd rather keep your data. What we need is plugin or site like http://www.deleteallmytweets.com/ but which has a cutoff point instead of simply deleting everything. I wonder how long such a site would survive, particularly if it became popular.
Then there's the question if you'd trust a third party with that amount of access to your profile.
I also bought a second one after the first one RROD'd.
It's not about being "extremely loyal" as you put it, it's about being pragmatic: - I still want to play games on a console, so I'd have to either fix it or buy a new one - Fixing the old Xbox would cost about as much as a new one, and the new one is simply better (quieter, extra controller, lower energy, wifi, larger HD, etc) - I have a game library which I'd like to be able to replay - I can use my old controller
Honestly I've always preferred the Playstation, but I won the Xbox in a contest a few years ago, and it made no sense to go out and spend extra money on a console which is essentially the same. For the next generation it'll be a PS for me. Either that or a box running Linux+Steam connected to the TV.
As for your friend breaking 12 Xboxes, that's really too much. I wouldn't lend him anything if I were you.
For some people, statistics is part of the fun. Also, as others pointed out, some people participate in activities for reasons other than (or in addition to) having fun.
Who modded this up? This reads like a collection of every snake-oil "fix" plaguing xda.
ONE: KILL-VS-SWAP
Swapping, besides the problem of wearing out flash that you pointed out (but strangely dismissed as not being a problem to ruin user's flash memory even if it's replaceable - even desktop OS's tend to disable swapping on SSDs), is also slower and more energy consuming. Actually, the effect of swapping would be that you'd get lag in your current application as your device realizes it needs to free up memory and initiates swapping instead of instantly dropping the other app.
Swapping only really helps re-opening an app faster, but the official recommendation here is that 1) apps start quickly (the dev environment will warn you if your app is doing too much work at launch) and 2) save its state when unloaded from memory and recover. Unfortunately, many app devs suck, which will be a theme for the following points.
TWO: DISDAIN FOR 2D GPU ACCELERATION
True that GPU acceleration came way too late in the game. There is no disdain however, there's only the fact that having a diverse universe of possible architectures forces the APIs to remain more abstract. This is also true of desktop OS' though, so not really a problem (and the newer Android devices certainly render as smooth as any other device).
I'm not even sure what you mean by architectural bias to rendering content on the fly. True that this happens in the Google Maps app and in the browser (and webview), and I wish they'd fix it, but for lists and every other view container, the architectural design is to reuse the views as much as possible. In fact, the API even gives you a cached view and handles the cache for you automatically, so you only have to add a few lines of code to take advantage of it. Problem is, again, that many app developers are crap.
THREE: ANDROID'S MEMORY-MANAGEMENT SUCKS
Allocations are expensive on any platform. Allocating more than you need wastes power and memory, both of which are limited on a device. Your solution seems to be to throw more memory at devices, but while I'd love if manufacturers started doing that, the sad reality is that they won't. So the OS has two choices: work within the current conditions, or optimize for pie-in-the-sky designs. You seem to prefer the latter. And even if your device has a shitload of memory, your app will still need to live in a multi-tasking environment with other apps. Because of point 1, you want every app taking as little of that precious memory as possible in order to conserve the entire system responsiveness. Stop being lazy and allocate only what you need.
FOUR: ANDROID'S DEFAULT CPU GOVERNORS MAKE AN ANNOYING PROBLEM INTOLERABLE
Wasn't this done for Android 4.2? Anyway, my experience with Android hackers is that they'd too gladly trade a lot of battery life for a little performance. I'm not saying the standard Android ratio is perfect, but this will come down to a matter of taste and use-cases.
To finish off, there's a line in the article which while stated poorly, does have some truth to it: (paraphrasing) when you reinstall your system it's always snappier, simply because you're getting rid of the cruft. This (and as someone in another post above said, paranoia), I believe is the real reason behind why a lot of the above ideas have taken so much hold. Someone makes a claim like this, posts a new ROM which "fixes" it, and people will invariably find their system snappier. Then, with time they start installing back their old apps, services, widgets and live wallpapers, and slowly turn the temperature on that frog. Then they are ready for the next conspiracy-induced "fix".
You're going to look pretty silly climbing up onto that billboard with your cellphone.
I don't know if a QR code would be much better.
