Good for you. I think one of the greatest skills a programmer has is the ability to quickly adapt. Your extensive knowledge of an API is entirely useless if you need, for whatever reason, to switch to another language for a project. All that counts is your fundamental understanding of programming and high-level concepts.
It's how good programmers are just as good in C++ as they are in Python, Javascript or even Prolog, even if they've never touched one or many of those.
I'm not sure what sort of IDEs you've used but none of the points you've mentioned apply to the big ones out there. Qt Creator and Eclipse both support multiplatform projects very well, being multiplatform themselves. Visual Studio doesn't, but it doesn't shoehorn you into Microsoft-specific extensions either. All IDEs give you a set of project types, one of which is invariably "empty project", which throws you in a text editor with a single main file opened; command-line tools, services, etc. are all very well supported. Finally, I don't really see how an IDE could actually handle memory management or interrupts, which are purely language features.
Basically, it seems like often people discredit IDEs without having ever really used them.
Yes and no. There's a reason why a lot of utility programs in C# have pretty good UIs and the same sort of thing in Java is utterly horrifying (well, apart from Swing being in itself utterly horrifying), and that's how UIs are a LOT easier to create in WinForms than manually writing them. I think the new XML-based (oh, sorry, XAML) UIs are a lot better than both WinForms and Swing though, and they're also a lot more friendly to WYSIWYG UI builders.
Just keep in mind that the F/OSS community's biggest problem has and always will be UI and that the vast majority of those are created without the use of IDEs.
I think I agree with this the most. The gist of it is just this: a programmer is what he knows, not what he uses. I wouldn't want to use emacs or vim even in my nightmares, but if you prefer coding with that and are proficient at it? Awesome. What I want is good programmers, not good IDE (or command-line) users.
I'll be frank, I've never seen a project which doesn't support either Eclipse or Visual Studio, depending on the language. Some also support Xcode and Qt Creator.
Generally, if they don't support any of those, they won't support any at all.
Congratulations, you managed to piss off both sides of the theological argument by putting them in the same sentence as Notepad! I know they're really easy to rile up, there's a whole bunch on Slashdot, and they tend to be extremely amusing to watch grumble about "young'uns" and "newfangled", but as they say in the zoos don't feed the chimpanzees or they might fling poo at you.
So wait, you guys had trouble making the Ovi Store attractive for devs, you haven't managed to make the Windows Store have anything worthwhile in it, and so your answer to WP failing is to make yet another app store you won't know what the fuck to do with? Brilliant.
If you wanted to have Android on the side, you don't make it rely on some rather complex software infrastructure like that. I really don't see Nokia as having the resources necessary to keep up with their full software stack. Even big players like HTC and Samsung aren't using an alternative app store and many alternative skins suck really bad. Just keep in mind that Amazon's Kindle Fire HD is still on a derivative of 4.0.3 and probably will stay that way.
What's so hard in understanding this simple three-step formula:
1) Make some nice hardware.
2) Put vanilla Android on it with a clear upgrade path to the latest version.
3) Profit!
Very few countries have as lax laws on political funding as the US. Heck, in many places, it'd be considered bribery.
This is pretty much what you get when corporations can throw an unlimited amount of money at unscrupulous politicians. I guess the current crop of politicians doesn't help, but they've in part been attracted by the very lax funding laws, so there you go.
I usually see Litecoin and Dogecoin mentioned in the same breath, sometimes with other random cryptocurrencies. I'm not sure Litecoin's done enough to distinguish itself.
Still, there's a lot of people spending a lot of time (and electricity) on extremely volatile and unproven currencies, which could crumble down at any second.
The Apple envelope will also have extremely innovative square corners, which nobody in the envelope industry would ever have thought of. Ergo, Apple will patent it and proceed to sue other envelope manufacturers. Also Samsung, somehow.
I do wonder if we're going to see a massive collapse of all those cryptocurrencies. Currently it seems like every time a currency stops being profitable to mine, another one springs up. This sort of thing won't last.
Google's generally pretty good at fixing vulnerabilities, but manufacturers and carriers generally stop supporting Android phone a year or two in, worse if the phone is low-end (in which case you can even get 2.3 phones, which is beyond ridiculous).
