I tried to learn java on my own and was unsuccessful. Later on I tried python and not only had great fun with it, but learned enough to write several useful programs. I'm not qualified to judge java as a language, but for beginners it's not fun and python is much better. I think you could learn more java by first learning how to *program* with python and then learning how to program using java - at least you'll be done with hardest stuff and java's inelegancies won't be as scary.
I've been through that and lived to tell..
on
Insanely Audiophile
·
· Score: 1
And here's a few things I can say: 1. If you never heard a real hi-fi - ok, here I have to stop and explain. Everybody slaps hifi on their stereos, so it's nearly meaningless. So, let's put this bullshit aside and define hifi as something that sounds close to the original. That is really expensive. And buying a stereo for $140k is a wiser choice than hiring an orchestra for a year, becuase you'll be able to enjoy more diverse music, movies, and it will last much longer than a year. It's very hard to get reasonably close to the real thing here, and even buying a $140k system isn't quite enough: you have to put aside a special room for it, spend a lot of time positioning it correctly, experimenting with components and audio wall covers, and so on. Also, once you have this perfect setup it may sound great on one recording and not as great on others. That sounds like too much trouble, doesn't it? Well, you're not in a position to answer that, unless you heard either some similar setup OR a world-class performer
doing your favorite song for you in your home. I haven't, so I reserve my judgement until i have. But what's this got to do with us normal people with normal paychecks? Well, that particular elusive 'almost perfect' quality isn't for us, alas - but that doesn't mean we should just give up and go buy some pathetic sony boom box. There are companies and store chains that sell you a shiny box that sounds a lot better than the box standing right next to it that about half as shiny and half as expensive - but it's still a robbery. Equipment that gives you decent sound quality can be very inexpensive - a pair of speakers may cost $70 or $80, integrated amp - a hundred and single cd player, also about a hundred. And you know, the difference between that and a typical dept. store box that may cost twice as much (rack systems.. ugghhh) is more than anyone believes it could be before they hear it. It's big enough to make you enjoy music you could never like before (I once realized that I never liked jazz or classical
precisely because I never heard them the way, you know, they really *SOUND*). I literally had some cds I couldn't listen to at all before I got an entry-level system (worth a bit over a thousand). Here's an example - you know that alarm clock sound at the start of Pink Floyd's 'time'? Whenever I heard it on a walkman or computer speakers, I could hardly stand it - it was plain annoying. There's a lot of high frequency sounds there and cheap speakers can't reproduce them anywhere close to reality. On the new system they sound just fine - in fact, pleasant. And that's just an example from the top of my head, the most striking one, but otherwise almost every recording I have sounded much better and I heard sounds I didn't even know were there (no, not burping, the musical sounds!;-). One other thing is the soundstage - on a low quality system, all instruments are blobbed together in fluffy mass, while on a decent one you can hear each instrument in its individual spot, and if you close your eyes it sounds as
if the walls of your room were removed and you're listening in a hall that's several times as deep. What's the big deal about that? Well, it makes it feel 'real' and 'alive', a cheap system is like listening with a pillow over your ears - it's just not nearly as good.
But enough, this post is probably too long as it is. Here's my advice: don't be a lazy dog, go to a good hifi store, grab your few favorite albums with you, and make an audition. Don't rush, try various combinations, don't buy anything until you're certain (even if it takes half a year or more), and don't buy anything because someone said it's good. Everybody likes different music, and even if music is the same, people may like it for different reasons. Sound also depends much on placement, a great system may be ruined if it's not placed just right. Some stores have listening rooms properly set up, others don't. Hear as many setups as you can, and your final choice will be good. Here's a site you can read about some decent equipment (but only as a starting point - the dumbest thing you could do is just rush out and buy one of these!!): goodsound.com, and good luck.
How are your actions representative of what most people do? From the point of view of that band, it's quite possible and likely that while they gain a few more fans because of napster, they lose more than they gain because most fans don't buy the cd they downloaded. Sounds to me it was *you* who were irrational here. You tell them you napstered their songs and still bought the cds and went to concert, and they're supposed to jump up and down, hail napster? Because of (4) people?