Recently I was at a music festival where they had some type of QR code hunt going on. The codes were all behind the fences where drunk people couldn't reach and destroy them, and just that bit of distance made it quite difficult to read the codes, even outside on a cloudy day (the abundant difuse light should be perfect for this).
Granted the codes they were using were a lot denser than needed (they were embedding the clue to the next code in English and German in the code itself -- stupid since you were using the festival's app to read the code anyway, they could've embedded the text in the app itself), which made them harder to read than normal, but the code was also quite big.
I also tried to read a small (unrelated) QR code which was glued to a pole, and the distortion caused by the pole's circumference made the code impossible to read.
So reading a code from a billboard, even in perfect conditions... It'd have to be pretty fucking huge!
Upfront, sure, but I've yet to find a contract where after it runs out, you haven't paid more for the phone that if you'd bought it and the contract separately.
You have to pre-register. After a while you'll get an email with an order code you can use on the website. I did it when the Rpi was announced and got the email a few weeks later.
I was really busy at the time, so I ignored the email and forgot about it. Until two weeks ago, when I decided to follow through with the order. They're expecting to send it "within 10 weeks", which frankly is a lot, but not unexpected.
I'm going to attach an external USB drive to it and set it up in a remote location to serve as a remote backup and a private proxy server (different country, could be useful).
It's unlikely that it's GSM related, since the Nexus 7 doesn't have cell data connectivity. The complaint is pretty odd to me too. Even if ASUS's existing licenses are not appliccable since they are selling the tablet under Google's brand, Google still owns the mobile branch of Motorola, and is hard to imagine that they don't have those patents.
Furthermore, all of the nexus devices up to now have had WiFi. Why complain only about the tablet?
Yes. It's quite well hidden, but there are a few details give it away.
It actually explains a but the slugishness, and crappy user experience of the app as a whole. It's especially bad when compared to the Google+ app. -- Well, the old one. In the new version they put in so many flashy animations, it became ubearable to scroll. I thought the google guys were all on Galaxy Nexus (like me). How come nobody noticed this? Perhaps it is usable on Jelly Bean. I guess I'll be finding out in two weeks.
I don't want to imagine what shitstorm was going on if MS pushed an update that "accidentally" changed your default browser to IE.
Back when I was using Windows XP, this was SOP. System updates would recreate the icons I'd deleted for IE, WMP and Outlook, and often times would reset the defaults to use those programs. I remember thinking how they were getting away with it, after their antitrust issues, so I remeber distinctly that there was no "shitstorm". Not even a shit-light-rain.
Anyway, I switched to Ubuntu some 5 years ago and never looked back, so I don't know what's happened since.
Not quite - they were having problems using them in a way that's sensible:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2450831
In short, once you put an SD card into a WP7 phone you can't take it out (or the phone won't boot) and you can't read it on any other devices. Each card model also needed to be "certified" before use.
So if you remove the SD card from the phone, neither the phone or the card will work as expected? How's that sensible?
Does that study take into account the productivity of a healthy worker versus that of someone who is permanently, or frequently ill? Health isn't an all-or-nothing affair. It's not like you have an internal bool is_healthy which goes to false one day and you go to the doctor so he can set it back to true, and you go on your way. The reality is that most people only visit the doctor when it gets really bad, and treatments can last very long times, especially if the patient keeps on doing whatever put him in the hospital in the first place (eating fat food and smoking).
I've also had to pick up VS2010 (for professional reasons) after a long time of using Eclipse, and the process has been painful. More painful due to the fact that I'm also moving from Linux to Win7 at the same time.
Now, Win7 is nicer than XP, and VS2010 is nicer than the previous one I'd used some 6~8 years ago, but it's all the little details and annoying "features" in VS which make it so hard to pick up: Document tabs now open on the left instead of the right. There's an option for that, but once the tabs overflow, their order becomes random. No quick way to toggle code commentting (a-la eclipse's shift-ctrl-c). There's ctrl-k-c/u or something, but it's much less usable, it's much less intelligent in how it comments the code and it was crashing VS2010 so much I started just commenting manually. Crappy automatic code formatting for c/c++. Cryptic c/c++ error messages. And others I can't remember now.
My theory is that they either designed it like this on purpose so that you can't easily jump to another IDE, or that it was designed in an echo chamber by past VS users who are (poorly) reinventing the wheel.
