I was kinda hoping he'd built some elaborate timing setup to somehow match the exact timestamps and compile speed as the official binaries were built with.
This is still a great analysis though, and the detail provided is a fun read and useful insight into the general mindset and method of how this kind of analysis is done.
Cars and bikes are incompatible. One is a fast moving heavy block of metal completely encasing a human, one is a slow moving light weight contraption offering almost no protection to it's rider.
If a car hits another car at city speed, the passengers stand a pretty good chance of walking away. If a bike his another bike, again, probably some injuries, but both will probably survive. If a car hits a bike at a decent speed, the biker is gonna get seriously injured.
Having them share the same space has always seemed absurd to me. We've established that there are enough idiots on both sides to make the thing unsafe.
Here in Halifax we have narrow roads originally built for horse and buggy in a city that wasn't designed (lots of weird intersections that don't line up/involve all kinds if strange turns) with no parking (lots of cars parked along those streets). You can make all the "bikers have a right to be there" arguments you want, but if you with my car, you might die while the driver might get a ticket and maybe a broken windshield (it's just a traffic accident unless obvious recklessness).
I was actually quite impressed with the push back against the 1996-level caps usage caps the CRTC tried a while back.
In that case we were talking direct cost to consumers though. Privacy it's a little more abstract and hard to get the average non-geek angry about. Then again, how many people have lets say "unique" web browsing habits (office stapler porn) that they may not want driving ads their wife/kids/friends using their wifi/etc would see. That's probably the cheat code right there.
replacement of common ad providers like DoubleClick in third party websites
It's down on my list of things that piss me off about this, but how the hell is that fair to websites supporting themselves through advertising.
This whole thing should be illegal. I'm blown away that it's not, and am hoping this enrages enough people to get the process rolling on making it illegal.
I'm more concerned with whatever magic they are doing to get the list of websites I'm visiting. Be it transparent proxy of packet inspection, it seems totally over the line.
I can respect that view, and I'm not one of those guys that points and screams "EVIL DOER!!" every time someone buys from a company I don't like.
I guess it's just a personal thing. All companies are evil, however I view certain media companies, Oracle, and Apple (though a little less so) to be excessively evil in ways I personally care about so I try to avoid doing business with them when practical (and occasionally when not).
That's probably what I would do if I had to run windows, but people are (not too surprisingly) hesitant to spend an additional $200 or so to get an older version of windows. Upgrading from XP to 7 probably makes sense for those running XP on machines that can support it.
My main use case has been running a windows VM for the small but unavoidable number of windows-only apps I need to run. Obviously this means LXC and OpenVZ are out, but KVM is starting to look attractive. I haven't done much research, but biggest requirement for me is probably USB support.
VirtualBox in the hands of evil was a real kick in the teeth, because it really is a great product:(
I've normally considered myself fairly pragmatic, and while I've run Linux happily for well over a decade, I totally get why it's not a practical solution for most. Interesting thing is, for the first time since.. forever, I actually feel like I can recommend Linux to my non-technical friends. The situation that's coming up a lot:
"I run windows XP, I tried windows 8 and hated it, what the heck am I supposed to do when they stop supporting XP".
Gaming is still the big sticking point (though even that's improving a lot), but for my "facebook and email" friends, throwing mint on there (or whatever the current user-friendly distro of choice is) is becoming a realistic thought. One in particular has a computer that's barely capable of running XP right now, so I might recommend it to her as a trial.
The other big unresolved sticking point has been attachment to specific software. In the case above, she has used some ancient version of "print master gold" for a while and would very much like to continue doing so. It's this kind of thing that we tend to shrug off that keeps people from switching, but at this point it probably won't work on windows 8 anyway, so nothing to lose, and might be able to make it work through wine..
Every one of these points hits the nail square on the head.
The key to take out of this is: document document document! At minimum you should have a set of instructions to re-build your dev and build environment. "Insert the <your company> dev workstation image v4" is not allowed to be a step! Your elaborate continuous integration multi-tree setup and mountain of environment setup scripts and template directories are great until the guy who set it up takes off and you have to upgrade something. Ideally a set of instructions talking to the motivation of certain decisions, roadblocks encountered, etc.
One thing the article doesn't have is have lots of 3rd party tools and keep the license servers/license files on whatever box is most convenient for the dev working on it at the time.
My experience with LaTeX has been good. I suspect a lot of complaints geared towards it are by people really pushing the limits of what it can do / working on complex projects, in which case all tools are going to have little annoyances. Not saying issues don't exist, but those kind of issues are probably not going to plague the common user.
Never used scrivener, I've just heard it mentioned by a lot of people who as you said, are mainly using it to write novels/short stories/ponies fanfics/etc. I too agree that it would annoy the hell out of me, but it seems oriented at people who don't care about the technical details.