It's not even that alot of things are wrong and only the relatively obvious ones are right, but that the picture on the whole is completely wrong. I mean an average joe sixpack's life is nothing like what you would imagine after reading this back then - and that was the purpose of this article, apparently.
Re:Why is code readability such a big deal?
on
Mark Lutz on Python
·
· Score: 1
Well, what about different bracing styles? Not to mention braces adding clutter and taking up precious lines:-).
I ran into this problem once, but it's not a big deal: it's trivial to convert tabs to spaces in any decent editor. I think the enforced readability advantage is well worth it.
I'm a python newbie, so take this with a cistern of salt:
Python is good for almost anything, but it's particularly good for studying programming, prototyping and as a 'glue' language. Let's rephrase the question, however to 'why hasn't it taken off more spectacularly?', because it is really quite popular and widely used, just not as much as perl or java. Now, when people are picking their first language they will often pick the one that's the most 'marketable' like C or java or perl. They don't understand why a good glue or prototyping language is important, and naturally they don't want to study language that's good for studying, they want to study a language that's good for doing something they need done. In my opinion, perl gives you an opportunity to do some really powerful and exciting things real quick, sacrificing some readability, maintainability and consistency in the process. On the other hand, newbies will find out that winamp, napster, etc are written in c++ and/or c and will prefer to study that, because of familiarity. And lastly, a language that
really shines at prototyping and 'gluing' will have inherently lower visibility than other languages (undeservedly, imho). All these things considered, it also surprises me that python isn't more widely used. Is this the dreaded 'worse is better' law at work? Are many people bugged by indentation syntax? I don't know, perhaps someone who tried it and decided against using it can share his reasons?
Well, your daughter can be excused since she's just _studying_ to be an egyptologist, but no decent person digging up Yucatan could have enjoyed this movie.
Fight club was just a dumb-ass movie pretending to be philosophical. It was kind of funny that dumbasses got fooled by this pseudo-insight of the movie and hated it, even though it was meant for them. Oh well.
But then you won't get as much of a kick out of having. The thrill of having is part realization that not having would make you miserable. You can't have eat a cake and have it as well.
If you want to play a game that doesn't cheat and at the same time will almost certainly beat you, try chess programs. It can't cheat because all the pieces and moves are visible, and the best of them has beaten Kasparov;-).
You miss the point that according to libertarians, government shouldn't be big enough or have any right to do anything with this info. If that was so, it wouldn't be buying that info. It wouldn't have money in the budget for it, and it couldn't do anything with it anyway. Libertarians have a problem not with them collecting this info per se, but with them having authority to use it in any way. But, as things *ARE* right now, I would say that most libertarians would consider it a bad thing when a corporation collects private information about citizens, because they may either sell it to government or government may simply get ahold of it by order of court or something.
If most people don't need universal all purpose turning machines, why are they being made and sold quite successfully? IOW, if you want to convince me that PCs will be no more, you have to show why they are here now and what will change that will (supposedly) make them unnecessary. There are webtvs, there are game consoles and either cost much less then a PC, so why the hell do people buy PCs if they don't need them? Riddle me that.
Uh.. it's not about willingness, it's about actual adoption. Everybody got willingness. Similarly you could say that Nigeria has even more willingness to adopt hi tech stuff than us and japan combined, but it's just too expensive for them. Heh.
Uh.. technically, there is a middle man! You're connecting to napster server, aren't you? As opposed to going to irc, talking to Joe and getting on his private ftp server?
Wouldn't there be very few people willing to pay good price for items and tons of people willing to sell them? I just don't see that supposed power-gamer snatching some sort of item every 30 minutes and selling it for $400. If it took him 2 hours and he could sell it for $30-40 - that I can imagine, but you have to keep in mind it probably already took him alot of time to get to this point, so the whole enterprise isn't terribly profitable. Of course at first there might be surge when a couple of people will make considerable money, but supply/demand tends to straiten these things out. I got to admit that this whole thing make little if any impression on me, since I never played an online game seriously enough to even consider buying some item. The only online game I played quite a bit was subspace, and there it was pure reflexes and skills - i.e. there was almost no building-up of character; you could saturate your equipment for the ship in like 5-10 minutes. Isn't it obvious that virtual item is only
valuable because of the time/skill you put into getting it? I can't feel any compassion for a person who pays good money for it, when he could instead give this money to a charity or something.. that's just bizarre. Can anyone explain this?
