How do you know what kind of pitfalls I was thinking of, since I never mentioned any?;-) Like I said, and you reiterated, it may not be a beginners' language, but it's nevertheless a very powerful and expressive language. I agree that current browser environments are not exactly the best for debugging, but things are getting better.
Ugh, because when a platform has "issues" it's better to hide those behind another platform, so you can reap the benefits of the issues of both. No thanks! You have to learn yet another framework and API and hope that Google sticks to this particular one for a while. But to each his own, there certainly are plenty of fans.
Not just the US, mind you, but the entire western world that is more than eager to offload manufacturing to China. We're all guilty of turning two blind eyes to save a buck, but I guess as long as we occasionally get to protest China's abuses in a public forum or some magazine opinion piece, all's well.
If you want a language that runs in every modern browser and lets you code current dynamic web apps, better learn to like JS. You can code your back-end in whatever you want, but more and more of the meat runs in the browser, and it speaks neither Ruby nor Python (which I'm also a fan of, btw).
It's the old glass half empty/half full thing. If you're looking for a language without problems or pitfalls you will be looking for a long time. Instead, focus on a language you like, find out its shortcomings and become good at avoiding them. You will have to do that anyway regardless of which language you pick.
Javascript not a great suggestion for the OP, that I can second. But an awful language? You either don't REALLY know js beyond some simple HTML even handling, or your definition of "awful" is different from mine. The more I use it as the primary programming language for dynamic, heavily web service oriented web apps, the more I like it. It's one of the most expressive and flexible languages, something completely belied by its deceptively simple syntax. Then again, that's a trait it has in common with its syntactic granddaddy, C, which also fooled a lot a people with its perceived dearth of keywords. Anyway, js can be summed up with one word: closures. Until you wrap your mind around what all can be achieved, js may indeed seem like an awful language to you.
Yeah, but my XBMC can play the full DVD including menus and everything from an ISO image on a share, whereas converting to xvid makes you lose a lot of that stuff. At least it used to when I last checked into that.
I didn't miss his original intention of off-site storage, but that still doesn't invalidate the NAS suggestion. You can easily sync the off-site USB drive with a NAS share. Depending on his off-site options, he could even set up the off-site drive as another NAS (say at the parents' or a friend's) and have the two NASs continuously sync via the internet using rsync or something. Do the initial sync on-site for speed, then incremental syncs over the WAN. I'm pretty sure there is an rsync port for the DNS-321.
Or get a cheap NAS like the D-Link DNS-321. While certainly far from the bee's knees in terms of performance or number of bays (2), it can be had for under $100 and has been hacked to death to run all sorts of other stuff on it. Plus it's nice and quiet and doesn't use much power. And it's kinda purdy.
I would be surprised if that were the case. The chemistry of all these Li-Ion cells is mostly the same, and regardless of the final outside shape of the battery, internally most use standardized cells connected either in parallel or series to achieve the desired current and/or voltage. I bet you that if you took apart that lawnmower battery, inside you'd find the same basic cells as in that laptop battery, just more of them.
So I would say the lawnmower batteries are mostly cheaper because of some subsidy. Look at other technologies using Li-Ion batteries that are more established, such as power tools: the battery for my Ridgid power drill is $99, which is very much in line with laptop batteries.
I assume those ridiculous costs include periodic refreshing of all the data onto new media, and not just the physical cubbyhole to store the drives in. In that case your objection is moot. The great advantage digital storage has is that given proper media maintenance and periodic replication you will have pristine copies indefinitely, something that simply cannot be said of any analog technologies. Given the right equipment, this refreshing and replication process can be automated to such a high degree that little human intervention is required.
Wow, if that's you cutting slack, I'm not sure I want to see you taking no prisoners. You know what, let me hold him down while you kick him in the teeth. Just look at the sales numbers and it's quite obvious that the 360 is the most popular current gen console. The Wii would probably be if they could actually ship enough numbers, just by virtue of being the cheapest. Just watch out that nobody shoves a fallacy up your derrière someday.
That hardly applies to the US after WWII. While the war certainly cost the US a lot of money, they gained a massive captive market in Europe for several decades that wouldn't have been the same without the war, since Europe had had its own strong industrial competitors to the US. I would consider the US more like the glazier in the parable, since its costs were negligible compared to the benefits, as opposed to those borne by Europe and other parts of the world.