That's the problem with an open, free-for-all OS: you get manufacturers who just don't give a shit and shove ancient versions out just because it's cheaper for them than renewing their crap additions for the new APIs. At that price point, people generally just don't know any better, either, so they accept it as being what it is when they most certainly could run a much more recent OS on similar or even identical hardware.
With 4.4 a lot of low-end phones could technically be supported when they couldn't run 4.3. The largest hurdles are carriers and manufacturers dropping support after an obscenely short time.
I've only read TFS in Slashdot tradition, but the spin of it almost makes me think the author is saying Microsoft would clone Google's apps outright to the extent of also offering a cloned Google Play app that'd connect to the actual Google Play store and allow to download and run apps that require the Play framework to run. I really hope TFS is wrongly worded (or that I interpreted it incorrectly) though because that shows a basic misunderstanding of how such a service works.
It's pretty well known by now that at the very least Eriksson reached North American centuries before Columbus, but that doesn't change the fact that Columbus' voyage and success ushered in a new era of colonization, which none of the previous encounters had. The Vikings may have reached Minnesota, but Americans don't descend from them now do they?
What you're referring to is called a Markov chain. You can generate some very interesting text with two-deep chains, to the extent that a speaker of the language used to generate the probabilities could read it naturally and it'd feel like it's actually in that language, even though it's complete nonsense. I guess my only question would be whether someone could've figured that out back in the 15th century when Markov chains only appeared centuries later (and also had the dedication to compile those statistics manually, which is quite a bit of work in order to faithfully reproduce the statistics of a language).
The amusing thing is that it's actually a choice on NVIDIA's part. They're crippling their DP performance on consumer-level cards to push their workstation cards, which have full DP performance but cost in the many thousands of dollars. I have to wonder if it actually works out well for them, though I suppose gamers must be thankful they can at least get one vendor's cards at reasonable prices with the ludicrous mining craze.
NVIDIA's done it a lot in the past: they'll introduce a tweaked or completely new architecture as a midrange card to test the grounds and tweak things. This most likely lets them get actual production cards out, which they can then test for problems and use as foundation to build their top-end cards. I guess it also lets them test the grounds with reviewer reactions and consumers.
There's a truckload of people constantly whining that climate science isn't backed up by observations. If you just took for granted that warmer poles meant darker poles which accelerated warming (a logical, but theoretical claim), you'd have people whining that they're just speculating and have no data to confirm it. This is scientists doing exactly what's being asked of them.
I'm gonna have to ask what claims have fallen and what claims aren't already more than supported by the evidence. The specifics of the models get tweaked continuously, that's what happens with an empirical science, but the climate science community is overwhelmingly in agreement on the situation and the course of action to take.
Of course, that's assuming you actually want to listen to people who have experience in the field.
The interesting thing is that if you have actual deities in the sense we generally accept, you don't even need a simulation: just put us in a place of the universe devoid of any trace of a god, which should be trivial for an omnipotent being. As long as our observable universe is sized such that we never notice such a trace until the experiment has run its course, it's just as effective.
Buffy and Misfits are non-realistic fiction, which is the point the author was trying to make. Currently, most streaming services-produced shows are grounded in either current day or historical fiction, not sci-fi or fantasy. If fantasy shows like Buffy work out, perhaps they'll expand more.
Also, not even knowing what Dr. Who is? What the fuck is wrong with you?
Not really. A lot of techniques first done in movies trickle down in games as graphics horsepower increases. Games are inextricably tied to graphics rendering.
Games are not meant to be merely a simulation of reality.
By whose definition, exactly? If the game designer/developer desires to make something that looks closer to reality, they're more than welcome to. That's the thing about art: you do what you want, not what some random Slashdot commenter says you should be doing.
Is music an attempt to accurately recreate the sounds we hear in nature? No, that would be moronic.
Wrong comparison. A better comparison would be synthesizers, which have evolved ever closer to reproducing actual instruments. Many people have lauded them as being heralds of a new age, where people could produce music without requiring expensive recording and mixing equipment. Are you saying that they're also wrong for not following your extremely narrow point of view?
Even better: striving for more realism isn't mutually exclusive with striving for more stylized renditions! Just look at Pixar's movies: they've kept their own style and their art is very far from realistic, but they've most certainly leveraged the latest advances in light transport, materials, filtering, particle effects and much more.
Slashdot Mirror
Good for you. I think one of the greatest skills a programmer has is the ability to quickly adapt. Your extensive knowledge of an API is entirely useless if you need, for whatever reason, to switch to another language for a project. All that counts is your fundamental understanding of programming and high-level concepts.
