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Comment Re:So much feedback and yet Microsoft ignores it a (Score 1) 112

That was under Sinofsky. He was fired.

He wanted to take advantage of old middle aged users afraid of change to get used to it so they will all stick with Windows Phone after being broken in.

MS is on the right step. The feedback tool and not re leasing isos and instead forcing updates to as many users as possible shows they are listening.

Returning the start menu and un-fullscreening applets shows it is paying attention. Tablet and hybrid users get a metroized big left start menu and screen which you can turn off.

Comment Re:OT: ":Fine money should be burned (Score 2) 398

Burning the money actually works reasonably well as an alternative. It reduces the money supply and therefore lowers inflation, resulting in a relative increase in the value of everyone's money. The counter argument is that rich people profit more, but generally if you have enough money lying around that the effect would be noticeable, you've invested most of it in things that have a much better return on investment than cash, so as a proportion of net worth if favours the people whose money is mostly money (predominantly poor people).

Comment Re:It is a common thing right now in other cities (Score 1) 398

That's fine, if late fees are for their original purpose (preventing people using a shared resource from impacting the quality of service for others). It's only a problem when they require them for revenue. Ideally, you want to completely decouple the revenue from punitive fines from the organisation that can set them.

Comment Re:Easy to solve - calibrate them to overestimate (Score 3, Insightful) 398

And then those same elected officials are subject to calls to cut taxes, but keep public services the same. Want to be reelected? It's difficult if you voted against lowering taxes and your opponent promises that he won't. But no one notices when you make a decision that raises revenue at the expense of safety.

Comment Re:Easy to solve - calibrate them to overestimate (Score 1) 398

I've been in quite a few places in the US where the lights one way turn red at exactly the same time that the lights going the other way turn green. In the UK, there's always a few second pause between the two to ensure that the junction is clear. We like to mock drivers in the US for its high level of road accidents per driven mile, but a lot of the blame goes to the road and signal design, which is just dangerous in a lot of places.

Comment Re:In time (Score 1) 164

My ability to put 'latex manuscript.tex' and 'dvi2pdf manuscript.dvi' into a makefile is not magic, it is basic automation

It's also redundant and likely not to do the right thing (ironic, given previous comments about libraries). Look for latexmk, which is part of the standard LeXLive distribution. Oh, and since this is not 1970 anymore, let's skip the DVI step and go straight to PDF with pdflatex (latexmk -pdf manuscript.tex is probably what you actually want).

Comment Re:I am not going to convert (Score 1) 245

You can checkout a subdirectory if (and that's a big proviso) you structure your code in such a way that each directory is a separate git repository, referenced as a submodule. The submodule points to a specific version of the other repository. Unfortunately, there are still a lot of issues with this approach:

The biggest is that you have to think about what parts of the project you might want to check out individually before you start. For new (small) projects, it's sometimes easy, but typically projects grow organically and parts get factored out. There's no good way of turning a subtree in a git repo into a new repo preserving history (and no way at all that allows you to merge into both).

The second big one is that you lose atomic commits (the thing we all switched to svn from cvs for in the first place). If you only have one layer of submodules, it's quite nice because committing something to the submodule and updating the version of the submodule are independent. That means that you can make changes to a component, unit test them, commit, and then later update their consumers. Unfortunately, there's no way of atomically updating two independent subtrees simultaneously.

The third annoyance is the most embarrassing for a DVCS: the remote repository for upstream is identified by an absolute URL. You can do relative URLs, but they don't work very well, which means that if you want people to use a local version then it's quite convoluted. There's no simple 'clone this repo and all of the submodules in such a way that someone else can clone my copy and it all work sensibly'.

In general, the dire UI of git has been an unexpected advantage. No one can stand working with it, so people have been motivated to write nice GUIs that make it tolerable.

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