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The right-click key you'll often find to the right of the spacebar is horribly useful, at least to me, fairly often. I tend to nav Windows Explorer by hand a lot, and right-click key-V often means "open in VIm", which is fun.
But what if your laptop manufacturer, in all of their wisdom, left that key off of their keyboard?
I've had Windows 8 on a new Lenovo for about a week, and it's great, even without a touchscreen or fancy device. If I hit the Windows key, I get to see a well designed dashboard of information-centric apps, and if I start typing it very quickly and seamlessly jumps into a search for programs and settings that match just like the Start button used to.
Hardware really does tend to be the product of a moreโฆ adult engineering culture than software. I donโt believe Iโve ever encountered a piece of computer hardware which was a steaming turd of sheer dysfunction (non-deterministic behavior, illogical/undocumented operation, simple defectiveness) in the same manner the average piece of software of any substantial complexity almost invariably is.
Via Gruber's Fireball.
Though note this comment to that post:
Yeah, Iโm with Jason โ it sounds like you just havenโt encountered much
hardware at a deep enough level. Look hard inside the Linux kernel (for
example) and youโll find all sorts of documented hardware breakage,
with software workarounds of various degrees of grottiness. Sometimes
the workaround is to (say) completely turn off features. A particular
multi-core embedded ARM processor I know of has totally broken
multithreading, so itโs being run single-core. The Intel Poulsbo
chipset has to run in linux with the โno-pentiumโ flag, because its
hyperthreading cache coherence had race conditions that could only be
turned off by page table features introduced back in pentium days.
Check out the errata for any processor of any sort of sophistication and
youโll find a long list of wont-fix bugs.
That makes some sense. I mean, I know the 6502 had some illegal opcodes. It's not like CPUs are always getting it done right.
What's important for hardware isn't so much that it's bug free as that the "legal" opcodes work. If they do and you use something else, well, that's your problem. And apparently not even the legal stuff is perfect.
Ah humans. What does Maynard say?
Angels on the sideline,
Baffled and confused.
Father blessed them all with reason.
And this is what they choose.
Slightly less morbid effects here, but same angelic confusion, I'm sure.
posted by ruffin
at 4/17/2013 12:44:00 PM
In git's culture, branching is horribly cheap. Everyone's workspace has more than one local branch, and it's okay to have many more on the shared repo server. We get branching, no pun intended. Powerful, cheap, and quickly merged.
TFS as I'm using it now (TFS 2010 in the day job) doesn't get it. Often when I talk about the advantage branches would get us, I'm told to "make a shelfset." I already knew you had to start at the same version of the app as the shelfset for it to work, but hadn't really played that forward until recently.
Apparently you canโt merge multiple shelfsets (or shelfsets
into code that has edits) in stock Visual Studio. It requires some Power Tools
Toys [sic].
Thatโs a good, technical reason to push towards git.
To begin working on the feature I
needed to pull down both shelves and have them merged. When I began to merge
the second shelf I got an unexpected error: ...it
was telling me that there were items in the shelf that were trying to be
overlaid onto files with pending changes. The obvious guess is that TFS would
do the normal merge operation just as if you had done a "get latest",
but that's not the case.
This
caused the merge issue to abort and rollback any files that had been brought
down from the second shelf. This is a huge pain because both shelve sets are
pretty large and encompass several projects in varying levels of the folder
structure. Merging these files manually would have taken HOURS.
I can't tell how I feel about Microsoft's love of Mono. In a sense, it's an obvious fit. It could represent Microsoft wanting to move beyond the OS into more popular, crossplatform [, and mobile] spaces by piggybacking on Mono's work with C#. I can't say I'm against Microsoft's best (and Visual Studio has some of their best, I feel relatively confident) working on Mono!
At the same time, Mono initially felt a little subversive. Less so now. We're not writing Windows Forms apps on Mac anymore.
Strange the bedfellows success creates. (Brought to you by Yoda, apparently.)
Newly disclosed documents prepared by IRS lawyers say that Americans enjoy "generally no privacy" in their e-mail, Facebook chats, Twitter direct messages, and similar online communications -- meaning that they can be perused without obtaining a search warrant signed by a judge.
As we recently learned with iMessage, it doesn't take exceptionally complicated encryption to render your data exceptionally safe. Heck, I bet you could rot13 your way past most sniffing. When you honestly encrypt, these sorts of privacy invasions are moot.
Itโs not that there really is no rhyme or reason to an artistโs success. Itโs not really random. Itโs just that the process of making a hit or a star is irreducibly complex,unpredictable and impossible to model. It can never be duplicated. ...
Yet everyone in the music business seems to think otherwise. Artists, managers, agents and record executives will argue otherwise. They will cite their own personal narratives that show how their actions and decisions led to some spectacular success. But there are always a few strange logical fallacies at work.
โSuccess has many fathers, failure is an orphanโ- arab proverb.
What this means is not that a successful project has many fathers helping to guide it on itโs way to success. No, this means that many people claim to be associated or responsible for a projectโs success no matter how tenuous. People play up their role in a successful project but downplay their role or completely disavow involvement in failures and disasters. Itโs a genetically encoded survival feature of Homo Corporaticus. By doing this people artificially increase their win/loss ratio. Equity traders would say they fraudulently increase their alpha or skill quotient.
This also helps create an illusion of causality. It helps us tell ourselves and others the lie that our actions decisions and theories usually result in great success. Thereโs also something called the narrative fallacy whereby an individual will look back on events and select a cause and effect narrative that brings order to what were really chaotic and random events and decisions.
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