rjempson

Awesome news. Hopefully it will render herbicides useless.

I think I just witnessed the day Hacker News died. This thread is appalling, much like the article. I'm no Windows apologist, but the article was a ramble about windows 8 with a paragraph tacked on the end, and the comments here are even less relevant.

I wonder what he is talking about. I recently created a script that can build our whole cloud based test environment from scratch. It creates the servers, downloads and installs the platforms, builds and deploys our software.

Maybe he is talking about end-user software that can be scripted? But even that isn't true for devs.

Here is an idea, sometimes it is a good idea to look inwards rather than outwards.

She won the lottery.

Much like tattoos.

Or they could just make sure the have a good spidey collection.

I should watch that movie, could be amusing. However I'm not sure I understand what you mean. I don't think the study reached a conclusion as to how many children someone might have, merely that the sperm quality was higher/lower.

Are you saying no game is relevant if there is a more difficult game (and that is assuming what you say is true or even provable)? And as someone who has played 100's of hours of both Starcraft and tournament chess, I can assure you that chess is much harder to master.

And just to throw around some unprovable opions, much like you, I declare that Starcraft becomes more a test of keyboard/mouse agility than strategy or tactics, because it has dominant strategies available for a master player.

Back to chess, I think it is actually entering a golden era of interest and popularity. The last 2 decades at the top level have been dominated by opening theory and computer assisted home preparation, which has made it a hard slog for the professional and spectator. However the last 5 years or so have seen the emergence of a new breed of player that is shunning that approach. The number one player in the world is a prime example of someone who doesn't focus on opening theory and computer assisted preparation, and he has been blowing everyone away.

I am just wondering whether you can write your own wrapper class that implements (exposes) the read method and doesn't expose a close method (or expose a close method that does nothing) and pass that in?

I am not suggesting this is a good solution, just curious.

I don't like LinkedIn for similar reasons but I somehow feel I will offend people if I drop out, and I have had some decent leads from it over the years.

The import contacts feature is particularly nefarious, it says "import" but it actually keeps checking down the track (or at least it used to work like that).

I think this comment is even more naive than the game UI comment. Excel has one of most complex UIs in existence. I seem to recall reading once there are many 100s of developers on that team.

I don't really get your point. Its obvious that game developers would produce better interfaces / experiences, because that is what they are selling.

Enterprises are selling a product or service, and the customer paying the bills doesn't see the internal software that facilitates some part of the process of delivering that product or service. You could dream up a few examples where the end customer might be impacted by a poor UI used by internal staff but it would be an edge case.

If every enterprise software project attempted to produce game quality interfaces and experiences to the user, the costs would explode.

The only benefits of producing better interfaces / experiences / workflows for an enterprise are user moral and user efficiency. The latter is quite often addressed in my experience, as it affects the bottom line.

Nothing like broad sweeping generalizations to make a good story.

I have a few points to make :

1. End users have an incredible ability to complain that software doesn't meet their very specific and peculiar requirements at any point in time. "Why can't I print this expense report landscape on a5 paper, we have run out of normal paper" - "Why doesn't this expense report sub-total by supplier and week, but only in leap years?"

2. If the people using the software were the business owners I think they would sing a different tune, or go out of business because they spend so much money optimizing for user experience.

3. Enterprise software tends to be infinitely more complex than most Saas projects. It is hard to budget and focus on the user experience when you are processing billions of dollars in transactions, with complex business rules, complex tax rules, complex laws, integrating with legacy systems, changing business conditions and strategy. Most businesses will put compliance and accuracy ahead of user experience.

4. Non-enterprise developers seem to think they are shit-hot and have a chip on their shoulders about enterprise developers for some reason. So you get an endless stream of articles along these lines.

I think this has parallels with the saying "I'm not young enough to save the world".

Buyer's pride perhaps?

This is an example of why analogies should never be used (except perhaps if trying to explain a concept, not something tangible).

ATM software has nothing to do with the backend storage of the data. My point is that I bet when the data is actually written to durable storage in the backend, the set of data being written will be wrapped in an ACID transaction.

I can't read the article, probably a HN DOS.

However, I really can't see the point of doing DRM in html5, it will just result in browsers becoming the equivalent of the evil plugin everyone hates(only certain browsers/platforms will be able to run the content).

Why not just leave html5 video open, and let those who wish to distribute DRM'd content build their own client-side players for the OS's they wish to support. Or let them build apps on top of Adobe AIR or Silverlight out of browser.

Calling "copyright protection" a straw-man is in itself a straw-man.

Nothing sucks in readers like a bit of Microsoft Schadenfreude. The may as well have implied the electricity powering the computers was to blame.

Nice headline, but I can't see what this has to do with Excel.

You are right that it was a generalization, however you are pretty much arguing the same point as the author.

I remember seeing a matrix/graph in a book, maybe 'code complete' or some other popular book. It basically had complexity on the y axis and risk on the x axis. The point being that high risk, and high complexity projects would justify the most discipline, testing, proofs etc, and the low risk low complexity projects justify minimal process. Something like an inventory management system for a t-shirt shop would be the latter, and sending a pacemaker to the moon would be the former.

What happens if the data has spaces in it or new lines in it? in other words, how do you escape a space / new line?

On a tangent, where the author says "Have you ever seen anyone play Angry Birds on a desktop?", funnily enough I have. My 5yo son has played a lot of angry birds on my phone, 3 stars on all levels of space. then last xmas someone gave him a PC version of seasons. since then he refuses to play on my phone, stating that it is "much better" playing on the PC, citing the screen size and sound as the main reasons.

They are going to call it iNanny

That is why some organizations don't allow adhoc data fixes to be run in production. Best practice is to backup the database, run the fix against the backup, test the fix against the backup, and all being well run the fix against production.

I'm sure this article is most interesting to those that would never buy a Microsoft product. Spurious.

err : A$1099 * 1.04 = US$1142

Yes, it must be the case that not every child loves preschool. And I would expect parents to deal with it at the individual level, so if a particular child found it traumatic then the parents should trust their instincts and withdraw the child if they thought it might have long term negative effects.

I wonder if the usage of the term preschool is important. In Australia this refers to the child care that happens immediately prior to going to school. It typically goes Kindergarten -> Preschool -> School. Wikipedia seems to imply in the US that it goes Preschool -> Kindergarten -> School.

The final sentence sums up the quality of that article. My observations are :

1. Children love preschool. 2. Parents need a break so they have the energy to engage with their children. 3. Children benefit in the long run from the exposure to germs. 4. Children benefit from early socializing.

And so forth....