I don't see this becoming too successful, but...
on
RSS and Weblog Ads?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Remember that RSS is even more "pull" than a web page. You might casually follow a link from a Slashdot story or something and end up at a site with a lot of ads, but you won't casually subscribe to an RSS feed. So, you're not going to have to worry much about "RSS spam" in the general case.
I have no ethical problems with ads in RSS feeds. But from a user experience point-of-view, I have a hard time imagining that I would stick with an RSS feed with anything remotely resembling obtrusive ads. I might tolerate a single Google-text-ad type ad on an excellent full-text feed, but much more than that and good-bye. (Including a non-"excellent" feed; merely "good" and I'll likely just unsubscribe.)
You can slap an ad on a webpage, but you can't just slap one on an RSS feed. I just can't see this becoming a problem, and anyone that tries to make it one will probably end up self-destructing.
Game companies need to stop thinking about making money because if the game is crap I'm probably just going to pirate it anyway....
Or you might consider, you know, not playing it at all?
I'm not saying this as an anti-pirate screed. I'm saying, don't you have better things to do than play crappy games? (Unless it's a springboard for other projects, but that's a rare case.)
Re:anything based on "I heard stories" is suspicio
on
New Standard Keyboard
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· Score: 1
No shit, Sherlock, but like I said, unless you've got a massive cache of peer-reviewed studies heretofore unknown to mankind, anecdotes are all we've got. I'd say it's very well established that RSI exists, and like I said, I've only heard one kind of story, plus my own experience of reduced stress on the hand, which is why I invited counter-anectdotes. I note none appeared. "Proves" nothing, but again, all we've got.
In the lieu of science, even those of us with a highly scientific bent are not required to shove our heads into the sand and yell that we can't possibly know anything, anyhow, not even for personal use. I've inherited something-or-other from my dad that seems to make it difficult to absorb iron. It doesn't have a name that I know of, let alone a scientific treatment. But rather than shove my head in the sand, I take iron pills. (A lot; typically on the order of 700% of my RDA, and I can handle even more than that, whereas even 350%, one pill I take, makes everybody else I know who has tried one sick to their stomach, even if taken with a meal.) I'd rather have a scientific treatment, but as there won't be one anytime soon, I am not obligated to yell "I can't know what to do!" and suffer a lifetime of permanent anemia just so I can feel Scientific.
So, nuts to your "bull".
Oh, and nobody I know of says it "heals" or "cures" RSI, it just causes it to flare up less and be less of a problem. (Somebody probably does, but I am not responsible for them. I certainly didn't.)
The fact is, QWERTY works and it works quite well.
Yes it does.
That would be its primary problem.
There is nothing like trying to get people out of a local opitma, even if it is sending them towards disaster. It's like trying to quit smoking; you know it will lead to a better life, but the current cost of a cigarette is so minimal, and the current pleasure of it so high.
QWERTY won't kill your hand in ten minutes or ten days. More like ten years. For some people, maybe even never. But for others, much sooner. I for one would prefer to never get RSI, and I decided after I experienced what turned out to be a false alarm that I never wanted to experience the real thing. Unfortunately, no science has been done in this domain to my knowledge so we are on our own with anecdotes. I note, however, that while I have heard many "I switched from QWERTY to DVORAK and my pain got better" stories, I have never heard an "I switched to DVORAK and my pain got worse until I went back to QWERTY". (People with that story are invited to comment and tell it, please!)
DVORAK probably isn't an answer to all the problems, but it helps a lot. You really do move your hands a lot less. As a secondary result, you will also find yourself actually touchtyping; all my life my hands were always wandering with QWERTY, now they don't, because they don't have to; wandering hands always "wander" into sub-optimal positions, which if you think about it ought to be a characteristic of a properly designed keyboard layout.
It's also about the only ergonomic thing you can do to a laptop.
For most of us non-competitive typer types, i.e., probably all but maybe one person reading this post, speed isn't a reason to move to Dvorak. But comfort is. This is so much nicer; the gain-per-minute is small, but I still plan to put a lot more minutes in front of a keyboard.
