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Comment Re:I vote for Inception... (Score 1) 201

The hotel loss-of-gravity action scene was a bit unique, but the action was still weak overall. It sort of felt like Nolan wrote the plot, took it to the studio, and they said "ok great whatever, it needs more action to sell". So they went back and added in the bits about dream defense force and threw in some guns and, unfortunately, probably sold more tickets as a result.

I'd be interested to hear what you thought was logically inconsistent about it, while you're at it.

Comment Re:Great idea but not likely to happen (Score 1) 244

OP didn't say to get rid of cookies, he said browsers shouldn't need to opt-out of the cross-site tracking discussed in the summary. A practical implementation would be if all browsers started blocking 3rd party cookies. This has been an option for a while, but as its not the default, it breaks a lot of random non-nefarious websites.

Unfortunately workarounds would be found by advertisers anyway, eg. having the website install the advertiser's cookie for them and traffic the info behind the scenes instead of through your browser.

Comment Re:flaunt? (Score 1) 197

These are two somewhat fundamental UI approaches. Although you might say the complex multiple-route approach is the natural or evolved method, while the single-way-to-do-anything is a more intentional UI approach.

I haven't use iOS *or* Android, but my experience learning the Xbox 360 UI has been subpar. When there are 5 ways to do everything, you have to learn 5 ways to do everything, and there are little hooks and catches to each of them. Many of the features of the 360 menu have at least 2 routes in the 360 dashboard, a 3rd route in the "home" button menu, plus a 4th route in-game for many actions. It's needlessly redundant and confusing.

That said, it's also very subjective. It's not as simple as "count the routes to a piece of functionality, if there are more than 1, you're doing it wrong". Google is pretty good so I suspect the Android is at a happy medium between Apple-simple and Microsoft-convoluted.

Comment Re:Is C++ ever the right tool for the job? (Score 2) 509

Overloading can certainly muddle code readability, but it still depends on someone doing something wonky or overcomplicated with an operator instead of a named function. Which you could argue, comes down to "bad code is bad".

In Java on the other hand, I find it totally unpredictable and unreadable. Bad Java code uses operators and tends to have major bugs due to object VS primitive issues. The "better" Java code uses functions everywhere for equality, addition, etc. So instead of being able to quickly tell where doSomething is called, you see extremely wordy nested functions for math that in C++ would actually look like math.

I wasn't very happy with operator overloading in C++, but now that I've used Java, I think I want C++ back.

Comment Re:Daily builds? (Score 1) 182

I figured out from another post that daily builds is in reference to large compiled projects. Somehow every project I've worked on has either been interpreted (eg. php: 'svn up' and visit any page, if configs are broken you find out immediately) or compiled projects small enough to rebuild every time you make a change to verify the change works.

It's actually really hard for me to imagine coding on a project so large I can't test my code as I work. Waiting even a day to get a build created and see the results of my work sounds frustrating! I can definitely see why daily builds would be a necessity on a project that takes 30 minutes+ to build.

Comment Re:Daily builds? (Score 1) 182

How can you know if the build is broken if you don't try it regularly?

You'd find out the next time a coder updates from the repository and builds, which (ideally) shouldn't take more than a day or two anyway.

so you can actually get a new binary with your changes about 1.5 hours after you make your code changes (it's a large tree).

Ahhhh, now I get it. With a build time that long I can definitely see the necessity for daily builds. I've never worked on a single compiled project anywhere near that size. Now I feel bad for whining that my last java project took 2 minutes to build ;)

Joel must have been talking about large compiled projects too, based on some of his other posts. I guess that item on the test deserves a mention that it only applies to large compiled software.

Comment Re:Daily builds? (Score 1) 182

I don't think Joel was referring to deploying/launching daily builds, just building in a test environment. I guess this goes against the spirit of the Joel Test, but I assumed it went without saying that any build going to production would go through building, unit tests, and QA. I'm pretty sure Joel was talking mainly about compilation to check for syntax errors.

I would expect the same build/unit test/QA process for a build used to demo, and that the demo would go to a UAT or other stable environemnt (in the "doesn't change every day" sense, not the bug-free sense). There's no reason to stop coding and commits to demo a stable build of your product.

But...that was a lot of assumptions, like multiple testing environments, that probably don't exist at companies failing the Joel Test.

Comment Daily builds? (Score 1, Interesting) 182

Daily builds have never made much sense to me. If someone breaks a build, the fix is easy - revert their commit and tell them they screwed up. If you have expensive (processing-wise) unit tests that you want to check with continuous integration, I can see value in that at least.

Other than that, Joel's list is quite solid. Those are the first things to fix at a company, and the things to jump ship over if the leadership refuses to address them.

Comment Re:Prototyping and Small Projects (Score 1) 206

but they will eventually switch to something else as the technology evolves, or the needs of the site change, and so on.

Unless the language is open source, and then you can change the language and frameworks to meet your needs instead of rewriting in a new language for 1 feature. Or being forced to throw up your hands when you find what seems to be a language or framework bug, versus being able to dig into the source, confirm it, and submit a patch.

Not saying changing languages is never the right solution, but with open source there are more options. That is actually how Facebook is still using PHP.

http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=2356432130
http://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/358

Comment Re:Passwords are a failure (Score 1) 236

Careful - they don't always tell you they're required to login until afterwards.

Best to keep a copy of the string of gibberish encrypted on a private machine in case you need it. That's the best solution for all passwords anyway, despite OP's claim that using password managers to save strong passwords is a bad idea.

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