I agree with this. I like to code listening to music (with headphones, my musical tastes aren't exactly "popular"), but I only do it when I'm coding away a pre-tought idea. When I need to think about the architecture, or read documentation I pause the music, and when I know again what to do, I resume it.
This is a completely different situation from the one in the article the GP quoted. That's music you can't pause at will and it may not even be to your taste or mood (even in my own collection I find myself skipping some songs to ones which I feel more like hearing at that particular time).
As for the isolation thing in TFA I have no idea what they're going on about. I use headphones so I don't bother my work colleagues, and expect them to have the same courtesy with me. I actually dislike the fact that headphones disconnect me from the office life. If there was a way to clearly mix music with office sounds in my headphones I would take it. My office is pretty quiet, though. YMMV.
They will just stick them in the separation between the car's door and the chassis. At least that's what a few of them started to do around these parts. I guess they figured out that it was annoying people (i.e. their possible customers) when it rains and the flier sticks to your window.
I'm still hoping that they come to the conclusion that putting trash in my car is always anoying, but like spam, that won't happen until it stops being effective (and I doubt it will).
Then book first class seats and most of your points become moot.
Except for the fresh air thing, but I don't really know what you're on about. I've been flying for decades and to me the air inside the plane has always been stale. On the other hand, long gone are the days where smoking was allowed on board. I guess that's the real reason why they needed to pump extra fresh air into the cabin. If you ask me, I'd rather take the 85% recirculated air than pure air + smoke from the human chimneys in the back.
As for the grumpy staff and babies crying, that's nothing new. It was like that 20 years ago and still is. But again, first class gets you nicer service and it's rare that a mother will pay first class tickets for her little monster. They usually fly in the back making lives misearble for the rest of us.
As far as I see it, for flights lasting up to around 4h, the airplane is just a glorified bus. I don't need anything else, just take me to where it says on the ticket, and in the mean time I can sleep/play/read/work to distract myself until we arrive. Granted, flying may not be a great experience, but cheaper flights mean I get to travel more and visit more of the world.
I have a cronjob running rsync to my server every night. It runs at 20h (8pm) every day which is when I expect the pc to be on and online the most often. Since it runs every day I don't really care if a give day's run fails because the PC was off, or I had no internet connection.
It runs off of a shell script, so I can run it manually whenever I want to make sure that new data is backed up properly (like when I make significant changes to my thesis, or when I take the laptop somewhere with me).
The problem is pure rsync isn't really backup, it's more like mirrorring. I like it because this means that the files on the server are exactly like the files on my PC, so I can access them directly. But if for some reason my files become corrupted and I don't notice it, the backup won't help me.
The other problem is that the server lives in my apartment. In case of a fire, or more likey, a commet hitting my home, it's possible to lose my pc and server simultaneously. The backups are actually done to a small external hard drive. At least in some of those cases, it might be possible to grab the drive and run for it, but I'm still looking at a possibility to start doing the backups remotely.
As a user of the nouveau driver in a system where the binary blob causes a lot of instability (which nouveau doesn't have), you have my eternal gratitude for your efforts.
I don't play games on my PC, so for me the performance is more than satisfactory. Desktop composition and effects are smooth enough, and I can play videos in any quality without any hickups. The only issues I have now is that I can't set the brightness level (aparently it works in the new kernel. I'll check that once I upgrade my Ubuntu installation), and it seems that my battery runs out quicker than with the binary drivers. But it's nice to know that that's being worked on.
So thanks for your work. I understand it can sometimes be a thankless job, and people on the internet tend to focus on the negatives, so I hope that you know the positive effect you're having in the computing world -- if it weren't for nouveau, I'd probably be in Windows right now.
Whatever happened to doing things for the pleasure of doing them? I thought here in slashdot of all places there would be more appreciation for home-built solutions instead of going to the nearest store and buying it pre-packaged.
I thought he had an elegant solution to a problem he wanted to fix, and I bet that he had fun coming up with it -- I know I would.
Sine we're sharing unsolicited advice on how to live each other's lives, here's mine: you're an asshole. Your arrogant and aggressive tone won't lead to any productive discussions and isn't going to be making in any friends. If this is how you act in real life, then you're in for a difficult one. But I suppose you're not really like this in real life. More likely you're just an internet bully, which is even worse -- it makes you a coward asshole.
