Coming a little late to the game here with this comment, but I live in NYC and my wife and I have hosted several couchsurfers from couchsurfing.org. Every time it has been a great experience. Usually it is couples looking for somewhere to stay, and feeling more comfortable staying with another couple. They've come, done their tourist thing, hung out with us, and provided us great stories about their travels and experiences, and even cooked us dinner once or twice. Usually our only worry is giving them a key to our apartment, so we only do that if we trust them after a day or two, or they have good references.
We host couch surfers because we have traveled a good amount and we know how much better your trip is when you get to meet and hang out with the locals. We also expect to take advantage of couchsurfing when we travel next, and so we feel it is only fair that we host others. On top of that we know how expensive it is to stay in NYC! Hosting someone here really saves them a *lot* of money:)
I highly recommend hosting a couchsurfer if you can, expect to learn a lot about different parts of the world, and to make some new friends.
Slashdot could have easily had the equivalent of Digg if they had opened up the story queue for public viewing. I know that this is not how the editors want Slashdot to work, but I think it would have let Slashdot address the audience that wants the absolute latest stories and the audience that wants indepth discussion. I have read the FAQ and I understand the issues with spam, but I think those are all solvable problems.
TextPayMe has been doing the same thing for a while now and it works pretty well for me. Paypal has too many horror stories for me to want to use them. I'd prefer that they have some successful competitor that forces them to improve. They need successful competition in this mobile market place, otherwise it will become just like the online marketplace where their customer service suffers and they can lock accounts at will because, well, you don't really have many other options.
No PayPal for me, I'll be using TextPayMe instead and I suggest you do too.
I don't know what the author's intentions were here and perhaps I should have given more examples than just RDoc. It was the first that came to mind because I had worked on it recently. I have debugged several other large ruby projects and that type of programming seems endemic.
Ruby makes it very easy to write code that is cryptic and difficult to follow. With some forethought and planning (and lots of comments) you can write maintainable code in any language, including Ruby. However, just like Perl, Ruby doesn't encourage that type of behaviour. It gives you lots of ways that make your programming life easier, but makes life very difficult for the person that has to maintain or debug your code.
Oh well. This comment is probably far too late in this thread for anyone to read it:(
I am commenting on the Ruby language, not RDoc. The RDoc parser which I was writing an extension for happens to be written in Ruby. It may not be part of RoR, but you can make the same comment on ActiveRecord. It suffers from same issues. It's extremely hard to trace ActiveRecord execution due to the dynamic and cryptic nature of Ruby.
Most important is: can you read and understand the code? Ruby on Rails wins in this category because it's brief - smaller and thus easier to comprehend than Java - without being cryptic like APL
I disagree with this. I recently had to debug some RDoc code to create a custom generator. RDoc a big chunk of mostly uncommented Ruby code. Trying to debug and understand it was somewhat reminiscent of trying to debug Perl. Ruby gives a programmer the same expressiveness that allows them to write highly cryptic short statements that are very difficult to unravel. Not as bad as Perl for sure, but still difficult. The other big problem is that Ruby is so dynamic. I found it very difficult to trace the runtime behaviour of code because it is so easy to modify the runtime behaviour of an object from anywhere in the code!
I agree that Java can sometimes be so verbose that it is hard to debug, but Ruby does not strike the right balance. I'd prefer to see a statically typed language (for easier debugging and refactoring in the IDE) that is also dynamic, but that enforces that runtime modification is somehow easier to follow.
I've emailed them myself because I disagree with the FAQ entry. Slashdot could open up their submission queue (just like Digg) and it would be a very interesting read. The reply to my email was that this is not what slashdot wants to be, however I think that slashdot can do both. Have accepted stories with indepth commentary and a posting queue without many comments. Perhaps with paid access, although now with Digg I'm not sure I'd pay for access to Slashdot's posting queue.
Never having done VB I can't really comment on that. Please try out Ruby on Rails though before dismissing it though. I have a feeling it is not like VB. Does VB provide all the functionality of the various Java web development libraries that I mentioned, and does it provide it in a sane, easy to use framework that is extensible?
