BASIC still exists, and so does Pascal, but honestly, why not use a real language?
Python has always been trivial to get started in. I taught my 9 year old to program in python in a few hours.
Java is easy to use, and the syntax is clean.
C# is basically a clone of java, so the same applies there.
You don't need to learn object orientation to use any of these languages. Sure, you probably SHOULD, but you can learn java programming solely in the main() if you just want to learn the basics. Even moreso with python, you can program in the interpreter at first, then move to running the code from files, then later migrate into an object oriented approach.
Paying for yourself not practical? I don't smoke and I'm not overweight, and I pay $150/mo for full coverage. If I stay in the hospital, I'm never on the hook for more than $1500; my insurance pays the rest. Granted I am single and young, but I'm not exactly going bankrupt here. I'm sure if you have a large family or are otherwise unhealthy it can be a a huge burden, but if you can't afford that then it pays to not have kids and just take care of yourself.
I'm married with kids, 37 years old, and a non-smoker. I've never had surgery or any serious medical claim, nor has anyone in my family.
My insurance is roughly $14,000 per year, if you count what my employer pays, and the coverage isn't even that good. Tell me how that's reasonable. The only reason to have insurance anymore is to avoid catastrophic illness, to be honest, and if you do have that your insurance company will probably just try to drop you anyway. It's the most corrupt, immoral, evil institution in the business world.
Reminds me that Americans are assholes when it comes to labor rights.
Labor rights exist to prevent exploitation of workers, not to allow workers to screw over their employers and get unfair compensation.
Honestly, if you want to see labor unions in action, look at what happened to GM. They overcompensated their workers until they went bankrupt and nearly took the US economy with them.
Aside from jobs like mine and steel workers, there are hardly any good reasons for unions to exist in the US anymore.
The only people I ever hear say something like that are people who don't install AV software and thus have no idea they're infected. They rely on the fact that their computer works to tell them that everything's honky dory. Not saying you're one of those people, but if you're not, you're the first, and I'd say your success is more attributable to luck than skill, like avoiding STDs by only having sex with people who appear to be upstanding citizens.
Either that or you avoid Windows. I had a virus on an old Mac IIsi running System 6, but I've never had one since. I've never gotten viruses on Linux or MacOS X, and it's not because I'm oblivious to the threats. It's because I made a conscious decision to avoid an insecure platform.
But for a big company with many lower-end users and the virus situation under control, it's hard for me to understand how TCO could be lower - though 3-4 years is a long time to make up a few hundred bucks.
But yeah, if I were setting up a bunch of new computers at a real estate office or something similar in scale, I might try Macs.
I work for a huge company (50k+ employees). We're all issued Windows laptops. In the 3.5 years I've worked here, I've had to have my laptop replaced or re-imaged 7 times. I don't run any nonstandard software, I don't download stuff off the internet, and honestly, I mostly use it for email, because I do my real work on a Linux desktop. These aren't some offbrand either, they're Lenovo and HP enterprise machines.
It's no wonder Apple is doing well in the enterprise. The few people who got Macs during one manager's brief stay never have issues with them, ever. If I could get one and run Parallels or VMWare Fusion, I'd do so in a heartbeat.
I got the 3G iPad. I thought I'd need the 3G. Turns out, there's free wi-fi almost everywhere you go, so the 3G is mostly useful in the car. I turn it on once a year for the family vacation.
Of course, now I have a Nokia N8 with the free Joiku Hotspot app, so I just use that as my Wi-Fi to 3G bridge now.
Have you considered making it light enough that your arm doesn't ache after 5 minutes?
Have you considered developing some muscle tone? My 4 year old can use the iPad for as long as I will let him with no complaints, and I have the heavier old model.
5 minutes to come down and install (program X that's actually work related) for me? Try a week and a half, if you're lucky.
Wait, my software development IDE is not on the "approved list", even though it's the defacto standard for the work I do?
Oh, you want to install Silverlight on my computer, even though I don't want, need, or use it?
Hmm, it's seems I accidentally formatted the hard drive and installed Ubuntu. Oops.
That's unfortunately a very Americanized view of the original statement, "".
What it really means is something along the lines of, "You should not emphasize your own individual excellence or difference over group harmony (wa, ) to avoid resentment and dissension."
