Have you ever tried working with others using a revision control system? unless you can magically get everyone to always adhere to an agreement on the spacing people are going to smack you everytime they go to do a code review and have to deal with all of the white space changes nested within every commit you make.

That aside I also hit indent region, but my indent region is going to insert whatever ive told it to. If i said to use tabs it will, if i said to use spaces it will. Secondly I dont always like indent region when it starts getting something wrong or when I'm working in someone elses code who has their own indentation scheme which defferred from my editors, and i'm not in the mood to reset my whole editor for every couple of files.

If you are starting from a clean code base with an enforced standard, this can work. But the problem is that in my admittedly still brief career, that seems to be as frequent as the base 'ideal' environment from newtonian mechanics... that is to say it almost never happens. I eagerly await when it does however.

Until you are working on a piece of code with a friend who wants to be able to view the code with an indent/tab size of 8 and you are just dandy with 2,3, or 4. Now everytime you each commit you will waste some time redoing each others 'spaces' indentation levels or have to remember so send everything through a formatter first...

OR you could just use tabs for indentation and then as long as you use a decent editor that can understand (emacs, visual studio, eclipse, etc) magically you can adjust the display and not the actual characters themselves. And avoid needless whitespace changes in version control.

Yes this dives into space/tabs debate which I have no intention of dragging into here, but I'm making a point that it is NOT simple or trivial or efficient to just keep re-expanding your indentation everywhere you go.

For the life of me I'm trying to grasp what the heck the difference between tab size and indent size... what does it mean for them not to be equal? I'm trying to grasp how the tab size of your code within visual studio has any relationship to its runtime behavior in usage with other products. if you are trying to print a tab as in the character '\t' isnt it just going to get printed however the reciever chooses to interpret the tab character?

And if the other "program" is processing the code itself for you, maybe its time to get that programs creators to creep ahead into the future and embrace the reality that tabs could be of a configurable width..

surely i'm missing something about the difference between the two. Even when I'm using no-tabs and spaces only I don't understand why they would be different

Did you even read the article? You missed the whole point entirely!

Furthermore, we don't care WHAT network is providing the service for the phone; it has no relevance at all this conversation (even if you did think that jailbreaking and unlocking were the same thing). Apple will always be against jailbreaking, PERIOD.

The jailbreak accomplishes more than allowing you to go to your own Carrier; as is clearly demonstrated by this whole topic; it allows you to things you fundamentally CAN'T do without being jail broken.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong here; but it sounds to me like without the jailbreak the only place for getting Apps, be it for the iPhone or the iPod touch would be the 'apple store'. This jailbreak allows you to go to a different SOURCE that apple doesnt control.

Apple's interest in preventing jailbreak is because they have and always have tried to maintain a vertical monopoly on their platform. If you don't buy things from their app store they will claim they lose an immeasureable amount of money becuase it decreases liquidity of the marketspace, reduces traffic (ad revenue), reduces sales (directly), etc etc. Or in otherwords, it creates competition and creates an actual open market.

I think this is an incredibly great idea in terms of concept. its time we started managing back and not accepting everything... but collectively counter them..

obv there are large reasons why yours is funny and not valueable. They have no way of knowing whether or not the file is there much less whether they agreed to it. Further if they were able to read it you'd probably have a seperate case on your hands against them for 'hacking/snooping' on your computer.

Now if you could find a way to get them to actually do something to sign it that would be brilliant.. perhaps a call in to their techline / conveniant use of their automated responses. this would be quite interesting if there was someway in which you could get them to actually 'accept' it.

problem is getting them to 'do' that. when I install the program the license etc pops up and asks me. While not realistic, i have the opportunity to decline the license and not install. At which point you would try to return the software; likely be told they don't accept returned opened software, and if my understanding is correct you would have to contact the producer to receive a refund.. which is quite obsurd.

While his article makes some interesting discussion, and some nice points, the most important piece of his 'persuasion' is in the experimental evidence he is seeking to provide. That evidence comes from a study conducted through the Navy and he describes how in their study Dvorak did not display the 'benefit' let alone a significant one.