I'm a somewhat experienced web developer and I have developed significant applications (1000s users) in Java,.NET and PHP (and a little Perl). I recently tried out Ruby on Rails and, so far, it is by far the best web development environment that I have seen.
It forces you to create a web application that is done-right(tm). The way it forces you is very insidious. If you create your application and database in a certain way then everything is very simple and easy to do. If you stray outside that way though, then suddenly you have to do so much more work. In this way you are led down the path of least resistance to a good design, and it actually works! Please try it for a week or two before you dismiss this, I was skeptical too:)
In Java to get the same functionality that I would get for free in rails I might have to use: Ant, XDoclet, Spring, Hibernate (or iBATIS), JUnit, jMock, StrutsTestCase, Canoo's WebTest, Struts Menu, Display Tag Library, OSCache, JSTL and Struts. The amount of configuration that all of those things take is very daunting, and can often have issues. Rails will give you all that functionality (well most of it) for free.
There *are* problems with with rails. The biggest in my mind is documentation. The wiki sucks. You really have to buy the Agile Web Development With Rails book to learn, but hopefully that will improve. This lack of documentation makes it hard when you want to stray outside of the framework. Rails really needs the equivalent of the PHP documentation with annotated comments.
Anyways, Rails is here to stay. I'm sure of that now having tried it myself. It feels painful to have to go back and develop in other languages for web development now!
We should go post on the blizzard feedback forums and see if we can't get it noticed that we are not happy with these types of answers and they need to retry...
Did the Bilzzard PR department do one moment of research before replying to these questions. Look at the group of people that you are responding to! You think that we would be happy with the bland, dodging, political answers that you gave us?
What a load of crap. Makes me less interested in the game if I know there are people like this working to control things behind the scenes.
Are there any plans to introduce accounts that cost less?
I'd like to try out WoW, but I don't have a huge amount of time and paying the high up front and monthly cost seems excessive to me for the amount of time I would play it. However if there was some form of time restricted cheaper account I think I would try it out.
I don't really mind either way how it works, but I think there should be a level playing ground. Why should DSL companies be regulated as a non-information service when cable companies have escaped that regulation. Seems pretty silly to me.
Change things one way or the other, but regulate or don't regulate both DSL and cable the same way!
I disagree, the data in the linked study didn't seem at all vague to me. The study may not be conclusive, but it is a very useful data point. Very low levels of cell phone type radiation can cause irreversible lens damage. Even if this is not normal cell phone usage it does provide a data point and a basis to continue onwards with a longer term experiment.
Then again, if you are a Hollywood agent with two phones strapped to your head 24/7 then this study might be pretty relevant to you...
This is spectacular. I mean talk about giving back to the community. I wish that google would pay the students on a bi-weekly basis though. When I was a student I would have leaped at this opportunity, but the lack of a stream of cash would have made it extremely difficult to take.
It is more of a motivator to give the cash in one lump sum at the end of the summer, and it reduces the possibility for fraud, but many students need cash to scrape by.
Anyways, go google, I hope these 200 student developers do amazing things over this summer!
So I just read the article (thanks previous poster for the link). I can't believe that Sys-Con would publish this trash. What sort of lowlife reporter is O'Gara, that she would stoop to ripping up someone like that in an article? There isn't a single thing about linux in there, it's all about Pamela Jones' personal living arrangements (with her home address!) and her religious leanings. There is no story there at all.
I think if I read this article on the site without looking at the other articles I might have though I was reading some of the lowest form of tabloid.
I read through this thread, and although I see many flames and trolls I also see a lot of geeks reasoning this issue in a logical way and not accepting the standard anti-gay marriage arguments. In general this is one of the huge strengths of geeks. We think for ourselves and we are not willing to accept what the majority might think.
Myself, I think that gay marriage rights make a lot of sense. I think that if you sit down and think about this issue and put aside your prejudices then it is difficult to come to any other conclusion. I leave it to the rest of this thread and to the sites out there to help you convince yourself of this.
