It was viable in 1998! That was when I last wrote an applet (a tetris game to run on a 40MHz ARM-based Set Top Box from Acorn that never saw the light of day).
No, no, wait, I did write a rotating 3D globe applet in 2006 for a laugh.
Applets were a bad idea, are a bad idea, and should be dead. Luckily browser security policies are making maintaining in-house applets non-viable so they can move to better installation mechanisms now.
Ah, the good old Junit / Hamcrest / Mockito Maven Pom upgrade joy!
Just maintain a visible Risk document with all the issues. Document the estimated fix time. Let it have visibility.
Then when the shit hits the fan, you have your arse covered. Not that this will protect you against particularly nasty management scum...
Using Apache libraries, or ${largeCompany} libraries is one thing. But random crap found on Github?
All you can do is overestimate work, and use the time to kill off the libraries one by one.
My previous employer was of this mindset. Even with in-house dependencies. Nothing was other updated, out of fear.
A horrible environment to work in, of course. Every few months a component upgrade would be required, and because it was 100 releases out of date the upgrade was a horrible horrible experience.
And they had generally reasonable test suites too. It was pure fear of downtime because of the monolithic architecture of the application.
Yet rechargeable AAs work at 1.2V and most products don't have problems with them...
It makes more sense for this tech to be installed in the devices that require that 1.4V+ supply rather than be external.
And in that case, the tech needs to be cheap, and we talking cents for a device cheap here.
And just stop buying non-rechargeables already!
You can. This new spec has 10GigE networking built into the specification.
And for most users, that one cable is going to be a bog-standard USB 3.1 passive cable, that can still be used for 20Gbps Thunderbolt, as well as USB 3.1 and DisplayPort. This is going to be massive news for consumer docks.
If you absolutely need more than 2GB/s for your attached RAID/GPU then you will need an active Thunderbolt cable to reach 40Gbps.
I'm sure this use case was part of the USB Type C plan.
Ah, but this will not be able to implement the ability to swing around corners that traditional pacman has, which lets you get away from chasing ghosts, just a little bit.
Otherwise, it's a great project if you want to work with microcontrollers and embedded programming. Beats the obvious tetris clone at least. Sokoban might be another good game to implement. And Bejeweled.
Yes, given the need to maximise headcount per square foot, open plan offices are here to stay. I agree with your points (I get most of them), they will keep morale higher.
Hot desking for tech people has to be the singular most stupid idea ever. In fact it is stupid for everyone, I think most people would prefer to have an assigned 'callcentre' style desk than to hotdesk. I have not heard a single good thing about the concept from people forced to endure it. As an aside, I worked on 'smart office' stuff for BT back in 2000, the idea was to personalise hot desks - clever stuff to keep the area personal with shared facilities (a person's photos would travel to the digital picture frame on the hot desk they were logged into, etc). It sucked back then.
I just wish the flexible working hours aspect was more of a thing here. Early in, early home would be nice for some, late in late home for others.
And yes, given a choice, I bet people would stick with open plan offices rather than a pay cut (to get a bigger work space) or commuting to some out of town office park full of empty Disaster Recovery offices, no food outlets, no pubs, no nothing.
You got a divider! Lucky sod.
Open plan offices suck, but they're here to stay because to work in a decent area, you have to pay more for the offices, and for many companies that is an undesirable situation. Most people can cope with background noise and hubbub, or use headphones to become totally unapproachable, you get distracted by the hot QA girl that walks by every so often which is a nice perk, etc.
It's a shame that most places don't use curved desks, so that the person behind you isn't directly behind you. Also the new thing seems to be about removing cabinets from desks, or moving to lockers. That's saving like fifty dollars, on a potentially $100k member of headcount.
They do work for overhearing things in your team that you can contribute to. But that would still work in a Team Lab space type office layout, with six to twelve people in a large room.
The days of individual offices, 10ft by 10ft or more, are over for most employees. At best you can hope for a 6ft by 8ft area. And that works partially because monitors are thin; you need 1/10th the paperwork and books and manuals you needed even ten years ago, never mind 20; no one ever prints so 2 printers can service an entire floor; and people are generally used to timewasting
From the OP: "The Greek government lied to its population, and the EU, about how much debt the country had."
Now the Greek people have to take blame for their culture of tax avoidance and cash in hand work practices. But that wasn't all Greek people.
Maybe they could sell a Greek island or two.
It would be best to let Greece exit, and go back to the Drachma and rebuilding themselves in the way they want to.
However they should not have been allowed into the Euro initially with such a corrupt tax collection ("evasion") system in place.
OTOH Austerity doesn't work unless you can control it yourself (i.e., devalue your own currency). As Greece doesn't have its own currency, Austerity is simply ongoing pain and punishment for them. Austerity is counter-productive in that it reduces GDP faster than debts are repaid (whereas Keynsian economics says spend money to raise GDP faster than the debt rises - successfully used by Obama in the US after the financial crash to give the US great rates of growth relative to other countries). Hopefully this will be the first step in the collapse of Germany's economic invasion of Europe, and in the future a more equitable and sensible combined currency can be created that doesn't have all the issues.
And yes, I'm generally in favour of the concept of the EU, the Euro, etc. However the current setup doesn't work right for many members and the incumbents (Germany, France) don't want to change it as it works for them.
This wouldn't be such an issue if they provided an alternative. Or hell, make it themeable, even at a very basic* level.
And no, the Windows 95 style 'alternative' isn't reasonable.
For example, adding settings that were only:
* UI element bevel, inset: 0 - n pixels
* UI light source: Top Left, Top, Top Right
You could allow unflattening of UI elements with just some bevel drawing and light sources. Hell, it could be a normal map on the UI elements and the GPU could render the bevels itself, no line-drawing required.
Metro is a big ass of a UI, that requires the user to learn locations of functionality rather than being easy to discover by use of functional groupings and large identifiable icons (not small monochrome abstractions). It's one of those UIs that's good on paper, and maybe screenshots (because of the blocks of colour), but is just horrible to use.
But are the townhouses $600,000 each?
Typically this is what happens in neighbourhoods as population goes up and house prices go up, and demand for cheaper (not cheap, just cheaper) houses increases.
Nothing new here. The new houses look like they're built to a decent standard of construction.
This is why your phone needs to be set to upload videos to the cloud at all times. You cannot let the pigs get the phone and conveniently lose it or break it to eradicate the evidence. Also make sure someone else has at least read access to the upload folder.
Surely the best move is to ensure that you are recording at the best quality the device can do, and the closest optical zoom the device can achieve, whilst staying out of the situation.
If all else fails, lower your standards.
