It's pretty well established that crappy migrations (mostly originating from Stack Overflow) are a recurring problem here on Stack Exchange.
Some have suggested eliminating migrations completely, while others have suggested banning repeat-crap-migrators from voting to migrate in the future. For ...
they are so quick here on the Review, almost always nothing to review for me, once in a while I get one but by the time I'm done editing, it has been reviewed by another.
I just self answered two questions that I see get asked a ton. They both follow the same template.
How do you remap Caps Lock to Control in Xubuntu?
How do you swap Control and CAPS Lock in Xubuntu?
Both of these two involve the same objects, Control and Caps Lock but they're totally differen...
(Screenshots from Adobe Reader 9)
You can set Adobe Reader to always restore the last view, which includes the last page, when opening documents:
Open the preferences window (Edit => Preferences).
Go to the Documents category on the left.
Tick Restore last view settings when reopening document...
> I read pdf-books and wanted to ask if there is a way to automatically open them in a specific page (so as not to have to navigate to the last page I read every single time).
@OliverSalzburg Oh, wow. That seems a little harsh, when we've had underage users before their account got dropped to 1 rep and they could carry on as normal when they turned the right age.
Alright, so I was going to install Source Film Maker but I didn't have any space, so I decided to connect an HDD via an USB converter(image below). I shut down the machine, turned the PSU off, and connected via a Molex connector & the USB converter. I turned back on the PSU, no sparks or anyt...
There are couple of a Chrome Extensions, Stylish and StyleBot which allow for designing of themes and style individual elements.
While Stylish relies on userstyles for custom styles, Stylebot has a an inbuilt sharing tool for share and fetch custom style sheets for most sites.
For this speci...
(I don't know much about laptop internals except that they're miniaturized versions of desktop internals, and I know about LVDS as a typical connector for flat panel monitors on laptops)
I've read a few phone teardown articles, and some guys who were hardware hacking at a place where I interned previously (developing smartphone OS) let me look at the internals
but I don't know the details other than that they are barely serviceable by hand, and you need lots of special tiny tools
I also recall being woken from slumber on a couch at about 8 am (at that point I'd had about 3 hours of sleep over the past 2 days) and asked to use my "young and discerning eyes" to tell a UI engineer whether I could tell the difference between a display that was double buffered and one that was single buffered
in terms of smoothness of UI animations
my eyes were so shot that the screens were flickering (due to fatigue my eyes weren't operating at their native FPS / refresh rate) and I was like... uhhh... you're asking the wrong person
these days the question is between double and triple buffering... funny that back in 2008 we were debating whether to use double buffering at all... nowadays I think Android is looking at triple buffering (or did Jelly Bean enable it by default?) and iDevices use it for a long time
well they were scrolling text in a browser and needed an opinion on whether it looked smoother... I guess they were kind of old and couldn't tell on the small screen? granted, in 2007/2008 they had much worse screens too
we were working on a competitor to Android when Android was just a little (unreleased) side project at Google
actually as I recall our main competition at the time was iOS and we still thought Windows Phone was threatening to take over the market... ha ha
(we still called it Windows Mobile back then)
it's funny... I learned a lot by interning at PalmSource (which had just been acquired by ACCESS Systems). Learned a lot about how not to do things ;P
they kept turning the boat every year and never got a product to market AFAIK
2005: PalmOS Garnet is old and outdated... we need a new OS to replace it that's betterer and can work on new hardware, like these full color LCDs and 64MB of RAM!
2006: OK, we're working on a new version of PalmOS! Based on the old one (for which we own the IP) but with new features!
late-2006/early-2007: Crap, that won't work... old stuff is too old and it doesn't even allow multitasking, this sucks... I KNOW! Let's start all over and create a new platform based on Linux! Because Linux is cool
mid-2007: Crap, people still want to run their old PalmOS Garnet apps! We need a Garnet virtual machine that runs within the memory budget of a smartphone with 64MB of RAM and no hardware floating point or virtualization instructions!
2008: OK, we're on our third revision of our Linux-based Palm-ish OS... our Garnet VM is still a memory hog and crashes our OS... and our customers hate our OS and keep wanting to make changes!
2009: Crap, our customers pulled funding. We're in a big hole now and with no products launched. Wut do?
2010: Ahhhh we're all getting fired! Help! No, screw that -- abandon ship!
2011: Let's start writing some apps for Android....
2012: Our apps for Android aren't gaining much traction. Welp, this sucks.
therein lies the history of PalmSource since ~2005 :)
@Bob And no, not "Palm"... the company named Palm got bought up by HP, after they separated from their software division, PalmSource, in like 2003 (or maybe a bit later, 2005 I think)
Possibly the most idiotic move in history: separating the software and hardware divisions of one unified platform into two separate companies
now both companies are small niche divisions of larger companies that are themselves beleaguered by becoming increasingly irrelevant in the market
it'd be like splitting Apple into AppleSoft, the developer and IP owner of iOS and Mac OS X, and Apple, the producer of hardware, and not maintaining any business ties or relationship between the two halves
As this comment shows, even bad questions have some value in serving as a reference for, well, bad questions. However questions with a lot of downvotes tend to be deleted, so the system lacks a final bad-question-keep-for-reference state (besides open and closed).
@allquixotic Share price comparison with 100%=Oct 1997 of AAPL vs. DELL from the day Michael Dell said about Apple "I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders" just over 15 years ago, to today. The stagnating one is Dell, the other, starting to increase around 2005, is Apple.
The unchecked exponential growth of a privately-held organization that does not have the public's best interest at heart can hardly be called a "good thing", but I can understand how someone can think this is a good thing if they hold stock in Apple.
Fortunately, today, there are alternatives. But their aggression to try and defeat their competition through the courts (hello, Samsung, HTC, et al) smacks of an attempted coup of the entire consumer electronics industry. Fascism at its best. Unchecked power.
Here's a very popular quote: Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts, absolutely.
@allquixotic Microsoft, hp, and pretty much all other Android phone manufacturers showed that you can create a modern smartphone UI without needing to copy the most distinguishing elements of a competitor's.
It's not like they're a 5 person company without a legal research team. They bet against Apple and lost (for now).
@DanielBeck Ah, but it's all in the definition of "copy". Apple's singular goal is to increasingly expand the definition of what exactly it means to infringe on some form of Apple "intellectual property" (which basically comes down to copyright, patent, or trademark infringement, or some combination of the three), so that eventually even MSFT, HP and the Android guys become targets.
A lot of people in the tech community already see their accusations against Samsung to be pretty ludicrous. If that becomes the new precedent, then the next new precedent in a few years will be even more sweeping.
No, because I'm not a patent lawyer; attempting to interpret them would be equivalent to my reading Chinese (in which I have no formal training). "Looking at the patents", even if that gave me some kind of magical insight into just how right Apple's claim was under the law, the point is that the law is trending towards favoring patent holders.
And it's not like they didn't try to get back at Apple. They however used essential patents for that. It's easily possible to build a smartphone that doesn't look like the iPhone. Pretty much all the others do. Building a phone without getting reasonable license terms for essential patents OTOH is pretty difficult.
You have a system (I'm making a reference to C++ here) that overloads the operator==() function to make A==B return true. The implementation of A==B in the courts continues to widen, until at some point it's practically going to be implemented as if(patent.holder == 'Apple') return true;
Validating that, yes indeed, the patents as they stand do in fact result in a return true; for the current implementation of operator==() is not going to give me any new insight, though.
@slhck That's why I think we need to consider who the players here are. It's not a small independent software vendor against Apple, it's Samsung. They do have a legal team to figure this out.
So you're saying a company that doesn't do its research and gets slammed in a patent case for not finding an existing patent that they're infringing upon is somehow at fault?
The problem is that translating source code and feature descriptions into legalese and then doing a comprehensive search over the entire patent database for each feature, where each 'feature' can be defined at an arbitrary level of abstraction, is an impossibly hard problem... I can't even quantify it in terms of complexity.
@allquixotic If it's a large, international company with the legal resources, a large patent portfolio of their own, and design docs essential saying "we need to make our stuff more like Apple's", definitely.
Plus, licensing costs are huge. You don't start researching/designing something without looking if someone else already did it. Because that could be a PITA later on.
So, licensing costs are huge (and the patent holder has no obligation to even agree to license it to you in the first place); patent infringement litigation costs are huge; and the cost of exhaustively determining that every feature at every layer of abstraction in every line of source you write is not infringing is huge. What's a company of any size to do?
The system is clearly stifling innovation. A company would have to invest about 98% of its resources into its legal team to truly be a reasonable degree of "safe" from this type of issue.
@allquixotic Lobby against the existing insane patent politics. For some reason, the big players love being able to patent stupid shit. Samsung clearly plays the same game.
I'm not excusing Samsung. I don't doubt that, given the amount of growth and the patent portfolio that Apple has, Samsung would probably be the bad guy. It's pointless to play favorites among a host of evils.
I do lobby against the existing patent system. But I don't excuse those who willingly play on the fallacy of the system, any more than I excuse those who run the system itself.
@allquixotic I don't play favorites. I hope Apple gets a kick in the balls for ripping off the Swiss train station clock design, for example. That's just not cool.
