In an absolute pinch there is staples... but you gotta be all out of options and really need the hardware.
The future shop / best buy thing is weird. As you said, same owner, same basic store.. but slightly different. Biggest difference here is future shop runs on commission and best buy doesn't. This puts future shop at the absolute bottom of the list. You go there and are immediately decended upon by their sales guys. For someone who likes to casually browse this is insanely irritating. If you do take their help.. you are rewarded by being pressured to pay for it immediately (so they get the commission). The whole things makes for quite a bad experience imo.
The old way was chaotic.. but it was also organic. Everything was in a big mess everywhere.. but it was right there when you needed it.
The new way is well structured, but totally misses the mark when it comes to comfortable work flow. As you said, it adds a series of jarring pauses to the process.
What's really annoying is they made the stuff that mostly worked worse, and left the stuff that doesn't work completely alone.
I too work on large word docs. I'd love to do them in latex (or just about anything else), but it's what the customer wants (they want to be able to change them themselves easily).
Revision tracking (the "track changes" feature) still has all the old annoyances. When you are using fields and cross-references they still don't update automatically. The old "print preview" to get them to update still works, and of course the annoying "even references that didn't change get crossed out and re-added" so you now have a change on every reference throughout the entire document. The old "disable track changes, print preview, re-enable" hack still applies. There is still no way to search or filter or do anything meaningful with the revision pane that isn't a complete nightmare.
Adding captions to images is still completely and totally fucked up, especially if you are using custom styles. Table of contents generator is still screwed up. The old list continuation bugs are still there (but are harder to fix now as word is trying to be too smart and it actually prevents you from doing the hacks that would fix these problems in the past. And of course section management is a nightmare as before, but all the options are buried!
Ok.. I'm gonna stop before I start frothing at the mouth.
I will admit that if you are just doing a quick document with nothing special, the ribbon (or chaos strip, that's a good one) works fine. But then again, the old toolbars worked fine for that stuff too! I guess what it comes down to is, has the chaos strip actually made anything easier, or did it maintain the status quo for easy stuff, and made hard stuff harder.
The effort to use a more secure hash is generally trivial, but there's still going to be a lot of people who either know and don't, or don't know.
For the first category, nothing you can do about it. Same people running wep on their wifi. They either don't see anyone ever attacking them, are tied in due to old systems, or don't care.
For the second category, stuff like this may help. I think at this point most people know md5 isn't as secure as once considered, but I don't think people realize just how insecure it is becoming. In peoples minds it's still in the "theoretically if someone was really dedicated they could break it" stage.. whereas it's actually entering into the "feasible to do it on large scale" stage. Breaking that perception might speed things along.
I think it's being driven by the cell phone / tablet craze. Everyones trying to make their desktop look like their cellphone. I too think it's a major step backwards.. and I think a lot of the UI design guys are out of touch with what people actually want.
I know I'm a terrible person.. but as someone who does a fair bit of highway driving.. I really hope they roll that one out. While they are at it.. paint up my hood and bumper too (much harder to clean).
No one would pay the cost to write something that's 100% bug free from square one. Instead, you defer the cost and risks via a support contract. Standard practice and works out for everyone.
Generally three things should be decided before work has even begun:
- initial cost of development - a warranty period - ongoing support agreement
Not to pile on the hate (I didn't find the review hard to read per se.. and nothing wrong with some elegant phrasing) but I too found the review got a little too much into the topic.
Maybe it's just personal preference, but when I read a review, I am not yet ready to delve into the subject matter. I'm primarily looking for a quick overview of the subject area, scope, and target audience (specifically whether I fall into it), tone (cheerful, funny, dead seriousy, insightful, technical, etc.) and quality (well written, poorly written, lots of pictures, wall of text, etc.) to determine whether I want to commit some brain time. If I have to start thinking while reading the review, I may as well be reading the book;p
This is more like a critique of the book or a discussion piece than a review. Which isn't a bad thing either. Certainly judging from the comments, I think it has served more to get people talking about design patterns vice the book itself or its subject matter (which I think is the case for most vook reviews anyway, I mean what discussion can be had about a book no one has read yet. How does one discuss a review).
Please tell me where you work so I NEVER apply there.