The Japanese have great respect for the group over the individual. It's not about repression.
Don't get me wrong, I have an iPad2 (I'm getting a wifi only Xoom later this month) and it's great and seems to beat Xoom in quite a few areas, but I cannot fathom how you can compare their web experiences and call them equivalent when flash still doesn't exist on iOS due to Jobs' ridiculous ego.
They're not equivalent. The question is, how much value is there in Flash, and how much do you care if you don't have it? Aside from youtube and clones of youtube, I keep FlashBlock running on all my browsers at home and at work, and I don't ever look at Flash, ever. I guess if you do a lot of online Flash games or something, then it has value. I've heard a coworker talk about a streaming music site called GrooveShark that depends on it too, but for me, there's little to no value in Flash at all, so lacking it wouldn't hurt at all.
I'd like to use this opportunity to say how much I love my government, my politicians, the corporations within it, the aristocrats, the bureaucrats, the wealthy and everyone else in power. I wish you all success and long, healthy lives. I would never go so far as to even so much as *voice* dissent, much less act out against or for anything. I love you all and consider myself gloriously privileged to live in this country. Most importantly, I enjoy having access to my bank account, medical records, medical services, government services, utility services, my reputation, my property, my family and friends, and continuing to actually exist and not be abducted and disappeared overnight. I promise my sincere obedience in the hope to retain all of these things, which I know come only *with* said obedience and may be withdrawn from my life at your leisure, if I ever make any untoward movements or noises. Bless you all and may you continue to live long and rewarding lives.
TLDR: I FOR ONE WELCOME OUR NEW/OLD GOVERNMENT OVERLORDS.
I have a couple of mobile devices with purported Flash support (Nokia N900 and N8), and while they play video and handle "click" ok, they don't do mouseover, dragging, and other things that makes anything besides video viable. The one device that I saw that supported these advanced features did so by creating a virtual cursor that you moved via arrow keys -- terrible.
When Apple decided not to support Flash, this was one of the justifications, and in my mind, the only truly legitimate one. Until Adobe redesigns flash with some sort of drag or gesture support, it's always going to be a poor experience on mobile devices.
Most of the comments here and elsewhere say something to the effect of, "I already have a smartphone and a laptop, so why do I need it?".
The thing is, a lot of people have neither, or one or the other. Much as crossover vehicles are neither car nor SUV, people who could benefit from either but only want one find them a reasonable compromise.
I have a powerful desktop computer. I also have an iPad. My laptop died, and I haven't bothered to replace it. For couch surfing, emailing, web browsing, and playing an occasional game, the iPad is awesome. I won't suggest that it will replace your laptop that you use for Office documents, but honestly, I never, ever write Office documents at work or at home, and the things I would use a laptop for (enumerated previously) the iPad does very well.
Their plan is idiotic. You may not like what Elop has proposed, but suggesting that Nokia just go stick their heads in the stand and work only out of Finland is idiotic. The Finnish culture at Nokia is largely what caused their downfall in the first place. The arrogance is unbelievable.
Actually it's quite easy to get a DVD movie onto an iPad.
1) Most movies come with "Digital Copy" now. Put the code in iTunes, and you are done.
2) For the ones that don't there's always Handbrake, which has presets for it and makes it trivial to convert in a few minutes. Once it's done, drag to iTunes and sync.
The PowerMac 7600? You realize that you gave up on Apple just before they started getting good at making computers again?
the Slashdot crowd would love the 7600. It had expansion slots, lots of memory slots, and a processor on a card that you could easily upgrade. I started out with a 7500, and upgraded the processor card 5 times, eventually putting the motherboard in a Daystar Genesis case and ending up with a dual processor 604e card.
As a geek, I loved that design. It ran MkLinux too.
If you don't already own every Beatles album, I feel sorry for you.
Why would I own them, when I never have any interest in hearing any of them, ever? I have a CD collection of probably 400 discs, and none of them are the Beatles.
When I grew up in Georgia (north of Valdosta, in the Atlanta suburbs), Valdosta was the home of Georgia football. Parents would hold their kids back a year before kindergarten so they'd be bigger for football in hich school (I kid you not). I don't know if it's as stupid a place as it was 35+ years ago, but it sounds like at least some part of it is.
