... can they finally bring a sane, performant and usable audio API please? One that I can use directly from Java, without being forced into native code, please. Maybe they could look at this for some ideas.
There were plenty of app stores and app platforms that pre-dated the iPhone that were doing just fine.
Well, I suppose 'doing just fine' is a statement that's opening to interpretation, but I can't think of any that fit my own personal definition of that term.
It really isn't like that at all. An API, its design, data model, guarantees and so-on, is actually the hardest thing to design. Once designed, the implementation is relatively straightforwards. The main different between Android, and iOS, for instance, is that Android's APIs are horrible, and iOS's are really nice to use. This is an API design issue, it's nothing whatever to do with the underlying implementation.
Or look elsewhere, at a less divisive example. Microsoft's WIN32 API is terrible. Everything is a handle, one ends up having to cast things all over the place. The message queue takes only a couple of integers as payload. There's no support for basic things, like JPEGs. And hands up anybody that's ever tried to use their DirectShow media APIs. Oh, that's right, you can't. You've long ago chewed your own arms off in frustration.
That's poor API design. It's massively important, and very hard to get right. For the record, I don't believe that Java's APIs are particularly nice. An likening an API to a "table of contents" is disingenuous at best.
That's a very fair and balanced comment. The problem though is that the whole notion of having the general public vote directly on actual policy - the details of which were not only unknown by nearly everybody, but weren't actually worked out by anybody - isn't at all how the United Kingdom's brand of democracy is supposed to work.
The UK is supposed to be a representational democracy, in which the public vote on people to be in charge, and those people make policy decisions. It's not a populist democracy, or whatever one might call such a system, wherein actual public policy is decided by popular vote. And there's a reason for that - doing so is an absolutely insane idea, because the details of public policy are beyond the knowledge of most people. This is not because people are stupid, but because people already have other jobs. Fully understanding policy is a full-time job in itself.
So the referendum was insane to begin with. That it went the insane way that it did, is just insanity on top of the insanity. That it was binding, is a third layer of insanity - and surely the utter chaos into which the UK is now plunged can surprise nobody.
As for the kids example, voice recognition software will improve to the point that it will bio metrically recognize who's talking
I don't think that there's any guarantee at all that voice recognition will ever improve to the point that it can accurately determine not only who's talking, but what they're saying, in an environment in which tens of people are all talking at the same time. But that's besides the point, the point is that typing on a keyboard, or scribbling on a tablet, or whatever, is a superior interface. I work in an office, as do most people on slashdot I suspect. Imagine all those people interacting with their computers via voice.
This will never happen because it is a terrible idea.
For people who don't have the luxury and benefit of two working arms, and a reasonable complement of fingers. For everyone else, touch interfaces will remain vastly superior.
Voice interfaces are hopeless. Even for actions like turning on the lights, they kinda suck, because it's nearly always simpler to just push a button.
Plus, twenty years ago, people were making exactly the same predictions. It didn't come true then, and it won't come true this time either. Case in point: Every high-school student has to bring a laptop to school. Can you imagine all of those kids controlling all of those laptops through voice commands?
Comments in code are there for a specific purpose. They exist to explain to you, the reader of the code, the intention, functionality and side-effects of the code. Since code cannot fuck, there is no need for the word "fuck" to be found, spread liberally or otherwise, in source code comments.
Grow up, learn to use the English language properly, and learn to express yourself concisely and clearly in the comments in your code. At best, a "fuck" in the comments is a waste of space. The comments aren't there to get something of your chest, they're there to explain.
At some point in the future, some of us might be writing firmware for sex robots. At that point, we can have this conversation again.
Who uses weekly backups? Back up automatically to as many cloud providers as you can afford, and use something like Time Machine (there must be equivalents of this for other OSs, right... surely...) too. No problem.
Exactly this. I bought a shit SSD, it lasted three years. Not too bad, I suppose. When it died, which it did last week, I was back up and running in an afternoon - including the time taken to drive to the store and buy a new one.
It's a really odd article in any case, why be so paranoid about the precise failure modes? Hardware is hardware, and it can break. Plan for it, and you won't have any problems.
There's nothing that compares with OSX. iOS I can live without, but OSX beats everything else hands down. Life's too short for Linux, and Windows is total and complete pig. What can I do?
That's a great counterpoint, and you're entirely right of course. Apple don't maintain backwards compatibility, even though it's perfectly clear that the OP meant instead that their hardware keeps going, and their software updates keep coming.
The trouble with MS maintaining all this backwards compatibility for ever, and ever, and ever - is that they're stuck with decades worth of cruft in their APIs, and it really, really, really shows.
