kaitnieks

Ok, I found this analysis by Symantec which makes the whole thing less naive than I originally thought: http://www.symantec.com/connect/fr/blogs/trojan-found-usb-ba...

My guess is that whoever made the installer had his computer infected. Not all companies have strict rules about what can be on the computer (or developers choose to not follow them and find ways around their enforcements) and this can be one of the downsides. I can't guess whether they virus-scanned the installation or not because it's quite possible that the trojan was new and not being picked up by scanner when they released the charger.

This kind of AI composer would be just perfect for games, especially indy games. Most indy game developers can't afford good original soundtracks and if there was a service that provided them for cheap...

That's an idea for a stratup.

We certainly don't need to fear that dolphins could try to dominate or exterminate us. So why bother treating them in any special way? The reason for morale and ethics is to maintain society and minimize risk of revenge. In case of dolphins there's hardly a society, the risk of revenge is none. To keep natural balance we should restrain ourselves from killing them all off or domesticating all of them and that's it.

Maybe this is too brutal opinion for modern times but I think people have gone too far in their foolishness. We should remember our real place and our real power, so that we can learn to use it more responsibly, instead of playing silly Ramen (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concepts_in_the_Ender%27s_Game_...) games out of the boredom.

The technology does not change as fast as it claims to. There are new languages, frameworks and even concepts all the time, but most of them are the old things with a twist and most of them do not even catch on. So if you don't want to be living on the bleeding edge, there is a good strategy: stick to the stuff that has been time proven. An indicator that something is good and works is that it's considered old and uncool. Keep an eye on technologies that are being widely used and when they become practical standard (there should be lots of documentation, tutorials and books around this time) - learn if you could use it and if so then learn the technology.

This sounds like a good idea to me. If I was .NET developer who had no reason to make my application run on Linux but also no reason not to, I would definitely try out this add-in.

For me the biggest problem with .NET is the fact that it doesn't generate true binaries and the deployment problems (framework needs to be installed). The advantage of Delphi is that it compiles everything into a single exe file that just works properly everywhere on any Windows machine. But if you develop in-house software or custom software for a specific customer then these reasons probably don't matter.

I have tried writing a few applications in .net and I liked it. I think it's really great for the programmer because C# language has lots of features that I really want to see in Delphi's pascal. Still, Delphi (I'm still using the old Delphi 7) is my favourite development tool.

what was this submission in question?

It comes with a border, it's blue, it has a title "Google Sidewiki" and it displays your name. I would say it can't be confused with the components of the website itself, although with Web 2.0 sometimes sites get built in a way that components that are parts of the site look like they're not.

It's funny - when I read that list of names, even though I knew a few, I thought of my younger brother. I'm quite sure he wouldn't have even heard of any of them, yet he's developing for some company all kinds of systems - from web, to Java and C++ backends and even software for GPS and other devices. Would I not hire him only because he's not interested in inspiring stories about people he doesn't know? Just because he chooses to use the algorithm or formula and not be interested in whoever came up with it? It might make sense in author's company - he might want to have people who are exactly the same as him around him so they can talk and talk about the best practices and such, but it doesn't make sense for me.

I see it more like a personal internet forum. Forums are great tools but you can never get all your friends and family to use the same one. Maybe wave can fix that.

I asked them about this in some unconference. They were very smug about it, they said that hardware developers will want to implement the whole thing as completely and as compliantly with other Android phones as possible and the message was "we don't care". I think Android development will become close to the nightmare that mobile games developers used (or still do?) to face.

I opened a normal Word document, created a screenshot and tried to OCR it. The quality was terrible and the result was completely unusable. Only a rare word was recognized correctly. The document was in Latvian, but the site claims it does support Latvian and I did check the correct language before recognition.

Since there's probably a heavy compression used and the modifications happen all over the wikipedia, I don't think there is a way. The only thing they could probably do is to split the articles in several categories and allow to update them separately.

I agree. Even when I had just started Pascal after early childhood years of ZX-Spectrum basic, even when I wrote a game that consisted of one huge block of code and the only reason I had to split it in 2 procedures called Dog1 and Dog2 is because Pascal compiler started to complain about main code block being to large - even then I was never puzzled by my own code.

Sadly I have lost the source now. I'm sure it's an epic and hilarious mess.