For me it was Verizon vs Time Warner. I ended up choosing Verizon after having Time Warner for a few months. It came down to these reasons.
1. Cable provides faster overall throughput but Verizon has faster upstream speeds (important for me because I run servers).
2. Verizon appears to have a less restrictive policy towards capping, so no worries about downloading/uploading as much as you want.
3. The Verizon news servers are excellent.
4. Personally I had a terrible experience with cable. During some periods of the day the packet loss was horrendous. I don't know if this was the high usage periods or not, but tech support saw the problem and I spent 5 months trying to fix the problem with them and they just marked it as a chronic issue without doing anything.
5. With DSL my ping times appear to be much lower.
Most of the time it's just not worth it for me to pay to send or receive a text message. I have so many voice minutes included in my plan that I never go over. I either pay for text messaging that is not included or use a 'free' voice call out of my minutes instead!
> Also, doesn't EA typically give their employees a couple of months off after such an extravaganza?
To quote the article...
"Additionally, EA recently announced that, although in the past they have offered essentially a type of comp time in the form of a few weeks off at the end of a project, they no longer wish to do this, and employees shouldn't expect it."
Someone give this man a job (how could he possibly have a full time job and time enough to do this?). The amount of work and spectacular hacking that has gone into this effort is amazing.
He built his own interface to the console, he built his own assembler, in fact he built every single tool used to create the game.
From what I can see it works extremely well. I have it running now and have been doing searches through some of my files. Very fast and very easy to find relevant results.
I wish there were more options though. They really dumbed it down which is great for your average user but I would like to be able to see the indexing progress in more detail. I would also like to be able to tell it to do the indexing, not just have it wait until my computer is idle. Also they don't let you set the location of the indexed files cache. Right now it is stored in:
C:\Documents and Settings\\Local Settings\Application Data\Google
I'd prefer it to be stored on my D: drive that is much faster. Could we also have an option to select how much memory it uses?
I have one of these boxes and I would say that for the price it was a pretty good experience for me.
I exchanged my old cable box, brought the new box back home and plugged it in and it just worked. Didn't have any problems with it. It took about a minute to boot up the first time and then it is pretty quick after that.
I had some difficulty in figuring out how to switch the display between HD and SD output. The instructions in the manual are for a different version of the software on the device (the new york models come with the Passport version of the software). My TV does HDTV but not very well so I wanted to use SD via the s-video port. I don't remember the key sequence but there is a key sequence that you press using the buttons on the front panel that will cause the device to switch between HD and SD (the display on the front will show HD and SD depending on what mode it is in). I found the sequence in an online forum, I'll see if I can dig it up again. The scaling of HDTV for 4:3 format works well with my TV. Getting to the advanced options menu is not documented but basically you hit the settings button on the remote and then press the yellow A button.
Pros:
1. Tons of space! 160 Gig hard drive. 2. Great recording options for recording shows. 3. Can record HD shows 4. Can record two shows at once or watch one show while recording another. 5. The recording interface is very intuitive and works well. 6. It is very cheap, about 9 bucks a month I think.
Cons: 1. It has crashed 2 or 3 times since I have been using it. When it crashes it freezes up and then reboots. I watch quite a lot of TV and it hasn't done it enough times to be annoying. 2. Switching between HD and SD is fiddly and not documented. 3. Navigating recorded shows is slow because they are just put into one big list. 4. Searching for shows by name is very slow and does not have a good interface. 5. Switching between channels is a lot slower than my old set top box but is still acceptable because the info display comes up very quickly even if the picture does not.
This makes Bush's debating points about leading Iraq towards freedom seem even more hollow. How can the US ever get out of Iraq when the Bush administration cannot even let the Iraqi government speak for themselves.
Iraq is now a mismanaged mess that didn't need to be. With full the support of other countries we would not have to stretch ourselves so thin to help Iraq rebuild... of course that was never going to happen with the Bush administration.
