Re:Actually, facebook is not completly down
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Facebook is Down
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I thought I was in FB jail too. I can't like or comment, and a (slightly um... edgy) comment I made earlier seems to have disappeared, along with someone's response. My wife can like but not comment. I guess it's just a weird coincidence.
I don't have large hands, but they're not tiny (23 cm handspan). I rate the GC controller as my favourite ever console controller (the wireless Wavebird is the best), and I'm genuinely surprised that they aren't highly rated.
That said, a quick check of a few websites ranking console controllers shows that it's pretty subjective, and the GC doesn't seem to appear on any of the worst controller lists.
The graphics were good enough to do the job, and to my eye they still look perfectly decent. The GC may have been slower than contemporary consoles, but graphics are just one (IMO pretty minor) part in what makes a game good (e.g. Thief graphics are terrible by today's standards, and yet it's still a better game to play than a lot of modern AAA titles).
And what do you mean "GC controllers were garbage"? It was one of the most comfortable and pleasant controllers ever released for a console, and I was pretty disappointed in the Wiimote in comparison.
I suppose that you also use rulers that start at 1 cm or 1 inch?
Of course not, that's counting (or measuring, with some notion of quantity), not ordering. And on a ruler after 0 you get 0.1 (1mm), or 1/16, not 1.
If you're storing some elements in your array (e.g. [0.0, 0.3, 10.5, 2.7, 10.3]), then the elements are stored in some order and you're looking for the nth element in the array, in which case the 1st element is 0.0, the 2nd is 0.3, the 3rd is 10.5 etc. You're not measuring distance from the start of items with some width given in bytes (okay, that's how the machine underneath happens to be doing it, but it could choose to store things in a different way (e.g. Clojure handles its arrays as trees), and still give you the results you're looking for).
I for one don't like the "everything white" UI trend. I'd much rather the UI elements were dark, so they didn't use power on my amoled display, and didn't blind me when I'm reading my phone in bed in the dark.
Unfortunately Google Chrome has no option to change it (unless you're lucky enough to be on a website that sets the colours) and I have no idea where you'd go to directly tell Google your opinion on the matter.
My Linux Mint is showing v0.5.2, but I manually installed v1.0.3 (fortunately it was very easy to do). I'm currently using Julia for most of my work, and there's really no reason not to be using the latest version.
Acronyms are words that you pronounce, like laser (Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation), scuba, radar, or PIN (Personal Identification Number number).
Initialisms are words you spell out, like FBI, CIA, DNR, ECG, MRI, DVLA etc.
A TLA is an initialism, not an acronym, so really it's not a TLA, it's a TLI. Not sure which one CAT is supposed to be though!
Well if performance is an issue, and you're already using Jupyter, why not go for the "Ju" part of the name and use Julia? It's pretty much perfect for the job.
Julia has syntax that's pretty similar to Python (replacing significant whitespace with more robust end tags), performance that closes in on C and Fortran, and offers Lisp like metaprogramming capabilities. Also makes access to C, R, Python, and Fortran very easy if you need it, and parallel and distributed programming is easy to implement.
I'm a mathematical modeller who's been using Julia exclusively for a couple of years now (replacing a mix of C++, GNU Octave, and R), for looking at disease spread in metapopulations, gene flow in anthelmintic resistance, and model fitting with MCMC. So far I'm finding it so much easier to write very fiddly algorithms, and my simulations that took days in C++... well they still take days, but they don't take years.
Its performance is good enough that I'm able to drop C++ (I'm a mathematical modeller), it's amazing at multidimensional array manipulation, and its typing system is really good. It just feels nice to program in. Bonus, one of the inspirations was Lisp, so it's got good metaprogramming. Also it's free software, made by people at MIT, so your conscience can remain appeased.
It's still a young language, but libraries are being built for it at an impressive rate, and it has a good collection so far. I think it has a great future ahead of it.
Yes it does have 1-based indexing. But then it's a language made by mathematicians, and like most of them (Fortran, Matlab, Octave, R, Maple, Mathematica) they usually index from 1. There are pros and cons, but ultimately it's just down to personal preference (personally I prefer 1-based indexing).
However Julia does support arbitrary starting indices, whether it's from 0, or say you wanted to index by year and start from 1960. It's not something I've tried, but I watched a presentation on it once and it seemed there were some very clever things you could do with it.
