Yep. I like functional programming, but it's a tool. But then OO is just a tool as well. It's not suitable for everything, and attempting to apply OO principles to problems that don't really need them is just a waste of everyone's time, just as being forced into a functional pattern when it's not necessary is useless.
I'm mostly familiar with functional programming in R, where it's an extremely useful part of the language, but you don't have to use it. But once you get used to it, loops end up looking like ugly, clunky constructions when you could just apply a function of a vector. Once you're in this mind-space, going back to language that actually require you to nest loops to get anything done feels annoying as hell.
Yes, I have noticed this. I've got an iPhone 5. And I've installed the Swype keyboard, which is pretty fantastic, but yep, it does feel a bit clunky. It takes a noticable amount of time for the keyboard to display on screen, and the visuals as display elements move around and adjust is definately a weird thing to see on iOS. I've noticed, for example, when turning the phone sideways, weird stretched graphics for a fraction of a second. And in other apps I've noticed some curious typographical anomalies - fonts in the app sitting just a little too close to the fonts in the status bar.
However, the extra features in iOS 8 do make up for this weirdness. It's stil usable, it just seems *slightly* imperfect, but I think that's to be expected for such a major change in the OS, particularly when it comes to the keyboard feature. I'm just going to have to assume that iOS 8.1 will iron out some of these kinks.
Heh, it's not even "customers" they're denying a download to - if you follow the nomenclature of Kickstarter, then it's *investors*! Evidence, if you needed it, that you're not really an investor when you get involved in Kickstarter, you're just paying a premium to pre-order something, and praying you won't get screwed over.
It is a bit disingenuous to state that "web monitoring of all Australians appears to be inevitable". I, for one, am tunneling my web traffic via SSH to a server overseas, so they won't be monitoring my URLs;)
I agree that there are probably higher priorities, but I think it's fair to say that this is necessary infrastructure for the 21st century.
Think of what it might enable for example - want to cut greenhouse gas emissions? How about installing the infrastructure that will make it much much easier for a significant proportion of the population to "telecommute" and work from home. And once people no-longer have to live near their workplaces, and with high-speed internet access being ubiquitous, they might move to regional centers, improving rural economies and taking pressure off the resources in our cities.
Okay, that might be a bit of wishful thinking, but it's certainly the direction we need to be heading in.
As for what you have...luxury. I live in a suburb of Hobart - 15 minutes drive from the CBD. I have no cable in the area, no ADSL since I'm too far from the exchange - my bloody dial-up modem would only connect at 28.8k because of the shitty phoneline - the ONLY solution for "broadband" (in the loosest possible sense of the word) is wireless 3G, which I pay Virgin $50 a month for 5GB, which sometimes gets whopping download speeds of 400kbps, but is usually closer to 120kbps. I could have paid much more to go with Telstra's NextG, but I generally don't like being raped by them.
Some places in Australia do have usable broadband. A lot of places still don't. And I measure "usable broadband" by the criteria of being able to watch a video on YouTube without having to press pause first and let the whole thing buffer...
Nah, they were rarely enforced. Most people don't know they exist, and that's fair enough, because you assume if you buy a CD you have the right to make a copy of it for yourself. That makes sense. The laws against it don't. It's only with the rise of portable MP3 players that the media has picked up on the fact that, before the recent opening of the Australian iTunes store, there was almost no legal use for an iPod in Australia, yet they were selling in their thousands.
I block ads on the internet because they are usually completely useless to me. When I watch TV at least, the ads are for things I might buy at the grocery store, or they advertise a sale on at a local furniture store, or they advertise a car I might one day consider buying.
The vast majority of ads on the internet are either completely disinteresting to me - trying to sell me a server appliance, or telephone deals in another country. Or they are advertising online casinos that I would never visit. Or they are scams - you know, the "Your computer is not OPTIMIZED click HERE" crap. If interet advertising was actually relevant to my every day needs, and didn't all come across as a cheap scam, then I might be more tolerant.
In fact, I am. I'm quite happy to view the Google ad-words ads, because they have, sometimes, shown me something I might be interested in.