It's how good programmers are just as good in C++ as they are in Python, Javascript or even Prolog, even if they've never touched one or many of those.
I'm not sure what sort of IDEs you've used but none of the points you've mentioned apply to the big ones out there. Qt Creator and Eclipse both support multiplatform projects very well, being multiplatform themselves. Visual Studio doesn't, but it doesn't shoehorn you into Microsoft-specific extensions either. All IDEs give you a set of project types, one of which is invariably "empty project", which throws you in a text editor with a single main file opened; command-line tools, services, etc. are all very well supported. Finally, I don't really see how an IDE could actually handle memory management or interrupts, which are purely language features.
Basically, it seems like often people discredit IDEs without having ever really used them.
Yes and no. There's a reason why a lot of utility programs in C# have pretty good UIs and the same sort of thing in Java is utterly horrifying (well, apart from Swing being in itself utterly horrifying), and that's how UIs are a LOT easier to create in WinForms than manually writing them. I think the new XML-based (oh, sorry, XAML) UIs are a lot better than both WinForms and Swing though, and they're also a lot more friendly to WYSIWYG UI builders.
Just keep in mind that the F/OSS community's biggest problem has and always will be UI and that the vast majority of those are created without the use of IDEs.
I think I agree with this the most. The gist of it is just this: a programmer is what he knows, not what he uses. I wouldn't want to use emacs or vim even in my nightmares, but if you prefer coding with that and are proficient at it? Awesome. What I want is good programmers, not good IDE (or command-line) users.
I'll be frank, I've never seen a project which doesn't support either Eclipse or Visual Studio, depending on the language. Some also support Xcode and Qt Creator.
Generally, if they don't support any of those, they won't support any at all.
Likewise notepad, VI, emacs are passe arts.
Congratulations, you managed to piss off both sides of the theological argument by putting them in the same sentence as Notepad! I know they're really easy to rile up, there's a whole bunch on Slashdot, and they tend to be extremely amusing to watch grumble about "young'uns" and "newfangled", but as they say in the zoos don't feed the chimpanzees or they might fling poo at you.
... They do say that in zoos, don't they?
So wait, you guys had trouble making the Ovi Store attractive for devs, you haven't managed to make the Windows Store have anything worthwhile in it, and so your answer to WP failing is to make yet another app store you won't know what the fuck to do with? Brilliant.
If you wanted to have Android on the side, you don't make it rely on some rather complex software infrastructure like that. I really don't see Nokia as having the resources necessary to keep up with their full software stack. Even big players like HTC and Samsung aren't using an alternative app store and many alternative skins suck really bad. Just keep in mind that Amazon's Kindle Fire HD is still on a derivative of 4.0.3 and probably will stay that way.
What's so hard in understanding this simple three-step formula:
1) Make some nice hardware.
2) Put vanilla Android on it with a clear upgrade path to the latest version.
3) Profit!
Very few countries have as lax laws on political funding as the US. Heck, in many places, it'd be considered bribery.
This is pretty much what you get when corporations can throw an unlimited amount of money at unscrupulous politicians. I guess the current crop of politicians doesn't help, but they've in part been attracted by the very lax funding laws, so there you go.
I usually see Litecoin and Dogecoin mentioned in the same breath, sometimes with other random cryptocurrencies. I'm not sure Litecoin's done enough to distinguish itself.
Still, there's a lot of people spending a lot of time (and electricity) on extremely volatile and unproven currencies, which could crumble down at any second.
The Apple envelope will also have extremely innovative square corners, which nobody in the envelope industry would ever have thought of. Ergo, Apple will patent it and proceed to sue other envelope manufacturers. Also Samsung, somehow.
I do wonder if we're going to see a massive collapse of all those cryptocurrencies. Currently it seems like every time a currency stops being profitable to mine, another one springs up. This sort of thing won't last.
Google's generally pretty good at fixing vulnerabilities, but manufacturers and carriers generally stop supporting Android phone a year or two in, worse if the phone is low-end (in which case you can even get 2.3 phones, which is beyond ridiculous).
That's the problem with an open, free-for-all OS: you get manufacturers who just don't give a shit and shove ancient versions out just because it's cheaper for them than renewing their crap additions for the new APIs. At that price point, people generally just don't know any better, either, so they accept it as being what it is when they most certainly could run a much more recent OS on similar or even identical hardware.
