I tried pinterest a while back (so apologies if it's changed since)... I remember the sign-up process was awful. Part of the sign up process forces you to follow a certain number of other people. I just wanted a blank page to start adding to. If I'm signing up to something "social" with my name attached, I don't want to be forced to publicly follow other people/groups that I haven't fully checked out.
The sign-up process was so in-your-face and demanding I gave up and never came back.
(I'm male, if that makes any difference or relevance).
I went through that same process to view one recipe, then deleted my account - and then started getting unwanted marketing mail by pinterest every couple of days. When I tried to disable the mail\unsubscribe it asked me to login (to the account I'd deleted) to update my marketing preferences. They now get filtered to my trashcan.
What was always worse was that the choices never came with any explanation. I remember a while back trying some flavour of Linux or other, and during installation it asked (paraphrased):
"Use Nautilus or Thunar?"
I imagine the story behind this is that half the Linux devs preferred the first, and half preferred the second, and so instead of the distribution having the balls to choose one, they forced they choice onto the user.
For the average user however, the choice read as:
"Open Mystery Box 'A', or Mystery Box 'B'? Warning: opening the wrong box will mean that many of the things you try to do simply won't work!"
Choice here is very bad: it makes the user feel powerless, yet simultaneously assigns blame to the user in the event that things go wrong.
In situations like this, you can report the bug to Microsoft Connect:
1. Submit bug report.
2. Wait six months.
3. MS tech will post a comment, "this will be fixed in the next release".
4. Wait two more years.
5. Bug report will be closed as "won't fix".
This. One bug in IE9 clickOnce launching thanks to them changing how download prompting works.
1. Reported to connect whilst in preview release status. Closed. Reported again. Closed. FULL test cases provided.
2. We're a gold partner with a £500k spend a year on licenses. Partner support. 19 hours on the phone over 6 months, blame shifting between the IE and .net teams and a daily call to get the case closed without resolution. Got a registry patch from ass-end support after 4 months that we have to ship to 2000 users at 200 different companies rather than an upstream fix. This checks a check box in the security settings.
They broke their own product and won't fix it. Basically you can't use JS to redirect to a clickonce URL.
Now today, IIS just stopped serving shit with no errors, nothing. Can't get anything out of minidumps+windbg. Just stops. None of our code is running.
Yup. Its funny as a dot net dev you learn to really love a few ms things and really hate the others. C# is a brilliant language. Entity framework is an awesome ORM. But anything to do with deployment? IIS? So very much rage. I'm in charge of the build process on my team and I'm quickly becoming "that guy in the corner who swears all the time".
Again, this. Even with WiX it's painful. HKLM vs HKCU + corporate deployment hell + why the fuck do I need two MSIs to bootstrap the CLR and VSTO. Argh.
I deal with VSTO, WiX, ClickOnce, IIS, COM, MSMQ and the usual bits. Pays well but it made my hair fall out and has taken a couple of years off my life at least.
I long for the gong to ring so I can go home to my MacBook and OpenBSD (where I truly belong).
Not a great fan of c#. It always dissolves into generic programming and constraint hell. Most of it is satisfying the compiler and working around shit (like non-serializable dictionaries), piss poor frameworks like MVC etc which have dubious lifecycle management for filters/attributes and state problems galore. Oh and sealed classes. Thanks bastards, I'll never need to mock them will I - oh wait!
Yes deployment is a broken pile of crap. We inevitably did an NIH and wrote a massive push deployment framework for that. Cost a fortune. And I look after our integration environment as well (TeamCity). TC is nice but the .Net toolchain is horrific. Requires so much maintenance it's unbelievable. Also everything is stateful meaning repeatability is a PITA.
I'm the sweary guy too. Usually "we should have used Java - we don't have to invent new wheels every two mins".
The only bit of our infrastructure that is reliable is some memcache boxes on CentOS which have been online without a reboot for over two years!!!
Give me a C compiler, preferably LLVM and let me leave all this behind.
I've had more luck then. Strange they first say it will be fixed and then later say it won't be fixed anyway, I always had the impression they had their stuff together at Connect. Slowly of course but I guess that's what's to be expected because of the sheer size (this is not in their defense, at all, just my idea of why that is). Probably also spend tons of time looking at issues posted by people thinking Connect is a Q&A like StackOverFlow. Anyway for the 6 or so bugs I filed, all for the C++ compiler, the flow was
1. Submit bug report.
2. Get response like "we're looking into it"
3. Wait 2 to 5 months
4a. MS tech (or sometimes event Stephan T. Lavavej himself) posts a comment, "this will be fixed in the next release"
5. Bug report closed as fixed
6. Wait x time where x mainly depends on the point in time of the release cycle where 1 occurred. The later 1, the smaller x. You've gotta time those bugs to get them fixed quickly :P
4b: "won'tfix" / "by design" i.e. I got an explanation of what I did wrong, or otherwise why it happens
4c: "deferred" i.e. posted something that can be worked around and considered too minor of an issue to fix soon
I've found the "24 Days of Hackage" series incredibly useful - each day is a brief introduction to a useful Haskell library, many of which show off features of Haskell that aren't available in 'standard' languages. Even better, each one comes with working example source on GitHub, so you've got a starting point if you do want to experiment.
(I'm a Haskell beginner, currently experimenting with using Scotty, Persistent and Esqueleto to make a web API - and these articles have been so useful to me - I'm finally getting my head around monad transformers, using them to extend the standard Scotty one. Proud moment for me.)
Keeping it running doesn't appear, in the UK, from the information you provide to be a crime unless it is done dishonestly to defraud creditors (fraudulent trading), and mere current inability to meet payments isn't enough. Lots of acts done with intent to defraud are criminal -- the fundamental wrong criminalized is fraud.
Mere trading while insolvent, without dishonesty and intent to defraud, appears to be an unlawful-but-not-criminal act that results in personal civil liability for company debts. "Unlawful" and "criminal" are not the same thing.
It also had bulk loads and stores that made reading/writing RAM cheaper. The trick there was to spill as many registers as you possibly could, so that you could transfer as many words as possible per bulk load/store.
LDMIA R10!, {R0-R9}
STMIA R11!, {R0-R9}
// Transfers 40 bytes from memory pointed to by R10 to memory pointed to by R11,
// And updates both pointers to the new addresses,
// And only takes (3+10)*2 = 26 cycles to do the lot.
If you ever feel like reliving a bit of your past the Game Boy Advance uses the ARMv3 instruction set. With an easily available flash cart you have a cool little portable system to develop on.
Nit: the GBA uses an ARM7TDMI that IIRC implements ARMv4T, which isn't a strict superset of ARMv3 (I think that's the first ARM that dropped the old crazy addressing). Still very fun to mess with.
I can't remember how tight I made it... but I would think you need a couple spare: one for the number of iterations, and another for the screen stride. But yes, spilling registers like SP and LR is a useful trick if you need it.
Surely open-source handset OSes are just as vulnerable to patent attacks? If Firefox OS were to take off, it would immediately become a target for exactly the same sort of lawsuit.
The question was not how do I buy a smartphone which is invulnerable to patent attacks/lawsuits, but how can I avoid supporting this kind of predatory corporate behaviour (Apple, Google, MS were listed as examples).
I agree open source handsets (as far as they can be) would also be vulnerable to software patent attacks, but we could at least support companies which don't engage in such attacks.
Are you sure about that? The issue isn't that people don't care if infants die, but that infant fatalities occurring quickly after birth can be declared "stillbirths", and that there aren't standards for that distinction.
