We use SVN exclusively for our projects at NeoSmart Technologies (private and public); and a huge number of highly-popular open source communities are also built around SVN...
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I use Consolas, and it's been my favorite until now.
The thing is, Consolas is beautiful.. but not as functional as Liberation Mono. It's a very "plain" font, but for screenful after screenful of code, fancy isn't what I need.
Liberation Mono isn't going to win any beauty awards, the MS typography team did a great job with their Vista fonts... But I think Liberation Mono is the ideal "productivity" font for hard-core coders.
I can just imagine it:
"And Hans Reiser was heard arguing with his wife - just like he'd practiced for years on the mailing lists of open source communities where overly-violent and highly-sensitive people are known to dwell and practice verbal abuse quite often."
I really recommend Atlassian's FishEye (similar to trac) and Crucible (peer code review, with a friendly forum-like twist) - both of which are tightly integrated - for anyone into some serious teamwork-based coding on SVN, CVS, Perforce, or several other version-managed development.
Entirely. I was shocked at the original BBC article, which touted the claims as "hard science" and made it all seem like we could be regrowing our limbs back in no time thanks to this amazing new "extra-cellular material" discovery.
Is this article for real? It's 8 short paragraphs long, and a single sentence at the end indicates that nVidia has big plans without any details, facts, or techniques. The link to "more info" at EE Times is broken, and there is no indication of "shaking things up." The article is entirely subjective, and misses out on all the finer points of parallel programming....
Putting aside any possible biases, anyone interested in an easy to use LaTeX-like program should give Microsoft's Word 2007 a shot. The new equation editor and symbols functionality is quite powerful, and incredibly easy to use.
It's brilliant. Everything from the limitations (real text files that can be indexed) to getting people to link their own stuff from other sites is very well thought-out.
There's a double-incentive for users to get their stuff at the top of Digg, Reddit, etc. First is the MBA they win, and second is the fact that it's _their_ stuff that's getting popular - pure brilliance!
And Scribd's slick licensing clause will make people submit their own, original content under an open source or CC license just for the chance of getting that MBA.
The real problem with a 120-135 degree posture isn't the tendency to slide off, it's the tendency to slack off... and the difficulty of getting things accomplished from that posture.
I don't think the study has factored in the use of a keyboard. It's not as easy to type when you're reclined backwards - it adds extra stress to the wrists and triceps (assuming your still typing on the desk).
The "new crappy ones" are the ones that I'm referring to in the OP - I got myself a 50 dollar MS keyboard, and my mistake ratio went up like crazy as a result of un-even tactile feedback that resulted in letters appearing out of order far too often. Stay away from them :)
Wow! I had to re-read the second point several times before I could get it through my head:
"Compile-time type errors annoy students to no end. It's better to at least let their program run and do SOMETHING rather than fail to compile and do NOTHING."
This is non-sense. It's encouraging bad coding practice, and it's the reason why languages like ColdFusion, JavaScript, etc. gave real developers so much trouble: amateurs write code that "runs" but is wholly broken. I agree that Python is a great beginner (and pro) language, but not for this reason!!
PHP is going towards where other languages have already tread long ago. I highly recommend anyone considering writing a webapp in PHP think twice about alternative languages, Python in particular.
Perl, Python, Ruby, and ASP.NET are all great webapp languages; but Perl is old, Ruby is heavy, and .NET is Microsoft - however PHP developers have no reason not switch to a real OOP language like Python and save themselves from a wheelbarrow-load of trouble.
It wouldn't. But it would make good coding easier for a good developer though. Don't get me wrong - I'm writing a PHP webapp _right now_ on the other monitor... The only reason it's in PHP is because it's a for-redistribution script and everyone knows PHP is easy to deploy and popular.
It has its strengths. They've obviously done something right to garner that huge userbase and support. But for a developer looking to write an internal webapp where only a couple of people get to look at the sort; I maintain that a good developer will be better off coding in one of the other languages that are, shall we just say, more "built" for the hard-core coding sort of thing.
As previous news articles state, Facebook has some implementation of XMPP going on. XMPP was designed from the ground-up to deal with exactly the issues that he highlights, and is the ideal real-time implementation for any system where everyone is expected to be aware of the statuses of all others on the network (verses the traditional "poll the server every x seconds" methods).