Using Xcode isn't required - you can build and deploy iOS apps on the command line if you really enjoy that kind of thing. Xcode is just using clang and gdb under the hood - plus some signing and packaging tools and what-have-you.
However they seem to be in love with creating new languages to achieve platform and developer lock-in as much as the next vendor. Maybe even more so.
Its speed is only partially important though. Higher CPU usage, which it will certainly be demonstrating if its a bit slower than the native widgets, leads to shorter battery life and quicker device turnover. This is a bad thing, and we should fight hard against it. On mobile, efficiency is paramount.
Underwear advertisements must be a dreadful minefield for you too.
Anyway, you saw "far too many" studies on the damaging nature of the images to which you found yourself too often inadvertently exposed. Perhaps you could provide a link to one or two of them? I've never found any.
No-one would begrudge you the method by which you've found satisfaction in a life too much undermined by distractions - but I really, really don't think you're in anything but a very small minority. Learning to give and take has nothing to do with "pornography", a term that doesn't even have a useful working definition in any case, and has everything to do with growing up. And education.
Good luck in your life, I hope you stay happy. But banning pornography, a move I venture to imagine you would be in support of, will do nothing to improve people's lives.
But the trouble is that the real reason this is happening is that Tumblr have failed to find a way of making money by providing free access to thousands of gigabytes of porn. They've also noticed that the percentage of their traffic costs used to move all of this porn around the internet is rather... high. It's almost as if it's not possible to run all this crap for free.
If you want porn, just pay for the god-damn stuff. It's not like it's very expensive.
You're begging the question of whether or not knowledge about sex is, in and of itself, a bad thing.
Here's a hint. It's not. Knowledge is power, and an educated population is an asset. Suggesting that an education in the way in which your own body functions is anything other than a good thing is extraordinary. Further, your argument is nothing more than a "think of the children" rant, in which you assume that knowledge of sex is damaging, and proceed from there.
Slashdot Mirror
... can they finally bring a sane, performant and usable audio API please? One that I can use directly from Java, without being forced into native code, please. Maybe they could look at this for some ideas.
There were plenty of app stores and app platforms that pre-dated the iPhone that were doing just fine.
Well, I suppose 'doing just fine' is a statement that's opening to interpretation, but I can't think of any that fit my own personal definition of that term.
That's like copyrighting a table of contents.
It really isn't like that at all. An API, its design, data model, guarantees and so-on, is actually the hardest thing to design. Once designed, the implementation is relatively straightforwards. The main different between Android, and iOS, for instance, is that Android's APIs are horrible, and iOS's are really nice to use. This is an API design issue, it's nothing whatever to do with the underlying implementation.
Or look elsewhere, at a less divisive example. Microsoft's WIN32 API is terrible. Everything is a handle, one ends up having to cast things all over the place. The message queue takes only a couple of integers as payload. There's no support for basic things, like JPEGs. And hands up anybody that's ever tried to use their DirectShow media APIs. Oh, that's right, you can't. You've long ago chewed your own arms off in frustration.
That's poor API design. It's massively important, and very hard to get right. For the record, I don't believe that Java's APIs are particularly nice. An likening an API to a "table of contents" is disingenuous at best.
That's a very fair and balanced comment. The problem though is that the whole notion of having the general public vote directly on actual policy - the details of which were not only unknown by nearly everybody, but weren't actually worked out by anybody - isn't at all how the United Kingdom's brand of democracy is supposed to work.
The UK is supposed to be a representational democracy, in which the public vote on people to be in charge, and those people make policy decisions. It's not a populist democracy, or whatever one might call such a system, wherein actual public policy is decided by popular vote. And there's a reason for that - doing so is an absolutely insane idea, because the details of public policy are beyond the knowledge of most people. This is not because people are stupid, but because people already have other jobs. Fully understanding policy is a full-time job in itself.
So the referendum was insane to begin with. That it went the insane way that it did, is just insanity on top of the insanity. That it was binding, is a third layer of insanity - and surely the utter chaos into which the UK is now plunged can surprise nobody.
Eventually the situation will correct itself
Yes, it will. America will collapse.
The military has propulsion, guidance, and control systems at least 2 generations ahead of what's available publicly.
They really don't.
Stomach ulcers, also once believed to be very complex to analyze, turned out to have a similar type of cause.
As for the kids example, voice recognition software will improve to the point that it will bio metrically recognize who's talking
I don't think that there's any guarantee at all that voice recognition will ever improve to the point that it can accurately determine not only who's talking, but what they're saying, in an environment in which tens of people are all talking at the same time. But that's besides the point, the point is that typing on a keyboard, or scribbling on a tablet, or whatever, is a superior interface. I work in an office, as do most people on slashdot I suspect. Imagine all those people interacting with their computers via voice.