Slashdot Mirror
Coming a little late to the game here with this comment, but I live in NYC and my wife and I have hosted several couchsurfers from couchsurfing.org. Every time it has been a great experience. Usually it is couples looking for somewhere to stay, and feeling more comfortable staying with another couple. They've come, done their tourist thing, hung out with us, and provided us great stories about their travels and experiences, and even cooked us dinner once or twice. Usually our only worry is giving them a key to our apartment, so we only do that if we trust them after a day or two, or they have good references.
:)
We host couch surfers because we have traveled a good amount and we know how much better your trip is when you get to meet and hang out with the locals. We also expect to take advantage of couchsurfing when we travel next, and so we feel it is only fair that we host others. On top of that we know how expensive it is to stay in NYC! Hosting someone here really saves them a *lot* of money
I highly recommend hosting a couchsurfer if you can, expect to learn a lot about different parts of the world, and to make some new friends.
Slashdot could have easily had the equivalent of Digg if they had opened up the story queue for public viewing. I know that this is not how the editors want Slashdot to work, but I think it would have let Slashdot address the audience that wants the absolute latest stories and the audience that wants indepth discussion. I have read the FAQ and I understand the issues with spam, but I think those are all solvable problems.
:)
Oh well, too late now, Digg stole that thunder
TextPayMe has been doing the same thing for a while now and it works pretty well for me. Paypal has too many horror stories for me to want to use them. I'd prefer that they have some successful competitor that forces them to improve. They need successful competition in this mobile market place, otherwise it will become just like the online marketplace where their customer service suffers and they can lock accounts at will because, well, you don't really have many other options.
No PayPal for me, I'll be using TextPayMe instead and I suggest you do too.
I don't know what the author's intentions were here and perhaps I should have given more examples than just RDoc. It was the first that came to mind because I had worked on it recently. I have debugged several other large ruby projects and that type of programming seems endemic.
:(
Ruby makes it very easy to write code that is cryptic and difficult to follow. With some forethought and planning (and lots of comments) you can write maintainable code in any language, including Ruby. However, just like Perl, Ruby doesn't encourage that type of behaviour. It gives you lots of ways that make your programming life easier, but makes life very difficult for the person that has to maintain or debug your code.
Oh well. This comment is probably far too late in this thread for anyone to read it
I am commenting on the Ruby language, not RDoc. The RDoc parser which I was writing an extension for happens to be written in Ruby. It may not be part of RoR, but you can make the same comment on ActiveRecord. It suffers from same issues. It's extremely hard to trace ActiveRecord execution due to the dynamic and cryptic nature of Ruby.
I disagree with this. I recently had to debug some RDoc code to create a custom generator. RDoc a big chunk of mostly uncommented Ruby code. Trying to debug and understand it was somewhat reminiscent of trying to debug Perl. Ruby gives a programmer the same expressiveness that allows them to write highly cryptic short statements that are very difficult to unravel. Not as bad as Perl for sure, but still difficult. The other big problem is that Ruby is so dynamic. I found it very difficult to trace the runtime behaviour of code because it is so easy to modify the runtime behaviour of an object from anywhere in the code!
I agree that Java can sometimes be so verbose that it is hard to debug, but Ruby does not strike the right balance. I'd prefer to see a statically typed language (for easier debugging and refactoring in the IDE) that is also dynamic, but that enforces that runtime modification is somehow easier to follow.
Many people have suggested this to the slashdot editors and there is even an FAQ entry:
http://slashdot.org/faq/suggestions.shtml#su400
I've emailed them myself because I disagree with the FAQ entry. Slashdot could open up their submission queue (just like Digg) and it would be a very interesting read. The reply to my email was that this is not what slashdot wants to be, however I think that slashdot can do both. Have accepted stories with indepth commentary and a posting queue without many comments. Perhaps with paid access, although now with Digg I'm not sure I'd pay for access to Slashdot's posting queue.
Never having done VB I can't really comment on that. Please try out Ruby on Rails though before dismissing it though. I have a feeling it is not like VB. Does VB provide all the functionality of the various Java web development libraries that I mentioned, and does it provide it in a sane, easy to use framework that is extensible?
I'm a somewhat experienced web developer and I have developed significant applications (1000s users) in Java, .NET and PHP (and a little Perl). I recently tried out Ruby on Rails and, so far, it is by far the best web development environment that I have seen.
