Agreed. I actually like perl a lot. CPAN is amazing and, sure, there's a learning curve to read it and to write it *well*, but learning curves have never scared me if the payoff is there.
I like perl better than javascript, that's for sure. And PHP. I haven't learned python yet, and i'm sure I will some day. The main reason that I am inclined to learn python instead of continuing to use perl has everything to do with its widespread usage (which, e.g. results in Google having official python libraries, but not perl) and nothing to do with the language itself.
The people I really don't understand are the node.js crowd. You have to subject yourself to javascript for client-side web programming. Server-side, you can use anything. I'm convinced they're all masochists.
It's for non-power users who turn off their Bluetooth and don't understand why their Apple Pencil stopped working or why their Watch won't connect to their phone. I'd imagine the Genius Bars get to answer this question 20 times every day. I'd be OK with it if they'd give power users the option to revert back to the old behavior.
Get a Matias Quiet Pro. It's a mechanical keyboard and it's pretty quiet. I have the Laptop Pro which uses the same keyswitches. It's so much better than a rubber dome keyboard.
I'm typing this on my favorite keyboard of all time -- the Apple Extended Keyboard II, but it would never be confused with "not bulky." Plus, you have to get an ADB-USB adapter and, at best, the keyboard will be about 20 years old. That said, they're the best keyboards ever made IMHO and, even at 20 years old, mine still types like new. Plus they're pretty quiet for a mechanical keyboard.
I also love the Model Ms from Unicomp, but those definitely aren't quiet.
makes a huge difference. My first comp sci teacher in high school was great. Even as he was teaching us the basics, he gave us very open-ended assignments that encouraged creativity. We were programming Pascal in DOS (and I've dated myself). The last topic he introduced in the first year was the Turbo Pascal graphics unit. Our last major project was to "write a program using the graphics unit." We could literally do anything. Some of the less advanced people just drew pictures on the screen. Others did a choose your adventure-style game. One other kid in the class and I had a friendly competition going to see who could make the better project and we were constantly eyeing the progress of the other and trying to one-up each other. I ended up making a game with some rudimentary physics where you could jump around and shoot at a bad guy. It was a blast, to say the least and I have been hooked on programming ever since.
Unfortunately, my teacher retired at the end of that year, and we brought in a new comp sci teacher. This new guy was very much into teaching to the AP test and took off points if our output deviated slightly from what each each assignment prescribed. I can't imagine that there were many enthusiastic programmers that came out of that environment.
I've gotten into a routine of asking Siri several questions when I leave my house in the morning. Inevitably, I have several questions go unanswered as I pull away and my phone switches from wifi to cellular. I didn't try this morning, but will definitely give this a shot tomorrow.
"full multitasking" is also not desirable. It may make developing an app more difficult, but the user experience is greatly enhanced. I couldn't begin to imagine how annoying it would be for some errant app to start using resources in the background and killing the responsiveness of the foreground app.
There is a good reason they implemented multitasking in the way that they did.
I jailbreak for one reason: tethering. I pay my phone provider for 3GB of data each month and I damn well am going to use my 3GB however I choose. The only "legitimate" route to tethering available to me (on my current provider) is to upgrade to a 5GB plan and *then* pay $15/mo extra for the privilege to tether other devices to my phone.
I am merely doing what the FCC should have been allowing me to do all along: accessing a service that I am paying for.
Well, I do think the default DE has some importance. At the very least, it shows where the distro's focus lies. I am not a tinkerer when it comes to my UI; I generally like to leave things in their respective default states. I figure, that way I'm using a configuration that has been thoroughly tested. So, when Ubuntu switched to Unity, it meant that I would either need to use Unity (yikes) or I would need to use a different DE which was no longer the focus of Canonical's development team. To me, Unity indicated that Ubuntu wanted to focus on netbooks and tablets. Unity is singularly poorly suited for multi-monitor setups, so I found it to be very lacking for my workstation.
I got a little deja vu, honestly, when Unity came out. It reminded me of when Be, Inc. announced they were going to focus on embedded devices rather than their desktop OS. Suddenly, I was no longer the target user for BeOS. This felt like that. I want to use an OS ( / distro) where I am the target user, or at least not being actively eschewed for some trendy new market.