There is surprisingly little research on post-early-childhood development.
Really? I'm sure that nobody has studied "the best time to learn a computer language", but if you've done a real survey of the literature, I'm sure you can synthesize your own answer superior to pretty much anything you can read here.
My own conjecture is that "developer ability" (the ability to construct your own abstractions, and use others effectively) as opposed to mere "coder abilitity" (the ability to make code "do this" and "do that") is probably almost directly correlated to mathematical ability, both in the K-12 and upper-level-college senses of the term. In fact I suspect there would be an almost direct parallel between the "numerical manipulation" skills that constitutes most math in a K-12 education, and the ability to do math at a Mathematician's level. To use the somewhat-out-of-date-but-still-useful Piaget naming, "concrete operational" vs. "formal operational".
I'm not saying the two are identical, just that the cognitive skillsets are so similar that the development literature for math is likely to apply quite directly to coding. Trying to teach an average six-year-old "Object Orientation" is probably too much abstraction for them; they may learn to manipulate pre-existing objects but I'd bet that until they become "formal operational" they will have a hard time creating good objects of their own.
OO here is just an example; functional, for instance, I'd expect to be even harder to really grasp in the general case. You could teach simple map and filter, but they aren't going to get the full richness. Again, on average.
So this is a meta-answer: I don't know the answer to your question, and 99 out of 100 people posting won't either. But I can refer you to the literature on learning math and guess that it is as likely to apply as anything, with the mapping I've given you here. I can't be sure, but it's a good guess. And I'm pretty there's been a lot of study on that topic.
(People rushing to reply to this are encouraged to be sure they understand the meaning of "concrete" and "formal operational", and the meaning of the word "average". If so, fire away, but I'm sick of people mentally editing qualifiers like "average" or "most" out of my messages and then firing with all cannons as if they weren't there, and if you don't know those Piaget terms you don't really know what I said here.)
(And while I've defined the terminology, I'm going to point out a lot of people who think they are "developers" are in fact "coders", at least as evidenced by the source code I've seen both in closed and open source projects. Few people seem capable of creating decent abstractions.)
While that is an excellent paper and I've been known to link to it from time to time, that isn't what the GP was referring to. Assuming Mozilla's Find dialog isn't bugging out on me (focus issues, it keeps searching the wrong tab for me but I can't replicate the various focus issues I have well enough to file bugs), "depression" doesn't even show up in that paper.
Unfortunately, Googling for "self-assessment depression" isn't turning up anything relevant, just depression self-tests. But I can vouch for the fact that there was work done that demonstrates that; I recall it from my abnormal psych class. It is, no pun intended, slightly depressing, but I think the interpretation that being slightly optimistic beats out realism or depression in most ways is the best one. Hyper-realistic self-assessment isn't in and of itself a goal worth pursuing, and often a bit of optimism can be a good thing; you may correctly assess that you are not currently capable of something, but that doesn't mean you can't become capable if you just try, and a bit of optimism helps you try.
Adding Tapestry looks like adding another language to me for a lot of us.
I'm working on a pure Javascript solution to that problem, XBLinJS (sourceforge project) which implements the capabilities of XBL in JS. It will is easy to create widgets that are XMLHttpRequest aware. I don't ship any, partially because the project is young and partially because needs tend to be too specific to be easily demo-able, but it's not too hard; I'll be doing that today or tommorow in the project XBLinJS is supporting for me.
And although the article makes a statement that 400ppm for CO2 is a critical point - it never explains what evidence supports this number.
"It's round, and God works in base 10 using our measurement units. See also, speed of light in meters per second (we actually screwed up, it's really 300,000 km/s exactly), and the world ending in 2000, or maybe 2100."
I send out my resume......no, wait, I fill out yet another dumb form while my resume sits and collects virtual dust...... and just carefully file all the lack of responses (even automated ones!) in my brain.
So far the only danger of this is that it tends to result in lowered levels of certain vital nuerotransmitters, which manifests as "depression".