The plotting isn't quite as bad as it sounds. You can either use whichever graphics library you're familiar with (Winston for Matlab style, PyPlot for Matplotlib style, Gadfly for Grammar of Graphics style, GR, Plotly.js, AsciiPlot etc.) or you can use Plots.jl and tell it which backend to use. It would be nice if there was just one way to do it (same for saving and loading data), but I've always managed to get something nice working.
I primarily use Julia now, and I agree, "end" tags would make Python a lot more comfortable for me (plus it would match the Python koan "be explicit, not implicit", i.e. explicitly end your blocks with an end tag).
That said, as a mathematical modeller, I just find Julia easier than Python it pretty much every way going (I even prefer the 1-based indexing, which is a feature in nearly every programming language used by mathematicians). I know Python sees quite a bit of use in science (along with R, which is the other big name), but I think Julia is definitely going to gain some ground on Python in the future, especially as it approaches the 1.0 release.
What's the one thing that a new year changes? The numbers you write when you write the date. The one it takes 3 months to get used to. 1999 -> 2000, when all the digits changed, made a far bigger difference than 2000 -> 2001, when only 1 changed.
When 2000 approached, we didn't say "no, hold on, nothing interesting about this date, let's wait until 2001 to celebrate the _real_ millennium"? Well, some people did, but the rest of us were busy celebrating the change of the (arbitrary) year's most significant digit a year early, and getting used to writing the new date.
And when people say "the 1980s", they mean 1980 to 1989, not 1981 to 1990. People who smugly claim that 1990 is part of the 1980s can sit in the corner and be technically right all by themselves while no one else cares.
I'm not really interested in the labelling of centuries relative to some arbitrary event that was not marked at the time. I'm far more interested in when the most significant digits change.
It seems therefore sad that the last human who was born in a year beginning with 18 passed seemingly without note.
we actually say 400-kilo gorilla, 300 is not impressive enough I guess, or maybe even numbers look less odd:-)
Or a 60 stone gorilla. Now that sounds scary!
(Okay 57 stone). Honestly I have no idea what 800 lb is supposed to mean without making that translation, and if you talk about a 200 lb human, is that heavy? It's just not a meaningful number system to me.
No, I wouldn't get an iPhone even if it were free. I don't want to buy into their ecosystem, nor do I want to reward their tax dodging, or their cult like practices.
When I open up someone else's code, and I find the indentation isn't quite what I find comfortable, I can easily change the tab size and everything magically appears the way I like it. With spaces I have to manually reindent everything to look right.
Sorry, as far as I'm concerned, it's spaces that are the unholy mess, not tabs. Unless you're talking about right-aligning comments after code, but frankly that's a mess no matter how you try it. At least with tabs the comments line up 3/4s of the time.
You can get incredibly fine control over your mouse on Linux with xinput. Yes, you have to use the command line, and it takes a little experimentation, but it's all there for you to customise. To turn off mouse acceleration on OS X you need to open up a terminal and type defaults write.GlobalPreferences com.apple.mouse.scaling -1 Then log out and back in, and frankly it still feels off. There is no way at all, short of installing 3rd party software, of turning off mouse wheel acceleration.
Mac keyboards use some weird ANSI / ISO hybrid keyboard layout if you're a UK user. If you plug in a PC ISO keyboard, then it will swap around a bunch of the keys (not just the @ and " keys). To make matters worse, I don't use the qwerty layout, and I cannot find a PC ISO Colemak layout for Mac. Karabiner used to let you fix the problem, but that no longer works (since it's classified as a keyboard logger). Ukelele lets you create new keyboard layouts... apparently. I struggled for several hours before giving up.
As for applications that still won't work properly with retina displays: MS Office, all the font and style previews are blocky. Inkscape, it's the entire application (apparently because it relies on XQuartz, which might never get retina support). It's certainly been getting better, but retina has been available for several years now.
So I'm left with a mouse profile and keyboard layout that just don't feel right and that I can't seem to fix. Certainly, it wasn't trivial to fix on Linux, but I did manage to figure it out, whereas I gave up trying on OS X. You might rightly say "these are some pretty niche problems", and maybe you're right, but they're pretty important to me, so that's been my experience with OS X.
That is debatable. Having used Linux for around 13 years, and OS X for about 4, I personally find Linux easier to use. The number of times I've struggled to make something work in OS X, even something as simple as turn off mouse scroll wheel acceleration and make the mouse movement less jumpy.
OS X is probably easy to use if you're happy with the default configuration and all your applications can be installed via drag and drop, but the moment you start trying to do something else, or want a different music player to iTunes, then that user friendliness just seems to dwindle away. I still don't know how to make my mouse feel right, or stop many applications from looking horrible on a retina display. I find aptitude much easier than the mix of Mac Ports and manual installation / updating.