This is absurd. I am quite sure the Valdosta police have better things to do.
First off, the constitution only protects US citizens. "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union..." doesn't apply to some dumbass British citizen who sends drunken expletive-filled diatribes to the president. For all we know, it had direct threats on him in it.
As everyone on Slashdot knows, he can look in his sent box (and I am sure he has) and know exactly what was sent. The fact that's he's being duplicitous about it makes a pretty strong case that he's not telling the whole story, because "threatened the life of the president" isn't covered under free speech.
You can actually have your iPad activated at the Apple store, and never connect it to a computer again. Generally, I connect mine once a month or so to back up the apps, books, and documents, but that's it really. It's definitely an area where some improvement is due (and iOS 4.2 in November adds some of this, like wireless printing) though.
This entire premise is flawed. If you need a physical keyboard for lots of data input, an iPad (or any tablet with a touchscreen) isn't ever going to fit the bill. It doesn't matter what you do. Similarly, if you are primarily interested in media consumption (web, video, etc), then the tiny screen on a netbook isn't going to cut it.
I have an iPad (along with computers running Linux, MacOS X, and Windows). Honestly, the only thing on the web I care about that Flash provides is video. None of the "tools" or "interactivity" matter to consumers. What matters is "someone sent me this video of a dancing cat, and I can't see it". If that problem gets solved, Flash goes away. Only the items dealing with DRM and codecs are really of interest here, and to be honest, the HTML5 codec issue is not much of an issue when Internet Explorer, Safari, and Chrome all solved it. That one comes down to Firefox and free software that unfortunately relegates it into an unenviable position in the marketplace.
The thing about Flash that proponents don't seem to consider is that adding it to touch devices doesn't make interactivity work. I've tried Flash on my N900, which has a crappy touchscreen and Flash support, and most interactivity doesn't work on a touchscreen. There are no mouse-enter, mouse-exit, or mouse-down events in a touch environment.
Slashdot Mirror
Python has always been trivial to get started in. I taught my 9 year old to program in python in a few hours.
Java is easy to use, and the syntax is clean.
C# is basically a clone of java, so the same applies there.
You don't need to learn object orientation to use any of these languages. Sure, you probably SHOULD, but you can learn java programming solely in the main() if you just want to learn the basics. Even moreso with python, you can program in the interpreter at first, then move to running the code from files, then later migrate into an object oriented approach.
Paying for yourself not practical? I don't smoke and I'm not overweight, and I pay $150/mo for full coverage. If I stay in the hospital, I'm never on the hook for more than $1500; my insurance pays the rest. Granted I am single and young, but I'm not exactly going bankrupt here. I'm sure if you have a large family or are otherwise unhealthy it can be a a huge burden, but if you can't afford that then it pays to not have kids and just take care of yourself.
I'm married with kids, 37 years old, and a non-smoker. I've never had surgery or any serious medical claim, nor has anyone in my family.
My insurance is roughly $14,000 per year, if you count what my employer pays, and the coverage isn't even that good. Tell me how that's reasonable. The only reason to have insurance anymore is to avoid catastrophic illness, to be honest, and if you do have that your insurance company will probably just try to drop you anyway. It's the most corrupt, immoral, evil institution in the business world.
Reminds me that Americans are assholes when it comes to labor rights.
Labor rights exist to prevent exploitation of workers, not to allow workers to screw over their employers and get unfair compensation.
Honestly, if you want to see labor unions in action, look at what happened to GM. They overcompensated their workers until they went bankrupt and nearly took the US economy with them.
Aside from jobs like mine and steel workers, there are hardly any good reasons for unions to exist in the US anymore.
The only people I ever hear say something like that are people who don't install AV software and thus have no idea they're infected. They rely on the fact that their computer works to tell them that everything's honky dory. Not saying you're one of those people, but if you're not, you're the first, and I'd say your success is more attributable to luck than skill, like avoiding STDs by only having sex with people who appear to be upstanding citizens.
Either that or you avoid Windows. I had a virus on an old Mac IIsi running System 6, but I've never had one since. I've never gotten viruses on Linux or MacOS X, and it's not because I'm oblivious to the threats. It's because I made a conscious decision to avoid an insecure platform.
