dcminter

It doesn't sound too off to me - I can believe that there are a million legacy COBOL users around and that each writes on average a thousand lines of maintenance code each year. Or maybe fewer us…

This might be more to your taste: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/gemini-pda-android-linux-... …

I completely agree and these days I follow exactly that strategy, to good effect. However I think it's still, in general, damaging to general perception. Another factor is that most of my encount…

Me: Can you blah blah blah? Them: Yes Me: Ok, and would you be able to blah blah blah? Them: Yes Me: Great, and do you think that will be ready by blah blah? Them: Yes Me: Fantastic. What approach do …

Exactly - I enjoy side projects precisely because they're not bound by pragmatic concerns. I can delve as deep as I like into getting the CI pipeline working just right, making sure the servers a…

Because the ultraviolet-B component of sunlight is what allows your skin to create vitamin D, and glass blocks ultraviolet-B pretty effectively.

It's certainly an annoying behaviour - but my personal suspicion is that it arose from the system's origin as the recommender for a bookstore . I mean if I read a book by P.G.Wodehouse it i…

Oh, looking at their site, I now see that it's a substantially different cost and set of constraints than those that applied when I allowed my subscription to lapse. Disregard.

Why would their Safari service not be suitable for you if you prefer to consume their content as PDFs anyway?

The leap from a single author to a cabal is entirely your own. That a single English fantasy author could be staunchly xenophobic is perfectly feasible and you could bring your own substantive sources…

Well, hidden to the child I used to be. But you're right of course.

You're currently being downvoted and I'm not sure why. However, I don't think you're quite right about Lewis' motives so that may be part of it. Yes, he had a hidden agenda: t…

The windows command line client for PostgreSQL used to produce confusing errors on my machine because my development source code directory happened to be called "C:\dev" What constitutes &qu…

The purpose of fizzbuzz is not to select for people with good programming ability; it's to eliminate people with no programming ability or knowledge whatsoever.

This was just "work long hours to get the project back on track" being communicated as "improve velocity" with about as much success as you'd expect and less understanding tha…

Nope. That I could have respected and would have made some sense. It was code for "the team will work longer hours and over the weekend so that an arbitrary number is higher."

I was once on a project where an "agile" team, at the behest of their managers, held a sprint "to improve velocity." I kid you not. I will add that I was not on that team. Our scru…

Assuming this is scrum or something similar then if "[the standup] just drags for an hour almost every day" then they're not really doing it right. I've been in well run Agile team…

I'm in a similar position. I do use vim but only for the most basic of editing tasks. I certainly haven't made the switch - but I read this just the other day and it's at least addressi…

David E. H. Jones is a.k.a Daedalus, the crackpot inventor of the eponymous column in New Scientist and Nature in years gone by. To those of you who are fans of Randall Munroe's What-If I heartil…

I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. I've lived in London for about 20 years and really must get around to visiting St Paul's Cathedral one of these days :)

Yes, all of this is stuff that surprised me - I'd also add that the smell of the thing is an intimate part of the experience; you're in no doubt that this spent a lot of time in a marine e…

It's hard to think of a finer example of imposing ones customs and beliefs on other people than outlawing their relationships. Or does this only apply at an international level in your opinion?

Commodore 64C rather than the plain old 64 I think. Still very impressive! How on earth is that disk drive still working!?

Likewise. People frequently told me to go see the Vasa and I rather expected it to be something like the Mary Rose; historically interesting but the bare shell of part of the hull of a boat. Basically…