Anyway, to your point, the DB I was speaking about was an Android sqlite DB. Sure, I could've made that clear in my original post, but I didn't think that anyone would be an asshole about it (that's you -- see above). If you're not aware, the Android sqlite DB is there as a convenient way for apps to store data. It does not feature a "dev db server" or even run on a separate system. It is possible to connect to a running emulator and run tests from the pc, but the interface is contrived and difficult to use. Furthemore, this is just a hobby, not my job, so forgive me for not having an incredibly elaborate development environment.
You seem to be the sort of developer who thinks that real developers must have it hard, and that the niceties that modern IDEs offer are for the newbies and incompetent. That and your poor social skills make you a crappy team mate and generally a bad programmer. I hope I'll never have the displeasure of being stuck in a project with you.
While I agree in many ways with the points you raise, I still think there's a place for his ideas in an IDE. For example, I'm currently writing some SQL for a project of mine, and it'd be really helpfull to be able to see the results of my queries in real time as I write them out (especially since my SQL is so rusty).
The same goes for a few simple functions with a bit of complex math I have here. A side view like he has in his algorithm example would've saved me quite a few trips to the debugger.
Sure, I could open a connection to the database and test it incrementally, but that's exactly what he's talking about: being able to see the results change dynamically as you type can improve productivity and identify problems earlier.
It may not be as essential as he seems to claim, but it'd be a nice addition to an IDE.
Slashdot Mirror
I've often wondered about deleting all of my social networking messages older than [$time_frame], say 6 months.
Social networking like Twitter and Facebook is usually very time-critical: you post something relevant for the moment, but that doesn't really make sense to store for very long (unlike, say, a blog post).
After a few days your post will be so far down your contacts' streams that it will probably never be seen again by a human anyway.
So why leave it up for machines to harvest your data? Why keep posts you did when you were younger and which could possibly be embarrassing later? Why leave open the possibility that through some security failure or site policy change your data suddenly becomes public?
The problem is doing the deleting itself. Going over each post and deleting them manually is a bore.
Facebook, G+ and Twitter are obviously not going to help you automate it -- they'd rather keep your data.
What we need is plugin or site like http://www.deleteallmytweets.com/ but which has a cutoff point instead of simply deleting everything. I wonder how long such a site would survive, particularly if it became popular.
Then there's the question if you'd trust a third party with that amount of access to your profile.
I also bought a second one after the first one RROD'd.
It's not about being "extremely loyal" as you put it, it's about being pragmatic:
- I still want to play games on a console, so I'd have to either fix it or buy a new one
- Fixing the old Xbox would cost about as much as a new one, and the new one is simply better (quieter, extra controller, lower energy, wifi, larger HD, etc)
- I have a game library which I'd like to be able to replay
- I can use my old controller
Honestly I've always preferred the Playstation, but I won the Xbox in a contest a few years ago, and it made no sense to go out and spend extra money on a console which is essentially the same.
For the next generation it'll be a PS for me. Either that or a box running Linux+Steam connected to the TV.
As for your friend breaking 12 Xboxes, that's really too much. I wouldn't lend him anything if I were you.
For some people, statistics is part of the fun.
Also, as others pointed out, some people participate in activities for reasons other than (or in addition to) having fun.
Who modded this up? This reads like a collection of every snake-oil "fix" plaguing xda.
ONE: KILL-VS-SWAP
Swapping, besides the problem of wearing out flash that you pointed out (but strangely dismissed as not being a problem to ruin user's flash memory even if it's replaceable - even desktop OS's tend to disable swapping on SSDs), is also slower and more energy consuming.
Actually, the effect of swapping would be that you'd get lag in your current application as your device realizes it needs to free up memory and initiates swapping instead of instantly dropping the other app.
Swapping only really helps re-opening an app faster, but the official recommendation here is that 1) apps start quickly (the dev environment will warn you if your app is doing too much work at launch) and 2) save its state when unloaded from memory and recover.
Unfortunately, many app devs suck, which will be a theme for the following points.