Frankly, if I didn't need access to Microsoft products for collaboration purposes and hadn't been given a MBP by my work, then I'd happily use Linux full time (btw no, I'm not an application developer or full time programmer, just a university researcher).
Thou dost make a point, but I think I'm going to ignore it, as it's now non-standard English, I'm sure thou wilst agree. Art thou from the US? because none of thine examples are from the UK.
You'll still find 'thou' in various parts of the UK. It died out partly because of a dislike of Quakers who refused to accept ranking in society (they're lovely people), and a fear of not recognising one's betters (since the classes became increasingly blurred), but it didn't die out completely. Also in Shetland you'll hear 'du', 'dine', etc.
Unfortunately, I think the rules for using 'thou', 'thee', and 'thy' are fairly complex. "Thou art", "thou goest", "thou dost", "thou wilt",...
That said, while most of us don't use it, we can still figure out what people mean when they say it, rather like how we can figure out what people mean when they use singular they.
You are allowed to use "are" with a singular, such as "what are you wearing?" when referring to just one person. For some reason everyone seems to forget that usage when quibbling over singular they!
However, while I'm perfectly happy to use singular they (and frequently do), I wouldn't start combining it with "is".
I've been using Linux exclusively for about 13 years. To me, 2003 was the year of the Linux desktop, and then every year since then.
Just because it hasn't achieved the popularity of Windows or OSX, doesn't mean it isn't just as capable (I've used a MacBook Pro for 4 years at work, and I still haven't been persuaded to make the switch at home). I installed it on my mother's ageing laptop a few years ago, and she's been pretty happy using it since then.
Mint is what I've been using for probably around 7 years now (can't remember exactly). Before that it was Ubuntu, and before that Gentoo and a couple of other things as I tested the water.
It's not perfect (no OS is), but I feel really comfortable using it, there are usually minimal surprises when upgrading, and I'm not afraid to recommend it to other people interested in trying Linux.
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I thought I was in FB jail too. I can't like or comment, and a (slightly um... edgy) comment I made earlier seems to have disappeared, along with someone's response. My wife can like but not comment. I guess it's just a weird coincidence.
I don't have large hands, but they're not tiny (23 cm handspan). I rate the GC controller as my favourite ever console controller (the wireless Wavebird is the best), and I'm genuinely surprised that they aren't highly rated.
That said, a quick check of a few websites ranking console controllers shows that it's pretty subjective, and the GC doesn't seem to appear on any of the worst controller lists.
The graphics were good enough to do the job, and to my eye they still look perfectly decent. The GC may have been slower than contemporary consoles, but graphics are just one (IMO pretty minor) part in what makes a game good (e.g. Thief graphics are terrible by today's standards, and yet it's still a better game to play than a lot of modern AAA titles).
And what do you mean "GC controllers were garbage"? It was one of the most comfortable and pleasant controllers ever released for a console, and I was pretty disappointed in the Wiimote in comparison.
I suppose that you also use rulers that start at 1 cm or 1 inch?
Of course not, that's counting (or measuring, with some notion of quantity), not ordering. And on a ruler after 0 you get 0.1 (1mm), or 1/16, not 1.
If you're storing some elements in your array (e.g. [0.0, 0.3, 10.5, 2.7, 10.3]), then the elements are stored in some order and you're looking for the nth element in the array, in which case the 1st element is 0.0, the 2nd is 0.3, the 3rd is 10.5 etc. You're not measuring distance from the start of items with some width given in bytes (okay, that's how the machine underneath happens to be doing it, but it could choose to store things in a different way (e.g. Clojure handles its arrays as trees), and still give you the results you're looking for).
I for one don't like the "everything white" UI trend. I'd much rather the UI elements were dark, so they didn't use power on my amoled display, and didn't blind me when I'm reading my phone in bed in the dark.
Unfortunately Google Chrome has no option to change it (unless you're lucky enough to be on a website that sets the colours) and I have no idea where you'd go to directly tell Google your opinion on the matter.
My Linux Mint is showing v0.5.2, but I manually installed v1.0.3 (fortunately it was very easy to do). I'm currently using Julia for most of my work, and there's really no reason not to be using the latest version.
That was clearly intentional and meant as a joke, since everyone says "PIN number" all the time instead of just "PIN".
It's a case of RAS syndrome (or is it RIS syndrome?)
