First off, let me admit that I have not yet read the Book reviewed here, but from reading the review, it sounds like it is targeted mainly to the "new to programming" crowd.

I have started my Android Development career by reading Mark Murphy's "Busy Coder's" books, and gotten a lot of details out of his Tutorial book.
http://commonsware.com/books.html

I'm not affiliated with him, but I'd like to really recommend his books to any developer who has an existing background in either Java and wants to quickly get productive in Android Development.

As an additional bonus, all of Mark's books are available electronically or as self-published printed paper back's.

He himself is also a great guy and very active on the Google Android developer forums.

Playing devil's advocate (I actually think there's an interesting argument here, even if Murdoch is on a stupid extreme of it): you're presenting a false dichotomy - either content is allowed to be indexed and presented by search engines at any level of detail or it should not be indexed at all. It's perfectly reasonable for there to be a middle ground where content is indexed but presented with only the minimal information required to evaluate its worth as a search result.

Where do you think the line should be? Should Google be able to copy the entire content of an article and present the whole thing sans ads in the name of indexing it? I presume you would agree that's at least a little bit wrong. At the other extreme Google can't show anything about the indexed site. That's a little bit stupid - most of the internet would cease to function effectively under that paradigm. So there's a gray area in between the extremes where it goes from acceptable to not acceptable.

So at risk of defending Murdoch (who I don't agree with, btw), there's at least an argument to be had here that is more interesting than what you are pretending.

I am a healthcare worker and I have no direct patient contact, yet I am being forced to get a series of 3 shots (1 for seasonal flu, 2 for H1N1). I have no problem with shots for things that you will have continued immunity for (ex. Hepatitis B, Tetanus), but this virus could mutate next week, making these vaccines completely useless. Add to that the fact that this has been rushed to production, and I am doubly hesitant. I would rather you stuck a swab with H1N1 up my nose, at least then I would know what I was getting. What about every visitor to the hospitals, should they be forced to be vaccinated? What about delivery personnel? What about vendors? Should we also be forced to be vaccinated for SARS, Hunta virus, avian flu, or any other virus du jour that the media is hyping?

If you're writing code, you need a platform that is well supported by your IDE. If you're writing for vs.net all the time, you probably don't want a Mac. Using Eclipse for Java work, then Mac is fine -- etc.

Since almost any product on the market will work from a power standpoint, look at the details of form. Is the case well made? A magnesium or aluminum case can mean less flex even with less weight. Consider the touch pad -- is it multi-touch? Is the keyboard comfortable?

Also, watch the resolution. One mistake I've made in the past is getting too high a resolution screen for my eyes. At 15" the best resolution for my eyesight is 1440x900, so having a higher res screen means the typeface is too small or it's fuzzy as I switch to a non-native resolution for the screen (windows does NOT cope with rescaled fonts well).

In terms of stability, reliability, and so on -- I find Acer and Gateway to be near the bottom of the line; ASUS makes great hardware but I've never been happy with their support or documentation and their software (for custom bits of hardware, bios updates, etc) is downright terrible. Dell makes some great stuff in the latitude line, but the inspiron stuff isn't well made Dell's support has been downright misleading to me on more than one occasion (documented and published). FWIW, My Latitude D820 has been outstanding even if Dell's support has been terrible. HP has some stuff out that looks pretty, as does Toshiba but neither appeals to me all that much.

I'm kind of in the same boat as you -- I'm ready to replace this D820 after nearly 4 years, but nothing on the market right now really impresses me. I'm waiting for this winter's new stuff based on Core i7 to see what that looks like in a laptop. I'm also going to evaluate Windows 7. If it's not substantially more comfortable and more maintainable than Vista, I'll have no choice but to switch to Mac.

 

Basically what the subject line says: stay away from anything you can get at Best Buy and you'll probably be golden. That means Lattitude not Inspiron from Dell, and so on. What you lose in 'features'. (better speakers, media buttons, graphics, shiny palmrests and so on) will be more than made up in quality

I know HP and Dell right now have extra battery 'slices' which can take your battery life over a full work day, and even into the 12 hour range, which is fantastic. Other accessories are mostly USB therse days, so not as much a concern for most as they might be for you.