To answer your question, I have no idea what people do; I had no idea that people were getting so many offers and interviews they needed special tracking software. My system seems to be working pretty well, at least in the sense that no system could possibly be more useful for me.
(What do you do when even networking fails? I have a network, but it consists of people who have work or know people who have work in the theoretical sense of "Gee, it'd be nice if we could do X", but can't scrape together any money for it.)
But never with a consumer market for the devices. You need realtime graphics of maximal quality and speed, you need a GPU. I am fully aware of that wheel, but it isn't a law of nature, not even on par with Moore's law, it has to be analysed on a case-by-case basis. (See, told you I knew about it.:-) )
GPUs win big by being years ahead of what the CPU could do. People aren't going to stop wanting realtime maximal-quality graphics, and GPUs aren't going to stop being ahead of what your CPU could do by years for a long time. They aren't going back on to the CPU anytime soon.
General purpose processors can't be as good at graphics as graphics cards, the optimizations are mutually exclusive in a lot of ways, especially in the physical world. If they are, virtually by definition they aren't very good CPUs.
This isn't going to change. Searching a string for the next occurance of "</bleh>" isn't going to be well done by a GPU, but CPUs have to do that all the time and you can parallelize to your hearts content, but that need in the real world isn't going away.
Despite the centralization trends towards CPUs, I expect we'll always have some form of GPU, right up to the day it's specialized to generate direct neural input to our simulated minds. We'll always want the extra performance and it is likely to always consist of highly specialized computations that have mutually exclusive optimizations to general purpose CPUs.
emphasized text editors for making gui objects. Gui by the blind ???
Try again with Python sometime. It's actually a kick-ass idea and I've long since stopped using graphical GUI constructors, but trying to do it in Java would be a nightmare; I wouldn't want to do that and it was probably a bad idea to teach it there.
The idea is that you generate your GUI from metadata of some kind (and you can almost always find some relevant metadata), and after you get good at it, while the graphical builders can still throw down a skeleton faster than you, you'll kill them in laying down a complete, usable GUI. Oh, and consistent, which they don't have a prayer of acheiving without super-human discipline or super-human management and quality control.
And if you have a wide variety of similar, but not quite identical things to edit, where they build a form for each and you generate a GUI off of the object description itself somehow, you'll even kill them on that point.
GUI builders have their place, but they are more like training wheels than swiss army knives.
(The only slightly annoying thing in wx is the ID issue, since you're going to be generating a lot of widgets. I used an ID generator to give out guaranteed unique IDs, but ISTR they had a better solution in the later versions. Unfortunately, I have no idea what it was or what it was called, so I can't give you any other better hints.)
Maybe this time Sony will see fit to include that really high-tech mipmapping stuff, so their console isn't the King of Sparkle.
(Stupid Sony, I've had my PS/2 for about a year now and I still notice it almost every time I play. Can't believe how unbelievably stupid they were not to include it. That one change, which by computer graphics standards is dirt cheap, would have massively improved its graphics. Anti-aliasing, on the other hand, is expensive to do right, so while I expect it on this next generation, at least while running in NTSC or PAL, I wouldn't have expected it in the PS/2 era. Though some managed, I think....)
After that, I don't trust them any farther than I can throw them. The PS/2's graphics subsystem wasn't an Eighth Wonder of the World, it was an incompetent disgrace. Fortunately most of their fanboys are so stuck up the ass with Sony that it took them years to notice, instead of it jumping out at them in 5 seconds.
I have it for the game selection, and I like the games, I like the controller, I like the case, etc... but the graphics are far, far worse than what they should have been. You have to reach back for years and years to find anything else that didn't do mipmapping.
(I've also played the Dreamcast some more lately. It definately pumps out fewer polygons, but equally definately, they are higher quality polygons, and the fact that the Dreamcast clearly has mip-mapping is no small part of that. The PS/2 was a step forward in some ways, but a big step back from the DC in others.)