Acronyms are words that you pronounce, like laser (Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation), scuba, radar, or PIN (Personal Identification Number number).
Initialisms are words you spell out, like FBI, CIA, DNR, ECG, MRI, DVLA etc.
A TLA is an initialism, not an acronym, so really it's not a TLA, it's a TLI. Not sure which one CAT is supposed to be though!
Well if performance is an issue, and you're already using Jupyter, why not go for the "Ju" part of the name and use Julia? It's pretty much perfect for the job.
Julia has syntax that's pretty similar to Python (replacing significant whitespace with more robust end tags), performance that closes in on C and Fortran, and offers Lisp like metaprogramming capabilities. Also makes access to C, R, Python, and Fortran very easy if you need it, and parallel and distributed programming is easy to implement.
I'm a mathematical modeller who's been using Julia exclusively for a couple of years now (replacing a mix of C++, GNU Octave, and R), for looking at disease spread in metapopulations, gene flow in anthelmintic resistance, and model fitting with MCMC. So far I'm finding it so much easier to write very fiddly algorithms, and my simulations that took days in C++... well they still take days, but they don't take years.
Julia? It ticks quite a few of those boxes.
Its performance is good enough that I'm able to drop C++ (I'm a mathematical modeller), it's amazing at multidimensional array manipulation, and its typing system is really good. It just feels nice to program in. Bonus, one of the inspirations was Lisp, so it's got good metaprogramming. Also it's free software, made by people at MIT, so your conscience can remain appeased.
It's still a young language, but libraries are being built for it at an impressive rate, and it has a good collection so far. I think it has a great future ahead of it.
Yes it does have 1-based indexing. But then it's a language made by mathematicians, and like most of them (Fortran, Matlab, Octave, R, Maple, Mathematica) they usually index from 1. There are pros and cons, but ultimately it's just down to personal preference (personally I prefer 1-based indexing).
However Julia does support arbitrary starting indices, whether it's from 0, or say you wanted to index by year and start from 1960. It's not something I've tried, but I watched a presentation on it once and it seemed there were some very clever things you could do with it.
The plotting isn't quite as bad as it sounds. You can either use whichever graphics library you're familiar with (Winston for Matlab style, PyPlot for Matplotlib style, Gadfly for Grammar of Graphics style, GR, Plotly.js, AsciiPlot etc.) or you can use Plots.jl and tell it which backend to use. It would be nice if there was just one way to do it (same for saving and loading data), but I've always managed to get something nice working.
I primarily use Julia now, and I agree, "end" tags would make Python a lot more comfortable for me (plus it would match the Python koan "be explicit, not implicit", i.e. explicitly end your blocks with an end tag).
That said, as a mathematical modeller, I just find Julia easier than Python it pretty much every way going (I even prefer the 1-based indexing, which is a feature in nearly every programming language used by mathematicians). I know Python sees quite a bit of use in science (along with R, which is the other big name), but I think Julia is definitely going to gain some ground on Python in the future, especially as it approaches the 1.0 release.
What's the one thing that a new year changes? The numbers you write when you write the date. The one it takes 3 months to get used to. 1999 -> 2000, when all the digits changed, made a far bigger difference than 2000 -> 2001, when only 1 changed.
When 2000 approached, we didn't say "no, hold on, nothing interesting about this date, let's wait until 2001 to celebrate the _real_ millennium"? Well, some people did, but the rest of us were busy celebrating the change of the (arbitrary) year's most significant digit a year early, and getting used to writing the new date.
And when people say "the 1980s", they mean 1980 to 1989, not 1981 to 1990. People who smugly claim that 1990 is part of the 1980s can sit in the corner and be technically right all by themselves while no one else cares.
I'm not really interested in the labelling of centuries relative to some arbitrary event that was not marked at the time. I'm far more interested in when the most significant digits change.
It seems therefore sad that the last human who was born in a year beginning with 18 passed seemingly without note.
we actually say 400-kilo gorilla, 300 is not impressive enough I guess, or maybe even numbers look less odd :-)
Or a 60 stone gorilla. Now that sounds scary!
(Okay 57 stone). Honestly I have no idea what 800 lb is supposed to mean without making that translation, and if you talk about a 200 lb human, is that heavy? It's just not a meaningful number system to me.
No, I wouldn't get an iPhone even if it were free. I don't want to buy into their ecosystem, nor do I want to reward their tax dodging, or their cult like practices.