Everybody and their dog knows that a zombie of buried composer may rise from the dead within 70 years from death and demand their copy rights. Where you're from, Mongolia?
Well, i'm not into HT so I dunno.. As long as we're talking music, the stuff on goodsound (and particularly what i got - paradigm monitor 3's speakers, NAD cd changer and NAD integrated amp) - result in a far better sound than sub+5sats for $600 from sony. But of course, it's much better than stuff that is usually available for pc audio... Basically, if you want good music sound, audition paradigm speakers at a hifi store.. Chances are you'll be impressed, although it depends on music too. For instance, I used to be dep mode and pet shop boys fan, and with their music it doesn't seem to make all that much difference. For my current fave - PF - it makes tons of difference, though. With all the atmospheric sounds and stuff...
When I saw the title 'looking for aliens in wrong places' I almost expected the article to say 'after spending millions and millions of dollars to search the sky for aliens, first alien was actually found behind the sofa pillows.' And then I thought 'But how would it get there?'
The best teacher I had was mr. Castelli - english teacher. He was a hippy looking guy, long hair, multiple bracelets, etc. He was notorious for using the F word - it wasn't uncommon for him to use it 4-5 times during the lesson. I know this sounds pretty bad, but it worked - he used it as if he was talking to a friend and describing a book he really loved, and using strong words because he was overwhelmed with awe. He was also a huge fan of Oprah - he said that if he got to Oprah show, he'd stand on his knees (he immediately demonstrated it) and made a tirade about how great she is. I should watch her sometime.. He was also very articulate and had a very decent vocabulary (expletives notwithstanding). I think he later got transferred for the f-word, or maybe fired - and I really think that it wasn't fair because perhaps the only way to be taken serious by students there (mostly black in one of the worse neighborhoods of brooklyn) was to use their language. I'm really quite sorry I never tried hard there
cause of the general fucked up school attitude of 'slacking along' that I conformed to, but he made an influence on me still. Cool guy, and a great teacher! There was *never* any droning in his class - at worst you were in for quite a show, and at best you were a part of it..
Slashdot Mirror
Well, cds were always breakable, didn't that bother you? :-)
I tried to learn java on my own and was unsuccessful. Later on I tried python and not only had great fun with it, but learned enough to write several useful programs. I'm not qualified to judge java as a language, but for beginners it's not fun and python is much better. I think you could learn more java by first learning how to *program* with python and then learning how to program using java - at least you'll be done with hardest stuff and java's inelegancies won't be as scary.
doing your favorite song for you in your home. I haven't, so I reserve my judgement until i have. But what's this got to do with us normal people with normal paychecks? Well, that particular elusive 'almost perfect' quality isn't for us, alas - but that doesn't mean we should just give up and go buy some pathetic sony boom box. There are companies and store chains that sell you a shiny box that sounds a lot better than the box standing right next to it that about half as shiny and half as expensive - but it's still a robbery. Equipment that gives you decent sound quality can be very inexpensive - a pair of speakers may cost $70 or $80, integrated amp - a hundred and single cd player, also about a hundred. And you know, the difference between that and a typical dept. store box that may cost twice as much (rack systems.. ugghhh) is more than anyone believes it could be before they hear it. It's big enough to make you enjoy music you could never like before (I once realized that I never liked jazz or classical
precisely because I never heard them the way, you know, they really *SOUND*). I literally had some cds I couldn't listen to at all before I got an entry-level system (worth a bit over a thousand). Here's an example - you know that alarm clock sound at the start of Pink Floyd's 'time'? Whenever I heard it on a walkman or computer speakers, I could hardly stand it - it was plain annoying. There's a lot of high frequency sounds there and cheap speakers can't reproduce them anywhere close to reality. On the new system they sound just fine - in fact, pleasant. And that's just an example from the top of my head, the most striking one, but otherwise almost every recording I have sounded much better and I heard sounds I didn't even know were there (no, not burping, the musical sounds!
if the walls of your room were removed and you're listening in a hall that's several times as deep. What's the big deal about that? Well, it makes it feel 'real' and 'alive', a cheap system is like listening with a pillow over your ears - it's just not nearly as good.
