ben_straub

Yeah. "C++0b" is most likely at this point.

Well, you either have to publish your member variables and their names to the world, or use PIMPL, which is (I think) a bit of a hack. Having partial classes (a la C#) would be nice for this.

Sort of like Quince(http://quince.infragistics.com/) for the web. Nice.

With a capacitive device, it's possible to detect things like fingers some distance away from the surface, but the signal is so noisy that you get a lot of false positives.

The endpoint of all this stuff seems to be the Minority Report UI (http://www.ted.com/talks/john_underkoffler_drive_3d_data_wit...) or Kinect, where the computer is detecting what you're doing with your body in a holistic way; it can infer intent, rather than measuring specific points of data without knowledge of where they came from.

Of course, that requires bigger and more expensive sensors than you're likely to find in a $499 device today.

For good or bad, Microsoft has committed to backwards compatibility. That means that all the techniques that work for installing apps now will work until Windows 7 is no longer supported.

My team has put a lot of effort into making our install more contained, but certain things still need to go in system locations. Registering a handler for a file extension means writing to the registry, as does (ironically) registering for visibility in the Add/Remove Programs UI.

I'm certainly jealous of the bundle system on OS X, but it doesn't solve everything. Device drivers still need to associate hardware devices with a handler, which we have to run code for on OS X.

Granted this isn't an issue for most mainstream users, but this would put my company (Wacom) out of business. Not all input devices are keyboards or mice; not all applications can get by with only network and limited disk access. Not all computers are iPhones and iPads.

MS Word has a diffing feature. I'm not sure how to trigger it from the UI, but my current source control system activates it when you diff two versions of the same Word doc.

I actually keep my homework on github. :) And yes, depending on your pipe, downloading all the binaries can be slow. But the ability to have history and synchronization between machines (I probably use 4 or 5 computers on a regular basis) is super nice.

You still know who it's from, just look at the signature: http://i.imgur.com/Icz56.png

Nope. MSBUILD and all the new compilers ship with the Windows 7.1 SDK:

http://blogs.msdn.com/windowssdk/archive/2010/04/07/coming-s...

They support some of C99. LMGTFY: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/146381/visual-studio-supp...

Exactly my thoughts: neither of the two characteristics ("exceptional-ness" and "loyalty") are binary qualities. Both exist on a continuum, and more importantly, they're orthogonal. But the article assumes everyone is either moving up or moving out.

What ABOUT the really good engineer with a family, who's content to stay even if the work isn't bleeding-edge exciting? Are they ignorable just because they don't fit into this model? Do we stigmatize them because they're neither churning nor making partner?

I'm in: http://mailhide.recaptcha.net/d?k=01WPnhCByvoC3ga_XHOsFoYg==...

A company is giving its customers good service. Is this fact altered by their motivations for doing so?

But unfortunately irreversible, and non-upgradeable. When things improve on a Moore's-law curve, you don't want to make a permanent commitment.

Google Voice ain't VOIP. Here's what it is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4Q9MJdT5Ds

It's by Tom DeMarco. The co-author of this:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0932633439

Google sells ads. Apple sells hardware.

I got into this a while back. One of my.. things was used for the splash screen.

http://www.contextfreeart.org/gallery/view.php?id=207

I've had mostly the same experience. I can type much faster than I can write, so notetaking isn't much of a killer app.

However, the ability to add diagrams and sketches to my notes is REALLY nice. Things like this are really compelling: http://www.rohdesign.com/weblog/archives/cat_sketchnotes.htm... But the form factor and responsiveness aren't anywhere near a Moleskine.

Something like 95% of TabletPC's use a Wacom panel for the pen input, and those panels have similar characteristics to the Wacom consumer tablets and Cintiqs.

Well said; I work at Wacom, and I don't think I could have explained it better. :)

Powering the pen does consume some energy, but I believe the panels used for TabletPCs can actually be classified as "Low-Power" USB devices, so the drain isn't nearly as much as, say, the hard drive. I'm not sure how efficient the Windows Ink code is, but our driver, which hasn't taken extreme pains to be performant, peaks at about 3% of a 1GHz CPU when the pen is in range.

The existence of computers, and increasingly realistic behavior of hardware and software, does not deprive anyone of anything. Rather, raising children entirely on Surface and TV, or with no technology at all, leaves them ill-prepared for the real world.

I'm hoping to expose my children to all kinds of technology. I hope they come away from these experiences with the same sense of wonder and awe as I do. But I'm still planning on cleaning finger paint off the walls.

Having played with one of these, and knowing how it works under the hood, it's more likely that she just didn't have the technique right. Surface prefers you use single fingertips as points of control; Isobel was using her entire hand.

Couldn't you use Google Calendar for group calendaring? Just have everybody add the mygroup@gmail.com calendar as an overlay.

And folders are just a degenerate case of labels, where each message can only have one label. You can set up a filter to "label as emacs-devel and archive", and watch the unread count in the labels box. Just as easy as folders, though it's harder to have a "favorites" list like in Outlook.

Hungarian notation makes sense if (a) you have to declare all your variables at the top of the function, so you can't see the variable types, and (b) you don't have a code browser that gives you type information when you hover over a symbol. More and more, neither of those are true, so I find Hungarian fairly useless.

Same result; apparently phpMyID isn't supported. :P

If I were to say "Ruby is a terrible language to write a first-person shooter in!", you would naturally say, "Of course. That's not really its sweet spot." Then I could say

> There was no discernible refutation.

Yes, program authors should just get it right the first time. If they hadn't written those bugs in the first place, there'd be no security exploits!

I understand that the updates are annoying, but all of the alternatives are worse. Silent updating? I want control. Manual updating? People won't do it. No updates at all? The botnet lords love this idea.

So the only real solution is to default systems to patch themselves, and hopefully get the experience right for the confirmation dialog.

Looks like around 5: http://www.compdigitec.com/labs/2009/03/17/windows-7-clean-i...

7 scales down like Vista never did. I installed the beta on a 4-year-old TabletPC with .5GB RAM, and it runs as well as XP ever did. I'll probably upgrade my dev workstation when the RC is released.