This will never happen because it is a terrible idea.
Voice interface will work OK for people ...
For people who don't have the luxury and benefit of two working arms, and a reasonable complement of fingers. For everyone else, touch interfaces will remain vastly superior.
Sticks and stones, etc.
Voice interfaces are hopeless. Even for actions like turning on the lights, they kinda suck, because it's nearly always simpler to just push a button.
Plus, twenty years ago, people were making exactly the same predictions. It didn't come true then, and it won't come true this time either. Case in point: Every high-school student has to bring a laptop to school. Can you imagine all of those kids controlling all of those laptops through voice commands?
Neither can I.
Comments in code are there for a specific purpose. They exist to explain to you, the reader of the code, the intention, functionality and side-effects of the code. Since code cannot fuck, there is no need for the word "fuck" to be found, spread liberally or otherwise, in source code comments.
Grow up, learn to use the English language properly, and learn to express yourself concisely and clearly in the comments in your code. At best, a "fuck" in the comments is a waste of space. The comments aren't there to get something of your chest, they're there to explain.
At some point in the future, some of us might be writing firmware for sex robots. At that point, we can have this conversation again.
Who uses weekly backups? Back up automatically to as many cloud providers as you can afford, and use something like Time Machine (there must be equivalents of this for other OSs, right... surely...) too. No problem.
Exactly this. I bought a shit SSD, it lasted three years. Not too bad, I suppose. When it died, which it did last week, I was back up and running in an afternoon - including the time taken to drive to the store and buy a new one.
It's a really odd article in any case, why be so paranoid about the precise failure modes? Hardware is hardware, and it can break. Plan for it, and you won't have any problems.
Or even if it's perfectly usable, notch-less, has a headphone jack and removable battery, and costs $100 - $200.
.... and is total shit, and receives zero support.
So... phones are currently getting more and more expensive, and your prediction is that they will suddenly become free?
Ok.
I hear you man, but here's the trouble;
There's nothing that compares with OSX. iOS I can live without, but OSX beats everything else hands down. Life's too short for Linux, and Windows is total and complete pig. What can I do?
The latest version of iOS is faster - why you wouldn't upgrade is a bit beyond me.
That's a great counterpoint, and you're entirely right of course. Apple don't maintain backwards compatibility, even though it's perfectly clear that the OP meant instead that their hardware keeps going, and their software updates keep coming.
The trouble with MS maintaining all this backwards compatibility for ever, and ever, and ever - is that they're stuck with decades worth of cruft in their APIs, and it really, really, really shows.
You have it backwards. People DON'T want new phones.
Exactly. They want their existing phone to not break.
Using Xcode isn't required - you can build and deploy iOS apps on the command line if you really enjoy that kind of thing. Xcode is just using clang and gdb under the hood - plus some signing and packaging tools and what-have-you.
However they seem to be in love with creating new languages to achieve platform and developer lock-in as much as the next vendor. Maybe even more so.
Its speed is only partially important though. Higher CPU usage, which it will certainly be demonstrating if its a bit slower than the native widgets, leads to shorter battery life and quicker device turnover. This is a bad thing, and we should fight hard against it. On mobile, efficiency is paramount.
Underwear advertisements must be a dreadful minefield for you too.
Anyway, you saw "far too many" studies on the damaging nature of the images to which you found yourself too often inadvertently exposed. Perhaps you could provide a link to one or two of them? I've never found any.
No-one would begrudge you the method by which you've found satisfaction in a life too much undermined by distractions - but I really, really don't think you're in anything but a very small minority. Learning to give and take has nothing to do with "pornography", a term that doesn't even have a useful working definition in any case, and has everything to do with growing up. And education.
Good luck in your life, I hope you stay happy. But banning pornography, a move I venture to imagine you would be in support of, will do nothing to improve people's lives.
How on earth would Tumblr have been profitable in the first place?
But the trouble is that the real reason this is happening is that Tumblr have failed to find a way of making money by providing free access to thousands of gigabytes of porn. They've also noticed that the percentage of their traffic costs used to move all of this porn around the internet is rather... high. It's almost as if it's not possible to run all this crap for free.
If you want porn, just pay for the god-damn stuff. It's not like it's very expensive.
You're begging the question of whether or not knowledge about sex is, in and of itself, a bad thing.
Here's a hint. It's not. Knowledge is power, and an educated population is an asset. Suggesting that an education in the way in which your own body functions is anything other than a good thing is extraordinary. Further, your argument is nothing more than a "think of the children" rant, in which you assume that knowledge of sex is damaging, and proceed from there.