pointyhat

This requires me to sign in to a Google account (I don't have one). Bring back usenet!

That's what comments are for. If something is ambiguous, then you should comment it.

As for your approach, I do like that better.

This is perfectly valid code. You cannot modify a collection which is being iterated safely so it's the best way to handle the situation.

What you describe are "appliances". Single purpose items.

Computers, are by nature interchangeable with respect to their use at the whim of the user, without cost. They serve many purposes interchangably.

What I am concerned about is that a cost for changing purpose is being programmed (excuse the pun) into the users, converting them from users into consumers.

Consider the case of a Leatherman tool. Would you buy one if it had a couple of useless tools supplied with it and you found out when after you bought it that you have to buy all the good ones? Also the screwdriversr can only be used with Apple-licensed screws and you have to turn them the wrong way.

That is precisely it. Which brings me to the point here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3003812

"We're slowly being led into paying incrementally for utility computing on a device we actually paid up front for".

If it's no longer a computer, it's an open market to exploit. We are consumers, not users any more.

Lucky for Manhattan.

Borrowing something for a week is a good way to find out if it suits, which it didn't. The person I borrowed it from was one of the people above who have discarded it. I gave it back as I discovered that it could be harmful.

Better than marketing-spiel and 10 mins playing with one in the Apple Store.

It is though. What is it if it's not a computer?

Taking the top 100: http://www.alexa.com/topsites:

YouTube, BBC, Xvideos, Xhamster, Pornhub, Youporn, Dailymotion, Netflix...

It's always choppy over WiFi in London from experience as there's so much interference from the amount of WiFi networks around and contention from the overcrowding.

(for ref, I borrowed an iPad for a week and played with it).

I agree with the OP:

> Oh, bullshit. Do you really think there is someone siting around at Apple dreaming up new ways to take away your freedom?

Yes - more precisely they are working out new ways to charge you for it.

We're slowly being led into paying incrementally for utility computing on a device we actually paid up front for.

Only a fool buys something then pays to use it.

IMHO I think that's wierd. I'd never consider using a computer in any of those places personally. I consider them all "downtime".

It's a fair point.

I'm looking out for small-form-factor Windows 8 devices which are hybrid tablets (much as the ThinkPad X61 but less clunky) and have 10 hour+ battery life.

I'd argue that there is no dedicated tablet market then.

80% I'd say.

It seems to go like this:

1) They bought it with a purpose in mind but it didn't work quite as well as they were hoping (khan academy, mapping, general use, recipes in kitchen, streaming video).

2) The games last a while but they are mainly novelty rather than immersive or lasting so it's back to the XBox.

3) then the web browsing gets frustrating as streaming video is choppy over WiFi and impossible over 3G and "what do you mean flash or java doesn't work" - I can't play facebook pool.

4) then the keyboard becomes frustrating when they try and do real work because it's not tactile.

5) then they switch back to their laptop when they have to do something like mail merge.

6) then the ipad goes in a drawer, followed by ebay about 2 months after they find it again.

I've seen this so many times across about 12 ipad owners now. 20% "software dev". 40% "tech enthusiasts". 40% "joe average".

Bear in mind this is just my observation.

Composability is what makes something greater than the sum of its parts. The iPad, I found, is so constrained as to be useless. I know of very few people who are still using their iPad regularly after 6 months or so precisely because of this (and the star trek wow factor has worn off).

Ironically, composability is why I still carry around a 15-year old TI92 calculator instead of an iPad, even though my peers look at me strangely. Oh and it still runs on good old fashioned AA batteries :)

I can't say I expect anything less from Adobe having been through the rigmarole of getting a bug fixed in Fireworks CS2.

All I'm saying is that it worked for me.

How are you hosting it? I'm using Apache 2.2 with mod_wsgi on Ubuntu 10.04LTS. Don't use mod_python - it's terrible.

From observing other people (I consider myself to be the least important person on the planet): It is usually the self that matters the most until you become part of a family. At that point:

Some people mature into people who put their family first.

A lot more people mature into people who put their family last.

The latter never achieve inner happiness.

I'm in the UK.

I spend as much time as possible with my children so that I can teach them that a 37 hour working week is actually normal and that they don't NEED to become an American-style 80-hour-a-week corporate slave.

Humans have needs: family, friendship and companionship.

"Work" is a relatively new thing; a product of the rapid growth of the population and the distribution of self-responsibility. Go back a couple of thousand years, and we were farming in family groups much like the Amish are today.

We're short-changing ourselves and missing out on a large chunk of life by not spending time with our closest ones.

...until you plug Greenhopper in.

Trac, Redmine, Flyspray, Mantis, JetBrains YouTrack. Even Sharepoint and the ASP.Net issue tracker starter kit.

I'm talking about the "maintenance agreement".

Switch to the postgres backend. The default sqlite one can get quite slow in high concurrency situations, although I've actually had 50 peple running quite happily off the sqlite backend.

Yes - lots of people like it. It's actually an incredible piece of software which allows you to build what you want on it.

Thanks - I will do that today.

I use Trac for all those things with the following plugins:

   * Time tracking: http://trac-hacks.org/wiki/TimingAndEstimationPlugin
   * Planning/reporting: simple trac reports + wiki dashboard.
   * Customer service, we have a separate trac instance with Intertrac set up between so you can link tickets.
   * VCS integration: works with hg and svn fine 

Also costs zero and upgrades flawlessly.

It is indeed interesting. Thanks for your report. I genuinely wish I'd had your experience.

No they are absolutely abysmal. Stay away for your own sanity.

My FINAL experience with JIRA + Fisheye + Greenhopper + Crucible nearly made me cry. This is on an 8 core Xeon, 12Gb RAM, 15k SAS RAID and Ubuntu 10.04LTS and Sun hotspot VM.

Random failures, null pointer exceptions all over the place that took us out for a couple of days, incredible memory usage, 8xCPUs jammed at 100% due to race conditions, Fisheye only barely just about works in Google Chrome because it's so slow, useless paid support, horridly slow and inconsistent UI, MyISAM tables causing relation failures (!!!!), don't even talk to me about their plugin management - it's a crock of shit.

I couldn't recommend it at all. It's worse than Visual Source Safe.

That's as a JIRA admin. As a JIRA user, I get people saying "can we have Trac back please".

If anyone at Atlassian is listening, please sort your product out. It's not fit for purpose.

That's rather interesting actually - nice bit of reading - thanks :)

I did kind of passively think that more syntax was not the way to solve these problems but shrugged it off. I've been slightly worried about the complexity of C# after some awful decisions (nullable types for examples).

I genuinely give as much of a shit as I did before they extended it and I'm sure that is the case for the rest of the population.

This is more about PR and marketing than it is about law.

I'm not sure it's the software. It seems perfectly ok on my Sony VPCJ1 which is a proper piece of kit with a decent touchscreen.

Last time I wore a suit was at a funeral in 1992. I've not used one at all since, which includes for job interviews, a couple of pitches, business meetings, formal events and a presentation or two.

I find it's more important to be an honest representation of yourself rather than be wrapped in a layer of turd polish. Also if you are judged on your appearance over your skills and/or product, then you really don't want to work with the other party.