I'm actually a Python partisan (like the philosophy and user base better), but the same basic thing applies to Ruby too: If your first criterion for evaluating a tech like this is "Is it written in Java/C++/Visual Basic?" or whatever other legacy language you're thinking of, you've already lost.
Learning Python or Ruby and using it will pay off in mere weeks vs. Java, C++, Visual Basic, and most other things like that. Pay off might be a month for C#, but only if you use C# like an expert to start with. (Also, if you use C++ like a mega-expert, but even then, to use it that way you lose with the staggering quantity of typing that takes... and I mean keypresses, not object typing!)
Ruby and Python have done everything they can short of directly downloading themselves into your brain. You have to expect to exert some effort to reap the benefits. And like I said, it pays off in mere weeks, so opportunity-cost-wise, you lose big for delaying it.
(Note "you" here may be your company, if you only program professionally. In that case, you personally may not have any choice, but the company is still losing big.)
There's a lot of reason to believe that negative energy is just a silly concept.
Negative energy isn't a silly concept. For one of the explanations I've found of this, see this Scientific American article (which appears to date from when that magazine was worth something scientifically), about halfway down. But the more you have, the shorter the time, and the longer the time you want to have it, the less you can have. I don't know the equation but the first-order behavior is something like:
In other words, it's useless for any human-scale engineering.
I mention this because I agree with your overall argument; as we dig more and more deeply into physics, where some physics fan boys see more and more possible loopholes, I, on closer examination of the relevant finds, find all the loopholes closing all the more tightly. FTL is "receding", and while that proves nothing, the smart money is on its continued impossibility.
Forget the inflammatory "gun" example, by this standard we should hold kitchen knife manufacturers responsible if they don't exercise "reasonable care"!
Don't think for a second that our clueless bureaucrats are special. The root fallacy here, trying to legislate tools rather than results, is widespread. Centuries of tool use and lawmakers still lack the cognitive toolset to deal with them.
But buck up a little; this isn't set in stone, it's just a law, and one on the fringe at that. The harder they come down the more people will agree with us. (I sometimes think our best strategy is to give Hollywood everything it wants, right now, and when people begin to have to worry about whether their particular combination of TV, DVD/video player, amplifier, speakers, and video disk are compatible, we'll win. Yeah, it's dangerous, but in the long term it could be best... BTW, I can counterargue this all day long, this isn't the total sum of my opinion, so feel free to post the counter-arguments if you like but don't expect to surprise me or anything.)
Riiiiiiiiiiiight...... I'm not sure if I should recommend a good rhetoric course or reccomend you stay away from them.
By the way, since you're such a "real man" and an ass, I'm banning you from using any tools other than an assembler from the 60s. You shouldn't take advantage of tools built that you don't respect the builders of.
Why make it easy for the 0.01% of programmers who code parsers, instead of the 99.09% who *use* that language?
Because it's those.01% of the programmers making our lives easier, indeed, even possible. If you don't support the guys writing the languages you work in, it will never be easy for the 99.99%. Does everything have to have a global payoff?
To concretize this point, your "insightful" argument applies 100% identically to Bison and yacc et al. Do you seriously think 99.99% of programmers would be better off without them? No, they'd be worse, because the tools those programs enable either wouldn't exist or would be of a lower-quality due to being "one-off" POSs.
Besides, think about what you're ultimately saying: "It won't directly benefit me, why the hell should it benefit anyone else?"
Slashdot Mirror
Remember that RSS is even more "pull" than a web page. You might casually follow a link from a Slashdot story or something and end up at a site with a lot of ads, but you won't casually subscribe to an RSS feed. So, you're not going to have to worry much about "RSS spam" in the general case.
I have no ethical problems with ads in RSS feeds. But from a user experience point-of-view, I have a hard time imagining that I would stick with an RSS feed with anything remotely resembling obtrusive ads. I might tolerate a single Google-text-ad type ad on an excellent full-text feed, but much more than that and good-bye. (Including a non-"excellent" feed; merely "good" and I'll likely just unsubscribe.)
