rnemo

More than one OpenBSD hacker used loongson

Large (tech) company employee here. For the project I work on, most of our production stack is made out of FOSS software that's wrapped up in support contracts.

Intel's Ivy Bridge processor has been out for almost a year now, and is on the 22nm fab process.

How is Terminal.app embarrassing? In most of the ways that a traditional terminal is important, it acts exactly as expected, and still has convenient "new" terminal things like tabs and profiles.

Everything in moderation. Video games can eat your life but so can anything else, it's all about how much self control you have. I still play a lot of games because, hey, I have to do something with my spare time (and having spare time is essential), and I find it to be one of the more engaging things I can do. Not to mention multiplayer games are the only way to do anything with a lot of my friends, as they live in different states.

The PC as a platform for gaming was absolutely dying around the time of the current generation console launch, the console was meeting it (price of games, internet multiplayer, AAA title selection) or beating it (ease of use, cost of hardware, marketing) in nearly every way. At that time the best advantage to the PC was the potential for better graphics, but the cost of a graphics card to do this was more than the cost of an entire console. Plenty of industry vets joked that the PC would soon be only for hardcore FPS or MMO players.

Since then no one thing has happened to bring the PC back to life, nor has there been a single moment where the course changed. Changing to digital distribution, spearheaded by Steam, has arguably been the biggest savior to PC gaming, but the declining price of both good hardware and new games, the rise of indie titles, and the spread of gaming to OS X have all been significant contributors.

I hate being that person, but I have to honestly ask, if the scientific community as a whole cannot agree on exactly how much effect humans personally cause to the environment today, how can anyone claim with the level of surety that these people seem to have that something major is going to happen, that humans can mitigate, within a lifetime?

I disagree with what your idea of proper hiring apparently is; to hire and test out a lot of people often is better than to spend extra time finding the right person. In my experience, a work environment that is a revolving door of often failing new staff is a waste of everybody's time, whereas a work environment with more carefully selected new staff that sometimes fails is only a waste of management's time. Such are the burdens of management.

I agree with most of your post, except:

"2) All new team members were automatically assumed to be terminated within a month or so. This was usually true. Any new employee that didn't pull their weight, sat around waiting for someone to tell them what to do, or lied in any way was terminated."

Quite frankly this just sounds like whomever is in charge of hiring in these teams does a shit job of it. If, during an extended interview or round of interviews, a person cannot manage to get enough of an idea about how a candidate is going to mesh with the team that new hires often last less than 30 days, that person should not be hiring. If that person also does the firing as well they shouldn't be allowed near personnel management whatsoever, and their overall ability to lead should be questioned.

Cloud and IT are not mutually exclusive. The roles they provide are so different I can't at all see why anyone bothers to makes this apples and oranges argument.

I'm having trouble getting a reference to USAAs current eligibility information, because their website is a mess of badly named links and what Google finds redirects me to their homepage, but as I understand it pretty much everything under their banking umbrella is now available to everyone, including the credit card and loan stuff, and with it, remote deposit access. That said these breathless USAA cheerleaders should try having actual contentions with them sometime, it's a pretty poor experience reminiscent of news stories you hear about BoA and similar

I agree, and additionally would like to know; how much tunnel vision must one have to believe that the next generation of a single successful tablet, in a sea of tablets that are failing, denotes that we're "post-PC" because the PPI has been increased

Wikileaks appears to be the best option out there at the moment. But while it's a good resource to mine for data, it is pretty useless to the average person who may want some easily discovered facts.

If you're really serious about that wiki though, and would like some help, shoot me an email, you can find it in my profile.

I would hope most C# developers are aware of most of these features and how they facilitate the writing of good C# code, but this article seems like a good jumping off point for gaining greater understanding of the nuances of C#.

A better title to this article would have been "Less Understood Features of C#," as things like nullable types, boxing and unboxing using as/is, readonly variables, Nullable<T>, type inferrence and most of the rest of the articles content should not be hidden to anyone who intends to have more than passing knowledge of the language. Most of the things mentioned by the post benefit from having the additional explanation so they can be understood well though.

Same here, I noticed the title bar first, was somewhat confused as to what the color change was for (though I assumed Christmas), and then I saw the numbers.

If it's really necessary to do something for Christmas why not just a small tree next to the logo, or perhaps replacing it. Changing the color scheme to me doesn't really add much Christmas flair to anything, it just makes the familiar design more jarring.

"Another turning point in the last 10 years is that basically any PC made since 2000 will probably be sufficient for what most normal users want. We get increasingly powerful CPUs that most people just don't need."

That's being quite generous to the Pentium 4. Really the last 4-5 years is when acceptably good CPU power in any circumstance for normal users became the norm. The Core series of processors is what first gave us the sort of power that we've come to expect and Nehalem, Westmere, Sandy Bridge and now Ivy Bridge are all just improvements on that.

Also, according to cpu world, the original 80386 was done on on 1.5µm lithography.

1. I can and will continue to blame the commentators and the respected publications in the financial world who give them voice for consistently publishing pieces that not only turn out to be wrong but aren't doing anything to help the problem. I really don't care what the government is or isn't doing, it's at best irresponsible to keep on publishing articles that doomsay to no result when investor confidence, employer confidence, and consumer confidence are such important parts of economic recovery.

