Who are these people? Seriously. No, I mean it. I've been using Firefox since 0.6, with occasional frays into Konqueror, w3, Lynx, Opera, IE and Chrome, and I don't think it's ever used more that a gig of RAM, even in the good ole' Delicious/Digg/Reddit days when everything was new and interesting. The last few years it's been running with at least the AdBlock Plus, Delicious Bookmarks, Flashblock and Web Developer extensions, on Windows 2000/XP, FreeBSD and Ubuntu, on at least five different machines that I can think of off the top of my head. Are these guys some sort of browser company/community minions/fanboys? I've also never heard of anyone having memory trouble with Firefox; it's always "I read/heard it somewhere."
Chrome is good for fast JS, Opera for W3C compliance, w3/Lynx for testing, IE for viruses, Konqueror for FTP, and Firefox for extensions. Now STFU and use your favorite.
I enjoy classical music, but not when it's played a) too loud (can't hear myself think), b) too quiet (think elevator music), and/or c) on a shitty speaker system (any shop / public vehicle).
My guess (didn't RTFA) is that a) and c) apply here, in which case, yes, they are unspeakable bastards for ruining the experience and using something the kids can't block out. They're just kids! Sure they can be rude and dishonest*, but do you really want a significant fraction of them growing up feeling like they are not wanted anywhere, before they have even done anything to deserve it? It's not like the local hang-out is an exclusive club for those with a criminal record.
* Just like grown-ups, who are just better at disguising it.
Having used Ubuntu first with 5.1 optical/analog onboard sound, and currently with 7.1 ditto, I have to say the ease of setup has gone up and down vastly between releases. The trend is upwards, however: 5.1 analog and stereo optical output works out of the box with 9.4 and 9.10, unlike before, now the only thing missing is the GUI option for 5.1 optical.
I find it interesting that after many years of stories about the impossibility of cellphone radiation having any damaging effect due to its low power, we suddenly hear this story about the positive effects it has. One of the two can't be true.
On the contrary, almost everything you get in touch with has positive and negative effects. To take the current example, the radiation might have a statistically significant effect on temperature, bacterial growth rate, electronic equipment or something completely different. Some of these might be positive, some might be negative, and some (probably most) will be either depending on other factors.
Heh, no. Finished MSc in CS in 2004, worked in large companies + CERN since then, and doing a PhD now. And yes, I believe it's easy and desirable to accept any input. Learn to escape and unescape (or parametrization when possible), along with the basics of Unicode, and your users will love your software even more.
Yep, it's that enormously annoying thing that almost no developers get right. They filter out emails that contain + or -, names with accents, and zip codes / phone numbers for other countries. You should never reject a value from a user: If it looks wrong to you, suggest that they change it, but for f's sake put it in your DB. And don't tell me about quotes or backspaces - RTFM or Google it.
So he does black box testing. That's certainly an important form of testing, but won't detect a huge swath of problems. For example, if your employer deals with enormous amounts of small sums per year, including currencies and interest rates, and the quality assurance is a "looks OK" from someone above you, would you be nervous about your savings? I know I would be, but unfortunately I am in no position to review their code. And some "error handling" code is really "error cover-up" code, which may end up creating sensible-looking data that is simply wrong.
I used to work on the software handling the test results from hardware commissioning of the LHC, and an inevitable conclusion is that a lot of smart people did a lot of work to get the accelerator working as well as it does, given the restrictions and unknowns of the project.
...is the manual filtering by the recipient. Actually, scratch that, I've deleted emails that were clearly legitimate. Ah well, as long as it adds to the arsenal.
"No PR is bad PR." Look at all the free PR they got now, because smart-asses (got karma to burn) want to point out the blindingly obvious. I'd say it's a genius statement, if it wasn't so sad that we've fallen for this trick over and over again.
Also, consider the blank stares if they'd said "This phone can take up to X Nm before breaking!".
Planck units since the Big Bang is the only way! Let's see: ~5.4E-44 seconds per unit, ~1.37E10 years since the Big Bang ~= 2.53E53 decimal = 2A4359FEF2C78D94A50F53B75B35AA648000000000000 hex, which should take about 180 bits to store.
Another simple tactic for them would be to simply bog down the SVG approval process to the point where the next version will be obsolete by the time it's approved. Queue tons of implementations conforming to a moving target and lots of extra work while the real MS heads get together to churn out another competitor as fast as they can.