Besides, I wasn't talking about immediate gains from physical goods removed from Germany, which after all the destruction would have been somewhat anemic. I'm talking about intellectual property and patents, which benefited American companies for decades after the war. While it would be hard for various reasons to perform detailed studies of German reparations to the US--not least because most were in hard to calculate IP--some attempts were made. The most prominent one appears to be the book Science Technology and Reparations: Exploitation and Plunder in Postwar Germany by John Gimbel, mentioned in the article I linked to above, which seems to be cited by others as well. I have read the Operation Paperclip book, which talks about rocketry specifically, but similar technology transfers happened in many branches of industry.
Again, I'm not listing any of this as a justification for the war, or a white washing of the war crimes, or anything like that. I still think Germany got away quite lightly in American hands, compared to the destiny that could have befallen it purely in European or Soviet hands. My point was simply that the US benefited enormously from WWII, and some have even suggested that it may very well not have been what it is today without the war.
Well, lucky are the few with such moral certitude as you. It's not clear at all that the Allies would have ever dropped a bomb over Germany, given the proximity of so many Allied countries. They had no qualms dropping them on Japan because of its geographic isolation. Besides, obliterating Germany that way would have prevented much of the technological looting after the war. The US in particular made out like bandits so to speak, and the war ended up being a net economic gain in the long run, both in terms of technology gained and new markets established.
Well, everyone does seem to be driving around in "volkswagons" and even wearing Lederhosen (at least around Oktoberfest time), so perhaps they won anyway...
Well, I would attribute a certain "droning sameness" to Radiohead more than NIN, and I do like Radiohead. KISS of course is much more style over substance, but perhaps that's just me.
Well, the laurels thing was just a figure of speech, but you're right of course, WM* certainly doesn't deserve any awards. It just amazes me that we've had so many iterations of this OS over the last few years, and the biggest change is a gradient fill in the flipping status bar. I had really high hopes for the iPhone, but Apple's asinine handling of the platform has really turned me off. Remains to be seen if Android will truly rock the boat, or if the many members of the alliance will manage to fight each other and strangle the baby in the crib.
Yes, Microsoft are the dominant smartphone platform right now, and Android is nothing more than an announcement. But that doesn't change the fact that Microsoft have seriously rested on their laurels with their pocket OS. For a company that likes to include the word "innovation" in just about any phrase they utter, there's not much of that going on in the mobile arena at all. Their most cutting edge and innovative effort to date has probably been the Windows Mobile Search app. Perhaps if they let those guys loose on the OS, we might actually see some real innovation. They've just dicked around with the look of WM, without any significant changes of any sort. Adding HTML email support to Pocket Outlook and calling that a significant OS enhancement, just because those apps are bundled with the OS, is skirting the issue that they have no real will to make any serious OS advances. They're pretty much stagnant and at a complete stand still. WM6 is still clumsy and helpless with regards to resource use. It needs a complete overhaul of how it handles application life cycles. Starting apps and having no real concept of when to stop them again--because hey, you might need them again, and keeping them loaded will improve loading times--is hardly a viable approach when PIE plus another app (say mobile search) will often exhaust available memory and prevent you from even popping up the Contacts list to make a call (this IS a phone, after all!), let alone the camera or any other such unnecessary luxuries. I don't know how often I've tried to pop up the camera app on my HTC Dash to capture a quick moment, only to be told that there's not enough memory and basta. Only extreme self control and the disdain for blowing $200 in a flash have prevented me from smashing the phone against the nearest wall in such moments. Microsoft, that's not how a mobile OS is supposed to behave. If Android does better than that, you will be pushed into total irrelevance within a few short years.
I don't know about reproducing per se, but I could certainly tolerate her and some of the very fine female staff going through the reproductive motions. I could even entirely overlook their conservative bias while doing so.
> All that aside, OOXML may not be a horrible standard.
Perhaps, as it currently stands. The problem with buying into any MS "standards" is that they morph over time to suit their requirements, while either not including the new bits into the open standard, or publishing them much later to give themselves a head start on using the new features. That way all other users of the "standard" will forever play feature catch-up.
In concrete terms, while it may appear that they currently exhaustively expose all object model entities in the file format spec, nothing prevents them from adding extensions along the line of base64-encoded-and-encrypted-data-storing-juicy-new-Word-functionality-that-nobody-else-can-read. A fat lot of good that does you.
Slashdot Mirror
How do you know what kind of pitfalls I was thinking of, since I never mentioned any? ;-) Like I said, and you reiterated, it may not be a beginners' language, but it's nevertheless a very powerful and expressive language. I agree that current browser environments are not exactly the best for debugging, but things are getting better.
