I'm pretty picky about my terminal font. I can't stand using "thin" fonts on the terminal, like Lucida Console or Courier New. Perhaps it's because a good thick font reminds me of the old QBasic days, under DOS. For years I've been true to Fixedsys -- a terminal-like font that's been supplied with Windows since the early days. It's fairly similar to the old 80x25 VGA OEM font.
Pretty much everytime I walk through the city I am accosted by some random asking for money. "Man, spare change for the bus" (piss off you'll just spend it on grog). "Excuse me, can I borrow some money for food?" (despite the old man being morbidly obese). I am sick and tired of it. Just cause I live in the city doesn't mean I'll give you money! I work hard for every dollar I earn. Oh but you're a public servant, people say, you don't work at all. Except for the fact that I worked hard for 13 years in school and then spent another grueling 4 years at university.
It's a strange phenomenon, but when you have an application that's developed to target multiple platforms, you often end up with a product that is of a higher level of quality. The first example that comes to mind is Apache. It runs on a vast array of very, very different platforms, from Linux to Solaris to Windows.
When building (or selecting) a new computer, if you use Firefox, the general rule is;
It's a sad state of affairs when Firefox becomes a line-item when building a computer. But alas, this is the case. Firefox is notorious for memory leaks, and consuming 100% of an entire CPU core for minutes on end.
There's an astonishing number of open source projects that rely on MySQL for their database engine. Think of practically any open source content management system. It's not hard to see why -- for small systems, it's quite ideal. It's free, has modest hardware requirements, and it's fast when you don't have much data.
Contrary to popular belief, Microsoft's motivation behind Internet Explorer was not profit. After all, how can you profit off a free browser? Microsoft's primary driver behind IE was more likely control. Back in 1995, the web was becoming quite a force. "e-commerce" had been around for almost a year, and Microsoft could clearly see that Netscape was doing quite well. No tech company wants another company driving control of the medium and the standards developed around it.
Jeff Atwood and Ben Collins-Sussman both believe that there are two distinct camps of software developers: The "20%", and the "80%".
The 20% folks are what many would call "alpha" programmers
The problem is that Sussman largely defines the 20% as actively participating in open source projects. In fact, it's so important, that he mentions it twice in his article.
I agree with most of his definition;
In the leadup to the election, Kevin Rudd announced that 98% of Australians will have access to minimum broadband speeds of 12Mbps. Of course, you're all assuming 12Mbps means "fibre". Most of the talk about "fibre" is hearsay; typically proliferated by IT commentators in the media who don't have a clue. Kevin never actually mentioned fibre.
Some extreme left-wing loonies have decided to drive around in vans, giving away free ice cream to raise awareness for climate change. They're handing out "climate change report cards" to patrons, which assess the political parties on the topic of climate change.
I'm rather disappointed the Greens party only scored a 90% on the scorecard. Clearly their anti-economy anti-progress anti-growth policies simply just don't go far enough.
There's an increasing number of lifts around Canberra that require you to swipe a proximity card before the lift permits you to press the buttons. It's been a long established de-facto standard that if you press a button in a lift and the button lights up, your command has been accepted.
A large number of the lifts requiring prox-card access are made by the Otis Elevator Company. Otis' lift firmware has a few usability issues. Two particular issues come to mind:
