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Comment: Re:Real World (Score 2, Interesting) 436

by Jellybob (#31581518) Attached to: Later School Start For Teenagers Brings Drop In Absenteeism

Actually, I've worked several jobs where working life did run to that timetable, so that people didn't get caught up in the morning rush caused by every job insisting that you should be sitting at your desk by 9am for no particular reason. It led to people not being exhausted by the time they got into the office because they'd been force to stand on the train with their head in somebody's armpit.

Comment: Re:What About The Parents? (Score 3, Interesting) 436

by Jellybob (#31581480) Attached to: Later School Start For Teenagers Brings Drop In Absenteeism

My brother recently finished secondary school in the UK, and for several years before he left the school had an automated system that would send a text message to my parents if he missed registration for any lesson, and request a response. If one wasn't received, then it moved onto making voice calls to secondary contacts.

It has a bit of a big brother feel to it, but it does mean that the parents can't claim that they didn't know it was happening.

Comment: Re:Uh, what? (Score 1) 503

by Jellybob (#31144212) Attached to: Bill Gates Responds To Apple iPad

You can have that. Mobile safari supports the local storage extensions to HTML being developed by WhatWG, which is designed for exactly the purpose you described.

Download some forms when you have a connection, go offline and fill them in, and then synchronise when you get back. You can see it working with Google Mail and Reader, as well as quite a few other pieces of software, already.

Comment: Re:When to use "agile" methods. (Score 1) 149

by Jellybob (#31070062) Attached to: Game Development In a Post-Agile World

One of key principles of agile is that you always have deliverable software, which plays right into needing to deliver working software at certain milestones.

A well run agile project will be delivering software every couple of weeks though, which also means that every couple of weeks you can hand something to the money men, and to play testers. They can then actually play the game, and pick up any major flaws much earlier in the process, making it feasible to actually do something about it.

I don't know if they were using agile, but one of the best examples of this sort of adaptation I've heard of in the context of games is Mirror's Edge, which originally was going to be a fairly generic first person shooter. At some point in development they realised that the leaping off buildings bits were much more fun, and refocused the game on them.

The Military

Russian Stealth Fighter Makes Its First Flight 418

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Comment: Re:Windows has some _really_ big no-nos (Score 1) 305

by Jellybob (#30887892) Attached to: NZ School Goes Open Source Amid Microsoft Mandate

The point isn't about licensing, its about knowing whether or not the software you're downloading is going to install a keylogger, or start datamining your home directory.

With the Linux model of having a central software repository for your distribution, you can be fairly safe in knowing that isn't going to happen. If it does happen, they can push a security release to the repository, and fix the problem.

The Windows/Mac OS model of downloading arbitrary executables from the Internet however relies entirely on you trusting the owner of a website not to screw you over. This is dealt with to an extent by virus scanners, but they are a band aid to prevent the worst problems, rather then a solution.

Comment: Re:Lyrics distract (Score 1) 1019

by Jellybob (#30475438) Attached to: Music While Programming?


Sadly every office I've worked at in the UK has been a big open plan floor, with very little private, quiet space.

The area I'm currently in has people who play music through speakers, a football table, people using speakerphones, and the general noise of approximately 40 people nearby.

Without headphones, I would never get anything done, despite the fact I prefer to work without music.

Comment: Re:Windows Media Center (Score 1) 536

by Jellybob (#30309620) Attached to: Best PC DVR Software, For Any Platform?

Media Browser solves a lot of the problems with playing downloaded video, providing a far better interface for browsing things then the default Media Centre one. I had the same problem with the almost unusable video browser in MCE 7, but now that I'm using Media Browser I'm a lot happier.

I've still not found anything to do music nicely, but I'm not really bothered about that personally, since I stream that to an AirTunes base station from iTunes.

Comment: Re:Could be one of the best HD DVRs out there... (Score 0, Offtopic) 329

by Jellybob (#30031940) Attached to: MythTV 0.22 Released

MCE in Win7 just works

And that is the crux of the matter really. I spent a long time messing around MythTV, and various frontends for it, but in the end I just installed Windows 7, and used MCE, which has been faultless since I did so.

It also has the benefit of working as a really, really, powerful games console.