However there is an enourmous flaw that I can't ignore, the complete lack of validity to this study. Having spent time studying it (see next paragraph) that 'study' is basically a text book example of how NOT to perform experimental research. It violated just about every single method of control that it encountered and was extremely biased. So much so that it was later used as a case study of how not to conduct research in one of my classes.

I say this all because I am familiar with the topic. When I was in college (graduated in '06) I took two courses of note: Human Factors in Design, and Research Methods and Statistics. The professor who teaches them both, had (and usually has) many students cross-enrolled and allows the semester project to be combined if appropriate subject matter is used. I combined my projects and the focus area was Dvorak and alternative layouts over QWERTY.

What I uncovered in background in a nutshell was as I said above. A seriously flawed study. Inadequate rest was given to the subjects, no control over ordering, while it can't be blind to subject the ordering the subjects were using should have been blind to the proctors. The assumed acceptable time for training on DVORAK was an extremely lowball guess. Furthermore there was a study the Navy 'funded' that showed the results the other way which they abandoned (as well as other studies from other branches). The entire study couldn't have been much more biased.

Furthermore if you are familiar with QWERTY, the very DESIGN of it was to slow you down. QWERTY was designed to prevent typewriters from jamming. Jams were caused by people typing too rapidly; QWERTY was enough of a hinderence to prevent it. By the time computers rolled around, there were so many typewriters and people trained and invested in the QWERTY layout that people simply didn't want to switch. Additionally companies likely didn't (and don't) want to replace their entire office at once; or to have to spend time and effort re-training.

We can see this kind of legacy hinderence throughout the market place; where despite a better product being around, the adoption of prior less ideal but acceptable product is so widespread that it can be disadvantageous to switch.

I'm not even going to waste my time talking about the details of the ergonomics. The only point I will make there is one that even DVORAK still had room for improvement on. That is balance of finger use. On a QWERTY keyboard there is an extreme overuse of the pinky and ring fingers compared to the middle, index, and sadly the most dexterous of all the thumb; (especially as compared to their relative strengths)

The problem is that while for a machine pushing each key is equally difficult; and thus jams are matter of angles; it is not so for a human. Pushing certain keys is more difficult than others.

I apologize that much of this has been said prolly, but I couldn't avoid commenting on a horrible post. Take a 13 year old article now, and make that article about a then 19 year old experiment. Clearly in the past 32 years or so we haven't had any advances in the standards for conducting valid research. Let alone advances in our very understanding of the underlying factors (many of which didn't have names when this study was conducted).

FAIL :-)

Scarier question, he's 17, did he have a drivers license or permit?

Would he expect his car to be fine after colliding first into oncoming traffic? Or even just from plowing into a building, such that no one is hurt and he drives away as if nothing happened? Or would he blame Need For Speed, despite their prominent warning that began at least with Underground.

The fact that the title was Halo 3 isn't really pertinent. The problem is : They took his copy of X away and so he killed them. X could have been Halo3, it could have been his cell phone, gun, permission to go out, car keys, teddy bear, security blanket, computer, etc.

He's 17... soon he will be a voting 18 year old adult.

Apparently you hadn't noticed, this whole conversation is primarily applicable to salaried workers, not hourly employees. That extends well beyond just Software Developers and Managers.

I don't think that's a state thing either; I'm not 100% sure but are there any states that doesn't require overtime pay beyond 40 hours for non-exempt employees?

We don't have that and our office is already deserted in december. You throw in a software release and the 'critical' time leading up to it where no one is supposed to be taking vacation, and it seems to end up the same way.

for school, job, and anytime politicians open their mouths:
Warning: repeated exposure to stupidity may cause you to lose your mind, lose intelligence, or to believe utterly incorrect things as true.

Doesn't he have better things to deal with right now then useless labels that are both unproven, completely meaningless and without merit. Go figure out your state's budget problem. Go solve a real problem.

you know what else should come with a warning? politicians: warning I might be speaking from my ass because thats where i keep my wallet which was lined by the company whose interests im currently taking above your own.

Or in this case the angry idiotic soccer moms who are too busy spending money to raise their kids. Funny thing, the kids who play the most video games are generally not in nearly enough physical shape to cause problems... and they are usually too busy playing the games to go be violent.