When I open up someone else's code, and I find the indentation isn't quite what I find comfortable, I can easily change the tab size and everything magically appears the way I like it. With spaces I have to manually reindent everything to look right.
Sorry, as far as I'm concerned, it's spaces that are the unholy mess, not tabs. Unless you're talking about right-aligning comments after code, but frankly that's a mess no matter how you try it. At least with tabs the comments line up 3/4s of the time.
You can get incredibly fine control over your mouse on Linux with xinput. Yes, you have to use the command line, and it takes a little experimentation, but it's all there for you to customise. To turn off mouse acceleration on OS X you need to open up a terminal and type .GlobalPreferences com.apple.mouse.scaling -1
defaults write
Then log out and back in, and frankly it still feels off. There is no way at all, short of installing 3rd party software, of turning off mouse wheel acceleration.
Mac keyboards use some weird ANSI / ISO hybrid keyboard layout if you're a UK user. If you plug in a PC ISO keyboard, then it will swap around a bunch of the keys (not just the @ and " keys). To make matters worse, I don't use the qwerty layout, and I cannot find a PC ISO Colemak layout for Mac. Karabiner used to let you fix the problem, but that no longer works (since it's classified as a keyboard logger). Ukelele lets you create new keyboard layouts... apparently. I struggled for several hours before giving up.
As for applications that still won't work properly with retina displays: MS Office, all the font and style previews are blocky. Inkscape, it's the entire application (apparently because it relies on XQuartz, which might never get retina support). It's certainly been getting better, but retina has been available for several years now.
So I'm left with a mouse profile and keyboard layout that just don't feel right and that I can't seem to fix. Certainly, it wasn't trivial to fix on Linux, but I did manage to figure it out, whereas I gave up trying on OS X. You might rightly say "these are some pretty niche problems", and maybe you're right, but they're pretty important to me, so that's been my experience with OS X.
That is debatable. Having used Linux for around 13 years, and OS X for about 4, I personally find Linux easier to use. The number of times I've struggled to make something work in OS X, even something as simple as turn off mouse scroll wheel acceleration and make the mouse movement less jumpy.
OS X is probably easy to use if you're happy with the default configuration and all your applications can be installed via drag and drop, but the moment you start trying to do something else, or want a different music player to iTunes, then that user friendliness just seems to dwindle away. I still don't know how to make my mouse feel right, or stop many applications from looking horrible on a retina display. I find aptitude much easier than the mix of Mac Ports and manual installation / updating.
Frankly, if I didn't need access to Microsoft products for collaboration purposes and hadn't been given a MBP by my work, then I'd happily use Linux full time (btw no, I'm not an application developer or full time programmer, just a university researcher).
Thou dost make a point, but I think I'm going to ignore it, as it's now non-standard English, I'm sure thou wilst agree. Art thou from the US? because none of thine examples are from the UK.
You'll still find 'thou' in various parts of the UK. It died out partly because of a dislike of Quakers who refused to accept ranking in society (they're lovely people), and a fear of not recognising one's betters (since the classes became increasingly blurred), but it didn't die out completely. Also in Shetland you'll hear 'du', 'dine', etc.
Unfortunately, I think the rules for using 'thou', 'thee', and 'thy' are fairly complex. "Thou art", "thou goest", "thou dost", "thou wilt", ...
That said, while most of us don't use it, we can still figure out what people mean when they say it, rather like how we can figure out what people mean when they use singular they.
Just because something is singular, does not mean you have to use "is". Have you forgotten singular you?
"You are right" not "You is right"
equally
"They are right" not "They is right"
You are allowed to use "are" with a singular, such as "what are you wearing?" when referring to just one person. For some reason everyone seems to forget that usage when quibbling over singular they!
However, while I'm perfectly happy to use singular they (and frequently do), I wouldn't start combining it with "is".
I've been using Linux exclusively for about 13 years. To me, 2003 was the year of the Linux desktop, and then every year since then.
Just because it hasn't achieved the popularity of Windows or OSX, doesn't mean it isn't just as capable (I've used a MacBook Pro for 4 years at work, and I still haven't been persuaded to make the switch at home). I installed it on my mother's ageing laptop a few years ago, and she's been pretty happy using it since then.
Mint is what I've been using for probably around 7 years now (can't remember exactly). Before that it was Ubuntu, and before that Gentoo and a couple of other things as I tested the water.
It's not perfect (no OS is), but I feel really comfortable using it, there are usually minimal surprises when upgrading, and I'm not afraid to recommend it to other people interested in trying Linux.