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The worst part about the implementation is that the browser icons often appear unsorted initially, and then the sort kicks in 0-5 seconds later, and they all shuffle.
This has caught me out at least twice by clicking on a browser icon to choose it, then the order changes after I clicked and the wrong browser installer is launched.
The solution is to get a decent external keyboard. A laptop keyboard is never going to be good. Stop dancing around the issue - get a decent keyboard.
I started to get wrist pain about 10 years ago, which worried me. This was right around the time MS first released their ergonomic keyboard. It was 100ukp, but I figured that was a small price to pay if it fixed my problem. It did - the pains went away in about 2 weeks. They've never come back (I've used various models of the MS ergo keyboard since then).
Get a decent keyboard.
http://developer.android.com/reference/java/lang/Compiler.ht...
"The Android reference implementation does not (yet) contain such a JIT compiler, though other implementations may choose to provide one."
I thought that was one of the complaints about Android/Java - the VM runs the code; there's no JIT. That's why the prototype Dalvik JIT that was announced very recently was big news. It certainly wasn't announced in the 90s, anyway.
The url itself is quite odd (firefox instead of facebook).
Mine is a stock iPhone. No jailbreaking or other shenanigans.
"Software apps or Apple can push updates I don’t want."
The badge on my iPhone's App Store icon that says '34' seems to suggest otherwise.
It's certainly the only explanation that fits the facts. The only one.
This reminds me of a point I heard someone make about (I think) a Heinlein novel. Heinlein (or whoever :)) had predicted the widespread use of telephone answering machines. Their point is that this was kind of easy to do - but what Heinlein also did was predict that people would use them to screen phone calls (in the book, the character hears his Dad call in, and picks up the phone and says something like "I'm in for you, Dad.")
The point is that predicting how people will use stuff is the hard part (as you say).
Odd. I have two 1920x1280 monitors (arranged as yours). With my mouse acceleration I can go from extreme left to extreme right without much effort (don't have to lift my palm off the desk). Yet I can easily hit small targets a few pixels across. Buttons are easy.
This is on Windows - haven't switch to Mac to test it - maybe the OS X acceleration is linear and hence a bit sucky?
Maybe it's this line:
"That's it for now. I really apologize for any inconvenience this may cause, but I hope you understand that this is fully beyond our control."
...because I've never written an Amazon API app, but even I know they have restrictions on usage wrt mobile apps.
There are an awful lot of people who never use the address bar - they just go to google.com and type the URL into that.
So this kind of makes sense.
Maybe, but a lot of interviewers ask questions like this because they love being smug about catching people out for not asking about requirements before starting.
I was in an interview where a couple of the interviewers asked me to do something, and I asked some basic requirements. After a few questions they just started grunting non-comittally and indicated I should get on an answer the question.
The feedback from these interviewers? That I didn't ask enough about the requirements/details before diving in to answering.
So I have sympathy for this guy.
I know I can't be alone in being super-excited that all those annoying Flash ads for dog food are going to work just fine on my mobile phone too.
If you search for leopard dildos on SL, it asks "Specify type of leopard"
Agreed. Whenever I see one of those operator precedence tables in a programming language book, I just skip it. Other than BODMAS, I have no real idea what precendence logical/bitwise operators etc have - I just use parentheses, and always have done.
Like you say - why waste brain cycles trying to parse expressions. But then I also write comments in my code :-)
You may also like the story of LEO then: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Computer-Called-LEO-Worlds-Office/dp...
And what's funny about trojans?
Also got redirected to some (presumably malware) antivirusscan site.
"Consumer banking has always been free in the UK."
No, it hasn't. Charges for writing cheques, withdrawals, etc were common at one point. I remember the switch to free banking in the UK when I was a child - not having to pay anything to use your bank account normally without going overdrawn was a big deal at the time.
When I check my GMail spam folder, I get spams at about the rate of one per minute these days.
Filtering those manually became unworkable for me years ago.
I maybe see a spam in my inbox once a day. It goes up and down, as spammers find workarounds and then Google fix them.
The email address I use is 10+ years old though.
Yes, in many ways, Jeff 'took one for the team' in a big way, in that he reminded a lot of people to "Er...I'll just check my backups and make sure they're working."
We're tech types, but e.g. I know a programmer who never backed up his laptop (with important stuff) because he'd never had a hard drive go bad on him. You'll never guess what happened...
The hard part is getting 'normal' people to back up. It's really hard. They have all their data/documents on that laptop, and all the digital photographs from the first 18 months of their baby's life or whatever, but if you advise them to back up, you sound like some crazy lady who throws cats at people in the street.
iirc, squatting is the best position for humans for this activity.
(You can probably work out why; something to do with the lack of toilets at some point in history)
When you test airbags, you have to then replace them. This is possibly the worst car analogy ever :-)
As mentioned already, the book Peopleware has a section the Black Team, which predates this article by quite a few years.
When I was interviewing C++ programmers, we had a C++ test, and some stock questions I asked face to face.
However, I found I could pretty much weed the good C++ programmers from the mediocre/just read about C++ before the interview by asking one question:
"What is a virtual function?"
If they have trouble starting to answer it, give them a hint with "What would cause you to type the keyword 'virtual' in your code?"
You would be amazed how many C++ coders don't really know the answer to this, or what is going on (vtables etc, or even just the behaviour).
One candidate answered "I'd make a function virtual if there were any other virtual functions in the class." It seems like there is no shortage of bad answers to this question. All the people who ever gave me a correct answer (hit rate was <10% of candidates) were good C++ developers.
It's a good question :-).
Yeah, Dell are great at support. </sarcasm>
My Dad's PC had a DVD-ROM drive that died. I was on the phone to Dell support for A WHOLE DAY. THe problem was trivial, but I got shunted around, told to try all the crappy shovelware shit they'd put on the PC that I'd uninstalled, etc.
XP's built-in CD burning just plain failed to work. Dell support tried to tell me that the CD-ROM drive was not compatible with XP's CD burning (totally nonsense). I even had to give them my credit card number to sign up for their software support (as well as the cash I'd paid for next-day hardware support), because "it might be a software problem, so you have to pay for software support." At least they had the decency to refund that.
They'd established (or rather, I had) that the drive was faulty, so they wanted to mail me a drive and I could fit it. As I'd paid for next-day on-site warranty I told them they could take a running jump.
Next day, hardware guy turns up, replaces drive in about 10 minutes, fixing the problem.
A WHOLE DAY on the phone. I've never bought Dell support again.
"Instead you would doom billions to death and starvation, because during the transition time you need young people to support the old."
Not if we kill them when they reach the age of 30.
"I know for a fact that most public accounts of Google interviews are wrong."
Out of interest, how do you know this for a fact? I presume you were actually at most of these interviews?
Sounds like somebody needs to read 'No Silver Bullet' again, especially the part about Essence vs Accident.
"I hadn't really seen this coming from Microsoft"
Not even when they first announced it at PDC2008 a year ago?