rajat

Probably worth doing regardless of brouhaha or not. Different design choices, etc!

So, if you really want to own a movie or a song, buy a physical incarnation of it, or make a digital copy of it.

Thinking is hard, and takes time, and we want to get the feature out now, immediately, and worry about performance later. If at all.

And, sad to say (for an engineer), it's not clear that from a "business" perspective it's wrong. Hard to argue when accumulating features seems to matter more than crappy software. We have a lot more software these days, to run all of these bright new pieces of hardware, and perhaps because I'm an old-timer, the general quality seems to have degraded significantly. But the novelty of the stuff certainly has exploded, and I'm continually delighted by the twists and features that folks are coming up with, while being saddened by crashes, slowdowns, need for restarting, etc.

Link: http://borepatch.blogspot.com/2013/06/long-lost-roman-concre...

This is, of course, the huge problem with this plan. Not that this isn't the right thing to do; but because the media and public will seize on the few morons who do stupid things and therefore malign a program that would actually help most.

Just imagine the headlines: Addicts Caught Buying Crack With Your Money.

It doesn't matter which party pushes it. If the Democrats pass it, the Republicans will scream about this; if the Republicans do, then the Democrats will scream how this justifies government as a warden.

But those are not hip tech entrepreneurs...

I always thought that the mantra about your first 10 games will suck was a way to take the pressure off you and get you to develop a game. The problem is that we psych ourselves out; we don't develop anything because we're too fearful about making a bad game, and we procrastinate, and we hem and haw and never develop anything.

1) You get better because you learn to manage complexities that are simply not found in MOST application level programs; exceptions are stuff like high-performance database servers and their ilk. You should come out with a really good understanding of how to write multithreaded code, for example;

2) You learn to manage a really big project with lots of related, but complex interconnections;

3) There really is a huge benefit from learning just how a system works at the low-level in becoming a master programmer. Things like cache-issues, virtual memory management, are topics that you may not use everyday, but knowledge of how and what goes on gives you a whole new level of insight.

Anyone who wants to become a master programmer should implement a toy operating system (we can't all be Linus) and a toy compiler. Even better, implement a compiler and then implement the operating system using that compiler.

And the final reason: because it's amazing FUN. That is, if you really like programming. It's so complex, so much hard work and hard thinking, that when your first application program, just Hello World, actually runs to completion, you get high.

I have tried apps from time to time but nothing gives me the flexibility of a simple spreadsheet. For example, I can add notes to explain odd circumstances (ie. indulged in drinking, slept late, etc.)

Public perception is being driven by a media with an anti-gun agenda.

I use a standing desk, and find that I am far enough away from the monitors that head movement is not an issue; moving the pointer can be but you can increase the tracking speed setting to make that a non-issue.

What I am considering switching to is using the display attached to my laptop. Xcode would be on the laptop screen and the display would be used for showing reference material.

This is what's in 99Designs faq:

"On 99designs, designers agree to upload only original artwork, so each designer owns the rights to their design submissions.

This is true until the contest holder chooses one of the designs as the contest’s winner. Then, and only then, can the designer agree to transfer his or her rights to that particular design to the contest holder."

In any case, a neat concept. Works great on Safari.

In a few years we'll think about hailing cabs by whistling or flagging them down in the same way. Plus, the taxi drivers won't be able to bypass particular minorities with quite as much immunity from being caught anymore. "You accepted the hail, we have the record for that, but then decided not to pick the passenger up. Why?"

It would be interesting to read articles about how a single programmer uses Git, how a small programming team, how a distributed team uses Git. Similar articles about how a team producing art, or text (not programmers) use Git.

There's plenty of Git command tutorials already; let's hear about how you actually use Git.

But, judging from other stories here and elsewhere, your social graph does seem to yield mostly accurate information about you. So, most likely, you are likely to be tagged as a deadbeat or not correctly.

More meaningful, I suppose, is for those of us that are very careful about social media. I have a Facebook account, but use it very little. However, it has come in very useful in that long lost friends have been able to get in touch with me through it. I must admit, I have never really initiated that myself (ie. go search for someone). So, am I likely to be judged incorrectly solely on the basis of being a social media avoider; that is, are the banks going to say hey ignore social media stuff for this guy, or are they going to say, loners avoid social media and loners are likely to be bad credit risks?

I am definitely a member of the group that almost instinctively react negatively to the use of social media for data mining like this. I am also aware that I'm old enough that I might just be an old fuddy-duddy. I wonder how many articles were written about the loss of privacy when telephones started becoming popular and when the white pages were introduced.

Maybe if the stock price was going to completely tank, which would affect his foundation, he would consider coming back. But the stock shouldn't do that; the company is still remarkably profitable.