I have used framemaker. "Structured" framemaker is actually pretty damn good, but it required a good understanding of the tool to do even the simplest thing without totally screwing it up, and you pretty much need at least 1 full time guru to set up the document initially and "harmonize" the input from other contributes. It's the kind of thing you see used to maintain tech manuals for 20 years (again, aerospace and defence), definitely not for quickly throwing together a report.
Word is popular because it is can be manhandled by just about anyone with basic computer skills into producing a passable document. Most people doing anything more complex have a variety of tools available with various trade-offs in functionality and learning curve.
This is largely true about most popular products. Tools which are technically inferior for a purpose are used because the gap in technical fitness is smaller and lest costly than the difference in skill required to use the better suited tool. Cheaper to have the hammer than can pound in most nails when you don't really care as long as it holds, then go get the specialized hammer when you do..
Word is good for casual word processing, but the cracks show when working on anything large, or where multiple people are working on the same document.
That said, those people who work on large documents or documents that get edited over a long period of time by different people have lots of tools available that support this (LaTeX, Scrivener, and Framemaker are the big three I see all the time).
I said it in an earlier post, but word is basically the lowest common denominator. It's a tool that basically does what most people need out of it, that just about everyone has access to and can deal with. When people need more, there's lots of available options.
LaTeX if you are generally technically minded and don't mind a learning curve. Lyx can take the edge of LaTeX while still preserving most of the benefits.
Scrivener is really popular with authors and seems generally geared more towards creative people vice technical people.
Framemaker has an almost cult following in certain circles, particularly tech writers in aerospace/defence/medical fields. It's a very powerful tool, but my god is it painful to use.
More abstractly, there are lots of tools which have sprung up to address the issues raised in the article.
Word has kind of become the lowest common denominator. Just about everyone can open a word document, and just about everyone can make one. As soon as more features are needed, people turn to tools like Scrivener (popular with authors), LaTeX (popular with technical people), or even bafflingly painful but powerful tools like Adobe's Framemaker (tech writers in certain industries).
At the IPO level it makes sense to me, because you are essentially providing them funding.
After that, you are buying from another investor. And some day, another investor is buying from you. The money at this point is just bouncing around from investor to investor.
In my model of ownership, the stock itself has no actual value (because you can't sell it).
I do accept that there are a tonne of holes in this approach. Why would a company in that situation even declare any profit vice just dumping it all into internal stuff, etc. It's more of a really high level view of how I wished it worked, that is, the money going directly to someone who is going to be doing something with it, rather than just bouncing around between other investors.
The original idea of a large number of people providing a small amount of money (and accepting a small amount of risk) for expensive and risky ventures (like merchant trips to the edge of the world to pick up some spices..) makes sense to me. I wish we could get back to some form of that.
I'm a believer in eliminating the buying and selling of "stock" amongst investors. It's gotten so abstract and convoluted that it serves only to take money off the top of others work as you said.
I'll admit I haven't really thought this through, but I envision a system where buy into a company in the hopes that they do well, and make your profit when they do (or take the loss when they don't).
All this second sale stuff is artificial and I think needs to go, people are buying things whos only purpose (barring dividends) is resale for the same purpose. Everyone plays along because everyone wants to be the winner, but when you stand back it seems like absolute lunacy. Add in this automatic microsecond trading and it looks even more so. How is any of this befitting anyone in a direct manner.
-Pulling out of a parking spot -Making a really tight turn into a stop sign (probably the hardest part of the test.. the place was basically at the end of a parking lot, and you had maybe a car and a half length to between the end of the lane and a stop sign, go past the stop sign or have your back wheels over the middle line and it was an instant fail. - Drive up one street - Make an easy right turn - Drive around for maybe 10 minutes - Park on a hill - Come back to the same parking lot - Pull back into the spot (this was another screw it up-instant fail moment, but it's practically a deserted lot with lots of room)
This to me seems absolutely ridiculous. We get some fairly hazardous weather here, not to mention most people end up driving into cities like Halifax, with crazy tight roads designed for horse and buggy and absolutely no planning (lots of weird 1 way streets, roads that don't line up, places you turn different ways different times of the day, etc).
Very least they should have something rigged up to simulate the experience of navigating a biker on the left of a parked car with oncoming in the next lane and like half a foot on each side clearance on a road with a slight curve (for the record, I will usually wait till the biker passes the car, but often the bikers will initiate this situation..).
Slashdot Mirror
I was kinda hoping he'd built some elaborate timing setup to somehow match the exact timestamps and compile speed as the official binaries were built with.
This is still a great analysis though, and the detail provided is a fun read and useful insight into the general mindset and method of how this kind of analysis is done.
Totally this.
Cars and bikes are incompatible. One is a fast moving heavy block of metal completely encasing a human, one is a slow moving light weight contraption offering almost no protection to it's rider.