I'm just a bit suprised to hear people actually have entire music collections in WMA format. A search of my Windows partition (no point looking for them in Linux) has discovered... three, all of which appear to be the "sample" files that come with Windows XP! I can't remember ever even seeing them on any legal indie music sites like BeSonic, or in peoples collections in any filesharing programs. I don't think I've ever listened to a WMA net radio station - all the good stuff seems to be on streaming mp3 and ogg. Where, in all honesty, are you people getting them from? I guess I'm out of the loop.
I don't see how Microsoft could keep up this kind of behaviour in the long run. Imagine they give Brazil Windows and Office for free. What happens when Argentina starts examining open source software? What about Japan? UK? Even the US? Wouldn't they all demand the same deal "otherwise we'll go Open Source"?
Before you know it, Microsoft have given every government on the planet free software. How long before large businesses and even individuals start making the same threats?
Microsoft will continue to attempt to disuade people from using Open Source by spreading lies / exaggerating deficiencies. All that Open Source needs to do is prove their lies wrong, and polish their software so Windows doesn't look as attractive. And we're most of the way there!
That's not their only argument. As was highlighted further along in the article, putting this system together on Windows would have meant purchasing expensive proprietary softare. In Linux: this wasn't necessary. Hence, the $400,000 saving. Cost savings are potentially more important than any "advantage" either OS might have had in terms of performance or stability.
It's a shame the most imformative reply in this thread had to come from an Anonymous Coward! Thanks for recognizing the real association between my grips and "useability". Sure, it's debatable whether single-click or double-click is more "user friendly". What's not debatable, however, is that options to configure things like this should be easy to find.
It's not a matter of single-click being "faster". It's a matter of how each individual is productive. How do I "select" a file without opening it, for instance? With a single-click interface, this seems impossible. But it's often the way I work, say, if I want to get a file's properties, or "highlight" it to find it later.
Picking my MP3 directory as an example was probably the wrong thing to do. KDE still seems slower than Windows reading from from FAT as well.
In any case, opening a terminal and typing "ls" generates the file list very quickly. Displaying a directory graphically in KDE, however, seems to take an extraordinary amount of time.
Yeah, KDE is pretty usable. But it's lacking real smarts. I consider usability to mean "the interface is efficient, and acts as I expect it to". Here are a few (what I consider fairly obvious) features that would really improve KDE for me.
1. Drag-and-drop menus. In Windows, the Start menu is really just a directory structure, and a special case of the Explorer view. You can drag and drop new items into the Start menu / Taskbar and they appear there instantly. You can "Explore" the Start menu and arrange / delete / add items as you please. Compare and contrast with the latest version of KDE that I've tried, where you essentially need a "menu edit" application to set up new shortcuts. Painfully old-fashioned.
2. Faster file access and directory listing in Konquerer. Comparison: Windows - to view C:\mp3 takes 3 seconds. Mandrake - to view \mnt\Windows\mp3 takes 9 seconds. What's more, in KDE the files display one-by-one as they are "found". My "Jazz" folder might appear first, but by the time I go to click on it, more folders have appeared and it has moved. Ugly.
3. Please, give us the option of a double-click interface.
Well, you've got to look at it the other way round. The only reason I have gigabytes of mp3 files instead of oggs is because my car stereo / home DVD player / portable only support mp3s. I think ogg is a much better format, and I'd love to use it for everything, but with the rising popularity of mp3-playing hardware, it faces a big fence to climb over.
Certainly, an ogg-only player isn't fantastic news, but any step towards players that will decode mp3 AND ogg AND whatever else you want to throw their way is a good thing.
jd, meet Phylocode, and efford to re-make the taxonomic system without meaningless, arbitrary ranks.
Genus, species, family, order - all irrelevant. If I look within a genus of animals (say, Panthera) I can see a massive amount of variation in morphology and ecology. I can look inside a whole class of worms and they all pretty much look and work exactly alike - apart from differences at the genetic and evolutionary level. The ranks are useless, and it's time to stop worrying about what fits inside a genus or a family or an order, and just work out what fits in an evolutionary sense.
