Viewing profile — MetaMan

Our judgement of the Roman / british legacy is subject to "Survivor Bias". If you can't see the cost paid by those who did not survive then things will look much better !

The standard of living might have improved for the descendants of those that survived but what about those who had to undergo generations of subjugation or slavery or worse? What a…

The standard operating procedure of the British Empire was "divide and conquer". In order to rule a minority was usually put in a privileged position. It should be no surprise to a…

"high point in world history" hahahaha - for who ? Look how many conflicts today have their roots in the decisions and actions of the British Empire. Seriously, yes, there were som…

well said !

can you provide a link. I found 2 books with the same title and neither is free. Thanks

Good points. Also since there will be loads of users stuck on Gingerbread / Froyo the N1 will probably be useful as a development test phone in my case.

When did you get your IPhone 3G? I got my Nexus one around 14 months ago. I choose it because its was the official Google developer's phone and so mostly likely to get updated! Exc…

Thanks. I think you have proven something that many of us have experienced - Android may have a number of technical advantages but its rollout management is unreliable and chaotic …

Agreed. But most of the crashes I see are of the former type (I.e developers fault). I honestly can't remember ever seeing a Flash crash actually bring down the the browser. Maybe …

For me there are many real world cases which can't be handled without showing the user a fatal error. E.g. - the developer asks for an runtime created asset that doesn't exist anym…

"Crashing in a managed environment is never the developer's fault" !!! WHAT? Are you serious? Please educate us as to how that is done.

Where did I say that that coding is the only useful thing? The point I was trying to make is that tools are productivity aids and if a tool gets in the way and distracts you from y…

Err - Maybe we just resent having to spend so much time on the mechanics of the tool/s rather than our main activity which is writing code.

Totally agree. We switched from SVN to Mercurial around 6 months ago and I have to say I am annoyed that I have to spend so much time messing around with the tool rather than codin…

One of the comments on this article referred to this long but very insightful article. http://www.truth-out.org/goodbye-all-reflections-gop-operati...

I agree with the principle of "over design" - we old guys call it "if it isn't broken don't fix it". However, some of his examples aren't convincing for me. I actually like the ugl…

Hey - I like your approach. Its a sort of "for dummies" illustration of the indeterminate nature of 0^0 that everyone can understand.

joe's reply clarified things somewhat - at least for me. Are replies always supposed to be rebuttals?

HAHAHAHAHA - I can't believe anyone is taking this seriously !!!

akeefer. I find it arrogant when someone assumes that disagreement means that the other person just don't understand. Ok. That aside. Let me go back to the actual issues here as I …

As a software programmer I don't agree with this view that software patents are wrong in principle. There I said it! Software just as much as hardware can be used to "express" some…

I can't (read won't) take these guys seriously because they commit one of my biggest design 'sins". They use tiny typefaces in places which can barely be read (at least by me) on a…

For me their philosophy is clear. Each G+ user needs to be identifiable. They are not against pseudonyms per se but if your pseudonym means they can't identify you then "off with y…

Taking things on face value I congratulate him. There's been a few times when I've tried to access an interesting academic paper only to find that it's only available behind some p…