But for a big company with many lower-end users and the virus situation under control, it's hard for me to understand how TCO could be lower - though 3-4 years is a long time to make up a few hundred bucks.
But yeah, if I were setting up a bunch of new computers at a real estate office or something similar in scale, I might try Macs.
I work for a huge company (50k+ employees). We're all issued Windows laptops. In the 3.5 years I've worked here, I've had to have my laptop replaced or re-imaged 7 times. I don't run any nonstandard software, I don't download stuff off the internet, and honestly, I mostly use it for email, because I do my real work on a Linux desktop. These aren't some offbrand either, they're Lenovo and HP enterprise machines.
It's no wonder Apple is doing well in the enterprise. The few people who got Macs during one manager's brief stay never have issues with them, ever. If I could get one and run Parallels or VMWare Fusion, I'd do so in a heartbeat.
Of course, now I have a Nokia N8 with the free Joiku Hotspot app, so I just use that as my Wi-Fi to 3G bridge now.
Have you considered making it light enough that your arm doesn't ache after 5 minutes?
Have you considered developing some muscle tone? My 4 year old can use the iPad for as long as I will let him with no complaints, and I have the heavier old model.
5 minutes to come down and install (program X that's actually work related) for me? Try a week and a half, if you're lucky. Wait, my software development IDE is not on the "approved list", even though it's the defacto standard for the work I do? Oh, you want to install Silverlight on my computer, even though I don't want, need, or use it? Hmm, it's seems I accidentally formatted the hard drive and installed Ubuntu. Oops.
That's unfortunately a very Americanized view of the original statement, "". What it really means is something along the lines of, "You should not emphasize your own individual excellence or difference over group harmony (wa, ) to avoid resentment and dissension." The Japanese have great respect for the group over the individual. It's not about repression.
One has Flash and the other doesn't.
Don't get me wrong, I have an iPad2 (I'm getting a wifi only Xoom later this month) and it's great and seems to beat Xoom in quite a few areas, but I cannot fathom how you can compare their web experiences and call them equivalent when flash still doesn't exist on iOS due to Jobs' ridiculous ego.
They're not equivalent. The question is, how much value is there in Flash, and how much do you care if you don't have it? Aside from youtube and clones of youtube, I keep FlashBlock running on all my browsers at home and at work, and I don't ever look at Flash, ever. I guess if you do a lot of online Flash games or something, then it has value. I've heard a coworker talk about a streaming music site called GrooveShark that depends on it too, but for me, there's little to no value in Flash at all, so lacking it wouldn't hurt at all.
I'd like to use this opportunity to say how much I love my government, my politicians, the corporations within it, the aristocrats, the bureaucrats, the wealthy and everyone else in power. I wish you all success and long, healthy lives. I would never go so far as to even so much as *voice* dissent, much less act out against or for anything. I love you all and consider myself gloriously privileged to live in this country. Most importantly, I enjoy having access to my bank account, medical records, medical services, government services, utility services, my reputation, my property, my family and friends, and continuing to actually exist and not be abducted and disappeared overnight. I promise my sincere obedience in the hope to retain all of these things, which I know come only *with* said obedience and may be withdrawn from my life at your leisure, if I ever make any untoward movements or noises. Bless you all and may you continue to live long and rewarding lives.
TLDR: I FOR ONE WELCOME OUR NEW/OLD GOVERNMENT OVERLORDS.
I have a couple of mobile devices with purported Flash support (Nokia N900 and N8), and while they play video and handle "click" ok, they don't do mouseover, dragging, and other things that makes anything besides video viable. The one device that I saw that supported these advanced features did so by creating a virtual cursor that you moved via arrow keys -- terrible. When Apple decided not to support Flash, this was one of the justifications, and in my mind, the only truly legitimate one. Until Adobe redesigns flash with some sort of drag or gesture support, it's always going to be a poor experience on mobile devices.
Most of the comments here and elsewhere say something to the effect of, "I already have a smartphone and a laptop, so why do I need it?". The thing is, a lot of people have neither, or one or the other. Much as crossover vehicles are neither car nor SUV, people who could benefit from either but only want one find them a reasonable compromise. I have a powerful desktop computer. I also have an iPad. My laptop died, and I haven't bothered to replace it. For couch surfing, emailing, web browsing, and playing an occasional game, the iPad is awesome. I won't suggest that it will replace your laptop that you use for Office documents, but honestly, I never, ever write Office documents at work or at home, and the things I would use a laptop for (enumerated previously) the iPad does very well.