If a car hits another car at city speed, the passengers stand a pretty good chance of walking away. If a bike his another bike, again, probably some injuries, but both will probably survive. If a car hits a bike at a decent speed, the biker is gonna get seriously injured.
Having them share the same space has always seemed absurd to me. We've established that there are enough idiots on both sides to make the thing unsafe.
Here in Halifax we have narrow roads originally built for horse and buggy in a city that wasn't designed (lots of weird intersections that don't line up/involve all kinds if strange turns) with no parking (lots of cars parked along those streets). You can make all the "bikers have a right to be there" arguments you want, but if you with my car, you might die while the driver might get a ticket and maybe a broken windshield (it's just a traffic accident unless obvious recklessness).
I was actually quite impressed with the push back against the 1996-level caps usage caps the CRTC tried a while back.
In that case we were talking direct cost to consumers though. Privacy it's a little more abstract and hard to get the average non-geek angry about. Then again, how many people have lets say "unique" web browsing habits (office stapler porn) that they may not want driving ads their wife/kids/friends using their wifi/etc would see. That's probably the cheat code right there.
replacement of common ad providers like DoubleClick in third party websites
It's down on my list of things that piss me off about this, but how the hell is that fair to websites supporting themselves through advertising.
This whole thing should be illegal. I'm blown away that it's not, and am hoping this enrages enough people to get the process rolling on making it illegal.
I'm more concerned with whatever magic they are doing to get the list of websites I'm visiting. Be it transparent proxy of packet inspection, it seems totally over the line.
If they could do that without long (or short) term complications, I'd be all for sedated flying.
I can respect that view, and I'm not one of those guys that points and screams "EVIL DOER!!" every time someone buys from a company I don't like.
I guess it's just a personal thing. All companies are evil, however I view certain media companies, Oracle, and Apple (though a little less so) to be excessively evil in ways I personally care about so I try to avoid doing business with them when practical (and occasionally when not).
That's probably what I would do if I had to run windows, but people are (not too surprisingly) hesitant to spend an additional $200 or so to get an older version of windows. Upgrading from XP to 7 probably makes sense for those running XP on machines that can support it.
My main use case has been running a windows VM for the small but unavoidable number of windows-only apps I need to run. Obviously this means LXC and OpenVZ are out, but KVM is starting to look attractive. I haven't done much research, but biggest requirement for me is probably USB support.
VirtualBox in the hands of evil was a real kick in the teeth, because it really is a great product :(
Was that ever a paid feature? A closed feature for sure, but I thought it was made available at no cost.
It's unfortunate that VirtualBox is in the hands of evil, because it really is a solid product :(
I've normally considered myself fairly pragmatic, and while I've run Linux happily for well over a decade, I totally get why it's not a practical solution for most. Interesting thing is, for the first time since.. forever, I actually feel like I can recommend Linux to my non-technical friends. The situation that's coming up a lot:
"I run windows XP, I tried windows 8 and hated it, what the heck am I supposed to do when they stop supporting XP".
Gaming is still the big sticking point (though even that's improving a lot), but for my "facebook and email" friends, throwing mint on there (or whatever the current user-friendly distro of choice is) is becoming a realistic thought. One in particular has a computer that's barely capable of running XP right now, so I might recommend it to her as a trial.
The other big unresolved sticking point has been attachment to specific software. In the case above, she has used some ancient version of "print master gold" for a while and would very much like to continue doing so. It's this kind of thing that we tend to shrug off that keeps people from switching, but at this point it probably won't work on windows 8 anyway, so nothing to lose, and might be able to make it work through wine..
SCCS
That sounds famil.. oh god! The memories... sccs, mergegj, teamware! Make it stop, I don't wanna play anymore!!!
Kidding aside, SCCS and it's best friend teamware may actually be satan.
Every one of these points hits the nail square on the head.
The key to take out of this is: document document document! At minimum you should have a set of instructions to re-build your dev and build environment. "Insert the <your company> dev workstation image v4" is not allowed to be a step! Your elaborate continuous integration multi-tree setup and mountain of environment setup scripts and template directories are great until the guy who set it up takes off and you have to upgrade something. Ideally a set of instructions talking to the motivation of certain decisions, roadblocks encountered, etc.
One thing the article doesn't have is have lots of 3rd party tools and keep the license servers/license files on whatever box is most convenient for the dev working on it at the time.
Yeah but then you're that guy who is always sending the messed up documents. This is especially true when field codes are being used.
My primary argument against Libre Office is that when I'm using Microsoft Word, its because someone else needs it in word doc format.
My experience with LaTeX has been good. I suspect a lot of complaints geared towards it are by people really pushing the limits of what it can do / working on complex projects, in which case all tools are going to have little annoyances. Not saying issues don't exist, but those kind of issues are probably not going to plague the common user.
