yeah, good point. mark me far less unsettled now ;)

I would SWEAR she says dipshit instead of dipswitch... she's a "brand manager" so not a techie. Now had they actually used an engineer or even better a real DIY'er then maybe they'd make some traction. sigh.

there are so many things I can no longer do with gnome3

- create a launcher on my desktop that has a complex command
- park a link to something on my desktop that I want to review later
- group launchers (ie drawer) for easy click access
- monitor system usage (ie applets)
- ALT-F2 a program (try gnome-ter ...it does not know the program exists)

Many have stated the idea that it's easier to meta-key and search. Well, the program names change both for the actual executable as well as the friendly-name (eg Pidgin) so remembering every program association is far more effort than creating a launcher that I can put on my desktop or into a panel or panel drawer. My current gnome2 requires at most 2 clicks to launch a program in debug mode with a custom working directory... I cannot do that with the default launcher from the search results and even the simplest is several clicks into arbitrary menu structures or abated attempts at searching ("messaging" as opposed to "pidgin".. puhlease!)

I'm at a loss for words as to how sheeplish gnome3 feels. It's like some early beta of windows vista that was trying to mimic a Mac.

In short: I hate it.

The Windows Server 2008 Web edition is included in WebSiteSpark . Considering the OP handle he's probably looking to develop microsoft technology skills moreso than a web site attracting "millions of accounts/hits" ;)

I'd spend a guess that he means Hosting when he says Cloud.

they seem to be saying 'potentially earth-like'. That's far and away from 'theoretical', unless I'm missing something...

this isn't news. It doesn't matter. It's not very interesting to nerds. I'm very very tired of the blatant click-bait. Please.. Stop.

just gonna dump Skype because it's owned by MS now

I have three platforms of interest: android, playstation3, and desktop linux. Add to that the next Wii that is probable for next year. Only two of those currently enjoy support, and they're both linux. Given a reasonable alternative which had a critical mass of users, then the answer is Yes.

I think your point about the XBox is underrated and I fear that Microsoft intention is not, as others say, really the customer base. I think it could very well be a defensive move as well as a technological grab. Primarily Microsoft wants to control the "living-room hub".

Microsoft's Skype acquisition is likely an attempt to position the Xbox 360 and other Microsoft platforms as a standard communication vehicle, in addition to its entertainment offerings

They're everywhere. There are over 600,000 licensed amateur radio operators in the US. If you live in the US, odds are, a ham lives or works less than half a mile from you.

you can use this resource if you doubt his words.

http://hams.mapmash.com/hammap.php

there are 46 in our little midwestern town of 9000 people. That, when I think about it, seems just a little crowded! ;)

that's just simply fascinating. thanks!

I haven't had time to watch the episodes I recorded but out of curiosity, how long does Watson have to wait until it marks that the host has finished reading the clue? I presume that Jeopardy didn't supply a trigger event and since Watson is less adept at reading human body language it would seem that some amount of audio silence would be required before Watson would allow itself to buzz in.

The humans though would observe the host "winding down" -that's where early buzzes come from- and be ready instantly as they hear the period. Clues can be complex sentences but the human can more readily identify the intention of the host of saying the last clue.

It seems like the humans would have some subtle advantage then.

I also was intrigued by the idea of a database-oriented file-system. A basic operation though is to get a file. how? by it's name or id. what is it's name? Something you have to define. It could have a category (eg. javascript development library) but that's something the schema would impose upon you. what if you're more interested in the files' Contributor (author, downloader, etc.) ?

By itself a file-system backed by a database engine doesn't make the problem smaller it adds overhead.

There's only one resolution that identifies one from another and that's the explicit bytes contained within its storage. That can be simplified by indexing schemes like mdasum but they all can have collisions. (rare but how much of a chance are you willing to take?)

Is a file of bytes, ended by CR the same as the same file of bytes ended by CRLF? While the system itself might probably use null termination, other files from other systems won't.

the low-hanging fruit for file de-duplication is in backup storage. When you and another person need to retain the same file it can easily be merged into the stream. when you have two files that are byte comparable that's not so easy because you probably have defined some separation criteria (eg different file paths). so on your system they still need to remain discrete.

I've not heard much about how they would integrate this at the OS level but I think that's the trick.

I gave my son his own computer and, like many IT strategies, told him I'd back up what he asked me to. I made him responsible for his own collection, as am I. They may duplicate but hardware is so cheap. When we watch recorded TV shows sometimes we are both interested in keeping a copy, and that's ok. A gig here or there really doesn't matter when I can add 2TB for a $100.

That's very different from the scenario we faced when his brothers were kids. A 100MB hard drive was then pretty significant. I had to consider floppies and temp spaces. Now I'm more concerned with the age of the hard drive.

I don't think I'm the best one to decide how he might like to find his information - who knows what innovation might bring. I DO care that the systems are stable and reliable. That means repairable, at least to me.

The plant, which has been in operation for some 50 years

                    ^in Pitman NJ,

was that so hard?

at least once every 2-3 months I see some bug I fixed come back, and I can only assume it's because we don't have a formal test suite.

Many have already mentioned that you need metrics if you want to prove that a test suite would be cost effective. You don't really say if that's to be automated and that's harder. You also don't say if the intent is module unit testing or integration testing or some other slice, nor do you say what technology the system is built around. 10 years probably would be VB6 and there was a unit testing framework a few years ago available but the tool-set is decidedly sparse AFAIK.

Anyway, the statement about bugs returning caught my eye. Perhaps they really are a regressive bug but take a close look at that idea. To illustrate suppose the complaint is that "a failure was not logged to the logging file". This could be *caused* by, among other things, a misconfiguration of the logging system, a missing logging statement within the code that handles the failure, a locked logging file which could not be written, use of a module that disabled logging, or which did not re-enable logging, and so on.

Since these are all discreet sources they really are different bugs. It's unlikely (disadvantageous actually) that one test would find re-emergence of all of these even though they result in the same basic problem.

The point I'm hoping to make is to be certain you really are identifying the same bug as haunting you not just similar bugs and be sure you can faithfully relate that to your stakeholders.

And if you can make that case then it should be a no-brainer that they'd *not* wish for their teams to spend time and their resources re-doing the same thing. At that point the question becomes "What's the best way to insure that we don't?"

Sometimes it comes down to better documentation of the modules being used or training of the people involved. It's very hard to quantify the cost of training folks to create useful tests that don't actually increase costs (a lot). Also hard is predicting the point of break-even where all the costs in training, tools, and coding (and testing) the tests have started to return enough that the net starts to be positive.

We often seek perfection but removal of all regressive bugs is probably not the best first step. Another clue I got was that these bugs are found late in the process. In any case, perhaps better defensive coding in the modules would make them more apparent or obvious, and found sooner or prevented from propagating in the development process or the system itself.

Can anyone offer suggestions for how to convince the owner that setting up a test suite is in his own best interest?

The question really is "Are they?".

with teachers that pre-published powerpoint slides and teachers that didn't. Students statistically significantly worse in the sections where they had access to the powerpoint slides. When I poll my students they all tell me how much of an advantage it would be to have them, but it turns out that what they think will help them is not what will help them

It would appear that you have proved that a dynamic environment is more productive than a static environment. Sort of "if I spend one-on-one time with my students I can help them quickly modify their path" is a DUH.