Why? Is there another computer or gaming console with that name? The only other tech-related "Pandora" that comes to mind is a music streaming service and I doubt that anyone is going to confuse those, so a trademark suit seems unlikely to succeed.

To be honest, the Pandora actually looked pretty good when it was announced and still fairly passable when it was released. Nowadays it's decidedly unimpressive for it's price, though.

Remember that many people still use earbuds for five bucks with such a bad quality that they honestly can't tell the difference between a 128 kbps MP3 and CD audio. Beats may not be good but they are vastly better than ultra-cheap earbuds.

Then again, so are other earphones with smaller price tags.

No, that's one problem with Python. There are others like it but this one is mine. (Well, and a few others but most of the good ones were already mentioned.)

Python, the language with radix conversion functions so inconsistent it makes PHP look well-designed.

(PHP: base_convert() can convert from any base between to and 36 to any base between 2 and 36. Python: int() can convert from any base between 2 and 36 to base 10 but String.format() can only convert from base 10 to bases 2, 8 and 16. There are no other built-in conversion functions. Admittedly, converting to thoer bases is rare but they could've at least make it consistent in both directions.)

True. I recently picked up my never-finished Fallout: New Vegas playthrough. I play a reasonably good guy like I usually do in RPGs. Stellar karma, usually trying to resolve quests in the best possible way, even trying to get out of situations without killing anyone if they don't try to kill me first. I have no qualms about shooting raider-type people but they have no qualms about a lot of really nasty things and it's a tough world. Still, I try to be nice to civilized people.

Except for Caesar's Legion. While originally I intended to be neutral for as long as possible, a Legion patrol decided to attack a trader I was going to do business with. Not wanting to lug my full inventory to the next town (and not appreciating being caught in the crossfire) I defended the trader against what I perceived to be random attackers. My faction karma immediately fell to "vilified" and the Legion now sends hitmen after me every couple ingame days.

Now, despite being a good guy, I've heard "The Caesar hat marked you for death!" one time too often. Originally I'd shoot the Legion assassins out of self-defense. By now I take perverse joy in confusing their AI (to the point where they follow me around but never attack or speak to me), leading them into minefields, pitting them against deathclaws or just taking off their limbs using high-powered sniper rifles before they're anywhere near their guns' effective range. If the Legion wants to see me as a horrible murderous sonuvabitch, I'll be happy to indulge them. (Of course it helps that the Legionnaires go out of their way to be pricks anyway but "The Caesar has marked you for death!" has done more to sway my opinion towards inflicting grisly violence upon them then their other actions ever could.)

I still try to be exceptionally nice to other people. Sometimes I even look up the endings of quests when I'm not sure if picking a dialog option is inadvertantly going to ruin someone's life. Making the simulated wasteland a better place is a big part of what I enjoy about the game. But yeah, if the people I meet work for the guy who feels so insecure about his army that one random firefight is enough for him to commit squad after squad of assassins to getting on my nerves when I least need it I'm going to paint the desert with their liquefied remains and I'm not going to feel bad about it.

So yeah, someone who usually tries to act nice can make big exceptions if they're just pestered often enough. (Of course it helps that in this case the pestering usually involves a lot of gunfire.)

Same here. I'm not really into PVP against strangers and as much exploration and growth as DayZ and Rust may involve, in the end there are enough people who just love shooting other players that those games seem to be nothing but PVP with extremely slow resource acquisition added in. Every single story I've heard about those games reinfoces thi impression. I'm not going to pay for a game and spend lots of time to grind up to a handgun only to get killed by a more experienced player and lose all my progress. That would be acceptable if it took maybe an hour to get to top-tier equipment but not as it seems to be now.

Now, if someone came up with a survival game that heavily rewarded cooperation I might be more interested. You know, besides Minecraft. (And before someone mentions Terraria and Starbound: Me and my friends played the hell out of those already. I'm thinking of something less voxel and more 3D. Something like a cooperative open-ended S.T.A.L.K.E.R. would be nice.)

Well, I'm not so sure about that. They designed their game for the horribly quirky PS3, which means that they'd either end up wasting much of the console's power or they'd twist the code until their video game works like a streaming application - which is the only thing the Cell can do efficiently. Since portability was not an issue (they knew the game was a PS3 exclusive) they decided to go with a PS3-specific design in order to get the most out of the hardware, thus making their game more appealing and thus more profitable.