TWO: DISDAIN FOR 2D GPU ACCELERATION
True that GPU acceleration came way too late in the game. There is no disdain however, there's only the fact that having a diverse universe of possible architectures forces the APIs to remain more abstract. This is also true of desktop OS' though, so not really a problem (and the newer Android devices certainly render as smooth as any other device).
I'm not even sure what you mean by architectural bias to rendering content on the fly.
True that this happens in the Google Maps app and in the browser (and webview), and I wish they'd fix it, but for lists and every other view container, the architectural design is to reuse the views as much as possible.
In fact, the API even gives you a cached view and handles the cache for you automatically, so you only have to add a few lines of code to take advantage of it.
Problem is, again, that many app developers are crap.
THREE: ANDROID'S MEMORY-MANAGEMENT SUCKS
Allocations are expensive on any platform. Allocating more than you need wastes power and memory, both of which are limited on a device. Your solution seems to be to throw more memory at devices, but while I'd love if manufacturers started doing that, the sad reality is that they won't. So the OS has two choices: work within the current conditions, or optimize for pie-in-the-sky designs. You seem to prefer the latter.
And even if your device has a shitload of memory, your app will still need to live in a multi-tasking environment with other apps. Because of point 1, you want every app taking as little of that precious memory as possible in order to conserve the entire system responsiveness.
Stop being lazy and allocate only what you need.
FOUR: ANDROID'S DEFAULT CPU GOVERNORS MAKE AN ANNOYING PROBLEM INTOLERABLE
Wasn't this done for Android 4.2?
Anyway, my experience with Android hackers is that they'd too gladly trade a lot of battery life for a little performance. I'm not saying the standard Android ratio is perfect, but this will come down to a matter of taste and use-cases.
To finish off, there's a line in the article which while stated poorly, does have some truth to it: (paraphrasing) when you reinstall your system it's always snappier, simply because you're getting rid of the cruft.
This (and as someone in another post above said, paranoia), I believe is the real reason behind why a lot of the above ideas have taken so much hold. Someone makes a claim like this, posts a new ROM which "fixes" it, and people will invariably find their system snappier. Then, with time they start installing back their old apps, services, widgets and live wallpapers, and slowly turn the temperature on that frog.
Then they are ready for the next conspiracy-induced "fix".
You're going to look pretty silly climbing up onto that billboard with your cellphone.
I don't know if a QR code would be much better.
Recently I was at a music festival where they had some type of QR code hunt going on.
The codes were all behind the fences where drunk people couldn't reach and destroy them, and just that bit of distance made it quite difficult to read the codes, even outside on a cloudy day (the abundant difuse light should be perfect for this).
Granted the codes they were using were a lot denser than needed (they were embedding the clue to the next code in English and German in the code itself -- stupid since you were using the festival's app to read the code anyway, they could've embedded the text in the app itself), which made them harder to read than normal, but the code was also quite big.
I also tried to read a small (unrelated) QR code which was glued to a pole, and the distortion caused by the pole's circumference made the code impossible to read.
So reading a code from a billboard, even in perfect conditions... It'd have to be pretty fucking huge!
Costs more
No it doesn't.
Upfront, sure, but I've yet to find a contract where after it runs out, you haven't paid more for the phone that if you'd bought it and the contract separately.
Just make it an US-only "update" and don't bring this bullshit to the rest or the world, where the patent system isn't (completely) torn to hell.
You have to pre-register.
After a while you'll get an email with an order code you can use on the website.
I did it when the Rpi was announced and got the email a few weeks later.
I was really busy at the time, so I ignored the email and forgot about it.
Until two weeks ago, when I decided to follow through with the order. They're expecting to send it "within 10 weeks", which frankly is a lot, but not unexpected.
I'm going to attach an external USB drive to it and set it up in a remote location to serve as a remote backup and a private proxy server (different country, could be useful).
Microsoft is also releasing a tablet.
It's unlikely that it's GSM related, since the Nexus 7 doesn't have cell data connectivity.
The complaint is pretty odd to me too.
Even if ASUS's existing licenses are not appliccable since they are selling the tablet under Google's brand, Google still owns the mobile branch of Motorola, and is hard to imagine that they don't have those patents.
Furthermore, all of the nexus devices up to now have had WiFi. Why complain only about the tablet?
Yes.
It's quite well hidden, but there are a few details give it away.
It actually explains a but the slugishness, and crappy user experience of the app as a whole.