Even if Facebook isn't using XMPP per-say, they have full access to its implementations and source code for internal use for sure.
Granted, Facebook _does_ have the "slight" challenge of having 70 million active users; in light of which near everyone else's IM/XMPP networks are a mere pittance; but the core framework and algorithms are wholly addressed and implemented in XMPP standard.
It's one thing to make a more-efficient implementation of an already-existing standard that scales damn decently verses _designing_ a whole new system to serve their needs.
Note that the article doesn't once mention XMPP though.
I don't see how it's difficult to see the "right" thing to do - it almost never is, really.
"The right thing" (TM) is to treat the poor like you would any other social entity. You (as a businessman) can profit off of them, but not by taking advantage of their desperate situation. You make a fair offer, you get a fair return, and everyone lives happily ever after.
Now if you choose to give them a more-than-fair offer (interest rates that just cover inflation, pretty much no profit involved) out of the goodness of your heart - kudos to you.
Keep in mind the most important thing: the current sub-prime woes were all caused by banks taking advantage of people who couldn't afford to pay them back; "balancing-off" the high risk of investment with even higher interest rates - and look where that's put the global economy. There's a lesson in there - you can't make a quick buck, and ripping people off can never help society as a whole in the long run.
This is a stupid PR stunt. Linux is great and all (using it now), but everything has its place. Just as it doesn't make sense to bundle 31 Cents ice cream with all Nike shoes, it doesn't make sense to stuff Linux down all motherboards. There's a time and a place for everything; and adding features we don't need to products is just going to drive their price up, increase their complexity (and vulnerability).
Oh, and the penguin inside me is screaming "Score another one for the good guys!"
But "grabbing" is a less-efficient solution. Just as moving the mouse around may be less efficient than typing on that keyboard; grabbing stuff to interact with them can be a waste of time. More intuitive != more productive; and the current problem (IMHO) with mobile devices is that they have such low efficiency rates that their productivity _despite_ the advantage of being always on and always with you still suffers (as a result of size, awkwardness, and time-consuming adaptations we need to use).
Bottom-line: You're going to be loading your full OS when you come to work in the morning anyway.... How often are you going to need your Skype and you're PC isn't already on, running your full OS?
Thanks for sharing your experience in this field. But (and forgive me if I'm mistaken) your application was a special exception where the option of using the touchscreen UI made more sense, just as the Nintendo DS has a usability edge with its touchscreen. But for the more-general "productivity" applications - from email clients to word processors to graphics design software (where the "word bias" isn't an issue), I don't see touchscreens being the more efficient way to go.
In my opinion, delight is great, but not when it comes at the expense of productivity. For games and leisure, productivity is a non-issue and - you're absolutely right - delight and simplicity should be the developer's number one focus. But for productivity tools, making things easier and quicker to get done is the most important thing. There's nothing more frustrating than banging out an email on a touch-screen keyboard; for productivity tools, increased productivity is the delight.
It could be argued that the reason they touch is because they haven't learned to use other (more efficient) senses in-tandem with the unique human ability to deduce and comprehend. We can touch things to see what they do, or we can process what we see and hear to arrive at the same conclusion but with less physical effort and in less time.
"The study was lent some credibility by the finding that the Russians were the most unhappy."
...and the Guardian's credibility was ripped to shreds when turns out that Russia did NOT score lowest on the UN Human Development Index report (as seen at http://hdr.undp.org/en/statistics/)
Russia is number 67 out of 70 in the "highest development" section, and number 67 out of 177 total. Sorry, Guardian.
They're in the ocean. Typically, that would involve eating fish and drinking water :)
Then again, this is the 21st century. I cannot imagine the food they eat would differ too much from the food you're currently eating in Seattle/Chicago/SV/London/etc.
In this day and age, whether or not something is available is no longer really a question. The only thing that is relevant becomes how much it costs to get it. In this case, the cost of shipping perishable goods to these "islands" on a daily/weekly basis.
Even if fish were sufficient, I don't think any of the inhabitants would appreciate eating fish and fish alone day in, day out. Non-perishable goods like crackers, chips, Pepsi, coffee, sugar, flour, etc. can be shipped in large quantities and cheaply (via barges). But stuff like eggs, milk, fresh meat, and other goods that can be held in storage for long periods of time without adversely affecting the quality and nutrition of their constituents need some other solution.