With 4.4 a lot of low-end phones could technically be supported when they couldn't run 4.3. The largest hurdles are carriers and manufacturers dropping support after an obscenely short time.
I've only read TFS in Slashdot tradition, but the spin of it almost makes me think the author is saying Microsoft would clone Google's apps outright to the extent of also offering a cloned Google Play app that'd connect to the actual Google Play store and allow to download and run apps that require the Play framework to run. I really hope TFS is wrongly worded (or that I interpreted it incorrectly) though because that shows a basic misunderstanding of how such a service works.
It's pretty well known by now that at the very least Eriksson reached North American centuries before Columbus, but that doesn't change the fact that Columbus' voyage and success ushered in a new era of colonization, which none of the previous encounters had. The Vikings may have reached Minnesota, but Americans don't descend from them now do they?
What you're referring to is called a Markov chain. You can generate some very interesting text with two-deep chains, to the extent that a speaker of the language used to generate the probabilities could read it naturally and it'd feel like it's actually in that language, even though it's complete nonsense. I guess my only question would be whether someone could've figured that out back in the 15th century when Markov chains only appeared centuries later (and also had the dedication to compile those statistics manually, which is quite a bit of work in order to faithfully reproduce the statistics of a language).
The amusing thing is that it's actually a choice on NVIDIA's part. They're crippling their DP performance on consumer-level cards to push their workstation cards, which have full DP performance but cost in the many thousands of dollars. I have to wonder if it actually works out well for them, though I suppose gamers must be thankful they can at least get one vendor's cards at reasonable prices with the ludicrous mining craze.
NVIDIA's done it a lot in the past: they'll introduce a tweaked or completely new architecture as a midrange card to test the grounds and tweak things. This most likely lets them get actual production cards out, which they can then test for problems and use as foundation to build their top-end cards. I guess it also lets them test the grounds with reviewer reactions and consumers.
There's a truckload of people constantly whining that climate science isn't backed up by observations. If you just took for granted that warmer poles meant darker poles which accelerated warming (a logical, but theoretical claim), you'd have people whining that they're just speculating and have no data to confirm it. This is scientists doing exactly what's being asked of them.
I'm gonna have to ask what claims have fallen and what claims aren't already more than supported by the evidence. The specifics of the models get tweaked continuously, that's what happens with an empirical science, but the climate science community is overwhelmingly in agreement on the situation and the course of action to take.
Of course, that's assuming you actually want to listen to people who have experience in the field.
The interesting thing is that if you have actual deities in the sense we generally accept, you don't even need a simulation: just put us in a place of the universe devoid of any trace of a god, which should be trivial for an omnipotent being. As long as our observable universe is sized such that we never notice such a trace until the experiment has run its course, it's just as effective.
Buffy and Misfits are non-realistic fiction, which is the point the author was trying to make. Currently, most streaming services-produced shows are grounded in either current day or historical fiction, not sci-fi or fantasy. If fantasy shows like Buffy work out, perhaps they'll expand more.
Also, not even knowing what Dr. Who is? What the fuck is wrong with you?
Not really. A lot of techniques first done in movies trickle down in games as graphics horsepower increases. Games are inextricably tied to graphics rendering.
Games are not meant to be merely a simulation of reality.
By whose definition, exactly? If the game designer/developer desires to make something that looks closer to reality, they're more than welcome to. That's the thing about art: you do what you want, not what some random Slashdot commenter says you should be doing.
Is music an attempt to accurately recreate the sounds we hear in nature? No, that would be moronic.
Wrong comparison. A better comparison would be synthesizers, which have evolved ever closer to reproducing actual instruments. Many people have lauded them as being heralds of a new age, where people could produce music without requiring expensive recording and mixing equipment. Are you saying that they're also wrong for not following your extremely narrow point of view?
Even better: striving for more realism isn't mutually exclusive with striving for more stylized renditions! Just look at Pixar's movies: they've kept their own style and their art is very far from realistic, but they've most certainly leveraged the latest advances in light transport, materials, filtering, particle effects and much more.
Over here universities have gotten worse and worse. Oddly enough, they also have started being run more as corporations and less as public services.
If I didn't make it clear: fuck no. Making all of education a business would be the last mistake the US would ever do.