The worst part about the implementation is that the browser icons often appear unsorted initially, and then the sort kicks in 0-5 seconds later, and they all shuffle.
This has caught me out at least twice by clicking on a browser icon to choose it, then the order changes after I clicked and the wrong browser installer is launched.
The solution is to get a decent external keyboard. A laptop keyboard is never going to be good. Stop dancing around the issue - get a decent keyboard.
I started to get wrist pain about 10 years ago, which worried me. This was right around the time MS first released their ergonomic keyboard. It was 100ukp, but I figured that was a small price to pay if it fixed my problem. It did - the pains went away in about 2 weeks. They've never come back (I've used various models of the MS ergo keyboard since then).
"The Android reference implementation does not (yet) contain such a JIT compiler, though other implementations may choose to provide one."
I thought that was one of the complaints about Android/Java - the VM runs the code; there's no JIT. That's why the prototype Dalvik JIT that was announced very recently was big news. It certainly wasn't announced in the 90s, anyway.
This reminds me of a point I heard someone make about (I think) a Heinlein novel. Heinlein (or whoever :)) had predicted the widespread use of telephone answering machines. Their point is that this was kind of easy to do - but what Heinlein also did was predict that people would use them to screen phone calls (in the book, the character hears his Dad call in, and picks up the phone and says something like "I'm in for you, Dad.")
The point is that predicting how people will use stuff is the hard part (as you say).
Odd. I have two 1920x1280 monitors (arranged as yours). With my mouse acceleration I can go from extreme left to extreme right without much effort (don't have to lift my palm off the desk). Yet I can easily hit small targets a few pixels across. Buttons are easy.
This is on Windows - haven't switch to Mac to test it - maybe the OS X acceleration is linear and hence a bit sucky?
Maybe, but a lot of interviewers ask questions like this because they love being smug about catching people out for not asking about requirements before starting.
I was in an interview where a couple of the interviewers asked me to do something, and I asked some basic requirements. After a few questions they just started grunting non-comittally and indicated I should get on an answer the question.
The feedback from these interviewers? That I didn't ask enough about the requirements/details before diving in to answering.
Agreed. Whenever I see one of those operator precedence tables in a programming language book, I just skip it. Other than BODMAS, I have no real idea what precendence logical/bitwise operators etc have - I just use parentheses, and always have done.
Like you say - why waste brain cycles trying to parse expressions. But then I also write comments in my code :-)
"Consumer banking has always been free in the UK."
No, it hasn't. Charges for writing cheques, withdrawals, etc were common at one point. I remember the switch to free banking in the UK when I was a child - not having to pay anything to use your bank account normally without going overdrawn was a big deal at the time.
This has caught me out at least twice by clicking on a browser icon to choose it, then the order changes after I clicked and the wrong browser installer is launched.