For what it's worth I was talking in the general, not my specific case. As it happens I did exactly as I said in my first post after working for a standard issue software mill and getting frustrated by the constant cost cutting and fear of outsourcing. Got into a specialized field where mistakes are expensive and high quality code is worth the price. Experienced coders, formal testing, people who can define the difference between system and software architecture, etc. I'd seriously recommend this to anyone getting fed up of being told "it works, ship it!".
Now how do cheap coders save money?
I don't pretend to understand how it works, I just have faith that things happen for a reason. Business guy's arn't _that_ stupid (they are generally making money after all). Obviously there are going to be cases where it doesn't work for whatever reason, but I have to assume that since the practice is becoming more universal, it has to have merit. Either way I've washed my hands of the mess.
It's actually an interesting topic.. because while newer languages and toolstacks have lowered the bar.. they've also made the cost of failure lower.
You can be a complete knuckhead.. and write absolutely terrible code. But if your using java.. it'll still probably work and after a while of hacking out the bugs (with more ugly code) it'll attain a surprising stability.
More relevant is this thought that better code will translate into the dollars and cents everyone else seems so concerned with. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. We get cheap coders because analysis of the business case shows you save more from the cheapness of the coders than you lose from the crumbiness of the software. If it was the other way around, most businesses would knock it off and up their standards.
Good jobs where they care about the skillset and are willing to pay for it do exist in industries where bad software costs a metric fuck-tonne (industries like defense, aerospace, medical) but it's no longer the norm for stuff where it doesn't.
On the other hand, if you spend all your time re-solving things which have already been solved.. you aren’t going anywhere fast either.
Ultimately design patterns already existed. Most of the commonly used ones are intuitive enough that most programmers arrived at them on their own. The main purpose served was creating a common vocabulary.
Design patterns served the purpose of giving names to the things that as you said, most coders already came up with. When I say strategy, or observer, or behavior, or singleton.. everyone knows what the hell I'm talking about.
I know I'm coming across as an arrogant snob but since when did programming stop being a profession and start being a free for all for all liberal arts failures who can type a line of C# and suddenly think they're Turing?
When we did what we do with everything.. made it easier. It's the natural progression. People said "hey, this is hard.. if we did it this way, it'll be less hard". Rinse and repeat. There's still hard stuff out there, but it's not common _because_ the common stuff has been made easy. If you want to be challanged, get a job doing something weird that hasn't benefited years of people doing the same thing and improving the process.
People have it in their heads that the crazier the class diagram, the easier the software will be to maintain. Obviously this isn't the case. Sometimes a design pattern can be used to provide useful abstraction or turn a complete hack into an elegant solution (or provide new and exciting hacks.. see: singleton),, but often it just adds extra classes that abstract things so core to the program that they will never change without a complete do-over.. or just adds useless layers of indirection that make it impossible for future maintainers to figure out what the hell anything does without using a debugger.
I think applicability comes down to justification. Can you justify the usage of this pattern? If not.. don't use it! Treat them as things to use when there is a reason, not things to just always use.
I imagine most people would also be hesitant to take it into a repair shop with that message displayed on the screen even if they recognize it as a scam.
There is a metric tonne of interest out there. The community doesn't exist yet because no one can get their hands on the damn thing!
That thing VIA is going to be putting out might end up crushing them if production doesn't ramp up soon.
Re:More like grilling for the gadget-obsessed
on
Grilling For Geeks
·
· Score: 1
I'll second the Serious Eats recommendation. Some very good advice and presented in a very digestible (hah) way. As a grilling newb, I’ve put a lot of the info to use and actually seen results.
This is second hand, but from a few people I know who are (kinda) in the business.. it used to be the exact opposite (the live performances promoted the music sales) but has now switched around to what is described. Best way to support your favorite band now is to see them live and buy an overpriced cheap screen printed t-shirt or CD off their merch stand.
Lots of ok music out there from people who do just that, but there is a reason indie music hasn't completely toppled the industry...
Hint: it's the same reason indie movies haven't toppled Hollywood.
There is still something to be said for those who actually devote all their time, not just the weekend, to producing content.. and who can afford the cheaper than before but still expensive pro gear.
And in general I agree with the sentiment in the argument. If the kind of distribution/creation model we've all been pushing ever actually takes hold.. it'll just become overrun by opportunists and we'll be right back to what we've got now.
