Posts by Brad Hutchings 17 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jun 2007
If the call were unsafe, we'd have more accidents per mile driven in 2008 vs. 1990. We don't. The data that correlates cell phone use with accidents is coincidental, not causal. If you don't understand the difference, you ought not be spouting off on this stuff.
Hey, whether they get to iPhone or not, REALbasic has been a pleasure to work with for more than 7 years for me. It touches about 60% of my income. If they do get to the iPhone/iPod Touch, watch for that platform to quickly eclipse Palm. Knowing REAL, they will make development for these embedded devices not only simple, but a real pleasure to do.
How about a link to the court brief PDF? I will bet anyone here $100 to your favorite charity that the language in that brief has to do with copying the file to the "shared" folder of a file sharing app. It's RIAA boilerplate at this point, and not terribly unreasonable.
Engadget has already said this story was debunked. Just no explanation of the debunking.
Single exit points should lead to development of easier to read code with explicit logic. That is, if you develop with the singe exit point in mind, and not try to retrofit the rule onto code that has multiple exit points. It should lead to code that allows testing of all the code. If you haven't run all lines of code in your flight system, how are you going to offer any assurance that it won't try to crash the plane? And your point about exceptions is where things get really sloppy for those who don't adhere to single exit.. If you call a function that throws exceptions, catch them and handle them. Don't let them percolate up. Talk about impossible to test code paths!!
Finally, even strong religious proponents of no-goto, single exit points, or any other coding convention will recognize situations where carefully violating the religious edict may increase readability, maintainability, etc. and will allow that. But adherence to the rule most of the time takes lots of problems off the table. It's usually the 20th time you run into an expensive bug caused by sloppy multiple exit point coding that makes you get religious.
The day of reckoning will be when Radiohead release their next CD. If they do it this way the next time, it was worth the effort. If instead, they end up signing another CD contract with a label, we'll know this was just a negotiating ploy. But there is another possibility that even the great Andrew hasn't recognized yet. Maybe their business plan is to sell support contracts.
Bush and DHS Secretary Chertoff don't actually want to enforce this. They're playing this gambit now to put the immigration restrictionists back into their place so they can pass comprehensive immigration reform before Bush leaves office. Absolutely nobody likes the uncertainty of the current situation, where immigration law is unenforced. Well, maybe the lawyers do... But the answer isn't to enforce the laws we have, because they've proven to be unenforceable and completely at odds with the labor needs of the US economy. Heck, even the so-called "illegals" picked up in the recent Reno area McDonalds sweep were being paid a competitive wage above the minimum. There aren't enough workers in service, construction, and agricultural sectors. And the H1B situation in the tech sector is ridiculous. At any rate, pay attention to how this ruling is not appealed to understand what the Bush Administration is really up to. In the long run, it will be good for everyone except the people who hate Mexicans.
Disintermediation isn't happening and won't happen. Reintermediation is happening and will continue to happen. What successful producers need to do now and going forward is forge relationships that can quickly get their products in front of purchasers, but which can also be broken when they are no longer getting products in front of customers. Do most bands with recording contracts get airplay? No. But can any band without a recording contract get airplay? Unlikely.
The biggest mistake bands or other creative people can make in the world of reintermediation is thinking that it's better to get 100% of nothing than 50% (or 15%) of a lot. Bottom line it and then decide how you're gonna deal.
You can have Arnold Schwarzenegger back. And take the Kennedys with him. For those Calleeforneeuh parents looking for an easy way to keep your kids talking on their cell phones without getting their name on the board from Kindergarten Cop, check out the Alpine CDA-9885 and add the iPod Full Speed cable and Bluetooth phone adaptor. They can get their calls through the dash, listen through the speakers, and talk through a discrete mic mounted on the sun visor. Crutchfield.com has the goods.
When Palm announced this gadget, I thought it was going to quickly and significantly change the way people do their computing. While Palm pitched it as an extension of the smart phone, I saw it more as an extension of the desktop.