I often find that the command name is far removed from how newbies would talk about a task ("grep" is meaningless* compared to "search"**) - GNOME has done some great work on this by creating sensible categories for applications, unlike "<company> Control Center Ultra" on Windows, but it needs a lot more work and a lot less ego. Also, the bridge between the available materials and the expected end point might be two or more levels removed: You just bought the Weird Worlds download version, and have no idea that gnome-terminal, ls, mount and wine could get you to the next step in 30 seconds (if they're all installed and you know how they work).
Come to think of it, why doesn't find have an option like "--contains" to grep, instead of the incredibly obtuse find... -exec grep "foo" '{}' \; -print?
* Yes, I know what it means
** Yes, I know you can echo "alias foo=\"bar\" > ~/.bashrc. Try that on someone who doesn't know what grep is.
If they all go black, remember to start running! It'll be too late for us here at the campus, but maybe some of you could make it to Mars and start colonizing it. Hairdressers and middle management first, please!
When registering IrfanView in 2007, I asked Irfan Skiljan if he had considered GPL-ing it. The reply was "Thanks, maybe later, but I don't think GPL is the best license type." It would be such a coup for open source platforms if it could be freed and ported...
After using a fitPC for the last three years as an Apache + SSL + Subversion (and recently, rsync backup) server, I'll give it a big thumbs up. The only maintenance work since installing Ubuntu Server has been the occasional sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade && sudo shutdown -r now.
Just a side note about how they handle file names: While bulk renaming files on an NTFS drive in Linux, I ended up with some file names having a space at the end. Windows (XP) Explorer was unable to delete or rename these.
After working on SharePoint for a year, I can honestly say that the documentation was a pile of dung. Development was only possible by accident, because often obvious functionality was undocumented or had so little detail that the only way to figure out what the options would do was to try them all. And SharePoint functions have a lot of options.
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Make colored output with shell escape sequences. Works especially well with red type for error messages, makes them really stand out.
Sounds like you really know your stuff, so I hope you can answer these:
Who are these people? Seriously. No, I mean it. I've been using Firefox since 0.6, with occasional frays into Konqueror, w3, Lynx, Opera, IE and Chrome, and I don't think it's ever used more that a gig of RAM, even in the good ole' Delicious/Digg/Reddit days when everything was new and interesting. The last few years it's been running with at least the AdBlock Plus, Delicious Bookmarks, Flashblock and Web Developer extensions, on Windows 2000/XP, FreeBSD and Ubuntu, on at least five different machines that I can think of off the top of my head. Are these guys some sort of browser company/community minions/fanboys? I've also never heard of anyone having memory trouble with Firefox; it's always "I read/heard it somewhere."
Chrome is good for fast JS, Opera for W3C compliance, w3/Lynx for testing, IE for viruses, Konqueror for FTP, and Firefox for extensions. Now STFU and use your favorite.
Yes: "The inclusion of WebKit into Steam, and of OpenGL into Source gives us a lot of flexibility in how we move these technologies forward."
I enjoy classical music, but not when it's played
a) too loud (can't hear myself think),
b) too quiet (think elevator music), and/or
c) on a shitty speaker system (any shop / public vehicle).
My guess (didn't RTFA) is that a) and c) apply here, in which case, yes, they are unspeakable bastards for ruining the experience and using something the kids can't block out. They're just kids! Sure they can be rude and dishonest*, but do you really want a significant fraction of them growing up feeling like they are not wanted anywhere, before they have even done anything to deserve it? It's not like the local hang-out is an exclusive club for those with a criminal record.
* Just like grown-ups, who are just better at disguising it.
Having used Ubuntu first with 5.1 optical/analog onboard sound, and currently with 7.1 ditto, I have to say the ease of setup has gone up and down vastly between releases. The trend is upwards, however: 5.1 analog and stereo optical output works out of the box with 9.4 and 9.10, unlike before, now the only thing missing is the GUI option for 5.1 optical.
I find it interesting that after many years of stories about the impossibility of cellphone radiation having any damaging effect due to its low power, we suddenly hear this story about the positive effects it has. One of the two can't be true.
On the contrary, almost everything you get in touch with has positive and negative effects. To take the current example, the radiation might have a statistically significant effect on temperature, bacterial growth rate, electronic equipment or something completely different. Some of these might be positive, some might be negative, and some (probably most) will be either depending on other factors.
