550 karma · joined November 8, 2009
Worth noting that SU traffic may be unusually low-engagement, since I would think it's likely a user will just click Stumble again after the half a second or so you get to grab their attention. (That's an educated guess, mind you--I don't have any data to support this beyond how using SU felt to me.)
On the other hand, I agree with you about the wiki; there's a lot to be said for having such good documentation on installing and configuring something as complex as GNOME or KDE.
As for me, I don't list my birthday to anyone. I don't like receiving those post floods. (In fact, really, the only information I list is contact info, since I only use FB for keeping my contacts up to date.)
It sounds to me like Nokia doesn't want to be "just another Android phone maker". They want to differentiate, and to do that they want Google to do more for them than their other partners (like Microsoft ended up doing). Google has little incentive to do that; Android is already a market success and doesn't need Nokia to make it one. From their perspective, the code is all up on the public repo, and Nokia can take it and release phones whenever they want without even asking.
So what exactly is arrogant or over-confident about Google not seeing a need to bend over backwards for Nokia?
On projects like this I would worry more about accumulated technical debt from decades of modification than the language they're written in. (I suppose the language can complicate the task of hiring programmers who are skilled with its idiosyncrasies, but that's hardly an insurmountable or crippling problem.)
Sadly though, these provide no defense against the multitude of shady for-profit services that write papers for hire that anyone can find by Googling "term paper".
The About page sadly doesn't say where he teaches beyond "Giant Public University in the South", which is unfortunate because, as cool as this blog may be, I would never want to send any of my hypothetical future children there.
That is not correct.
Carriers need to talk to Rubin and tell him what their plans are in order to gain early access to the source code.
The source code will still be published into a public git repository, and anyone, including carriers and manufacturers, can still acquire, modify, redistribute and ship it from there.
Is it the fact that they're buying patents and feeding into a dysfunctional system? He seems to acknowledge that Google needs a large patent portfolio in order to defend itself from others, so it's probably not that. Or is it the fact that Google appears to be hypocritical in its stance towards patents, by taking actions which it could theoretically use to attack underdogs that can't defend themselves while claiming that they're just for their own protection? If that is indeed what he's claiming, then until that actually happens, this is just FUD.
My first thought on reading it was: is that equivalence valid? A society is a collective; a collective functions at the behest of its members. My experience of human nature suggests to me that society will contain members who both are and aren't kind to "less valuable" members. So can, or should, a society enforce kindness towards them, even against the members who are disinclined to be so?
Another related question: should we measure a society's value by its total accumulated success, or the success afforded to its "less valuable"?
I don't claim to know the answers.
Can anyone tell me if MySQL fares any better than Postgres on a single EBS volume? I wouldn't assume it does but I shouldn't be making assumptions.
Oh, they're also requiring that we encrypt the answers in the database. With encryption keys stored on the same server. But that's a separate (and arguably sillier) issue.
"Python coders from non-English speaking countries: please write your comments in English, unless you are 120% sure that the code will never be read by people who don't speak your language."
Regardless, he's definitely made his point well (and my setup showing different but similarly bad results from his only proves his point): support for the <audio> tag is not really as solved as browser manufacturers are claiming, and is not currently a suitable competitor to Flash.
Direct link to test: http://www.phoboslab.org/files/html5audio/
> Need a Photoshop mockup for every single screen, including the "I forgot my password" dialog and the Terms of Use page
Designers, in my experience, like to keep a design consistent--just as we coders like to keep the code organized and generalized with as few special cases as possible. If and when I would do something like this--which I've never done for things as obvious as these examples--it's because I'm not sure if the designer would want me to change it later because whatever I came up with wouldn't look good in context. If I have some obvious model to work from, however (like, for example, a login page for a forgot password page), I would base it on that--after all, isn't that what stylesheets are meant to simplify in the first place?
> Assign different values at random to every margins and paddings
In my experience, this can happen because margin and padding--and indeed, many other concepts in CSS--are rather opaque if you're not familiar with how print design works. I know when I work with CSS, it involves a lot of trial and error to puzzle out exactly how to implement something, not helped by the fact that different kinds of elements are affected by margin/padding in different, non-trivial ways.
> Think 11px is the perfect size for body copy (and 14px is great for headlines)
This is a bit of an extreme example, but similar problems I encounter work like this: I try it in 11px, realize it looks awful, and then don't know how to make it better. In the case of something as obvious as text size, I'd experimentally make it larger and see if that improves it. But in less obvious cases, I often do find myself thinking "this is ugly but I don't know how to improve it", and then show it to a designer, get a better mockup back and implement that.
> Ask you to export a background image even for a 1px black line
I've never done this one, I know about border: 1px solid black. :) If I were newer to CSS, I might Google CSS rules to figure out how to do it.
> Do not understand the concept of aligning things together
I'm willing to bet that this often happens because many things that seem like they should be simple alignment-wise in CSS is a bitch, and falling back to tables feels dirty. (Most engineers I know, in the absence of knowledge otherwise, would assume that a rule named "vertical-align" would do what it says in more cases than it does.)
I admit without reservation that these are all things I should understand better, and I'm constantly learning new patterns for improving designs as I work. However, they don't come naturally to me, so they're things I have to learn with the guidance of someone to whom it does.