tentonova

8 ms·

31.
by tentonova 17y ago
Nine times out of ten, I ignore comments unless I'm stumped. In fact, I'm tempted to make emacs hide all comments unless I explicitly expand them. Given that Jason Baker just got out of school and is espousing a bold "I'm too smart for X"
32.
by tentonova 17y ago
This is an excellent (Regent Law School) lecture that elucidates exactly why you should NEVER speak to the police: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4097602514885833865...
33.
by tentonova 17y ago
Even with a binary format, you'd be sending data out of band in XMPP. XMPP is designed for interchanging _small_ bits of data. Having implemented both XMPP clients and servers, I don't particularly see your point. Exchanging small binary
34.
by tentonova 17y ago
There are obviously much fast formats for that type of thing, but they have their own drawbacks which are significant. Protocol Buffers are crazy fast but aren't self describing or human readable. Why does that matter? The fact that they
35.
by tentonova 17y ago
XML proponents always trot out "we're just not there yet" or "the basic idea is good, we just need some small fixes", or "parsers just need improvement -- use a better parser library", or any other number of excuses as to why XML doesn't ac
36.
by tentonova 17y ago
"XML is very bad at handling binary data." That is mostly false. No, it is not. Encode a reasonably sized JPEG (say, 500k-1MB) in an XML document. Try measuring how quickly you can parse that XML document on a lower-end device. Now try en
37.
by tentonova 17y ago
The primary issues with ASN.1 seem to be that the availability libraries are poor and the documentation is both hard to find, and difficult to follow.
38.
by tentonova 17y ago
The use of text is the right thing; Why? It's genuinely inefficient. This is not academic, as easily illustrated by serializing even a megabyte of binary data in a text-encoded document. Base64+GZIP is not a solution. ... if you really c
39.
by tentonova 17y ago
Historic note -- prior to System 7.1, all Mac OS versions were freely redistributed and provided for a nominal fee from Apple. We would get our copy from the local university bookstore for the cost of the media.
40.
by tentonova 17y ago
You don't "own" your instance of Basecamp, you just rent it. And there's nothing wrong with that. Some might disagree. Personally I find SaaS to be a general business imposition with significant long-term costs in terms of lock-in, opera
41.
by tentonova 17y ago
It is amazing to me that an organization that is Microsoft's size can decide and execute on anything at all. Cutting five layers of management, which is already few for an organization that's Microsoft's size, is really a recipe for chao
42.
by tentonova 17y ago
In terms of physical servers, we're actually 50-50 Windows / Linux. Starting on Windows did not blind us to Kannel, Rails, PostGIS, Apache, Samba, Erlang, etc. We use tons of open source software where it makes sense. What do you use for
43.
by tentonova 17y ago
We live in a representative democracy. If the costs were not externalized, market and political forces would dictate changes in both personal choices and infrastructure investment. I don't see the rational for abdicating responsibility for
44.
by tentonova 17y ago
I took some code recently and ran it on Mono and only encountered one issue, which was a Mono bug that has now been fixed. MonoDevelop isn't a drop-in replacement for VisualStudio which is a good thing since VS is bloated and MonoDevelop i
45.
by tentonova 17y ago
If the cost is too high to bear, then you don't have a luxury of choice.
46.
by tentonova 17y ago
There's nothing wrong with Mono, but neither Mono or MonoDevelop are drop-in replacements for C# and VisualStudio. VMware is not an adequate solution for day-to-day development. There's a performance impact, significant memory overhead, and
47.
by tentonova 17y ago
The opportunity cost associated with learning and becoming reasonably competent in a different development stack can be non-trivial, especially if you had 5 to 10 years of experience with a different stack or set of technologies. I've yet
48.
by tentonova 17y ago
Unless the tools/languages are tremendously better than what is available for free/cheaper, I don't particularly understand the value in: - Risking Microsoft's ire by breaking the licenses - Locking yourself in to long-term Microsoft licens
49.
by tentonova 17y ago
Not that LOC necessarily says anything on code complexity or design, but here's sloccount on gcc42: ansic: 869244 (70.89%) ada: 150280 (12.26%) cpp: 114629 (9.35%) f90: 34164 (2.79%) sh:
50.
by tentonova 17y ago
Is this a reasonable vehicle for entities that simply would not otherwise have the funds to engage in legitimate litigation against an well-funded adversary? That said, there seems to be an inherent unfairness in a system where the opponent
51.
by tentonova 17y ago
That's fine, but doesn't solve point 2, and doesn't take into account the "social" costs of car-dedicated community infrastructure. Of course, these costs are really not "social" at all, as easily observed by reviewing the impact on surroun
52.
by tentonova 17y ago
Yes, people should drive cars that don't produce such a large amount of noxious fumes, they should drive less -- cars are the number one accidental killer at 40k deaths/year in the US. Both of these things would naturally occur if driv
53.
by tentonova 17y ago
Compiler licensing is not enough to supersede the BSDs' pragmatism. We've been using GCC for years. If you've had to maintain GCC for your platform -- or worse yet, tried to add even small improvements -- you'd understand why momentum is bu