Ugh, because when a platform has "issues" it's better to hide those behind another platform, so you can reap the benefits of the issues of both. No thanks! You have to learn yet another framework and API and hope that Google sticks to this particular one for a while. But to each his own, there certainly are plenty of fans.
Not just the US, mind you, but the entire western world that is more than eager to offload manufacturing to China. We're all guilty of turning two blind eyes to save a buck, but I guess as long as we occasionally get to protest China's abuses in a public forum or some magazine opinion piece, all's well.
If you want a language that runs in every modern browser and lets you code current dynamic web apps, better learn to like JS. You can code your back-end in whatever you want, but more and more of the meat runs in the browser, and it speaks neither Ruby nor Python (which I'm also a fan of, btw).
It's the old glass half empty/half full thing. If you're looking for a language without problems or pitfalls you will be looking for a long time. Instead, focus on a language you like, find out its shortcomings and become good at avoiding them. You will have to do that anyway regardless of which language you pick.
Javascript not a great suggestion for the OP, that I can second. But an awful language? You either don't REALLY know js beyond some simple HTML even handling, or your definition of "awful" is different from mine. The more I use it as the primary programming language for dynamic, heavily web service oriented web apps, the more I like it. It's one of the most expressive and flexible languages, something completely belied by its deceptively simple syntax. Then again, that's a trait it has in common with its syntactic granddaddy, C, which also fooled a lot a people with its perceived dearth of keywords. Anyway, js can be summed up with one word: closures. Until you wrap your mind around what all can be achieved, js may indeed seem like an awful language to you.
Yeah, but my XBMC can play the full DVD including menus and everything from an ISO image on a share, whereas converting to xvid makes you lose a lot of that stuff. At least it used to when I last checked into that.
I didn't miss his original intention of off-site storage, but that still doesn't invalidate the NAS suggestion. You can easily sync the off-site USB drive with a NAS share. Depending on his off-site options, he could even set up the off-site drive as another NAS (say at the parents' or a friend's) and have the two NASs continuously sync via the internet using rsync or something. Do the initial sync on-site for speed, then incremental syncs over the WAN. I'm pretty sure there is an rsync port for the DNS-321.
Does its DLNA server stream video, too? I use it all the time for music but haven't tried video since I don't have any such media extenders yet.
Or get a cheap NAS like the D-Link DNS-321. While certainly far from the bee's knees in terms of performance or number of bays (2), it can be had for under $100 and has been hacked to death to run all sorts of other stuff on it. Plus it's nice and quiet and doesn't use much power. And it's kinda purdy.
I would be surprised if that were the case. The chemistry of all these Li-Ion cells is mostly the same, and regardless of the final outside shape of the battery, internally most use standardized cells connected either in parallel or series to achieve the desired current and/or voltage. I bet you that if you took apart that lawnmower battery, inside you'd find the same basic cells as in that laptop battery, just more of them.
So I would say the lawnmower batteries are mostly cheaper because of some subsidy. Look at other technologies using Li-Ion batteries that are more established, such as power tools: the battery for my Ridgid power drill is $99, which is very much in line with laptop batteries.
I assume those ridiculous costs include periodic refreshing of all the data onto new media, and not just the physical cubbyhole to store the drives in. In that case your objection is moot. The great advantage digital storage has is that given proper media maintenance and periodic replication you will have pristine copies indefinitely, something that simply cannot be said of any analog technologies. Given the right equipment, this refreshing and replication process can be automated to such a high degree that little human intervention is required.
Wow, if that's you cutting slack, I'm not sure I want to see you taking no prisoners. You know what, let me hold him down while you kick him in the teeth. Just look at the sales numbers and it's quite obvious that the 360 is the most popular current gen console. The Wii would probably be if they could actually ship enough numbers, just by virtue of being the cheapest. Just watch out that nobody shoves a fallacy up your derrière someday.
That hardly applies to the US after WWII. While the war certainly cost the US a lot of money, they gained a massive captive market in Europe for several decades that wouldn't have been the same without the war, since Europe had had its own strong industrial competitors to the US. I would consider the US more like the glazier in the parable, since its costs were negligible compared to the benefits, as opposed to those borne by Europe and other parts of the world.
Besides, I wasn't talking about immediate gains from physical goods removed from Germany, which after all the destruction would have been somewhat anemic. I'm talking about intellectual property and patents, which benefited American companies for decades after the war. While it would be hard for various reasons to perform detailed studies of German reparations to the US--not least because most were in hard to calculate IP--some attempts were made. The most prominent one appears to be the book Science Technology and Reparations: Exploitation and Plunder in Postwar Germany by John Gimbel, mentioned in the article I linked to above, which seems to be cited by others as well. I have read the Operation Paperclip book, which talks about rocketry specifically, but similar technology transfers happened in many branches of industry.