Never used scrivener, I've just heard it mentioned by a lot of people who as you said, are mainly using it to write novels/short stories/ponies fanfics/etc. I too agree that it would annoy the hell out of me, but it seems oriented at people who don't care about the technical details.
I have used framemaker. "Structured" framemaker is actually pretty damn good, but it required a good understanding of the tool to do even the simplest thing without totally screwing it up, and you pretty much need at least 1 full time guru to set up the document initially and "harmonize" the input from other contributes. It's the kind of thing you see used to maintain tech manuals for 20 years (again, aerospace and defence), definitely not for quickly throwing together a report.
So much this!
Word is popular because it is can be manhandled by just about anyone with basic computer skills into producing a passable document. Most people doing anything more complex have a variety of tools available with various trade-offs in functionality and learning curve.
This is largely true about most popular products. Tools which are technically inferior for a purpose are used because the gap in technical fitness is smaller and lest costly than the difference in skill required to use the better suited tool. Cheaper to have the hammer than can pound in most nails when you don't really care as long as it holds, then go get the specialized hammer when you do..
Word is good for casual word processing, but the cracks show when working on anything large, or where multiple people are working on the same document.
That said, those people who work on large documents or documents that get edited over a long period of time by different people have lots of tools available that support this (LaTeX, Scrivener, and Framemaker are the big three I see all the time).
I said it in an earlier post, but word is basically the lowest common denominator. It's a tool that basically does what most people need out of it, that just about everyone has access to and can deal with. When people need more, there's lots of available options.
LaTeX if you are generally technically minded and don't mind a learning curve. Lyx can take the edge of LaTeX while still preserving most of the benefits.
Scrivener is really popular with authors and seems generally geared more towards creative people vice technical people.
Framemaker has an almost cult following in certain circles, particularly tech writers in aerospace/defence/medical fields. It's a very powerful tool, but my god is it painful to use.
More abstractly, there are lots of tools which have sprung up to address the issues raised in the article.
Word has kind of become the lowest common denominator. Just about everyone can open a word document, and just about everyone can make one. As soon as more features are needed, people turn to tools like Scrivener (popular with authors), LaTeX (popular with technical people), or even bafflingly painful but powerful tools like Adobe's Framemaker (tech writers in certain industries).
At the IPO level it makes sense to me, because you are essentially providing them funding.
After that, you are buying from another investor. And some day, another investor is buying from you. The money at this point is just bouncing around from investor to investor.
In my model of ownership, the stock itself has no actual value (because you can't sell it).
I do accept that there are a tonne of holes in this approach. Why would a company in that situation even declare any profit vice just dumping it all into internal stuff, etc. It's more of a really high level view of how I wished it worked, that is, the money going directly to someone who is going to be doing something with it, rather than just bouncing around between other investors.
The original idea of a large number of people providing a small amount of money (and accepting a small amount of risk) for expensive and risky ventures (like merchant trips to the edge of the world to pick up some spices..) makes sense to me. I wish we could get back to some form of that.
I'm a believer in eliminating the buying and selling of "stock" amongst investors. It's gotten so abstract and convoluted that it serves only to take money off the top of others work as you said.
I'll admit I haven't really thought this through, but I envision a system where buy into a company in the hopes that they do well, and make your profit when they do (or take the loss when they don't).
All this second sale stuff is artificial and I think needs to go, people are buying things whos only purpose (barring dividends) is resale for the same purpose. Everyone plays along because everyone wants to be the winner, but when you stand back it seems like absolute lunacy. Add in this automatic microsecond trading and it looks even more so. How is any of this befitting anyone in a direct manner.
My drivers test (Atlantic Canada) consisted of:
-Pulling out of a parking spot
-Making a really tight turn into a stop sign (probably the hardest part of the test.. the place was basically at the end of a parking lot, and you had maybe a car and a half length to between the end of the lane and a stop sign, go past the stop sign or have your back wheels over the middle line and it was an instant fail.
- Drive up one street
- Make an easy right turn
- Drive around for maybe 10 minutes
- Park on a hill
- Come back to the same parking lot
- Pull back into the spot (this was another screw it up-instant fail moment, but it's practically a deserted lot with lots of room)
This to me seems absolutely ridiculous. We get some fairly hazardous weather here, not to mention most people end up driving into cities like Halifax, with crazy tight roads designed for horse and buggy and absolutely no planning (lots of weird 1 way streets, roads that don't line up, places you turn different ways different times of the day, etc).
Very least they should have something rigged up to simulate the experience of navigating a biker on the left of a parked car with oncoming in the next lane and like half a foot on each side clearance on a road with a slight curve (for the record, I will usually wait till the biker passes the car, but often the bikers will initiate this situation..).