You can slap an ad on a webpage, but you can't just slap one on an RSS feed. I just can't see this becoming a problem, and anyone that tries to make it one will probably end up self-destructing.
Computer geeks don't play sports games. They play FPS, strategy, and CRPGames. Believe it or not, its jocks and jock wannabes that play sports games.
As jock and jock wannabes outnumber us about 6 or 7 : 1, this is also why "our" hobby of computer gaming is becoming less and less about geeks.
#include <std_generalization_disclaimer>
Game companies need to stop thinking about making money because if the game is crap I'm probably just going to pirate it anyway....
Or you might consider, you know, not playing it at all?
I'm not saying this as an anti-pirate screed. I'm saying, don't you have better things to do than play crappy games? (Unless it's a springboard for other projects, but that's a rare case.)
No shit, Sherlock, but like I said, unless you've got a massive cache of peer-reviewed studies heretofore unknown to mankind, anecdotes are all we've got. I'd say it's very well established that RSI exists, and like I said, I've only heard one kind of story, plus my own experience of reduced stress on the hand, which is why I invited counter-anectdotes. I note none appeared. "Proves" nothing, but again, all we've got.
In the lieu of science, even those of us with a highly scientific bent are not required to shove our heads into the sand and yell that we can't possibly know anything, anyhow, not even for personal use. I've inherited something-or-other from my dad that seems to make it difficult to absorb iron. It doesn't have a name that I know of, let alone a scientific treatment. But rather than shove my head in the sand, I take iron pills. (A lot; typically on the order of 700% of my RDA, and I can handle even more than that, whereas even 350%, one pill I take, makes everybody else I know who has tried one sick to their stomach, even if taken with a meal.) I'd rather have a scientific treatment, but as there won't be one anytime soon, I am not obligated to yell "I can't know what to do!" and suffer a lifetime of permanent anemia just so I can feel Scientific.
So, nuts to your "bull".
Oh, and nobody I know of says it "heals" or "cures" RSI, it just causes it to flare up less and be less of a problem. (Somebody probably does, but I am not responsible for them. I certainly didn't.)
The fact is, QWERTY works and it works quite well.
Yes it does.
That would be its primary problem.
There is nothing like trying to get people out of a local opitma, even if it is sending them towards disaster. It's like trying to quit smoking; you know it will lead to a better life, but the current cost of a cigarette is so minimal, and the current pleasure of it so high.
QWERTY won't kill your hand in ten minutes or ten days. More like ten years. For some people, maybe even never. But for others, much sooner. I for one would prefer to never get RSI, and I decided after I experienced what turned out to be a false alarm that I never wanted to experience the real thing. Unfortunately, no science has been done in this domain to my knowledge so we are on our own with anecdotes. I note, however, that while I have heard many "I switched from QWERTY to DVORAK and my pain got better" stories, I have never heard an "I switched to DVORAK and my pain got worse until I went back to QWERTY". (People with that story are invited to comment and tell it, please!)
DVORAK probably isn't an answer to all the problems, but it helps a lot. You really do move your hands a lot less. As a secondary result, you will also find yourself actually touchtyping; all my life my hands were always wandering with QWERTY, now they don't, because they don't have to; wandering hands always "wander" into sub-optimal positions, which if you think about it ought to be a characteristic of a properly designed keyboard layout.
It's also about the only ergonomic thing you can do to a laptop.
For most of us non-competitive typer types, i.e., probably all but maybe one person reading this post, speed isn't a reason to move to Dvorak. But comfort is. This is so much nicer; the gain-per-minute is small, but I still plan to put a lot more minutes in front of a keyboard.
There is surprisingly little research on post-early-childhood development.
Really? I'm sure that nobody has studied "the best time to learn a computer language", but if you've done a real survey of the literature, I'm sure you can synthesize your own answer superior to pretty much anything you can read here.