Their plan is idiotic. You may not like what Elop has proposed, but suggesting that Nokia just go stick their heads in the stand and work only out of Finland is idiotic. The Finnish culture at Nokia is largely what caused their downfall in the first place. The arrogance is unbelievable.
1) Most movies come with "Digital Copy" now. Put the code in iTunes, and you are done.
2) For the ones that don't there's always Handbrake, which has presets for it and makes it trivial to convert in a few minutes. Once it's done, drag to iTunes and sync.
The PowerMac 7600? You realize that you gave up on Apple just before they started getting good at making computers again?
the Slashdot crowd would love the 7600. It had expansion slots, lots of memory slots, and a processor on a card that you could easily upgrade. I started out with a 7500, and upgraded the processor card 5 times, eventually putting the motherboard in a Daystar Genesis case and ending up with a dual processor 604e card.
As a geek, I loved that design. It ran MkLinux too.
This is a non-story.
1) Developer submits an app intentionally to get it rejected.
2) App gets rejected.
3) ???
4) Profit!
The funny thing is, this is actually happening here. 3 seems to be getting the "press" to cover you so people hear about your other apps.
That's not really true, though. Every generation has its superstars.
The Beatles are just your grandpa's Justin Bieber.
My grandfather probably liked Benny Goodman. My dad was part of the Beatles generation, but I think he was more partial to Elvis.
If you don't already own every Beatles album, I feel sorry for you.
Why would I own them, when I never have any interest in hearing any of them, ever? I have a CD collection of probably 400 discs, and none of them are the Beatles.
When I grew up in Georgia (north of Valdosta, in the Atlanta suburbs), Valdosta was the home of Georgia football. Parents would hold their kids back a year before kindergarten so they'd be bigger for football in hich school (I kid you not). I don't know if it's as stupid a place as it was 35+ years ago, but it sounds like at least some part of it is.
This is absurd. I am quite sure the Valdosta police have better things to do.
http://www.codeismylife.com/ascii_pile_of_poo/72457.html
I hope the students never need any help from Apple.
http://gawker.com/5641211/steve-jobs-in-email-pissing-match-with-college-journalism-student
Right, because needing tech support from Apple and harassing the CEO for a quote are the same thing.
First off, the constitution only protects US citizens. "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union..." doesn't apply to some dumbass British citizen who sends drunken expletive-filled diatribes to the president. For all we know, it had direct threats on him in it.
As everyone on Slashdot knows, he can look in his sent box (and I am sure he has) and know exactly what was sent. The fact that's he's being duplicitous about it makes a pretty strong case that he's not telling the whole story, because "threatened the life of the president" isn't covered under free speech.
You can actually have your iPad activated at the Apple store, and never connect it to a computer again. Generally, I connect mine once a month or so to back up the apps, books, and documents, but that's it really. It's definitely an area where some improvement is due (and iOS 4.2 in November adds some of this, like wireless printing) though.
This entire premise is flawed. If you need a physical keyboard for lots of data input, an iPad (or any tablet with a touchscreen) isn't ever going to fit the bill. It doesn't matter what you do. Similarly, if you are primarily interested in media consumption (web, video, etc), then the tiny screen on a netbook isn't going to cut it.
I have an iPad (along with computers running Linux, MacOS X, and Windows). Honestly, the only thing on the web I care about that Flash provides is video. None of the "tools" or "interactivity" matter to consumers. What matters is "someone sent me this video of a dancing cat, and I can't see it". If that problem gets solved, Flash goes away. Only the items dealing with DRM and codecs are really of interest here, and to be honest, the HTML5 codec issue is not much of an issue when Internet Explorer, Safari, and Chrome all solved it. That one comes down to Firefox and free software that unfortunately relegates it into an unenviable position in the marketplace.
The thing about Flash that proponents don't seem to consider is that adding it to touch devices doesn't make interactivity work. I've tried Flash on my N900, which has a crappy touchscreen and Flash support, and most interactivity doesn't work on a touchscreen. There are no mouse-enter, mouse-exit, or mouse-down events in a touch environment.