Indeed. This is high level "meeting for the suits" bullshit. I can picture this showing up on powerpoint presentation.
Here are your three options.. this is the one that sucks, this is the one that sucks for a different reason, and this is the one I want you to go with. Oh, and here is a chart with some pretty checkmarks and stuff to help clarify! Lets do lunch!
I too know very little about cable.. but I'm guessing the problem starts when you have multiple TVs. Having 5 or more TVs in a house is not at all uncommon (living room, bedroom). That ends up being a lot of bandwidth.
You do your evil stuff with it enabled Disable it and do some more stuff (changing the "real" image) When you re-enable delta-ing.. does it merge the images or something? I would assume when when you disable delta-ing, your changes are either merged down to the real image or lost. Or does it let you keep almost like an "overlay" that can be applied even after the base image has been changed?
It's actually an interesting thought exercise to come up with a setup that would:
a) allow you every day access to your data in a practical way b) allow you to get rid of the data, leaving no trace that it was there
Modern software leaves bits of information everywhere. Lock files, history files, logs, cache, etc..
If you re-image your disk to do an emergency destruction, the new image is probably going to be fairly obvious. Huge gaps in all system logs, and an old version of firefox with the last history entry from some time 4 years back? Yeah, this is what was on here 10 minutes ago! If you use that approach, you'd have to keep your "emergency image" in a state where it looks used. And that's not accounting for the fact that re-imaging a drive isn't exactly a quick process.
The other option of course is hidden volumes. But that then strays into the practicality side of it. How do you use something on a regular basis yet leave no trace of it on your system.
Ultimately I think it's a moot point. As has been said, they usually have a pile of evidence on people anyway.. at best you arn't giving them even more, at worst, you are making yourself look really damn guilty[tm]. It's just one of those things that's interesting to contemplate.
Slashdot Mirror
In an absolute pinch there is staples... but you gotta be all out of options and really need the hardware.
The future shop / best buy thing is weird. As you said, same owner, same basic store.. but slightly different. Biggest difference here is future shop runs on commission and best buy doesn't. This puts future shop at the absolute bottom of the list. You go there and are immediately decended upon by their sales guys. For someone who likes to casually browse this is insanely irritating. If you do take their help.. you are rewarded by being pressured to pay for it immediately (so they get the commission). The whole things makes for quite a bad experience imo.
Totally this!
The old way was chaotic.. but it was also organic. Everything was in a big mess everywhere.. but it was right there when you needed it.
The new way is well structured, but totally misses the mark when it comes to comfortable work flow. As you said, it adds a series of jarring pauses to the process.
What's really annoying is they made the stuff that mostly worked worse, and left the stuff that doesn't work completely alone.
I too work on large word docs. I'd love to do them in latex (or just about anything else), but it's what the customer wants (they want to be able to change them themselves easily).
Revision tracking (the "track changes" feature) still has all the old annoyances. When you are using fields and cross-references they still don't update automatically. The old "print preview" to get them to update still works, and of course the annoying "even references that didn't change get crossed out and re-added" so you now have a change on every reference throughout the entire document. The old "disable track changes, print preview, re-enable" hack still applies. There is still no way to search or filter or do anything meaningful with the revision pane that isn't a complete nightmare.
Adding captions to images is still completely and totally fucked up, especially if you are using custom styles. Table of contents generator is still screwed up. The old list continuation bugs are still there (but are harder to fix now as word is trying to be too smart and it actually prevents you from doing the hacks that would fix these problems in the past. And of course section management is a nightmare as before, but all the options are buried!
Ok.. I'm gonna stop before I start frothing at the mouth.
I will admit that if you are just doing a quick document with nothing special, the ribbon (or chaos strip, that's a good one) works fine. But then again, the old toolbars worked fine for that stuff too! I guess what it comes down to is, has the chaos strip actually made anything easier, or did it maintain the status quo for easy stuff, and made hard stuff harder.
Indeed.
The effort to use a more secure hash is generally trivial, but there's still going to be a lot of people who either know and don't, or don't know.
For the first category, nothing you can do about it. Same people running wep on their wifi. They either don't see anyone ever attacking them, are tied in due to old systems, or don't care.