:)
It forces you to create a web application that is done-right(tm). The way it forces you is very insidious. If you create your application and database in a certain way then everything is very simple and easy to do. If you stray outside that way though, then suddenly you have to do so much more work. In this way you are led down the path of least resistance to a good design, and it actually works! Please try it for a week or two before you dismiss this, I was skeptical too
In Java to get the same functionality that I would get for free in rails I might have to use: Ant, XDoclet, Spring, Hibernate (or iBATIS), JUnit, jMock, StrutsTestCase, Canoo's WebTest, Struts Menu, Display Tag Library, OSCache, JSTL and Struts. The amount of configuration that all of those things take is very daunting, and can often have issues. Rails will give you all that functionality (well most of it) for free.
There *are* problems with with rails. The biggest in my mind is documentation. The wiki sucks. You really have to buy the Agile Web Development With Rails book to learn, but hopefully that will improve. This lack of documentation makes it hard when you want to stray outside of the framework. Rails really needs the equivalent of the PHP documentation with annotated comments.
Anyways, Rails is here to stay. I'm sure of that now having tried it myself. It feels painful to have to go back and develop in other languages for web development now!
We should go post on the blizzard feedback forums and see if we can't get it noticed that we are not happy with these types of answers and they need to retry...
o w-general
o w-suggestions
General discussion:
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/board.aspx?fn=w
Suggestions:
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/board.aspx?fn=w
Note world of warcraft login required.
Did the Bilzzard PR department do one moment of research before replying to these questions. Look at the group of people that you are responding to! You think that we would be happy with the bland, dodging, political answers that you gave us?
What a load of crap. Makes me less interested in the game if I know there are people like this working to control things behind the scenes.
Are there any plans to introduce accounts that cost less?
I'd like to try out WoW, but I don't have a huge amount of time and paying the high up front and monthly cost seems excessive to me for the amount of time I would play it. However if there was some form of time restricted cheaper account I think I would try it out.
I don't really mind either way how it works, but I think there should be a level playing ground. Why should DSL companies be regulated as a non-information service when cable companies have escaped that regulation. Seems pretty silly to me.
Change things one way or the other, but regulate or don't regulate both DSL and cable the same way!
I disagree, the data in the linked study didn't seem at all vague to me. The study may not be conclusive, but it is a very useful data point. Very low levels of cell phone type radiation can cause irreversible lens damage. Even if this is not normal cell phone usage it does provide a data point and a basis to continue onwards with a longer term experiment.
Then again, if you are a Hollywood agent with two phones strapped to your head 24/7 then this study might be pretty relevant to you...
This is spectacular. I mean talk about giving back to the community. I wish that google would pay the students on a bi-weekly basis though. When I was a student I would have leaped at this opportunity, but the lack of a stream of cash would have made it extremely difficult to take.
It is more of a motivator to give the cash in one lump sum at the end of the summer, and it reduces the possibility for fraud, but many students need cash to scrape by.
Anyways, go google, I hope these 200 student developers do amazing things over this summer!
So I just read the article (thanks previous poster for the link). I can't believe that Sys-Con would publish this trash. What sort of lowlife reporter is O'Gara, that she would stoop to ripping up someone like that in an article? There isn't a single thing about linux in there, it's all about Pamela Jones' personal living arrangements (with her home address!) and her religious leanings. There is no story there at all.
I think if I read this article on the site without looking at the other articles I might have though I was reading some of the lowest form of tabloid.
I read through this thread, and although I see many flames and trolls I also see a lot of geeks reasoning this issue in a logical way and not accepting the standard anti-gay marriage arguments. In general this is one of the huge strengths of geeks. We think for ourselves and we are not willing to accept what the majority might think.
Myself, I think that gay marriage rights make a lot of sense. I think that if you sit down and think about this issue and put aside your prejudices then it is difficult to come to any other conclusion. I leave it to the rest of this thread and to the sites out there to help you convince yourself of this.
I am proud of my fellow geeks.