My own conjecture is that "developer ability" (the ability to construct your own abstractions, and use others effectively) as opposed to mere "coder abilitity" (the ability to make code "do this" and "do that") is probably almost directly correlated to mathematical ability, both in the K-12 and upper-level-college senses of the term. In fact I suspect there would be an almost direct parallel between the "numerical manipulation" skills that constitutes most math in a K-12 education, and the ability to do math at a Mathematician's level. To use the somewhat-out-of-date-but-still-useful Piaget naming, "concrete operational" vs. "formal operational".
I'm not saying the two are identical, just that the cognitive skillsets are so similar that the development literature for math is likely to apply quite directly to coding. Trying to teach an average six-year-old "Object Orientation" is probably too much abstraction for them; they may learn to manipulate pre-existing objects but I'd bet that until they become "formal operational" they will have a hard time creating good objects of their own.
OO here is just an example; functional, for instance, I'd expect to be even harder to really grasp in the general case. You could teach simple map and filter, but they aren't going to get the full richness. Again, on average.
So this is a meta-answer: I don't know the answer to your question, and 99 out of 100 people posting won't either. But I can refer you to the literature on learning math and guess that it is as likely to apply as anything, with the mapping I've given you here. I can't be sure, but it's a good guess. And I'm pretty there's been a lot of study on that topic.
(People rushing to reply to this are encouraged to be sure they understand the meaning of "concrete" and "formal operational", and the meaning of the word "average". If so, fire away, but I'm sick of people mentally editing qualifiers like "average" or "most" out of my messages and then firing with all cannons as if they weren't there, and if you don't know those Piaget terms you don't really know what I said here.)
(And while I've defined the terminology, I'm going to point out a lot of people who think they are "developers" are in fact "coders", at least as evidenced by the source code I've seen both in closed and open source projects. Few people seem capable of creating decent abstractions.)
While that is an excellent paper and I've been known to link to it from time to time, that isn't what the GP was referring to. Assuming Mozilla's Find dialog isn't bugging out on me (focus issues, it keeps searching the wrong tab for me but I can't replicate the various focus issues I have well enough to file bugs), "depression" doesn't even show up in that paper.
Unfortunately, Googling for "self-assessment depression" isn't turning up anything relevant, just depression self-tests. But I can vouch for the fact that there was work done that demonstrates that; I recall it from my abnormal psych class. It is, no pun intended, slightly depressing, but I think the interpretation that being slightly optimistic beats out realism or depression in most ways is the best one. Hyper-realistic self-assessment isn't in and of itself a goal worth pursuing, and often a bit of optimism can be a good thing; you may correctly assess that you are not currently capable of something, but that doesn't mean you can't become capable if you just try, and a bit of optimism helps you try.
Adding Tapestry looks like adding another language to me for a lot of us.
I'm working on a pure Javascript solution to that problem, XBLinJS (sourceforge project) which implements the capabilities of XBL in JS. It will is easy to create widgets that are XMLHttpRequest aware. I don't ship any, partially because the project is young and partially because needs tend to be too specific to be easily demo-able, but it's not too hard; I'll be doing that today or tommorow in the project XBLinJS is supporting for me.
Now that's not adding another language.
And although the article makes a statement that 400ppm for CO2 is a critical point - it never explains what evidence supports this number.
"It's round, and God works in base 10 using our measurement units. See also, speed of light in meters per second (we actually screwed up, it's really 300,000 km/s exactly), and the world ending in 2000, or maybe 2100."
I send out my resume... ...no, wait, I fill out yet another dumb form while my resume sits and collects virtual dust... ... and just carefully file all the lack of responses (even automated ones!) in my brain.
So far the only danger of this is that it tends to result in lowered levels of certain vital nuerotransmitters, which manifests as "depression".
To answer your question, I have no idea what people do; I had no idea that people were getting so many offers and interviews they needed special tracking software. My system seems to be working pretty well, at least in the sense that no system could possibly be more useful for me.
(What do you do when even networking fails? I have a network, but it consists of people who have work or know people who have work in the theoretical sense of "Gee, it'd be nice if we could do X", but can't scrape together any money for it.)