For the second category, stuff like this may help. I think at this point most people know md5 isn't as secure as once considered, but I don't think people realize just how insecure it is becoming. In peoples minds it's still in the "theoretically if someone was really dedicated they could break it" stage.. whereas it's actually entering into the "feasible to do it on large scale" stage. Breaking that perception might speed things along.
Totally agree.
I think it's being driven by the cell phone / tablet craze. Everyones trying to make their desktop look like their cellphone. I too think it's a major step backwards.. and I think a lot of the UI design guys are out of touch with what people actually want.
could enable robots that clean up oil spills
Yeah yeah how great for humani..
bug-proof car windshields
Oh glorious age of science!
I know I'm a terrible person.. but as someone who does a fair bit of highway driving.. I really hope they roll that one out. While they are at it.. paint up my hood and bumper too (much harder to clean).
No one would pay the cost to write something that's 100% bug free from square one. Instead, you defer the cost and risks via a support contract. Standard practice and works out for everyone.
Generally three things should be decided before work has even begun:
- initial cost of development
- a warranty period
- ongoing support agreement
Not to pile on the hate (I didn't find the review hard to read per se.. and nothing wrong with some elegant phrasing) but I too found the review got a little too much into the topic.
Maybe it's just personal preference, but when I read a review, I am not yet ready to delve into the subject matter. I'm primarily looking for a quick overview of the subject area, scope, and target audience (specifically whether I fall into it), tone (cheerful, funny, dead seriousy, insightful, technical, etc.) and quality (well written, poorly written, lots of pictures, wall of text, etc.) to determine whether I want to commit some brain time. If I have to start thinking while reading the review, I may as well be reading the book ;p
This is more like a critique of the book or a discussion piece than a review. Which isn't a bad thing either. Certainly judging from the comments, I think it has served more to get people talking about design patterns vice the book itself or its subject matter (which I think is the case for most vook reviews anyway, I mean what discussion can be had about a book no one has read yet. How does one discuss a review).
Please tell me where you work so I NEVER apply there.
For what it's worth I was talking in the general, not my specific case. As it happens I did exactly as I said in my first post after working for a standard issue software mill and getting frustrated by the constant cost cutting and fear of outsourcing. Got into a specialized field where mistakes are expensive and high quality code is worth the price. Experienced coders, formal testing, people who can define the difference between system and software architecture, etc. I'd seriously recommend this to anyone getting fed up of being told "it works, ship it!".
Now how do cheap coders save money?
I don't pretend to understand how it works, I just have faith that things happen for a reason. Business guy's arn't _that_ stupid (they are generally making money after all). Obviously there are going to be cases where it doesn't work for whatever reason, but I have to assume that since the practice is becoming more universal, it has to have merit. Either way I've washed my hands of the mess.
It's actually an interesting topic.. because while newer languages and toolstacks have lowered the bar.. they've also made the cost of failure lower.
You can be a complete knuckhead.. and write absolutely terrible code. But if your using java.. it'll still probably work and after a while of hacking out the bugs (with more ugly code) it'll attain a surprising stability.
More relevant is this thought that better code will translate into the dollars and cents everyone else seems so concerned with. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. We get cheap coders because analysis of the business case shows you save more from the cheapness of the coders than you lose from the crumbiness of the software. If it was the other way around, most businesses would knock it off and up their standards.
Good jobs where they care about the skillset and are willing to pay for it do exist in industries where bad software costs a metric fuck-tonne (industries like defense, aerospace, medical) but it's no longer the norm for stuff where it doesn't.
On the other hand, if you spend all your time re-solving things which have already been solved.. you aren’t going anywhere fast either.
Ultimately design patterns already existed. Most of the commonly used ones are intuitive enough that most programmers arrived at them on their own. The main purpose served was creating a common vocabulary.
Design patterns served the purpose of giving names to the things that as you said, most coders already came up with. When I say strategy, or observer, or behavior, or singleton .. everyone knows what the hell I'm talking about.
I know I'm coming across as an arrogant snob but since when did programming stop being a profession and start being a free for all for all liberal arts failures who can type a line of C# and suddenly think they're Turing?
When we did what we do with everything.. made it easier. It's the natural progression. People said "hey, this is hard.. if we did it this way, it'll be less hard". Rinse and repeat. There's still hard stuff out there, but it's not common _because_ the common stuff has been made easy. If you want to be challanged, get a job doing something weird that hasn't benefited years of people doing the same thing and improving the process.