Again, I'm not listing any of this as a justification for the war, or a white washing of the war crimes, or anything like that. I still think Germany got away quite lightly in American hands, compared to the destiny that could have befallen it purely in European or Soviet hands. My point was simply that the US benefited enormously from WWII, and some have even suggested that it may very well not have been what it is today without the war.
I meant strictly for the US, of course, because the rest of the world and especially Europe certainly lost enormously, especially human lives.
And in other news, over-analyzing humor takes all enjoyment out of it, along the lines of "what the hell would a rabbi do in a bar?!".
> I'm tiptoeing and not trying to introduce "them" into the discussion.
Good thing you didn't mention the war.
Well, lucky are the few with such moral certitude as you. It's not clear at all that the Allies would have ever dropped a bomb over Germany, given the proximity of so many Allied countries. They had no qualms dropping them on Japan because of its geographic isolation. Besides, obliterating Germany that way would have prevented much of the technological looting after the war. The US in particular made out like bandits so to speak, and the war ended up being a net economic gain in the long run, both in terms of technology gained and new markets established.
Well, everyone does seem to be driving around in "volkswagons" and even wearing Lederhosen (at least around Oktoberfest time), so perhaps they won anyway...
Well, I would attribute a certain "droning sameness" to Radiohead more than NIN, and I do like Radiohead. KISS of course is much more style over substance, but perhaps that's just me.
Well, the laurels thing was just a figure of speech, but you're right of course, WM* certainly doesn't deserve any awards. It just amazes me that we've had so many iterations of this OS over the last few years, and the biggest change is a gradient fill in the flipping status bar. I had really high hopes for the iPhone, but Apple's asinine handling of the platform has really turned me off. Remains to be seen if Android will truly rock the boat, or if the many members of the alliance will manage to fight each other and strangle the baby in the crib.
Yes, Microsoft are the dominant smartphone platform right now, and Android is nothing more than an announcement. But that doesn't change the fact that Microsoft have seriously rested on their laurels with their pocket OS. For a company that likes to include the word "innovation" in just about any phrase they utter, there's not much of that going on in the mobile arena at all. Their most cutting edge and innovative effort to date has probably been the Windows Mobile Search app. Perhaps if they let those guys loose on the OS, we might actually see some real innovation. They've just dicked around with the look of WM, without any significant changes of any sort. Adding HTML email support to Pocket Outlook and calling that a significant OS enhancement, just because those apps are bundled with the OS, is skirting the issue that they have no real will to make any serious OS advances. They're pretty much stagnant and at a complete stand still. WM6 is still clumsy and helpless with regards to resource use. It needs a complete overhaul of how it handles application life cycles. Starting apps and having no real concept of when to stop them again--because hey, you might need them again, and keeping them loaded will improve loading times--is hardly a viable approach when PIE plus another app (say mobile search) will often exhaust available memory and prevent you from even popping up the Contacts list to make a call (this IS a phone, after all!), let alone the camera or any other such unnecessary luxuries. I don't know how often I've tried to pop up the camera app on my HTC Dash to capture a quick moment, only to be told that there's not enough memory and basta. Only extreme self control and the disdain for blowing $200 in a flash have prevented me from smashing the phone against the nearest wall in such moments. Microsoft, that's not how a mobile OS is supposed to behave. If Android does better than that, you will be pushed into total irrelevance within a few short years.
I don't know about reproducing per se, but I could certainly tolerate her and some of the very fine female staff going through the reproductive motions. I could even entirely overlook their conservative bias while doing so.
> Reality has a well-known liberal bias.
LOL, my thoughts exactly. Fox News is the Colbert Report minus the sarcasm.
> All that aside, OOXML may not be a horrible standard.
Perhaps, as it currently stands. The problem with buying into any MS "standards" is that they morph over time to suit their requirements, while either not including the new bits into the open standard, or publishing them much later to give themselves a head start on using the new features. That way all other users of the "standard" will forever play feature catch-up.
In concrete terms, while it may appear that they currently exhaustively expose all object model entities in the file format spec, nothing prevents them from adding extensions along the line of base64-encoded-and-encrypted-data-storing-juicy-new-Word-functionality-that-nobody-else-can-read. A fat lot of good that does you.