But enough, this post is probably too long as it is. Here's my advice: don't be a lazy dog, go to a good hifi store, grab your few favorite albums with you, and make an audition. Don't rush, try various combinations, don't buy anything until you're certain (even if it takes half a year or more), and don't buy anything because someone said it's good. Everybody likes different music, and even if music is the same, people may like it for different reasons. Sound also depends much on placement, a great system may be ruined if it's not placed just right. Some stores have listening rooms properly set up, others don't. Hear as many setups as you can, and your final choice will be good. Here's a site you can read about some decent equipment (but only as a starting point - the dumbest thing you could do is just rush out and buy one of these!!): goodsound.com, and good luck.
How are your actions representative of what most people do? From the point of view of that band, it's quite possible and likely that while they gain a few more fans because of napster, they lose more than they gain because most fans don't buy the cd they downloaded. Sounds to me it was *you* who were irrational here. You tell them you napstered their songs and still bought the cds and went to concert, and they're supposed to jump up and down, hail napster? Because of (4) people?
It's not even that alot of things are wrong and only the relatively obvious ones are right, but that the picture on the whole is completely wrong. I mean an average joe sixpack's life is nothing like what you would imagine after reading this back then - and that was the purpose of this article, apparently.
Well, what about different bracing styles? Not to mention braces adding clutter and taking up precious lines :-).
Python's fun to me, personally. I can't agree with 'dirty is good' concept, either - I prefer clean code, even when it's a 5 line script.
I looked at it but didn't like %&$'s - the whole reason I use python is clean syntax (well, the main reason, anyway).
I ran into this problem once, but it's not a big deal: it's trivial to convert tabs to spaces in any decent editor. I think the enforced readability advantage is well worth it.
I'm a python newbie, so take this with a cistern of salt:
Python is good for almost anything, but it's particularly good for studying programming, prototyping and as a 'glue' language. Let's rephrase the question, however to 'why hasn't it taken off more spectacularly?', because it is really quite popular and widely used, just not as much as perl or java. Now, when people are picking their first language they will often pick the one that's the most 'marketable' like C or java or perl. They don't understand why a good glue or prototyping language is important, and naturally they don't want to study language that's good for studying, they want to study a language that's good for doing something they need done. In my opinion, perl gives you an opportunity to do some really powerful and exciting things real quick, sacrificing some readability, maintainability and consistency in the process. On the other hand, newbies will find out that winamp, napster, etc are written in c++ and/or c and will prefer to study that, because of familiarity. And lastly, a language that
really shines at prototyping and 'gluing' will have inherently lower visibility than other languages (undeservedly, imho). All these things considered, it also surprises me that python isn't more widely used. Is this the dreaded 'worse is better' law at work? Are many people bugged by indentation syntax? I don't know, perhaps someone who tried it and decided against using it can share his reasons?
Well, your daughter can be excused since she's just _studying_ to be an egyptologist, but no decent person digging up Yucatan could have enjoyed this movie.
Fight club was just a dumb-ass movie pretending to be philosophical. It was kind of funny that dumbasses got fooled by this pseudo-insight of the movie and hated it, even though it was meant for them. Oh well.
But then you won't get as much of a kick out of having. The thrill of having is part realization that not having would make you miserable. You can't have eat a cake and have it as well.
If you want to play a game that doesn't cheat and at the same time will almost certainly beat you, try chess programs. It can't cheat because all the pieces and moves are visible, and the best of them has beaten Kasparov ;-).
You miss the point that according to libertarians, government shouldn't be big enough or have any right to do anything with this info. If that was so, it wouldn't be buying that info. It wouldn't have money in the budget for it, and it couldn't do anything with it anyway. Libertarians have a problem not with them collecting this info per se, but with them having authority to use it in any way. But, as things *ARE* right now, I would say that most libertarians would consider it a bad thing when a corporation collects private information about citizens, because they may either sell it to government or government may simply get ahold of it by order of court or something.