They could decide between "write this platform-specific program in a suboptimal way so that it's easier to port to another platform" or "heavily optimize for the sole target platform in order to increase market success". I don't think the latter was an invalid choice. If anything, this story illustrates just how bad an idea it was to put a Cell in a game console.

The GP didn't say that communism works; the GP asserted that many of the things blamed on communism during the Cold War are not specifically related to communism but rather plain old government brutality, which Russia, unfortunately, has historically been good at in all of its recent incarnations. If Soviet Russia had been run by nicer people it probably still wouldn't have worked but perhaps there wouldn't have been any gulags.

I find that proposition to be plausible - any kind of government can become oppressive; communism just tends to go well with tyrants. Both love messing with any aspect of the people's lives they can. Take that plus the tendency of psychopaths to rise to the top and, yes, communism is a particularly fertile ground for abusive governments. But it's not identical with oppression.

It's like saying that WordPress is malware. It's not; it just has a lot of security issues that make it a great infection vector. There is a difference.

Having used both programs, there is one big difference between them (apart from the fact that one is an IDE and the other one is "just" a fancy editor): Atom seems to be easier to extend. The entire UI in Atom is an HTML document. If you want to change how things work you can mess with the stylesheet and voila, it works differently. Or you just outright replace part of the DOM. You even get the Chromium developer tools so you can see how everything works in detail.

In principle it should be possible to implement graphical editors for just about everything on top of Atom as long as you write them in JavaScript. It's kind of like emacs in that regard.

Fukushima is a testament to the sad reality that people who couldn't find their own asses if they had blinking neon signs pointing at them still get to make decisions about the safety measures for industrial installations.

That makes sense. Still, though, "just lump everything together" is not neccessarily a good idea, especially if the responsibilities aren't well defined and it isn't understood that someone in a hybrid role isn't equivalent to two specialists.

"The dev guys are tech savvy so they will be able to keep our infrastructure running with no impact on their workload and development efficiency" simply doesn't work, no matter how much certain people would like it if it did. Another related mistake is "we outsourced part of our infrastructure to another company, thus we will never have to spend significant time caring for it", which falls flat on its face once the outsourced infrastructure starts misbehaving or interacting with business requirements in a nontrivial way.

Holy crap, that's nasty. My experience is vastly different.

On my high school equivalent we had a bully in our class. When the teacher realized he didn't get a grip on the situation on his own we got a surprise visit from the principal who chewed out the bully in front of the class, gave him a somewhat humiliating (but not actually insulting) punishment next recess and promised he'd be back if the bully didn't straighten up. The bully did.

In this case the school was more concerned about its stellar reputation being sullied by bullies running around unchecked. Then again the school has a thousand-year history and used to be a high-class school for much of it so it might not be very representative...

The configuration "Developers - DevOps - Operations" makes sense. Unfortunately, a lot of companies just remove everything but DevOps from the picture because having dedicated developers and admins around would just be redundant.

I'm in such a company and its a hellhole - you can get emergency calls at any time of day because you're responsible for the infrastructure but that's not reflected in your pay because hey, you're just a developer. Also, keeping the infrastructure running flawlessly is not supposed to take any time away from coding; you're expected to fix any problems that arise and still get eight hours' worth of quality code done. Ater all, developers in other companies have no trouble doing so. Also, since support personnel is also redundant (because hey, the DevOps guys already know how the system works) keeping the customers happy is also the developers' job, again without compromising efficiency in your other responsibilities.

Of course the company is not doing well and of course the boss has no idea why. It can't be his management style; that approach worked well when he ran a similar company in a related market ten years ago with no existing customer base so obviously it would work now, too...

Careful. You came dangerously close to criticizing Wikipedia there. If you had then as per Section 34 (1), WikiG I would have been legally required to threaten to curbstone you. For your convenience I have appended a translation of the relevant article to this post.


Section 34 Defense of Wikipedia's Honor
(1) If any German citizen becomes aware that Wikipedia is
1. criticized;
2. ridiculed;
3. slighted;
4. compared to Hitler or
5. mentioned by or in the same sentence as an Axel Springer AG publication
then the citizen is to threaten the originator of said remark with a curbstoning within no more than twenty-four hours of becoming aware of the remark unless such a threat has already been issued within that time.
(2) It is up to the threatening citizen to decide the time and place of the curbstoning, should they decide that one is neccessary.
(3) Any citizen who fails to adhere to subsection (1) shall be punished with reading no more than five threads in 4chan's /b/ board or a fine.