But never with a consumer market for the devices. You need realtime graphics of maximal quality and speed, you need a GPU. I am fully aware of that wheel, but it isn't a law of nature, not even on par with Moore's law, it has to be analysed on a case-by-case basis. (See, told you I knew about it. :-) )
GPUs win big by being years ahead of what the CPU could do. People aren't going to stop wanting realtime maximal-quality graphics, and GPUs aren't going to stop being ahead of what your CPU could do by years for a long time. They aren't going back on to the CPU anytime soon.
That's right, buy the hype....
General purpose processors can't be as good at graphics as graphics cards, the optimizations are mutually exclusive in a lot of ways, especially in the physical world. If they are, virtually by definition they aren't very good CPUs.
This isn't going to change. Searching a string for the next occurance of "</bleh>" isn't going to be well done by a GPU, but CPUs have to do that all the time and you can parallelize to your hearts content, but that need in the real world isn't going away.
Despite the centralization trends towards CPUs, I expect we'll always have some form of GPU, right up to the day it's specialized to generate direct neural input to our simulated minds. We'll always want the extra performance and it is likely to always consist of highly specialized computations that have mutually exclusive optimizations to general purpose CPUs.
emphasized text editors for making gui objects. Gui by the blind ???
Try again with Python sometime. It's actually a kick-ass idea and I've long since stopped using graphical GUI constructors, but trying to do it in Java would be a nightmare; I wouldn't want to do that and it was probably a bad idea to teach it there.
The idea is that you generate your GUI from metadata of some kind (and you can almost always find some relevant metadata), and after you get good at it, while the graphical builders can still throw down a skeleton faster than you, you'll kill them in laying down a complete, usable GUI. Oh, and consistent, which they don't have a prayer of acheiving without super-human discipline or super-human management and quality control.
And if you have a wide variety of similar, but not quite identical things to edit, where they build a form for each and you generate a GUI off of the object description itself somehow, you'll even kill them on that point.
GUI builders have their place, but they are more like training wheels than swiss army knives.
(The only slightly annoying thing in wx is the ID issue, since you're going to be generating a lot of widgets. I used an ID generator to give out guaranteed unique IDs, but ISTR they had a better solution in the later versions. Unfortunately, I have no idea what it was or what it was called, so I can't give you any other better hints.)
Maybe this time Sony will see fit to include that really high-tech mipmapping stuff, so their console isn't the King of Sparkle.
(Stupid Sony, I've had my PS/2 for about a year now and I still notice it almost every time I play. Can't believe how unbelievably stupid they were not to include it. That one change, which by computer graphics standards is dirt cheap, would have massively improved its graphics. Anti-aliasing, on the other hand, is expensive to do right, so while I expect it on this next generation, at least while running in NTSC or PAL, I wouldn't have expected it in the PS/2 era. Though some managed, I think....)
After that, I don't trust them any farther than I can throw them. The PS/2's graphics subsystem wasn't an Eighth Wonder of the World, it was an incompetent disgrace. Fortunately most of their fanboys are so stuck up the ass with Sony that it took them years to notice, instead of it jumping out at them in 5 seconds.
I have it for the game selection, and I like the games, I like the controller, I like the case, etc... but the graphics are far, far worse than what they should have been. You have to reach back for years and years to find anything else that didn't do mipmapping.
(I've also played the Dreamcast some more lately. It definately pumps out fewer polygons, but equally definately, they are higher quality polygons, and the fact that the Dreamcast clearly has mip-mapping is no small part of that. The PS/2 was a step forward in some ways, but a big step back from the DC in others.)
I'm actually a Python partisan (like the philosophy and user base better), but the same basic thing applies to Ruby too: If your first criterion for evaluating a tech like this is "Is it written in Java/C++/Visual Basic?" or whatever other legacy language you're thinking of, you've already lost.
Learning Python or Ruby and using it will pay off in mere weeks vs. Java, C++, Visual Basic, and most other things like that. Pay off might be a month for C#, but only if you use C# like an expert to start with. (Also, if you use C++ like a mega-expert, but even then, to use it that way you lose with the staggering quantity of typing that takes... and I mean keypresses, not object typing!)