It's especially bad when compared to the Google+ app.
-- Well, the old one. In the new version they put in so many flashy animations, it became ubearable to scroll. I thought the google guys were all on Galaxy Nexus (like me). How come nobody noticed this?
Perhaps it is usable on Jelly Bean. I guess I'll be finding out in two weeks.
I don't want to imagine what shitstorm was going on if MS pushed an update that "accidentally" changed your default browser to IE.
Back when I was using Windows XP, this was SOP. System updates would recreate the icons I'd deleted for IE, WMP and Outlook, and often times would reset the defaults to use those programs.
I remember thinking how they were getting away with it, after their antitrust issues, so I remeber distinctly that there was no "shitstorm". Not even a shit-light-rain.
Anyway, I switched to Ubuntu some 5 years ago and never looked back, so I don't know what's happened since.
Not quite - they were having problems using them in a way that's sensible:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2450831
In short, once you put an SD card into a WP7 phone you can't take it out (or the phone won't boot) and you can't read it on any other devices. Each card model also needed to be "certified" before use.
So if you remove the SD card from the phone, neither the phone or the card will work as expected?
How's that sensible?
Does that study take into account the productivity of a healthy worker versus that of someone who is permanently, or frequently ill?
Health isn't an all-or-nothing affair. It's not like you have an internal bool is_healthy which goes to false one day and you go to the doctor so he can set it back to true, and you go on your way.
The reality is that most people only visit the doctor when it gets really bad, and treatments can last very long times, especially if the patient keeps on doing whatever put him in the hospital in the first place (eating fat food and smoking).
I've also had to pick up VS2010 (for professional reasons) after a long time of using Eclipse, and the process has been painful.
More painful due to the fact that I'm also moving from Linux to Win7 at the same time.
Now, Win7 is nicer than XP, and VS2010 is nicer than the previous one I'd used some 6~8 years ago, but it's all the little details and annoying "features" in VS which make it so hard to pick up:
Document tabs now open on the left instead of the right. There's an option for that, but once the tabs overflow, their order becomes random.
No quick way to toggle code commentting (a-la eclipse's shift-ctrl-c). There's ctrl-k-c/u or something, but it's much less usable, it's much less intelligent in how it comments the code and it was crashing VS2010 so much I started just commenting manually.
Crappy automatic code formatting for c/c++.
Cryptic c/c++ error messages.
And others I can't remember now.
My theory is that they either designed it like this on purpose so that you can't easily jump to another IDE, or that it was designed in an echo chamber by past VS users who are (poorly) reinventing the wheel.
I agree with this.
I like to code listening to music (with headphones, my musical tastes aren't exactly "popular"), but I only do it when I'm coding away a pre-tought idea.
When I need to think about the architecture, or read documentation I pause the music, and when I know again what to do, I resume it.
This is a completely different situation from the one in the article the GP quoted. That's music you can't pause at will and it may not even be to your taste or mood (even in my own collection I find myself skipping some songs to ones which I feel more like hearing at that particular time).
As for the isolation thing in TFA I have no idea what they're going on about. I use headphones so I don't bother my work colleagues, and expect them to have the same courtesy with me.
I actually dislike the fact that headphones disconnect me from the office life. If there was a way to clearly mix music with office sounds in my headphones I would take it.
My office is pretty quiet, though. YMMV.
They will just stick them in the separation between the car's door and the chassis.
At least that's what a few of them started to do around these parts. I guess they figured out that it was annoying people (i.e. their possible customers) when it rains and the flier sticks to your window.
I'm still hoping that they come to the conclusion that putting trash in my car is always anoying, but like spam, that won't happen until it stops being effective (and I doubt it will).
But in that case they wouldn't be able to impersonate him.
Then book first class seats and most of your points become moot.
Except for the fresh air thing, but I don't really know what you're on about. I've been flying for decades and to me the air inside the plane has always been stale. On the other hand, long gone are the days where smoking was allowed on board.
I guess that's the real reason why they needed to pump extra fresh air into the cabin. If you ask me, I'd rather take the 85% recirculated air than pure air + smoke from the human chimneys in the back.
As for the grumpy staff and babies crying, that's nothing new. It was like that 20 years ago and still is. But again, first class gets you nicer service and it's rare that a mother will pay first class tickets for her little monster. They usually fly in the back making lives misearble for the rest of us.