The compilers might be more helpful, too, by displaying hints or even warnings when the clever code is used. This would not forbid it but would encourage for universally cleaner code.

Besides if you do need something like SOAP but without the unnecessary overcomplications you always have XML-RPC (http://www.xmlrpc.com/) which I use a lot.

Yes, this. I'm a happy windows user (probably a minority here) except for this bloody feature. And the fact that every time windows updates are downloaded I have to review them to make sure they don't contain some kind of genuine validation checker that won't benefit me in any way except probably make my windows copy illegal by mistake.

At first I thought he might be serious, but the practical examples made it seem more like a joke, since the subtlety was somewhat lost there. Like this part:

Once a product is released, focus on fixing bugs, not adding new features. All overacheiving companies try to do the latter and fail. Instead, have a single new functionality, maybe along the lines of ‘New ! Option to save your work’. The rest should be all bug fixes. This will dramatically improve the quality of your software and PC magazine will give it 5 stars.

I'll talk about the setup and configuration part. I mean this has been talked about to death but people still don't get it. And lately I'm starting to fear that maybe some people like it.

This is especially visible when trying out various new programming languages. I have written exactly one .NET application in my life and I absolutely loved it that I could just downl... I mean buy the Visual Studio, install it and start coding, debugging and deploying the application. The same story with Delphi.

A very different story is about Python, Haskell and all things Java related. You need to download compilator, then you need to find and download IDE separately, then you need to figure out how to make it work with the debugger, if you're lucky enough to get it working at all. It takes time and effort that doesn't benefit me. It's all reading instructions, changing paths in configuration files and setting environment variables.

And the reason why this is done so is because as I mentioned some people absolutely love the idea that they can use any tools in any configuration that somehow after some effort work together. And people who like to tinker are the people who write open source. So there.

Also making good product = fun, making good setup = boring.

These things can be fixed by automatic check for updates and preferably seamless automatic update, but the problem is that people who normally like open source don't like automatic updates. People don't like when they're asked too much questions ("Do you want to check for updates?" - Yes - "Do you want to download update?" - Yes - "Do you want to update now" - ffs just do it!) and they don't like if program does this kind of stuff silently in background. How to fix this problem?

The question about "male hookers" is fair but the reason is probably more physiological than anything else. I mean most males simply can't sleep with unattractive women (and I hope I don't have to explain the reasons for that - maybe there are medical workarounds for that but I have no idea about the efficiency) while women can. The demand is probably unbalanced, too, but I'm sure it's not completely, um, satisfied on women's side. As long as we can still acknowledge that there are differences and deal rationally with them, the humanity will be all right.

C++ and Delphi are almost the last of few ones left to generate proper Windows exe files. DotNET is great for business applications but when you think about creating mass products, you have to keep returning to C++ and friends.

I'm not fond of scrolling (or ctrl+clicking) up and down to see what every little subroutine does to understand the code I have to fix. Only if it's my own code, I can be somewhat sure the tiny function does indeed SetOrderDate, but maybe it also modifies order's XML or changes some global variables... I can never be sure and I have to look, so reading bulldozed code is almost like reading huge routine but with way more scrolling.

Looking at this makes me both nostalgic about asm and thankful that I don't have to write any enterprise applications in it.

Execution is important, no doubts there. And I agree that for mass products it is more important than vision. However, I think that if the product is targeted for a single customer or a small niche group then vision is way more important - users will tolerate much of the shortcomings in execution if they see a great future perspective and are excited about it.

This is complete opposite of what I saw in Germany in Wolfsburg where VW plants are located. We were practically the only ones not driving VW there with exception of few Audis.

I think in car industry there are more benefits for using your own product than just being your own tester. It's also advertising (even such VW hater as me could not shake off a feeling that it has to be a good car after seeing a whole city is FULL of them) and increased product volume.

You're probably talking about USA and while the prices are higher here as well, that's only because of taxes which are bigger for diesel.

By how much more does diesel cost in USA compared to petrol?

In what respects are they less convenient exactly?

I actually liked the article because I used to be confused about the fact that anyone would choose this limited protocol over RPC but I'm starting to get it.

I personally will still stay away from it. I'm sure that if I implemented RESTful system, eventually I would need some special functionality that would force me to either emulate RPC over REST (what was the point implementing it in first place if I do that) or end up with 2 interfaces - one for REST and other for RPC, making things confusing.