Ruby and Python have done everything they can short of directly downloading themselves into your brain. You have to expect to exert some effort to reap the benefits. And like I said, it pays off in mere weeks, so opportunity-cost-wise, you lose big for delaying it.
(Note "you" here may be your company, if you only program professionally. In that case, you personally may not have any choice, but the company is still losing big.)
There's a lot of reason to believe that negative energy is just a silly concept.
Negative energy isn't a silly concept. For one of the explanations I've found of this, see this Scientific American article (which appears to date from when that magazine was worth something scientifically), about halfway down. But the more you have, the shorter the time, and the longer the time you want to have it, the less you can have. I don't know the equation but the first-order behavior is something like:
some_really_small_constant = NE_quantity * NE_duration
In other words, it's useless for any human-scale engineering.
I mention this because I agree with your overall argument; as we dig more and more deeply into physics, where some physics fan boys see more and more possible loopholes, I, on closer examination of the relevant finds, find all the loopholes closing all the more tightly. FTL is "receding", and while that proves nothing, the smart money is on its continued impossibility.
RTFA. Carefully.
To the moderator who modded that "Overrated": Yeah, no shit.
Congratulations on almost, but not quite, getting it.
By the way, it's been a bit but I would like to confirm I am indeed still alive, and that that is still Slashdot-worthy news. Thanks for caring.
I know it's been a couple of minutes. I'd just like to point I'm still alive.
Hope I didn't keep any of you in suspense or anything. As pointed out by noted scientist Douglas Adams, suspense can be fatal in large doses.
Hi.
I'm still alive, too.
Yeah, that's kinda a mundane fact, but the evidence says that Slashdot cares about that sort of thing.
Would someone be so kind as to submit this comment as a Slashdot front-page story? I'd feel kinda egotistical submitting it myself.
Forget the inflammatory "gun" example, by this standard we should hold kitchen knife manufacturers responsible if they don't exercise "reasonable care"!
Don't think for a second that our clueless bureaucrats are special. The root fallacy here, trying to legislate tools rather than results, is widespread. Centuries of tool use and lawmakers still lack the cognitive toolset to deal with them.
I talk about this some in the context of "IP", but the argument trivially extends to other things as well.
But buck up a little; this isn't set in stone, it's just a law, and one on the fringe at that. The harder they come down the more people will agree with us. (I sometimes think our best strategy is to give Hollywood everything it wants, right now, and when people begin to have to worry about whether their particular combination of TV, DVD/video player, amplifier, speakers, and video disk are compatible, we'll win. Yeah, it's dangerous, but in the long term it could be best... BTW, I can counterargue this all day long, this isn't the total sum of my opinion, so feel free to post the counter-arguments if you like but don't expect to surprise me or anything.)
Riiiiiiiiiiiight...... I'm not sure if I should recommend a good rhetoric course or reccomend you stay away from them.
By the way, since you're such a "real man" and an ass, I'm banning you from using any tools other than an assembler from the 60s. You shouldn't take advantage of tools built that you don't respect the builders of.
Why make it easy for the 0.01% of programmers who code parsers, instead of the 99.09% who *use* that language?
.01% of the programmers making our lives easier, indeed, even possible. If you don't support the guys writing the languages you work in, it will never be easy for the 99.99%. Does everything have to have a global payoff?
Because it's those
To concretize this point, your "insightful" argument applies 100% identically to Bison and yacc et al. Do you seriously think 99.99% of programmers would be better off without them? No, they'd be worse, because the tools those programs enable either wouldn't exist or would be of a lower-quality due to being "one-off" POSs.
Besides, think about what you're ultimately saying: "It won't directly benefit me, why the hell should it benefit anyone else?"
A better idea is to have something which acts like an XML parser except that it takes in a programming language instead of actual XML.
Which would make it an XML parser.
(Think about it. Think about what makes a parser, and make sure to separate "syntax" from "semantics" in your head, which is hard work.)