117789
submission
Bat Country writes:
The workflow system at the department I develop for was hand-coded by my predecessor in a rather short amount of time, resulting in somewhat unreadable code with a number of interesting "features."
When I took over maintenance of the code base, I started patching bugs and cleaning up the code in preparation for a new set of features.
When I was done however, I got a pile of complaints about features which disappeared which turned out to be caused by the bugs in the code.
So that leads me to ask, what is your favorite bug that you either can't live without or makes your life easier?
116315
submission
dpolak writes:
I recently discovered that if you use Walmart's Canadian digital photo services you release all rights to your photos. Under their terms of service:
You grant to Wal*Mart Canada Corp. a non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, unrestricted, world-wide right and license to access, use, copy, reproduce, distribute, transmit, display, perform, communicate to the public, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, and otherwise use such Materials (in whole or in part) in connection with the Site and/or the Products, using any form, media or technology now known or later developed, without providing compensation to you or any other person, without any liability to you or any other person, and free from any obligation of confidence or other duties on the part of Wal*Mart, its affiliates and their respective licensees;
Uploaders beware!
108921
submission
IdaAshley writes:
If your PHP application is plodding, use a profiler to target and measure where time is being spent or memory is being used. You can target the statement, loop, function, class, or library that's most sluggish. Part 1 of this "Make PHP apps fast, faster, fastest" series demonstrates how you can accelerate your entire site by eliminating redundant work using XCache, a PHP opcode cache.
108417
submission
eldavojohn writes:
The U.S. Department of Commerce & National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) has an upcoming problem. If they switch to all airwave TV signals from analog to digital, where does that leave consumers? Well, the answer is to offer each household two $40 coupons for converters that would translate the signal from digital to analog rendering all old TVs able to display the picture. Hardly a flawless plan but an interesting one, nonetheless. Analog signals are scheduled to cease February 19, 2009.
107951
submission
Lars Skovlund writes:
Groklaw reports that the Office XML standard is being put on the fast track in ISO despite the detailed complaints from national standards bodies. The move seems to be the decision of one person, Lisa Rachjel, secretariat of the ISO Joint Technical Committee, according to a comment made by her.
107915
submission
wh0pper writes:
Intel is entering the solid-state hard drive market with its Z-U130 flash-based drives, but not to sell to the consumer. Intel plans to offer the systems to computer manufacturers and embedded systems makers as a way to offer low-power, high-speed storage and let them achieve better performance than they would with traditional hard disk systems. Intel claims read performance will be at 28 MB per second, write performance will reach 20 MB per second, and the units will offer an average mean time between failure (MBTF) of a whopping 5 million hours. How does this compare to the flash-based hard drives in the various MP3 players?