2. I was using metaphor when talking about stuffing money into mattresses, the point being that most of the time the recommended actions for saving the individuals money do nothing good for the overall economy, instead the actions just provide a potential safety blanket. In terms of talking about economic ups and downs and how to prevent them, these actions have not much more effect than shoving money into a mattress

Investor confidence and consumer confidence are both very important factors in how well the market does over any given period of time. So yes, these doom and gloom articles tend to be somewhat self-fulfilling a lot of the time.

It's always reasonable to be cautious, even wary. Doubly so these days. Throwing caution to the wind is what got the US economy into this mess. Never stop being cautious when dealing with any sort of market.

That said ever since the end of 2008 you can find a Forbes or WSJ opinion piece not less than once a month about how within the next six months the entire planet is going to fall straight to bits and theres nothing you can really do about it, but heres a few things to do to make you feel better. And those things always happen to conveniently be things that make the problem even worse, basically putting your money into a mattress. Another common theme is that the fact the government is spending a dime at all on anything is whats causing the problem, despite the fact that the US governments deficit problems only play a small part in the overall economy (consumer confidence, lack of hiring, and etc are all more important woes).

This particular article is bad enough that I really wish I could downvote it. It's a scare article marketed as journalism and I think it's pretty insulting.

This is an important point, the users decide the experience of their computers to a great extent, whether they understand what they're doing or not. Which brings up another point, that for web apps to become more popular than native apps, internet connectivity is going to have to get much better everywhere. The average user doesn't like it much when a program they use doesn't work at full functionality because they don't have an internet connection, and they definitely wont like it if they cant access their apps at all.

After the whole Arrington drama I think it would do Techcrunch a lot of good to stop talking about internal AOL politics for a while. Reading articles like this doesn't help their credibility in my eyes, and I'd be very surprised if it actually helped their credibility with anyone at all.

You're partially right with Windows. Windows NT, since the beginning IIRC, uses a hybrid kernel in which things like drivers and IPC are and such are still in the kernel, but the application subsystems and fileservers run in user space. Plan 9 has a very similar design.

Bitcoins are a bubble commodity just like anything else that rapidly rises almost entirely because of speculation. In a sense the Bitcoin market is a lot like the current gold market, both are enjoying a massive boom fueled by demand for the product without any commercial reason to back up that demand, and the inevitable result of this is that values will at some point begin to plummet. The difference between Bitcoin and gold though is that even after gold plummets it will still retain highly respectable value, whereas when Bitcoin falls it's entirely possible for it to be completely devalued as a product.

Just as a point of correction, Doomsday is not a Doom remake, it's an advanced source port. Freedoom (freedoom.sourceforge.net) is the closest thing to a remake, it's a project to create a free IWAD (the game data). It needs to be paired with an engine though, Doomsday is one, but there's also ZDoom (zdoom.org), PrBoom+ (prboom-plus.sourceforge.net) and my personal favorite, Eternity (doomworld.com/vb/eternity).

Anecdote from a SysAdmin: I remember during the early 2000s there was a trend for a little while to scale down the IT department, and rely on corporate support, or use outside consulting firms, or other methods that involved keeping the payroll mostly free of such "backroom" types. I've heard a lot of horror stories from people who would go into a company to fix a small problem or perform an upgrade, and would find virus ridden computers barely running, people doing ridiculous things like burning cds to move a couple of files (remember, early 2000s here), people losing their product license or support information, or other terrible things, simply because there was no on-site sysadmin to keep all of their computers in good functional order.

This article presents much the same scenario, but updated for 2011. And make no mistake, it will probably work for small, well managed, web-based companies, full of people that already know plenty about computers and technology. For pretty much every other type of major company though, there needs to be at least one person who's responsibility is making sure that the technology in the workplace can be worked with and not just worked around, and who can be responsible for dealing with the new technologies that come around, and until the cloud can provide such a service, the sysadmin will be alive and well.

Agreed. While the author tends to take the viewpoint that attempting to write self documenting code is almost a bad thing, and that's very wrong, I understand his frustration, because too many programmers these days seem to think that documentation in the comments are either superfluous or a sign of bad code, and that's also just flat wrong. It's a shame that the author takes the opposite extreme.

Like most things in life, code documentation requires balance, and one should strive to create code that is easy to read and understand, but good code cannot be easy to read and understand in all circumstances, and comments should be used in any situation that confusion could possibly arise.

For my own code, aside from commenting on obviously confusing sections, I tend to create functions that have an easily understood purpose when called, but I tend to use 1-2 lines of comments when I declare the function so that I can feel reasonably sure that anyone reading my code wont have too many questions. I've found through feedback that this is a fairly functional method of documentation.

I clicked on the link to this article expecting some thoughtful questions on why poor teaching is a contributing factor to poor education overall in America, and how the system is doing much about it, but I feel like I read an entire article that can be summarized as "A lot of teachers are doing good work, sometimes under tough conditions, but plenty of them need firing too. We need a way to figure out the ones that need to be fired, somehow. Possibly involving test scores."

In my opinion, the question we need to be asking is not "how do we find bad apples" but "how do we improve the quality of the apple tree." Good education is hard to come by regardless of what teacher, or indeed, school district you come from. The problem may not be how good is teacher performance, or even how good is student performance, but what is the quality of the teaching goals and design of lessons. Once we've successfully answered that question, then we can focus on the teachers who consistently have "losing seasons."

I'd say that this acquisition might be more related to that question than you think. Zynga games will probably be accessible through Facebook for a long time to come, but the Flock acquisition may be the start of them looking for other ways to reach customers.