I jumped off the Ubuntu bandwagon, with many others I can only assume, when they launched Unity. I've been using Debian since. Sure am glad I made that switch because while Unity was an inconvenience, this keylogging crap would have been a total deal breaker for me.
Macs aren't any better. They leave configurations behind.:P
except that Macs don't come with crapware preloaded.
Nor do iPhones for that matter.
I also discovered that Dell doesn't put (much) crapware on their Precision line. I bought a Precision laptop a few months ago and it had a few harmless Dell utilities and one trial version of TrendMicro which I could have avoided had I been paying attention to the custom build configuration. (You can turn the TrendMicro trial off) The Precision is a very solid machine and virtually no crapware. Can't say the same for the equivalent Lenovo. I ordered a ThinkPad W530 (an *expensive* machine) for a coworker and it came preloaded with as much crap as you'd expect on a $500 Acer laptop.
You shouldn't have go through linguistic gymnastics to determine whether or not your official party platform opposes the teaching of critical thinking skills in schools. Really... it's not something that should be even a little ambiguous.
Read that again:
We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills,... critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education...
I think a fair reading of that is that they consider all teaching of critical thinking skills to be a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education and, therefore, the platform opposes all teaching of critical thinking. If they, in fact, do not oppose all teaching of critical thinking skills, then that is very poorly worded.
huh? Not sure how you're going to get around a whole bunch of extra writes when you're dealing with swap space. Good filesystem design can only help you so much.
The only reason they would enable virtual memory is if they think their flash chips can handle the extra writes. Assuming the results of a quick Google search are correct, it appears that VM is disabled on the iPhone. Enabling it would probably improve performance, but it would reduce the lifespan of the phone.
And you realize of course than phones also can have a virtual memory / "swap" (working decently nice, considering flash storage), right?
It is generally considered a bad idea to use SSDs for swap space because it forces the drive to make lots of extra writes and, thus, wears it out faster.
That multipalyer is forced to be on battle.net only is slightly annoying, but I had not intended to play anywhere else anyways.
I did. Some of my favorite Starcraft 1 games were played with my friends on an ad hoc LAN in the middle of nowhere while on vacation.
Earlier this year gamers reacted angrily to the strict DRM used by Ubisoft
...
StarCraft II developer Blizzard is taking a different approach.
Is the author a Blizzard employee? Did they give him a free Warcraft account for a year? Seriously -- requiring an internet connection to play against someone who is across the room from me is just as bad as requiring one for a single player game.
You can't have it both ways, Blizzard. The gaming community is more than willing to shower you with good will (and lots of sales) if you legitimately want to denounce DRM and remove it from your games. But we're not morons. You can't pretend to be anti-DRM and use it anyway -- even if it is slightly less draconian than Ubisoft's implementation.
"If we've done our job right and implemented Battle.net in a great way people will want to be connected
This is a red herring. I'm sure Battle.net is a good service, but they're repeating this talking point to distract from the fact that one of Battle.net's primary functions is DRM. Great service or not, I shouldn't have to be connected to it to play over my LAN.
Too bad all browsers don't equally support the same features of HTML/CSS/JavaScript. Flash also isn't completely there yet, but it's closer on the platforms it does support.
Yes, but there is a very workable subset of HTML/css/JavaScript that is supported by all the major browsers -- especially if you decide not to support IE6.
Plus, support for those standards is improving at a much greater rate than flash is improving. Firefox and Chrome have finally forced Microsoft to actually try to improve Internet explorer.
x86-64 is THE de-facto architecture. Save the enthusiast label for all the retro x86 steam punk guys.
no kidding. I can't stand Flash. Heck, the 32-bit Linux version is barely passable. The web would be so much better off if people just used open standards for web sites. With javascript and CSS, you can do all sorts of cool stuff and it'll run perfectly on any platform -- even my PowerPC Linux box.
How's the PowerPC Linux port of Flash coming, Adobe? right...
Slashdot Mirror
consumers won't be forced to buy Samsung phones
Agreed. I actually like perl a lot. CPAN is amazing and, sure, there's a learning curve to read it and to write it *well*, but learning curves have never scared me if the payoff is there.
I like perl better than javascript, that's for sure. And PHP. I haven't learned python yet, and i'm sure I will some day. The main reason that I am inclined to learn python instead of continuing to use perl has everything to do with its widespread usage (which, e.g. results in Google having official python libraries, but not perl) and nothing to do with the language itself.