As far as I see it, for flights lasting up to around 4h, the airplane is just a glorified bus. I don't need anything else, just take me to where it says on the ticket, and in the mean time I can sleep/play/read/work to distract myself until we arrive.
Granted, flying may not be a great experience, but cheaper flights mean I get to travel more and visit more of the world.
I have a cronjob running rsync to my server every night. It runs at 20h (8pm) every day which is when I expect the pc to be on and online the most often.
Since it runs every day I don't really care if a give day's run fails because the PC was off, or I had no internet connection.
It runs off of a shell script, so I can run it manually whenever I want to make sure that new data is backed up properly (like when I make significant changes to my thesis, or when I take the laptop somewhere with me).
The problem is pure rsync isn't really backup, it's more like mirrorring.
I like it because this means that the files on the server are exactly like the files on my PC, so I can access them directly. But if for some reason my files become corrupted and I don't notice it, the backup won't help me.
The other problem is that the server lives in my apartment. In case of a fire, or more likey, a commet hitting my home, it's possible to lose my pc and server simultaneously.
The backups are actually done to a small external hard drive. At least in some of those cases, it might be possible to grab the drive and run for it, but I'm still looking at a possibility to start doing the backups remotely.
But it is disabled by default in Firefox 11 as it is the first release with SPDY. That will probably change in Firefox 12 or Firefox 13.
So, next week then.
As a user of the nouveau driver in a system where the binary blob causes a lot of instability (which nouveau doesn't have), you have my eternal gratitude for your efforts.
I don't play games on my PC, so for me the performance is more than satisfactory. Desktop composition and effects are smooth enough, and I can play videos in any quality without any hickups.
The only issues I have now is that I can't set the brightness level (aparently it works in the new kernel. I'll check that once I upgrade my Ubuntu installation), and it seems that my battery runs out quicker than with the binary drivers. But it's nice to know that that's being worked on.
So thanks for your work. I understand it can sometimes be a thankless job, and people on the internet tend to focus on the negatives, so I hope that you know the positive effect you're having in the computing world -- if it weren't for nouveau, I'd probably be in Windows right now.
Whatever happened to doing things for the pleasure of doing them?
I thought here in slashdot of all places there would be more appreciation for home-built solutions instead of going to the nearest store and buying it pre-packaged.
I thought he had an elegant solution to a problem he wanted to fix, and I bet that he had fun coming up with it -- I know I would.
Sine we're sharing unsolicited advice on how to live each other's lives, here's mine: you're an asshole.
Your arrogant and aggressive tone won't lead to any productive discussions and isn't going to be making in any friends. If this is how you act in real life, then you're in for a difficult one.
But I suppose you're not really like this in real life. More likely you're just an internet bully, which is even worse -- it makes you a coward asshole.
Anyway, to your point, the DB I was speaking about was an Android sqlite DB. Sure, I could've made that clear in my original post, but I didn't think that anyone would be an asshole about it (that's you -- see above).
If you're not aware, the Android sqlite DB is there as a convenient way for apps to store data. It does not feature a "dev db server" or even run on a separate system.
It is possible to connect to a running emulator and run tests from the pc, but the interface is contrived and difficult to use.
Furthemore, this is just a hobby, not my job, so forgive me for not having an incredibly elaborate development environment.
You seem to be the sort of developer who thinks that real developers must have it hard, and that the niceties that modern IDEs offer are for the newbies and incompetent.
That and your poor social skills make you a crappy team mate and generally a bad programmer. I hope I'll never have the displeasure of being stuck in a project with you.
While I agree in many ways with the points you raise, I still think there's a place for his ideas in an IDE.
For example, I'm currently writing some SQL for a project of mine, and it'd be really helpfull to be able to see the results of my queries in real time as I write them out (especially since my SQL is so rusty).
The same goes for a few simple functions with a bit of complex math I have here. A side view like he has in his algorithm example would've saved me quite a few trips to the debugger.
Sure, I could open a connection to the database and test it incrementally, but that's exactly what he's talking about: being able to see the results change dynamically as you type can improve productivity and identify problems earlier.
It may not be as essential as he seems to claim, but it'd be a nice addition to an IDE.