What the hell are you on about? The most commonly accepted definition of "species" is taxa that cannot breed with each other and create viable offspring. All human races are capable of successfully interbreeding. In no stretch of the imagination could they be considered different species. You you consider different breeds of dog to be different species? Nope, all Canis familiaris.
True, MajorMud affected me - it achieved the perfect balance between efford and reward. Spend days or weeks (at higher levels) playing / scripting to get to the next level, at which point your abilities are upgraded, but never quite enough to keep you satisfied. It was crazy addictive, and social too. The power of text!
I remember one time, I was playing the original Doom - some mod level someone had created. (I should emphasize I was pretty stoned at the time). The level was dark, and grey. There was a wide courtyard, mossy brick walls and scattered, dead, black trees. The sound effects included creepy scrapes and crows "cawwing". It scared me to hell, and I had to stop playing.
I haven't got any real complains about this - after all, it does look slick and simple, which is always good. However, the thing that needs to be improved most on the Linux desktop is NOT just the look of the interface - it's how it all works together.
Cut, copy and paste that works between ALL applications
One standard, common file-association / MIME-type setup
One standard, common menu system set-up
Fast, comprehensive file manager - I should be able to do whatever I want without having to resort to an xterm shell
Common add-in architecture, so installed software can interface with context menus, task-bar etc. in a standard way
THESE are the aspects of Windows that Linux needs to replicate, not just the pretty icons. These are all features that Windows got right years ago, but Linux is still struggling with to this day.
If you ask me, that's the PROBLEM with games - they have become the ultimate bloat-ware. Insane memory and processor usage, and the latest 3d visual effects, do not necessarily make a good game - just look at the success of games like The Sims that don't require a $500 3D card and a liquid-cooled processor. Personally, I have more fun playing Sonic the Hedgehog in my emulator...
Slashdot Mirror
Yep. I like functional programming, but it's a tool. But then OO is just a tool as well. It's not suitable for everything, and attempting to apply OO principles to problems that don't really need them is just a waste of everyone's time, just as being forced into a functional pattern when it's not necessary is useless.
I'm mostly familiar with functional programming in R, where it's an extremely useful part of the language, but you don't have to use it. But once you get used to it, loops end up looking like ugly, clunky constructions when you could just apply a function of a vector. Once you're in this mind-space, going back to language that actually require you to nest loops to get anything done feels annoying as hell.
Yes, I have noticed this. I've got an iPhone 5. And I've installed the Swype keyboard, which is pretty fantastic, but yep, it does feel a bit clunky. It takes a noticable amount of time for the keyboard to display on screen, and the visuals as display elements move around and adjust is definately a weird thing to see on iOS. I've noticed, for example, when turning the phone sideways, weird stretched graphics for a fraction of a second. And in other apps I've noticed some curious typographical anomalies - fonts in the app sitting just a little too close to the fonts in the status bar.
However, the extra features in iOS 8 do make up for this weirdness. It's stil usable, it just seems *slightly* imperfect, but I think that's to be expected for such a major change in the OS, particularly when it comes to the keyboard feature. I'm just going to have to assume that iOS 8.1 will iron out some of these kinks.
Heh, it's not even "customers" they're denying a download to - if you follow the nomenclature of Kickstarter, then it's *investors*! Evidence, if you needed it, that you're not really an investor when you get involved in Kickstarter, you're just paying a premium to pre-order something, and praying you won't get screwed over.
It is a bit disingenuous to state that "web monitoring of all Australians appears to be inevitable". I, for one, am tunneling my web traffic via SSH to a server overseas, so they won't be monitoring my URLs ;)
I agree that there are probably higher priorities, but I think it's fair to say that this is necessary infrastructure for the 21st century.
Think of what it might enable for example - want to cut greenhouse gas emissions? How about installing the infrastructure that will make it much much easier for a significant proportion of the population to "telecommute" and work from home. And once people no-longer have to live near their workplaces, and with high-speed internet access being ubiquitous, they might move to regional centers, improving rural economies and taking pressure off the resources in our cities.