I think you nailed it in the first sentence.
People have it in their heads that the crazier the class diagram, the easier the software will be to maintain. Obviously this isn't the case. Sometimes a design pattern can be used to provide useful abstraction or turn a complete hack into an elegant solution (or provide new and exciting hacks.. see: singleton) ,, but often it just adds extra classes that abstract things so core to the program that they will never change without a complete do-over .. or just adds useless layers of indirection that make it impossible for future maintainers to figure out what the hell anything does without using a debugger.
I think applicability comes down to justification. Can you justify the usage of this pattern? If not.. don't use it! Treat them as things to use when there is a reason, not things to just always use.
I find a lot of them are very useful in extremely special circumstances.
There are some though that I do use on a fairly regular basis. The biggest ones being the factory pattern and observer/strategy patterns.
I also the Singleton more often than I like to admit.
I imagine most people would also be hesitant to take it into a repair shop with that message displayed on the screen even if they recognize it as a scam.
Indeed.
There is a metric tonne of interest out there. The community doesn't exist yet because no one can get their hands on the damn thing!
That thing VIA is going to be putting out might end up crushing them if production doesn't ramp up soon.
I'll second the Serious Eats recommendation. Some very good advice and presented in a very digestible (hah) way. As a grilling newb, I’ve put a lot of the info to use and actually seen results.
This is second hand, but from a few people I know who are (kinda) in the business.. it used to be the exact opposite (the live performances promoted the music sales) but has now switched around to what is described. Best way to support your favorite band now is to see them live and buy an overpriced cheap screen printed t-shirt or CD off their merch stand.
Lots of ok music out there from people who do just that, but there is a reason indie music hasn't completely toppled the industry...
Hint: it's the same reason indie movies haven't toppled Hollywood.
There is still something to be said for those who actually devote all their time, not just the weekend, to producing content.. and who can afford the cheaper than before but still expensive pro gear.
And in general I agree with the sentiment in the argument. If the kind of distribution/creation model we've all been pushing ever actually takes hold.. it'll just become overrun by opportunists and we'll be right back to what we've got now.
Indeed. This is high level "meeting for the suits" bullshit. I can picture this showing up on powerpoint presentation.
Here are your three options.. this is the one that sucks, this is the one that sucks for a different reason, and this is the one I want you to go with. Oh, and here is a chart with some pretty checkmarks and stuff to help clarify! Lets do lunch!
Now that's just desperation.
Come on .. keep this shit in bi. Either it takes off or it doesn't.
I'm guessing population density.
That's the big problem here in Canada. Countries like Japan where they are packed in like sardines have great internet.
I too know very little about cable.. but I'm guessing the problem starts when you have multiple TVs. Having 5 or more TVs in a house is not at all uncommon (living room, bedroom). That ends up being a lot of bandwidth.
Maybe I don't quite get how deltaing works, but:
You do your evil stuff with it enabled .. does it merge the images or something? I would assume when when you disable delta-ing, your changes are either merged down to the real image or lost. Or does it let you keep almost like an "overlay" that can be applied even after the base image has been changed?
Disable it and do some more stuff (changing the "real" image)
When you re-enable delta-ing
It's actually an interesting thought exercise to come up with a setup that would:
a) allow you every day access to your data in a practical way
b) allow you to get rid of the data, leaving no trace that it was there
Modern software leaves bits of information everywhere. Lock files, history files, logs, cache, etc..
If you re-image your disk to do an emergency destruction, the new image is probably going to be fairly obvious. Huge gaps in all system logs, and an old version of firefox with the last history entry from some time 4 years back? Yeah, this is what was on here 10 minutes ago! If you use that approach, you'd have to keep your "emergency image" in a state where it looks used. And that's not accounting for the fact that re-imaging a drive isn't exactly a quick process.
The other option of course is hidden volumes. But that then strays into the practicality side of it. How do you use something on a regular basis yet leave no trace of it on your system.
Ultimately I think it's a moot point. As has been said, they usually have a pile of evidence on people anyway.. at best you arn't giving them even more, at worst, you are making yourself look really damn guilty[tm]. It's just one of those things that's interesting to contemplate.