Please tell me you aren't driving during your commute.

I commute by train, 15 minutes each way. Also, I don't think we live on the same continent (I'm Dutch), so you're probably safe :)

there's no clear way to define a per-device mapping

System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Modifier Keys, select keyboard to apply to. I've had per-keyboard mappings (one for my macbook's builtin keyboard and one for my Model M) since 10.4.x (Tiger).

Hope that helps.

Dell does (at least, for all the machines I've bought from them.) That's why I buy Dell, or try to.

And if you look at that MS user agent string, you'll see that IE was itself faking a Netscape user agent string...

I don't see what was particularly veiled about the commentary in the show. Half the time, Serling himself would outright state the moral the end, or the beginning.

He obviously ran out of arguments for his software so he has to claim that all existing software (and most DNS-Server right now are open source) is bad and _therefore_ his software must be great.
It's a train of arguments used by many people in the past: "Witches are bad, therefore we are good when we burn them." "The terrorists are evil, therefore we are good whatever we do."
Now this is paired with an idiot who doesn't even know the difference between free software and freeware.

So you're convinced that hanging on to connectors created 10 or more years ago on laptops is a good engineering design call?

They are a good design call until more people than not don't NEED it.

Here's some light reading on the topic for ya.

I have nothing against displayport. I have nothing against the progress it represents. You seem to think I somehow dislike displayport or progress in general. That couldn't be further from the truth. All 3 monitors on my desk are hooked up via DVI. And my newest one supports both displayport and hdmi as well, so it should be forward compatible with my next video card too.

But it ALSO has a VGA port, which has proven useful on many occasions. And its good to have that legacy option, because despite the fact that its 'obsolete' its still MASSIVELY IN USE. And that's on a stationery device that never goes anywhere, where having an adapter or two isn't actually inconvenient, nor apt to be left behind or misplaced. Virtually all monitors and projectors you encounter right now take VGA and will have a VGA cable hanging off them ready to plug into your laptop... so yes that is the most sensible port to put on the laptop.

If they want to add displayport too, that's awesome.

Oh yeah, that article ends with three or four advertisements for places that sell cables... cheaper than Apple's.

Glad to see you are coming around to my original argument then. That Apple grossly overcharges for them.

Locking is a solved problem in most Database Management Systems. I think you are worried about the wrong layer of your application. Web and Application code is most often agnostic to how records are retrieved, updated, and locked for concurrency. For reference, look up the ACID properties of a typical RDBMS.

Absolutely correct, but that just means that there has to be server-side locks for the commitment phase (4-6), it doesn't impact the client-side. This has an implication for performance of the commitment phase, but luckily, database vendors have been struggling with efficient implementation of commit for years, so using the transaction features of whatever database is used for storage should resolve most of those problems (i.e. check and update the version number in the database in a single transaction).

We ran into the same problem.
What we finally did is lock the editing page, so that if someone else had it opened you were not allowed to update it until they removed the lock on that page.
Or the user could over ride the page lock if they felt pretty sure that the other user was not using it for editing ( Maybe they just had it open on their desktop).
In a table we put the page, user identification, and timestamp when the lock was created.
So whenever the page was opened, it checked the table to see if it was locked. If it was locked, then it displayed header showing who had it locked and how long they have had it.
We generally only have 3 to 4 users that may open a page for editing and they soon learn that if you are going to edit something after it has been sitting for some time to update the page.
We should probably update this with ajax so that at least the header of the page tells the user someone else has taken the lock.
But currently happens though is that the page won't update if it doesn't have a lock and the user has to go back if and start over if someone stole the lock. So far I haven't heard of it happening, because they usually open or update right before they start editing so they know they have the lock.
But handling it in this manner has greatly reduced our problems.


Yeah, it's amazing how if you think it could happen it will. And most of our problems, I think, were caused by users opening the same page on multiple computers and then instead of closing the page, they were updating the page with the old information.