For me it was Verizon vs Time Warner. I ended up choosing Verizon after having Time Warner for a few months. It came down to these reasons.
1. Cable provides faster overall throughput but Verizon has faster upstream speeds (important for me because I run servers).
2. Verizon appears to have a less restrictive policy towards capping, so no worries about downloading/uploading as much as you want.
3. The Verizon news servers are excellent.
4. Personally I had a terrible experience with cable. During some periods of the day the packet loss was horrendous. I don't know if this was the high usage periods or not, but tech support saw the problem and I spent 5 months trying to fix the problem with them and they just marked it as a chronic issue without doing anything.
5. With DSL my ping times appear to be much lower.
they've begun to gain a reputation for writing, editing and finding book authors
Good for them, how do you edit a book author though? Remove a finger or two if they don't send you their rough draft?
Most of the time it's just not worth it for me to pay to send or receive a text message. I have so many voice minutes included in my plan that I never go over. I either pay for text messaging that is not included or use a 'free' voice call out of my minutes instead!
> Also, doesn't EA typically give their employees a couple of months off after such an extravaganza?
To quote the article...
"Additionally, EA recently announced that, although in the past they have offered essentially a type of comp time in the form of a few weeks off at the end of a project, they no longer wish to do this, and employees shouldn't expect it."
Someone give this man a job (how could he possibly have a full time job and time enough to do this?). The amount of work and spectacular hacking that has gone into this effort is amazing.
He built his own interface to the console, he built his own assembler, in fact he built every single tool used to create the game.
From what I can see it works extremely well. I have it running now and have been doing searches through some of my files. Very fast and very easy to find relevant results.
I wish there were more options though. They really dumbed it down which is great for your average user but I would like to be able to see the indexing progress in more detail. I would also like to be able to tell it to do the indexing, not just have it wait until my computer is idle. Also they don't let you set the location of the indexed files cache. Right now it is stored in:
C:\Documents and Settings\\Local Settings\Application Data\Google
I'd prefer it to be stored on my D: drive that is much faster. Could we also have an option to select how much memory it uses?
I have one of these boxes and I would say that for the price it was a pretty good experience for me.
I exchanged my old cable box, brought the new box back home and plugged it in and it just worked. Didn't have any problems with it. It took about a minute to boot up the first time and then it is pretty quick after that.
I had some difficulty in figuring out how to switch the display between HD and SD output. The instructions in the manual are for a different version of the software on the device (the new york models come with the Passport version of the software). My TV does HDTV but not very well so I wanted to use SD via the s-video port. I don't remember the key sequence but there is a key sequence that you press using the buttons on the front panel that will cause the device to switch between HD and SD (the display on the front will show HD and SD depending on what mode it is in). I found the sequence in an online forum, I'll see if I can dig it up again. The scaling of HDTV for 4:3 format works well with my TV. Getting to the advanced options menu is not documented but basically you hit the settings button on the remote and then press the yellow A button.
Pros:
1. Tons of space! 160 Gig hard drive.
2. Great recording options for recording shows.
3. Can record HD shows
4. Can record two shows at once or watch one show while recording another.
5. The recording interface is very intuitive and works well.
6. It is very cheap, about 9 bucks a month I think.
Cons:
1. It has crashed 2 or 3 times since I have been using it. When it crashes it freezes up and then reboots. I watch quite a lot of TV and it hasn't done it enough times to be annoying.
2. Switching between HD and SD is fiddly and not documented.
3. Navigating recorded shows is slow because they are just put into one big list.
4. Searching for shows by name is very slow and does not have a good interface.
5. Switching between channels is a lot slower than my old set top box but is still acceptable because the info display comes up very quickly even if the picture does not.
This makes Bush's debating points about leading Iraq towards freedom seem even more hollow. How can the US ever get out of Iraq when the Bush administration cannot even let the Iraqi government speak for themselves.
Iraq is now a mismanaged mess that didn't need to be. With full the support of other countries we would not have to stretch ourselves so thin to help Iraq rebuild... of course that was never going to happen with the Bush administration.