Dying old beats dying young I guess, but dying sucks overall. The only ones "ready to die" are those where age or illness has already sucked the life out of them. I'm not going to chase the singularity or cryogenics or any other mumbo-jumbo promising eternal life, but heck I hope I'll be like this when I'm 89.

Living in Norway + artificial light + student life with no real commitments I found that my natural cycle is more like 24/12 = 36 hour days than 24. In fact, without alarm clocks I'd have a helluva time staying on the same page as everyone else. The problem is that that sooner or later that clashes with real life and you must get up in the "middle of the night" for a family dinner or you get up in the "morning" and start drinking at a party which messes you up. On Mars making it another 40 mins would be the least of my worries.

Sounds like you've never seen what passes for production code in the bowels of a major corporation. Look at the questions on experts-exchange or stackoverflow. You can safely assume most of them are for paid work. After that, you shouldn't have self esteem issues anymore.

Nothing is better than your own code. But given the choice between my predecessor's hairy ball of custom code and a hairy ball of clue between documented frameworks, I'm not so sure anymore. Because the other side to being generic is "will probably continue to function in a sane fashion if I tweak it a little" while one-off code tends to make a lot of assumptions that may have been true when it was written but falls apart in surprising ways when you try to change it. Unless your predecessor actually made clean, documented code but I know with myself that if you're in a hurry that won't happen. I had to walk a colleague through some systems we use once a year to update various coding schemes and such and to be honest it's an ugly mess. But we do it once a year and we're busy fixing the stuff we use often, so....

I have no idea what you're talking about.

The Web is in the mess it now is because Microsoft (and, to a lesser extent, Netscape, back in the day) has gone through so many iterations of deliberately trying to create subtly incompatible variants of HTML. Creating a browser which is backwards compatible with that mess simply perpetuates the mess. The new browser should simply refuse to render non-conforming legacy pages at all - that would force web site owners to clean up their act in short order.

It isn't that hard -- Macs haven't had any sort of specialty printer port on any model that I'm aware of for at least 15 years now.

Yaz

If I'm the only one who can unlock your encrypted communications, then it's in my best interest to have everyone encrypt their communications, because then, I'll be the only one with total situation awareness.

It won't be in any of your interests, of course, because you'll be handing me my advantage on a silver platter... but you're all far too shortsighted to pay attention to such things.

Of course Obama and the NSA want you all using strong encryption. Stupid of you to give them what they want, though.

That's not it, CRLF was a feature. How do you make strike-through text on a type-wheel printer? It automatically advances to the next position and it only has a fixed number of characters, you don't double it with strikethrough-a in addition to regular a. So you send a CR - carriage return - to return to first position, space your way over to the text to be striked out and make a ------- over it before you CRLF to the next line. And you have no idea how old knowing that makes me feel.

Unfortunately most of the projects I've been on are of the "We want to replace old system A and make a new system B that also has features X, Y, Z" variety. What they want from the new system is usually okay, it's somewhat documented already, you've identified some stakeholders, you can show them prototypes, you can ask for clarifications and their testing validates the feature. Developing new code for genuinely new features is actually quite easy and fun.

The old system on the other hand is more like software archaeology, nobody really seems to have the specs - or maybe a spec 1.0 from 10 years ago that's got nothing to do with reality - and if you're replacing it it's probably because it's crap, uncommented code in an arcane language with poor frameworks and third party components. So you dig and keep digging and try to implement something similar without knowing what's a feature and what's a bug, who'll come yelling if you break something or features nobody told you about and you weren't aware anyone was using disappear.

I had a bit of an epiphany today at work when i finally found out how structure a major piece of the redo I'm working on and I've so far spent ~2 months digging through that code. From a similar job I was doing in another area I thought maybe 2-3 months total, now I'm guessing it'll be 6-12 because of all the rework I have to make and every apparently simple thing has exceptions and special cases. It's wasn't my bad estimation, it's that the conditions are entirely different. Like comparing travel speed for a walk in the park to chopping your way through a dense jungle.

Good managers get my best guess.
Bad managers get my worst case.
Horrible managers get my resignation.

Tag: WORKS4ME

Except for cost. That's what powered the Android drive, it wasn't the technical superiority. There's probably more people gaming on phones and tablets than any other platform when you count Angry Birds, Candy Crush and such. Chromebooks running on Linux also seem to sell reasonably well for the same reason. If Valve can get a a range of steamboxes out there to sell to everything from a $99 box to sell freemium + $1-5 games to a $999 gaming rig to people who don't really care about having a desktop anymore with their tablet/convertible covering those needs there's probably a market for gaming boxes.

It does of course assume that you commit enough to get it off the ground. Nobody wanted to code for Android either before it got popular. And if Valve is backing off now that the Microsoft Store doesn't seem that big a threat after all, it might take many years. But Linux is well propped up by servers, supercomputers, embedded, cell phones, tables, chromebooks... it's not going away. Particularly not in the direction we're going with more cloud, less local it's certainly not going to get worse.

The driving force behind Mesa is Intel, they're certainly not going away. Pretty soon they'll hit the big OpenGL 4.0 and it seems almost all the prerequisities for 4.1 and 4.2 are done once they get over that hurdle. And they certainly want to keep their OpenGL ES current if they want to play in the x86 smartphone/tablet market. AMD also apparently like their open source driver for embedded/custom projects, less legal hurdles for customers who want full control. So maybe they don't win, but I don't see how they could lose much terrain either.

Built one almost like it, but with a 35W Core i7 4765T. It's not exactly a cheap machine though, for a HTPC it's way overkill. You can get a lot cheaper to play 1080p BluRays and probably won't be enough when 4K BluRay arrives, 3840x2160x60fps 10-bit HEVC decoding will need new, dedicated chips.

Guilty as charged, eventually I had to move off 2k for XP. Skipped Vista (went on a Linux hiatus), got 7, skipping 8.x but Win10 looks like the next usable version. Until either WINE is just as good as the real thing or most games are cross-platform I'll probably be stuck with a box with a semi-recent version of Windows. Currently the WINE rating of the game I play the most is garbage.

Unfortunately, the experiment came to an abrupt end when they threw "ET: The Extra Terrestrial" at the AI, whereupon after an hour of trying different tactics the AI decided that the only way to win was to send a power surge through the system, frying the only working Atari 2600 the researchers could dig up.

This still classifies the AI as coming up with the best solution to the game ever implemented.

Yaz