Heh, no. Finished MSc in CS in 2004, worked in large companies + CERN since then, and doing a PhD now. And yes, I believe it's easy and desirable to accept any input. Learn to escape and unescape (or parametrization when possible), along with the basics of Unicode, and your users will love your software even more.
The counterpart to accepting any input is sanitizing any output. It's really very easy if you have centralized DB fetching (and you should).
Ever heard of input sanity checking?
Yep, it's that enormously annoying thing that almost no developers get right. They filter out emails that contain + or -, names with accents, and zip codes / phone numbers for other countries. You should never reject a value from a user: If it looks wrong to you, suggest that they change it, but for f's sake put it in your DB. And don't tell me about quotes or backspaces - RTFM or Google it.
So he does black box testing. That's certainly an important form of testing, but won't detect a huge swath of problems. For example, if your employer deals with enormous amounts of small sums per year, including currencies and interest rates, and the quality assurance is a "looks OK" from someone above you, would you be nervous about your savings? I know I would be, but unfortunately I am in no position to review their code. And some "error handling" code is really "error cover-up" code, which may end up creating sensible-looking data that is simply wrong.
I used to work on the software handling the test results from hardware commissioning of the LHC, and an inevitable conclusion is that a lot of smart people did a lot of work to get the accelerator working as well as it does, given the restrictions and unknowns of the project.
...is the manual filtering by the recipient. Actually, scratch that, I've deleted emails that were clearly legitimate. Ah well, as long as it adds to the arsenal.
"No PR is bad PR." Look at all the free PR they got now, because smart-asses (got karma to burn) want to point out the blindingly obvious. I'd say it's a genius statement, if it wasn't so sad that we've fallen for this trick over and over again.
Also, consider the blank stares if they'd said "This phone can take up to X Nm before breaking!".
Thanks - Never had Latin in school, and I've seen at least three variants, so I just picked one :)
So nature does open source genetic engineering? Sweet!
Seriously though, could this be used to explain some instances of co-evolution?
Planck units since the Big Bang is the only way! Let's see: ~5.4E-44 seconds per unit, ~1.37E10 years since the Big Bang ~= 2.53E53 decimal = 2A4359FEF2C78D94A50F53B75B35AA648000000000000 hex, which should take about 180 bits to store.
Another simple tactic for them would be to simply bog down the SVG approval process to the point where the next version will be obsolete by the time it's approved. Queue tons of implementations conforming to a moving target and lots of extra work while the real MS heads get together to churn out another competitor as fast as they can.
PS: Not the source
Java isn't platform independent; it is a platform.
Bjarne Stroustrup
I often find that the command name is far removed from how newbies would talk about a task ("grep" is meaningless* compared to "search"**) - GNOME has done some great work on this by creating sensible categories for applications, unlike "<company> Control Center Ultra" on Windows, but it needs a lot more work and a lot less ego. Also, the bridge between the available materials and the expected end point might be two or more levels removed: You just bought the Weird Worlds download version, and have no idea that gnome-terminal, ls, mount and wine could get you to the next step in 30 seconds (if they're all installed and you know how they work).
Come to think of it, why doesn't find have an option like "--contains" to grep, instead of the incredibly obtuse find ... -exec grep "foo" '{}' \; -print?
* Yes, I know what it means
** Yes, I know you can echo "alias foo=\"bar\" > ~/.bashrc. Try that on someone who doesn't know what grep is.
If they all go black, remember to start running! It'll be too late for us here at the campus, but maybe some of you could make it to Mars and start colonizing it. Hairdressers and middle management first, please!
When registering IrfanView in 2007, I asked Irfan Skiljan if he had considered GPL-ing it. The reply was "Thanks, maybe later, but I don't think GPL is the best license type." It would be such a coup for open source platforms if it could be freed and ported...
After using a fitPC for the last three years as an Apache + SSL + Subversion (and recently, rsync backup) server, I'll give it a big thumbs up. The only maintenance work since installing Ubuntu Server has been the occasional sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade && sudo shutdown -r now.
Just a side note about how they handle file names: While bulk renaming files on an NTFS drive in Linux, I ended up with some file names having a space at the end. Windows (XP) Explorer was unable to delete or rename these.
After working on SharePoint for a year, I can honestly say that the documentation was a pile of dung. Development was only possible by accident, because often obvious functionality was undocumented or had so little detail that the only way to figure out what the options would do was to try them all. And SharePoint functions have a lot of options.