Blatantly obvious copy of someone else's design, only this time Apple infringes. And I do not try to play that down.
The mere existence of a potentially exploitable situation doesn't force one to exploit it. Would you take advantage of a prurient person {of a sex/gender which you selectively prefer} if you had them in an extremely advantageous situation, such as alone in an isolated area? Most people would say: no way, I wouldn't do that.
But that's exactly what Apple (and Samsung, in a parallel universe where they got the first jump) is doing / would do.
It's funny, because Google outwardly says they want to explicitly not do it, which is in essence, allying themselves with the common man's sense of morality. "Don't be evil". I don't know whether they are living up to that or not, but... the system makes it very difficult for any corp to live up to such an ideal, doesn't it?
Right. Like two robbers who stumble into the same house at the same time with the same goal. They both want all the money and valuables in the house, so they start sparring with knives.
Perfectly normal human behavior.
@DanielBeck Absolutely. Ideas are meant to be copied. It doesn't serve anyone except myself to pass some legislation that places me up on some pedestal and gives me some exclusive rights just for being the first to think of something. Who the hell cares who came first?
Ideas, designs, blueprints, concepts, whatever you want to call them -- they have this awfully convenient built-in feature that the cost of sharing them is excessively low. The information infrastructure of the internet has made that painfully obvious, where it was only partially obvious in the day of books.
It is truly counterproductive to introduce artificial walls to attempt to limit the spread and deployment of good ideas. The best results -- the best manufactured objects, physical items, and even the best ideas, emerge from the combination of diverse ideas from all corners of the earth.
@allquixotic Except that the most economical approach is to take what others come up with and clone it. Much cheaper than inventing stuff on your own. Which results in the most successful companies being those that excel at having no original ideas.
I've heard the argument that taking away the incentive of doing something different would cause us to become stagnant and not introduce any new ideas. The reality is that the creation/discovery/production of new ideas does not require an economic incentive. So many people will produce novel ideas regardless of whether it benefits them or not.
And, there are a few economic incentives to being the first to come up with something, even without the patent system. See, it takes time to develop products. In the day of consumer electronics, product development cycles, even when you have all the ideas squarely in your hands, are very expensive and take a long time.
So if you're first, you go ahead and use your ideas and develop a product, and -- hey! -- you're first to the market by 6 to 12 months. You've got a new killer feature, and you effectively have a monopoly on that feature until someone can copy it.
Even if the information travels at light speed from your brain conceiving the idea to someone trying to implement it, you've got the advantage because you can keep it a trade secret (which involves no law, just protecting your company's proprietary information) until it hits the market.
So if it's truly a remarkable new idea, it's going to have some tangible impact on the product, and that's going to drive your revenue. Boom. Financial incentive for the birth of ideas.
And those who don't make financial incentive a prerequisite for producing new ideas? They exist. Professors and grad students at universities are happy to produce new ideas and unleash them upon the public for a salary and a nice academic medal or award.
The system is so allergic to the possibility that some poor inventor could conceive an incredible new idea and be forced to live in poverty for the rest of his life because everyone else stole his ideas and productized them faster than he could. It's a corner case. The system optimizes to protect a corner case when the elephant in the room says the system is broken.
@allquixotic Do you have numbers to back that assertion? Given how many people are paid to have ideas, it's difficult to imagine it'd just continue as it does now. Especially the big innovations, not just incremental improvements.
@allquixotic To me it seems whatever university's doing — there's always a company who has been doing the same thing behind closed doors for longer, just because they have more money :)
I just self answered two questions that I see get asked a ton. They both follow the same template.
How do you remap Caps Lock to Control in Xubuntu?
How do you swap Control and CAPS Lock in Xubuntu?
Both of these two involve the same objects, Control and Caps Lock but they're totally differen...
(Screenshots from Adobe Reader 9)
You can set Adobe Reader to always restore the last view, which includes the last page, when opening documents:
Open the preferences window (Edit => Preferences).
Go to the Documents category on the left.
Tick Restore last view settings when reopening document...
Alright, so I was going to install Source Film Maker but I didn't have any space, so I decided to connect an HDD via an USB converter(image below). I shut down the machine, turned the PSU off, and connected via a Molex connector & the USB converter. I turned back on the PSU, no sparks or anyt...
There are couple of a Chrome Extensions, Stylish and StyleBot which allow for designing of themes and style individual elements.
While Stylish relies on userstyles for custom styles, Stylebot has a an inbuilt sharing tool for share and fetch custom style sheets for most sites.
For this speci...
As this comment shows, even bad questions have some value in serving as a reference for, well, bad questions. However questions with a lot of downvotes tend to be deleted, so the system lacks a final bad-question-keep-for-reference state (besides open and closed).
