cubicle67

PayPal are bastards. I cancelled my account with them a few years ago and they've since refused to process any payment using my cc. This has caused me much frustration over time and I'm not alone

Not sure if people who use PayPay for credit card processing are aware of this. I'd love to buy this - and I attempted to - but can't.

Edit: yeah, it's a cheap shot, but my point is "correctness" is not binary

http://au.news.yahoo.com/technology/news/article/-/15610781/...

Now police in Colac, west of Melbourne, say faults with Google maps are putting people's lives at risk along the Great Ocean Road and in the southern Otways.

Sergeant Nick Buenen says trucks, buses and tourists are being directed down Wild Dog Road, which is a one-way track, not built for heavy traffic.

He says VicRoads has denied responsibility and Google Maps has not responded.

I find GoodReader excellent for pdfs on the iPad. It's not only a great reader but also allows annotation etc plus makes getting pdfs into and out of your iPad fairly painless

I remember going to an MS Dev event for 64 bit XP (still have the shirt!) and being pretty excited about it, but bugger all worked in XP64. As someone who spent many (10+) years writing for Windows and now uses a Mac it's hard not to compare Apple's 64 bit switch to Microsoft's

Yes, I believe Interbase might fit this description

Borland open-sourced Interbase in 2000, but then bought it back in-house. The OS code was forked and became Firebird (aside - Firefox was originally called Firebird, but changed names after the name clash with Firebird db was realised)

Interbase http://www.embarcadero.com/products/interbase

Firebird http://firebirdsql.org

sorry, I thought the sarcasm was self evident. obviously it wasn't

It's a shame really, as OpenFeint was developed initially for Aurora Feint†, a very nice iPhone puzzle game and one of the very first iPhone games. It was free, and it seems OpenFeint was an effort to make money for the devs

† http://www.appsafari.com/games/5330/aurora-feint-app/

wow! so now Romney's loss is all because of this one guy, and if he'd done his job they'd have won?

different in that Israel is allowed to do things we'd never accept from any other nation?

Poe's Law is strong with your two comments here.

it's enough to extract one final post from minimsft http://minimsft.blogspot.com.au/2012/11/a-microsoft-without-...

less like "thrown out the window" and more like "nudged slightly"

The iPhone 5 lengthens the screen by 176 pixels in 1 direction, leaving an old style layout with 88 pixels of banding (a bit over 6mm) on each edge.

For Apple to run with a sreen resolution similar to the Nexus, say 1200 x 900, we'd have banding of 88 and 66 pixels along each long and short side respectively, so it wouldn't be too bad.

fwiw Infinity Blade II and Asphalt 7 both run silky smooth on the iPad Mini. My wife bought one because it fits in her handbag and I've since discovered it makes an awesome gamining machine :) Haven't used a Nexus 7 but it should be similar if not a bit faster. Can't go wrong with either I'd think

[Edit: on the subject of games, don't buy the latest Need For Speed game - it's a simplistic, samey, cynical cash grab from EA. But it's biggest sin is it's just plain not fun]

Apple's hands are tied by decisions made long ago re display layout. Because elements are positioned absolutely and not via a layout manager, they can't go with an intemdiate resolution - they're tied to either 1024x768 or 2x that.

all this is true if we add "for XCode based development" as a qualifier to "Definitely NOT Apple"

I use an ageing (4yo) 13" macbook as my primary development machine and it works fine. I'm no where near geeky (or whatever term you use) to be even thinking about fiddling with OS internals and I've never hit an OSX bug that bothered me much

yes, that's one of the things people forget about battery power - it decouples the generation of the energy from the storage. This means that you can switch from burning coal to solar, hydro or wind as an energy source with no changes at all to the car

yeah, it's a bit silly and I'm not sure how long until they fix it, but at the moment it points to a page selling Windows 7

Although Jobs' negotiation with Disney wrt distribution included the concession from Disney that the Pixar logo would be of the same size and prominence as the Disney one. As far as I'm aware this was pretty much unheard of.

this is where your US infinite detention becomes interesting. Both Obama and Romney support the infinite detention of American citizens without trial, but most people aren't worried as it's "only for the bad guys"

What happens when you get on the bad side of the gov, like this guy? Declare someone a Domestic Terrorist and you can lock them away for good. Sure, it almost certainly won't be used in this case but that's not the point; the option shouldn't event exist

anyway, good on the guy. Rosa Parks hyperbole aside, what's the problem with people trading in gold coins if they like? more power to them

yes, "only computer" is incredibly dependent on what your needs are, and there's a very diverse range of those. My inlaws have been using an iPad as their only computer for about 4 months now and doing fabulously (they love it), but for myself I need a unix terminal and good text editor

It's why the old "which is best" argument is completely useles without a qualifier "for ..."

what?

longer version - I have no idea how your comment relates to the story I just read

actual article http://www.anandtech.com/show/6309/iphone-5a6-sunspider-perf...

dave's law - Software development always takes 50% longer than expected, even when you allow for dave's law

Slightly off topic - since I cancelled my PayPal account they've refused to process any credit card payments using the card that was linked to my PayPal account, which happens to be my only credit card. This means that I'm unable to purchase anything from anyone who uses PayPal as their sole payment option. A bit of hunting on the interwebs shows I'm not the only person this has happened to

oh hell yeah, absolutely. This sort of code is not uncommon at all but is pretty much incomprehensible (let alone maintainable) for anyone beyond the original implementer

I've know my wife for the last 18 or 19 years and it was written before that, so I haven't seen the original. I have seen him debugging code in the evenings though. This consisted of printing out the entire programme (in the DBase sense a "programme" is a single file, but a programme in our sense would be a collection of dbase programmes) and the paper (dot matrix, so it's all connected) trailing all thruought the house as he draws pencil lines all over it to reconstruct programme flow. no indentation at all

The short answer to your question is no, I didn't see any evidence of improved structure or practices at all. All variables global. goto ftw. no procedures/methods/functions at all. He's never even heard of the concept when I tried to explain.

[Edit: managed to get hold of some of the code (see parent) and it looks like I was wrong on the indentation - he did start to use it at some point]

[update: I've got hold of some of the code. Here's a copy of one of the programmes http://pastie.org/4615158]

I have an awesome story that i think I've told before, but I'll tell it again anyway :)

My father-in-law is a pharmasist. back in the early 90s computers were starting to make their way into Pharmacy and the first few pharmacy sortware packages appeared. this increased with time, as you'd expect. At some point he decided it was inevitible but he decided (I have no idea why, except that he's always been quite independent) he'd write his own software. Took himself off to nightschool and learned dBase III. He'd never written a line of code prior to this.

He then proceeded to write an entire pharmacy suite of software tools that are still in use. They've been heavily updated and added to over the last 20 years but it's still all DBase III running on DOS. It's a saggering amount of code over hundreds of files but it all works. I've seen the code and it wouldn't pass a first semester coding course. each programme is a single 10,000 line spaghetti-fest. I've tried to explain functions/methods to him but he didn't understand and in the end I gave up. apparently he doesn't need them!

I can't understate how complex this software is - it's stock control, point of sale (including the usual things like birthday vouchers, discounts accounts etc etv), prescription dispensing, patient records etc. everything for a modern pharmacy. The australian health dept know about it and it's met all their criteria. it does everything.

It's mindbogglingly awfull bad code by any metric imaginable but yet it's robust, appears to be as-good-as bug free and has been able to be maintained (gov regulations for pharmacy change constantly so it's required major changes each year to keep up to date) and in production use for almost 20 years. oh, and it's fast :)

[Edit: looking at the other comments it seems I've replied to the wrong thing. I was actually writing a comment in response to this http://prog21.dadgum.com/87.html (Write Code Like You Just Learned How to Program) which was linked to from the main article]

this is true, but they have felt increasingly thiner on content over time. I understand John's reasoning behind having an iPhone only event, but my concern is that there's simply too little material - we have the 6th generation of a device where the highlight feature is likely to be a new (usb3 and/or thunderbolt) connector. Everything else will be slightly more of what we've all seen before

Edit: After a bit more thought (not too much, getting kids out the door for school atm) here's what I see:

From the sounds of things, there's 3 (possibly 4) new product launches expected before the end of the year - iPhone, iPods (+iTunes?), iPad jr and possibly new ATV content. It also looke like there's only 2 events expected - one on the 12th Sept and the other early Oct. If the iPad jr rumour has any basis, then I'd think that's be the device that gets the stage to itself.

So, here's my revised guess: Sept - iPhone + iPod Touch + iPod Nano + (hopefully) iTunes. Oct - 7" iPad + new atv content

ok, so Apple have an entire event devoted to the iPhone. How on earth are they going to fill the time?

Here's the new iPhone* It's a bit thinner and lighter than before. the battery runs a bit longer. it has a bit better camera and it runs iOS 6 which you've all seen before. er, thanks for comming...

* there's absolutely no way this will be called iPhone 5. It'll be iPhone 6, the New iPhone or just plain old iPhone - my money's on the later

an excellent company I used to use for hosting (who were later swallowed by by a not so excellent company) had a great solution to this. You'd log into your account and from there you could generate a single use token that you'd read to the csr.