Okay, that might be a bit of wishful thinking, but it's certainly the direction we need to be heading in.
As for what you have...luxury. I live in a suburb of Hobart - 15 minutes drive from the CBD. I have no cable in the area, no ADSL since I'm too far from the exchange - my bloody dial-up modem would only connect at 28.8k because of the shitty phoneline - the ONLY solution for "broadband" (in the loosest possible sense of the word) is wireless 3G, which I pay Virgin $50 a month for 5GB, which sometimes gets whopping download speeds of 400kbps, but is usually closer to 120kbps. I could have paid much more to go with Telstra's NextG, but I generally don't like being raped by them.
Some places in Australia do have usable broadband. A lot of places still don't. And I measure "usable broadband" by the criteria of being able to watch a video on YouTube without having to press pause first and let the whole thing buffer...
He's right, you know. Wii is for kids.
Nah, they were rarely enforced. Most people don't know they exist, and that's fair enough, because you assume if you buy a CD you have the right to make a copy of it for yourself. That makes sense. The laws against it don't. It's only with the rise of portable MP3 players that the media has picked up on the fact that, before the recent opening of the Australian iTunes store, there was almost no legal use for an iPod in Australia, yet they were selling in their thousands.
I block ads on the internet because they are usually completely useless to me. When I watch TV at least, the ads are for things I might buy at the grocery store, or they advertise a sale on at a local furniture store, or they advertise a car I might one day consider buying.
The vast majority of ads on the internet are either completely disinteresting to me - trying to sell me a server appliance, or telephone deals in another country. Or they are advertising online casinos that I would never visit. Or they are scams - you know, the "Your computer is not OPTIMIZED click HERE" crap. If interet advertising was actually relevant to my every day needs, and didn't all come across as a cheap scam, then I might be more tolerant.
In fact, I am. I'm quite happy to view the Google ad-words ads, because they have, sometimes, shown me something I might be interested in.
I'm just a bit suprised to hear people actually have entire music collections in WMA format. A search of my Windows partition (no point looking for them in Linux) has discovered... three, all of which appear to be the "sample" files that come with Windows XP! I can't remember ever even seeing them on any legal indie music sites like BeSonic, or in peoples collections in any filesharing programs. I don't think I've ever listened to a WMA net radio station - all the good stuff seems to be on streaming mp3 and ogg. Where, in all honesty, are you people getting them from? I guess I'm out of the loop.
I don't see how Microsoft could keep up this kind of behaviour in the long run. Imagine they give Brazil Windows and Office for free. What happens when Argentina starts examining open source software? What about Japan? UK? Even the US? Wouldn't they all demand the same deal "otherwise we'll go Open Source"?
Before you know it, Microsoft have given every government on the planet free software. How long before large businesses and even individuals start making the same threats?
Microsoft will continue to attempt to disuade people from using Open Source by spreading lies / exaggerating deficiencies. All that Open Source needs to do is prove their lies wrong, and polish their software so Windows doesn't look as attractive. And we're most of the way there!
That's not their only argument. As was highlighted further along in the article, putting this system together on Windows would have meant purchasing expensive proprietary softare. In Linux: this wasn't necessary. Hence, the $400,000 saving. Cost savings are potentially more important than any "advantage" either OS might have had in terms of performance or stability.
http://www.x-rates.com/d/USD/AUD/graph120.png
;)
How many $US a $AU has buying. Up up up. I think the US currency is the one that's in trouble
It's a shame the most imformative reply in this thread had to come from an Anonymous Coward! Thanks for recognizing the real association between my grips and "useability". Sure, it's debatable whether single-click or double-click is more "user friendly". What's not debatable, however, is that options to configure things like this should be easy to find.
It's not a matter of single-click being "faster". It's a matter of how each individual is productive. How do I "select" a file without opening it, for instance? With a single-click interface, this seems impossible. But it's often the way I work, say, if I want to get a file's properties, or "highlight" it to find it later.
Picking my MP3 directory as an example was probably the wrong thing to do. KDE still seems slower than Windows reading from from FAT as well.