At any rate, they'll have an easier time at getting something to eat than the inhabitants of the International Space Station for sure :)
I think this is directly applicable to the current situation at Microsoft.
The number of contributors to the Windows codebase has risen dramatically over the last couple of years, while some other teams have remained at a fixed size (such as the XBox team and the Office team). It could be a (highly-unlikely) coincidence, but the end-user satisfaction with both the latter products is far greater than for Windows Vista.
Obviously a correlation does not imply causation, but it's certainly food for thought (even if slightly rehashed/redundant).
Pay close attention to the bit about being generated on a WAMP system. This is clearly an issue with PHP using a faulty random-number generator on the Windows platform, and not a general fault that necessarily exists in all programming languages' random number generators. (Just for the record: Windows has a number of random number generator functions in its cryptographic libraries, some of which are on-par with those that ship with *nix. It's just that PHP on Windows isn't using them the right way)
Microsoft Research has some brilliant developers that make some real-nifty stuff (despite what you may think about the rest of the company). For instance, a while back they had a tool that could be used to connect a single wi-fi card to multiple wi-fi networks simultaneously, reviewed here: http://neosmart.net/blog/2006/multiple-wireless-networks-wit...
Excellent points here, especially the bits about the rationale behind patching major packages when maintainers should be taking the extra time to submit patches upstream instead.
An added advantage is far faster runtimes thanks to bytecode-compilation (vs the default interpreted-code nature of Python in most circumstances).
You can write your code in Visual Studio on Windows or MonoDevelop on Linux. On Windows, it'll use the native Win32 controls, on Linux Mono will "draw" controls that look like the native ones without actually calling the native binaries - it allows for a huge compatibility boost and still manages to look 99% native (technically it's drawing the exact same native controls, but the drawings aren't perfect).
It's not easy. As the founder of a 4-year-old non-profit tech company, I can tell you that it's not easy and your best bet is to make it your number 1 short-term goal to become self-sustaining. By borrowing money, asking the right people, getting donations, etc. you can get off the ground and get started. Form there, focus on finding steady income source (ads are a good way) even if it's not a lot of money.
Finally, don't underestimate end-users willingness to donate. Paypal buttons don't work because everyone assumes everyone else has donated money. We started using "donation trackers" by ChipIn (chipin.com) and they've been quite effective. Make sure you set a "goal" because people love to feel they're helping you work towards a particular amount. (For instance, we always get our most donations at the beginning and end of each month, when people send the donations percentage to 5% and to 100%).
Best money-saving tip: find a webhost to donate a dedicated server; it's the most important way to save money and keep afloat.
I see a lot of RPC-bashing going on here... I actually use it (typically via higher-level wrappers in Java or C#), and it's OK.... but what do you guys recommend as an alternative?
I can vouch that BZR has one of the best plain-text diff tools - whether or not it's number 1 without numbers to back the claim is a different matter though.
However, what I really want to see is BZR and GIT catching up to SVN when it comes to binary diffs - SVN remains the most efficient at finding and commiting changes to binary data between revisions. It may not seem so important, but if you're ever in a backwards country on business and need to upload to a repository via dial-up..... and of course, the smaller the binary diffs the more space saved on the server and bandwidth charges.
Mostly binary dependencies. Some are executable files (for instance, GRUB Stages 1 & 2), some are DLLs, and some are redistributables.
Reason they're under SCM is because we maintain some of them; with varying degrees of changes. Some have their own repositories, naturally, but others involve minor changes and/or just simply take too long to build. And for some of the redistributables: we don't have the source code for them in the first place.
I don't get why most everyone on HN assumes all hackers are < 30, have no family, and would give their left nut to live in a big city or The Valley.
I know plenty of middle-aged experts in the computer industries with wives and kids who love it out "in the country" and wouldn't trade it for anything else.
While there's a lot to be said for the bling and bang of living in somewhere like NYC, Seattle, SF, Chicago (my hometown! :D), or the valley; there's a whole 'nother side to the coin that involves a quite family life away from the city and the people.
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