The people I really don't understand are the node.js crowd. You have to subject yourself to javascript for client-side web programming. Server-side, you can use anything. I'm convinced they're all masochists.
It's for non-power users who turn off their Bluetooth and don't understand why their Apple Pencil stopped working or why their Watch won't connect to their phone. I'd imagine the Genius Bars get to answer this question 20 times every day. I'd be OK with it if they'd give power users the option to revert back to the old behavior.
Get a Matias Quiet Pro. It's a mechanical keyboard and it's pretty quiet. I have the Laptop Pro which uses the same keyswitches. It's so much better than a rubber dome keyboard.
I'm typing this on my favorite keyboard of all time -- the Apple Extended Keyboard II, but it would never be confused with "not bulky." Plus, you have to get an ADB-USB adapter and, at best, the keyboard will be about 20 years old. That said, they're the best keyboards ever made IMHO and, even at 20 years old, mine still types like new. Plus they're pretty quiet for a mechanical keyboard.
I also love the Model Ms from Unicomp, but those definitely aren't quiet.
makes a huge difference. My first comp sci teacher in high school was great. Even as he was teaching us the basics, he gave us very open-ended assignments that encouraged creativity. We were programming Pascal in DOS (and I've dated myself). The last topic he introduced in the first year was the Turbo Pascal graphics unit. Our last major project was to "write a program using the graphics unit." We could literally do anything. Some of the less advanced people just drew pictures on the screen. Others did a choose your adventure-style game. One other kid in the class and I had a friendly competition going to see who could make the better project and we were constantly eyeing the progress of the other and trying to one-up each other. I ended up making a game with some rudimentary physics where you could jump around and shoot at a bad guy. It was a blast, to say the least and I have been hooked on programming ever since.
Unfortunately, my teacher retired at the end of that year, and we brought in a new comp sci teacher. This new guy was very much into teaching to the AP test and took off points if our output deviated slightly from what each each assignment prescribed. I can't imagine that there were many enthusiastic programmers that came out of that environment.
I've gotten into a routine of asking Siri several questions when I leave my house in the morning. Inevitably, I have several questions go unanswered as I pull away and my phone switches from wifi to cellular. I didn't try this morning, but will definitely give this a shot tomorrow.
"full multitasking" is also not desirable. It may make developing an app more difficult, but the user experience is greatly enhanced. I couldn't begin to imagine how annoying it would be for some errant app to start using resources in the background and killing the responsiveness of the foreground app.
There is a good reason they implemented multitasking in the way that they did.
I jailbreak for one reason: tethering. I pay my phone provider for 3GB of data each month and I damn well am going to use my 3GB however I choose. The only "legitimate" route to tethering available to me (on my current provider) is to upgrade to a 5GB plan and *then* pay $15/mo extra for the privilege to tether other devices to my phone.
I am merely doing what the FCC should have been allowing me to do all along: accessing a service that I am paying for.
Well, I do think the default DE has some importance. At the very least, it shows where the distro's focus lies. I am not a tinkerer when it comes to my UI; I generally like to leave things in their respective default states. I figure, that way I'm using a configuration that has been thoroughly tested. So, when Ubuntu switched to Unity, it meant that I would either need to use Unity (yikes) or I would need to use a different DE which was no longer the focus of Canonical's development team. To me, Unity indicated that Ubuntu wanted to focus on netbooks and tablets. Unity is singularly poorly suited for multi-monitor setups, so I found it to be very lacking for my workstation.
I got a little deja vu, honestly, when Unity came out. It reminded me of when Be, Inc. announced they were going to focus on embedded devices rather than their desktop OS. Suddenly, I was no longer the target user for BeOS. This felt like that. I want to use an OS ( / distro) where I am the target user, or at least not being actively eschewed for some trendy new market.
I jumped off the Ubuntu bandwagon, with many others I can only assume, when they launched Unity. I've been using Debian since. Sure am glad I made that switch because while Unity was an inconvenience, this keylogging crap would have been a total deal breaker for me.
I sure have. My first exposure to BSD was NetBSD and then I switched to OpenBSD several years ago and haven't looked back.
Macs aren't any better. They leave configurations behind. :P
except that Macs don't come with crapware preloaded.
Nor do iPhones for that matter.