If most people don't need universal all purpose turning machines, why are they being made and sold quite successfully? IOW, if you want to convince me that PCs will be no more, you have to show why they are here now and what will change that will (supposedly) make them unnecessary. There are webtvs, there are game consoles and either cost much less then a PC, so why the hell do people buy PCs if they don't need them? Riddle me that.
Uh.. it's not about willingness, it's about actual adoption. Everybody got willingness. Similarly you could say that Nigeria has even more willingness to adopt hi tech stuff than us and japan combined, but it's just too expensive for them. Heh.
Uh.. technically, there is a middle man! You're connecting to napster server, aren't you? As opposed to going to irc, talking to Joe and getting on his private ftp server?
Er.. what if he didn't buy that character and would simply started asking annoying questions with a basic character? What difference does it make?
Wouldn't there be very few people willing to pay good price for items and tons of people willing to sell them? I just don't see that supposed power-gamer snatching some sort of item every 30 minutes and selling it for $400. If it took him 2 hours and he could sell it for $30-40 - that I can imagine, but you have to keep in mind it probably already took him alot of time to get to this point, so the whole enterprise isn't terribly profitable. Of course at first there might be surge when a couple of people will make considerable money, but supply/demand tends to straiten these things out. I got to admit that this whole thing make little if any impression on me, since I never played an online game seriously enough to even consider buying some item. The only online game I played quite a bit was subspace, and there it was pure reflexes and skills - i.e. there was almost no building-up of character; you could saturate your equipment for the ship in like 5-10 minutes. Isn't it obvious that virtual item is only
valuable because of the time/skill you put into getting it? I can't feel any compassion for a person who pays good money for it, when he could instead give this money to a charity or something.. that's just bizarre. Can anyone explain this?
Everybody and their dog knows that a zombie of buried composer may rise from the dead within 70 years from death and demand their copy rights. Where you're from, Mongolia?
Well, i'm not into HT so I dunno.. As long as we're talking music, the stuff on goodsound (and particularly what i got - paradigm monitor 3's speakers, NAD cd changer and NAD integrated amp) - result in a far better sound than sub+5sats for $600 from sony. But of course, it's much better than stuff that is usually available for pc audio... Basically, if you want good music sound, audition paradigm speakers at a hifi store.. Chances are you'll be impressed, although it depends on music too. For instance, I used to be dep mode and pet shop boys fan, and with their music it doesn't seem to make all that much difference. For my current fave - PF - it makes tons of difference, though. With all the atmospheric sounds and stuff...
Where's your logic? I mean, I could see NY being totally flooded and Washington being like Venice.. but not the other way around! Look at the map!
When I saw the title 'looking for aliens in wrong places' I almost expected the article to say 'after spending millions and millions of dollars to search the sky for aliens, first alien was actually found behind the sofa pillows.' And then I thought 'But how would it get there?'
The best teacher I had was mr. Castelli - english teacher. He was a hippy looking guy, long hair, multiple bracelets, etc. He was notorious for using the F word - it wasn't uncommon for him to use it 4-5 times during the lesson. I know this sounds pretty bad, but it worked - he used it as if he was talking to a friend and describing a book he really loved, and using strong words because he was overwhelmed with awe. He was also a huge fan of Oprah - he said that if he got to Oprah show, he'd stand on his knees (he immediately demonstrated it) and made a tirade about how great she is. I should watch her sometime.. He was also very articulate and had a very decent vocabulary (expletives notwithstanding). I think he later got transferred for the f-word, or maybe fired - and I really think that it wasn't fair because perhaps the only way to be taken serious by students there (mostly black in one of the worse neighborhoods of brooklyn) was to use their language. I'm really quite sorry I never tried hard there
cause of the general fucked up school attitude of 'slacking along' that I conformed to, but he made an influence on me still. Cool guy, and a great teacher! There was *never* any droning in his class - at worst you were in for quite a show, and at best you were a part of it..