In any case, opening a terminal and typing "ls" generates the file list very quickly. Displaying a directory graphically in KDE, however, seems to take an extraordinary amount of time.
Well, where's the option? I've spent ages searching through all KDE's configuration to find where I turn on "double-click".
Yeah, KDE is pretty usable. But it's lacking real smarts. I consider usability to mean "the interface is efficient, and acts as I expect it to". Here are a few (what I consider fairly obvious) features that would really improve KDE for me.
1. Drag-and-drop menus. In Windows, the Start menu is really just a directory structure, and a special case of the Explorer view. You can drag and drop new items into the Start menu / Taskbar and they appear there instantly. You can "Explore" the Start menu and arrange / delete / add items as you please. Compare and contrast with the latest version of KDE that I've tried, where you essentially need a "menu edit" application to set up new shortcuts. Painfully old-fashioned.
2. Faster file access and directory listing in Konquerer. Comparison:
Windows - to view C:\mp3 takes 3 seconds.
Mandrake - to view \mnt\Windows\mp3 takes 9 seconds.
What's more, in KDE the files display one-by-one as they are "found". My "Jazz" folder might appear first, but by the time I go to click on it, more folders have appeared and it has moved. Ugly.
3. Please, give us the option of a double-click interface.
Well, you've got to look at it the other way round. The only reason I have gigabytes of mp3 files instead of oggs is because my car stereo / home DVD player / portable only support mp3s. I think ogg is a much better format, and I'd love to use it for everything, but with the rising popularity of mp3-playing hardware, it faces a big fence to climb over.
Certainly, an ogg-only player isn't fantastic news, but any step towards players that will decode mp3 AND ogg AND whatever else you want to throw their way is a good thing.
If you're still struggling to get it off the offical site, you can find QNX here:
Planet Mirror.
A couple of different ISOs are offered - one with all the packages, and a basic ISO. It's able to install within a Windows partition, apparently.
jd, meet Phylocode, and efford to re-make the taxonomic system without meaningless, arbitrary ranks.
Genus, species, family, order - all irrelevant. If I look within a genus of animals (say, Panthera) I can see a massive amount of variation in morphology and ecology. I can look inside a whole class of worms and they all pretty much look and work exactly alike - apart from differences at the genetic and evolutionary level. The ranks are useless, and it's time to stop worrying about what fits inside a genus or a family or an order, and just work out what fits in an evolutionary sense.
What the hell are you on about?
The most commonly accepted definition of "species" is taxa that cannot breed with each other and create viable offspring.
All human races are capable of successfully interbreeding. In no stretch of the imagination could they be considered different species. You you consider different breeds of dog to be different species? Nope, all Canis familiaris.
True, MajorMud affected me - it achieved the perfect balance between efford and reward. Spend days or weeks (at higher levels) playing / scripting to get to the next level, at which point your abilities are upgraded, but never quite enough to keep you satisfied. It was crazy addictive, and social too. The power of text!
I remember one time, I was playing the original Doom - some mod level someone had created. (I should emphasize I was pretty stoned at the time). The level was dark, and grey. There was a wide courtyard, mossy brick walls and scattered, dead, black trees. The sound effects included creepy scrapes and crows "cawwing". It scared me to hell, and I had to stop playing.
- Cut, copy and paste that works between ALL applications
- One standard, common file-association / MIME-type setup
- One standard, common menu system set-up
- Fast, comprehensive file manager - I should be able to do whatever I want without having to resort to an xterm shell
- Common add-in architecture, so installed software can interface with context menus, task-bar etc. in a standard way
THESE are the aspects of Windows that Linux needs to replicate, not just the pretty icons. These are all features that Windows got right years ago, but Linux is still struggling with to this day.If you ask me, that's the PROBLEM with games - they have become the ultimate bloat-ware. Insane memory and processor usage, and the latest 3d visual effects, do not necessarily make a good game - just look at the success of games like The Sims that don't require a $500 3D card and a liquid-cooled processor. Personally, I have more fun playing Sonic the Hedgehog in my emulator...