I'm far more concerned with the meatheads who walk around thinking they are invincible because they spend all their time in a gym, and that because they can bench a whole lot it means that a. only they matter. and b. that they have the right to threaten you with violence to get what they want. Where is their warning? And why not slap one one on beer / guns / cars / horns / etc.

Again I'm not asking the gov't to have do a damn thing about it... my point is these kids aren't violent because of video games. They are violent because they are tired of getting walked all over their entire lives. And perhaps that 'violence' is the only possible way they know how to make it stop.

But I digress. Congressman whatever your f'ing name is do the state you represent a favor and get back to doing something that actually CONCERNS them at a more significant level than video games. What's next? distract them from your current failures by championing some legislation to get rid of some of your obscure uninforced / uninforcible blue laws?

That's a meaningless and effectively incorrect point. Seeing as the schools are not going to run hackintosh's and OS X is really only sold with hardware (aside from upgrades) the hardware cost and OS cost is inseperable just the way they like it. That way whenever we complain there hardwear costs are bloated they can BS about how they are charging us for the OS itself.

OS X is just as expensive as windows; and thats not the point of this article.

An excellent reference can be found at Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_memory_access

You clearly have no idea what you are talking about. I did a co-op during college involving real-time OS, highly parallel processing, etc; primarily on embedded systems. (boards w/ lots of 500-800mhz powerPC chips and ram) Still rather than try to communicate it or take my word for it, take a look at this except from wikipedia...

"Direct memory access (DMA) is a feature of modern computers and microprocessors that allows certain hardware subsystems within the computer to access system memory for reading and/or writing independently of the central processing unit. Many hardware systems use DMA including disk drive controllers, graphics cards, network cards, sound cards and GPUs. DMA is also used for intra-chip data transfer in multi-core processors, especially in multiprocessor system-on-chips, where its processing element is equipped with a local memory (often called scratchpad memory) and DMA is used for transferring data between the local memory and the main memory. Computers that have DMA channels can transfer data to and from devices with much less CPU overhead than computers without a DMA channel. Similarly a processing element inside a multi-core processor can transfer data to and from its local memory without occupying its processor time, overlapping computation and data transfer.

Without DMA, using programmed input/output (PIO) mode for communication with peripheral devices, or load/store instructions in the case of multicore chips, the CPU is typically fully occupied for the entire duration of the read or write operation, and is thus unavailable to perform other work. With DMA, the CPU would initiate the transfer, do other operations while the transfer is in progress, and receive an interrupt from the DMA controller once the operation has been done. This is especially useful in real-time computing applications where not stalling behind concurrent operations is critical. Another and related application area is various forms of stream processing where it is essential to have data processing and transfer in parallel, in order to achieve sufficient throughput."

One of the first learning activities I did was to compare the speed of computing a matrix multiplication in parallel (for an 1000x1000 matrix of floats and then ints). Comparing: programmatically on one node to: 4 nodes using sockets (PIO), to DMA on 4 nodes. DMA is significantly faster than PIO because it avoided context/thread switches and more importantly interupts. This results in minimizing misses on the L1 cache. There was zero file IO at all, in fact there wasn't even a hard drive attached to those boards.

You make in interesting point; but PIO/DMA has implications FAR beyond just Parallel ATA devices.

I would mod up if i could. but that's exactly the point... in a nutshell every EULA or TOS these days reads as "you have no rights whatsoever in any circumstance, we aren't liable for anything... blah blah blah (detailing numerous ways in which they aren't liable which may or MAY NOT be valid)." and then finally "except where prohibited by law, blah blah defer to federal,state,municipal rights"

the problem is that they have thus basically wasted time and just misled the consumer, when all it really could have said is that you are afforded no rights other than those guarenteed by law... and god forbid list a couple or where you can expect to find them. Its a riot.

and theres also no law that you wont get sued for being a dick :-) heck too many people in this country will sue you even if you arent one.

its been said, and it seems fitting to say it again. Someone, somewhere is funding your free lunch. Just because you don't pay for it; or don't know how its being 'paid' for doesnt mean it isnt. Gmail is a business venture that makes money, much like facebook and myspace and name your free blogsite.

sometimes you just dont pay for something with money.

FWIW that was an amazing issue; aside from the aforementioned hideous cover