Currently, my MacBook Pro is the center of my work life. I can spit my contacts out to my Palm T|X or my Sanyo M1, check e-mail on the go on my T|X, but to get data back to the MacBook, I pretty much use e-mail rather than Palm syncing, etc. I could see a small subnotebook like the Foleo taking over e-mail, IM, etc.while the MacBook remains my central data repository, development and productivity machine, etc. I could see leaving the MacBook behind for meetings and just bringing the Foleo, or opening the Foleo during lunch to catch up on e-mail, or even taking just the Foleo on short trips. Who knows if they'd have ever gotten the syncing right, but the possibility was certainly there.
I can also see getting friends and family who just need e-mail, web, and IM hooked up with Foleos instead of desktops. Might not be the right form factor for older people, but certainly for busy professionals who want to be able to get e-mail or shop on Amazon at home in the evenings.
So I'm bummed out that the killed what could have been a category definer before they could get it market. But I'm sure it's gotten other players thinking... Perhaps an Apple subnotebook that plays nicely as a digital hub extremity (and as a main computer) would fit the bill. The need for such a device won't go away.
I had used Earthlink for business SDSL for almost 6 years. When I called tech support, at any hour of the day or night, I got a live person on their biz support number, not a phone tree, and that person was able to diagnose my problem and fix it from right there. Probably happened 4 or 5 times in the 6 years, and the service was worth the $300/month and then some. Early this month, my line went down, called the number, got a 2 hour queue. The guy on the other end of the phone was Indian talking on VOIP so we could barely understand each other. I'm all for outsourcing, but for some functions, it would be just as effective to eliminate the services as it does to outsource.
He had to call a tech for a site visit, which was scheduled for a Friday and didn't happen until the following Monday. That guy decided it was a telco line problem and had to start a ticket with the telco. I got a call confirming that the problem had been fixed the following Wednesday. Still not fixed. And the problem seemed to be (from my side) an authentication database on their end.
Earthlink is most definitely not the company it was 6 years ago, or even 1 year ago. In the wake of this emergency, we decided to stop hosting in our office and just use consumer quality cable for access, with hosting providers for e-mail and web. Cut our costs in half. And by the way, cable self installed in less than 2 hours after we had the idea.
If anyone wants to do something really revolutionary, come up with a "BSD 2.0" license that ensures that code derived from BSD 2.0 licensed code may always be used under the BSD 2.0 or later license, at the user's option. I'm sure you could pimp it at Tim's conferences now that Moglen earned his lifetime ban.
(a) our reader's comment,
(b) all the Americans that are going to have to think about your last sentence,
(c) all the people who bought 2 iPhones: one for themselves and one to sell at a 10% discount on ebay,
(d) all the people who bought 2 iPhones: one for themselves and one to disassemble and post the resulting video on YouTube with a parts inventory on their blog,
(e) any of the people who waited in line,
(f) all the professional iPhone developers that recently completed their official training course:
http://developer.apple.com/iphone/designingcontent.html
Send your answers to steve.jobs@apple.com
Those 120 Processor Value Units (PVUs) are pipelined and parallelized, resulting in a dramatic increase in value throughput by the Power6. Do you guys remember when each PVU was on a separate chip and most computers shipped with an empty PVU socket? My how times have changed!
Inspired by the commenter above, my plan to save the environment is to make people work longer hours. If everyone just drove to work and back and rarely drove anywhere else or had any fun, we'd save billions of gallons of fuel annually and pump millions of tons less CO2 into the air. I think this is a plan that every environmentally conscious corporation could get behind!
If Apple had given him credentials, no doubt he would have written a flowery piece about how Apple found the right balance in allowing developers to run apps on iPhone through Safari and how all the developers are happy that they won't shut down the entire west coast network and all that!
Notice that AAPL is down $5 of not giving El Reg a free pass to WWDC. Not a good move.
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