I also discovered that Dell doesn't put (much) crapware on their Precision line. I bought a Precision laptop a few months ago and it had a few harmless Dell utilities and one trial version of TrendMicro which I could have avoided had I been paying attention to the custom build configuration. (You can turn the TrendMicro trial off) The Precision is a very solid machine and virtually no crapware. Can't say the same for the equivalent Lenovo. I ordered a ThinkPad W530 (an *expensive* machine) for a coworker and it came preloaded with as much crap as you'd expect on a $500 Acer laptop.
While true that ASLR was added in Vista, it is disabled by default because of a bug in the ATI Catalyst driver that causes issues with it.
I think the only thing you can say with any certainty about that the platform is that is very poorly worded and ambiguous.
You shouldn't have go through linguistic gymnastics to determine whether or not your official party platform opposes the teaching of critical thinking skills in schools. Really ... it's not something that should be even a little ambiguous.
Read that again:
I think a fair reading of that is that they consider all teaching of critical thinking skills to be a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education and, therefore, the platform opposes all teaching of critical thinking. If they, in fact, do not oppose all teaching of critical thinking skills, then that is very poorly worded.
Not entirely limited to Apple:
http://www.gnustep.org/
http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/04/17/1826215/gimp-core-mostly-ported-to-gegl
Not in 2.8, but it will be in 2.10.
I hope that doesn't mean that QT 5 is x86/amd64-dependent because V8 is. I would hate for QT to be locked into one architecture.
huh? Not sure how you're going to get around a whole bunch of extra writes when you're dealing with swap space. Good filesystem design can only help you so much.
The only reason they would enable virtual memory is if they think their flash chips can handle the extra writes. Assuming the results of a quick Google search are correct, it appears that VM is disabled on the iPhone. Enabling it would probably improve performance, but it would reduce the lifespan of the phone.
And you realize of course than phones also can have a virtual memory / "swap" (working decently nice, considering flash storage), right?
It is generally considered a bad idea to use SSDs for swap space because it forces the drive to make lots of extra writes and, thus, wears it out faster.
math fail to you, too
Some people can see magnitudes smaller arcmin than .6 up close
up close? The angle is constant for all distances.
I think Jobs was justified in saying what he did as long as the average person can't distinguish the pixels
That multipalyer is forced to be on battle.net only is slightly annoying, but I had not intended to play anywhere else anyways.
I did. Some of my favorite Starcraft 1 games were played with my friends on an ad hoc LAN in the middle of nowhere while on vacation.
Earlier this year gamers reacted angrily to the strict DRM used by Ubisoft
...
StarCraft II developer Blizzard is taking a different approach.
Is the author a Blizzard employee? Did they give him a free Warcraft account for a year? Seriously -- requiring an internet connection to play against someone who is across the room from me is just as bad as requiring one for a single player game.
You can't have it both ways, Blizzard. The gaming community is more than willing to shower you with good will (and lots of sales) if you legitimately want to denounce DRM and remove it from your games. But we're not morons. You can't pretend to be anti-DRM and use it anyway -- even if it is slightly less draconian than Ubisoft's implementation.
"If we've done our job right and implemented Battle.net in a great way people will want to be connected
This is a red herring. I'm sure Battle.net is a good service, but they're repeating this talking point to distract from the fact that one of Battle.net's primary functions is DRM. Great service or not, I shouldn't have to be connected to it to play over my LAN.
Wait till you see the 64-bit version of flash, it has twice the number of bits!!
so...it's like orange juice with more pulp?
Too bad all browsers don't equally support the same features of HTML/CSS/JavaScript. Flash also isn't completely there yet, but it's closer on the platforms it does support.
Yes, but there is a very workable subset of HTML/css/JavaScript that is supported by all the major browsers -- especially if you decide not to support IE6.
Plus, support for those standards is improving at a much greater rate than flash is improving. Firefox and Chrome have finally forced Microsoft to actually try to improve Internet explorer.
64-bit enthusiasts?
x86-64 is THE de-facto architecture. Save the enthusiast label for all the retro x86 steam punk guys.
no kidding. I can't stand Flash. Heck, the 32-bit Linux version is barely passable. The web would be so much better off if people just used open standards for web sites. With javascript and CSS, you can do all sorts of cool stuff and it'll run perfectly on any platform -- even my PowerPC Linux box.
How's the PowerPC Linux port of Flash coming, Adobe? right...