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User: Elbows

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  1. Probably on Ask Slashdot: Is it Practical To Replace C With Rust? · · Score: 1

    Rust can give you precise control of memory layout, and supports inline assembly as well as calling C functions. So it ought to have everything you need for controlling hardware.

    Rust the language is young but stable (code you write now should continue to work in newer releases). And it sounds like this is a relatively small project that shouldn't need a ton of 3rd-party libraries, so the maturity of the library ecosystem isn't as big a concern.

    My experience was that Rust took a little getting used to but it's a pretty nice language. In addition to the safety guarantees, it gives you a lot of expressiveness compared to C++ and (especially) C -- algebraic datatypes, very nice iterators, lambdas, generics, etc. And I expect that any well-rounded developer with a good grasp of C could learn Rust pretty quickly.

  2. Re:Umm, why? on Brain Stimulation For Entertainment? · · Score: 1

    Apparently a lot of the rat addiction studies are flawed, in that they keep the rats in cages without social interaction or other forms of entertainment, so whatever drug/electrical stimulation the researchers provide is their only possible source of pleasure. Rats kept in more stimulating environments are much more resistant to addiction. (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...)

    I recall reading recently that a similar effect can be seen in humans. People who can get their jollies elsewhere mostly don't become addicated to drugs.

  3. Re:Completely unrelated... on Cops 101: NYC High School Teaches How To Behave During Stop-and-Frisk · · Score: 1

    The broken windows theory in policing is a different thing than the broken window fallacy in economics.

  4. Re:fMRI? on Empathy For Virtual Characters Studied With FMRI Brain Imaging · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Interesting article. But I don't think it reaches the conclusion that you're suggesting.

    Some people like to use the salmon study as proof that fMRI is woo, but this isn't the case, it's actually a study to show the importance of correcting your stats.

    So basically fMRI studies are only as good (or as bad) as the statistical analysis you do of the data. Which is probably the case for a large portion of modern science.

  5. Re:"Undead" doesn't mean vibrant, though. on Perl Is Undead · · Score: 1

    But my editor can do the indentation for me based on the braces. And if I change the control flow (for example, moving a block of code into an if), the editor can easily reindent the whole block. So using whitespace for indentation doesn't save me any work and in some cases takes more work (when I have to manually adjust indentation because the editor can't figure it out).

    It's a relatively minor annoyance, and I'm actually a big fan of Python. But I sometimes wish it had an "end" keyword like Lua or Ruby.

  6. Re:bit heavy on the fud on The Death Cap Mushroom Is Spreading Across the US · · Score: 1

    in North America, all native berries with a blue or purple color are edible

    Pokeweed has purple berries and some species are poisonous: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...

    According to the linked article they are native to North America. They certainly grew wild all around my house when I was a kid.

  7. Re:so its not global warming? on The Yosemite Inferno In the Context of Forest Policy, Ecology and Climate Change · · Score: 2

    Fire burns up undergrowth and dead branches on the forest floor, but the larger trees mostly survive. Logging removes the large trees and allows brush to grow up in its place.

    So logging has a totally different ecological impact, and probably increases the risk of fire.

  8. Re:Netflix on Mono Abandons Open Source Silverlight · · Score: 1

    I'm using a VirtualBox VM for Netflix streaming and it actually works pretty well for me. Haven't had to boot into windows for a few months now. The only issue I had was some audio lag which turned out to be caused by PulseAudio.

    What problems have you run into?

  9. Re:FlexLM... on Ask Slashdot: Copy Protection Advice For ~$10k Software? · · Score: 1

    Or even better, use RLM. Same basic idea as FlexLM (and written by the same guys, I believe), except with some of the most egregious annoyances fixed. And their pricing is a lot more reasonable.

  10. Re:It isn't that complicated on White House Responds To SOPA, PIPA, and OPEN · · Score: 5, Insightful

    20 year copyright term limits are very reasonable. The current term limits + options to extend are absolutely unreasonable, and they drive people to rebellion.

    I mostly agree with you, and I definitely favor shorter copyright terms. But I doubt that 20+ year-old works make up a significant chunk of online piracy. People are largely downloading recent movies, games, and music, and limiting copyright to 20 years probably won't put much of a dent in it.

  11. Re:Games on What's Keeping You On Windows? · · Score: 1

    I can see where the GP is coming from. I suppose it depends on your definition of productive -- there are lots of things in life that can produce feelings of accomplishment and satisfaction even if you don't make any money at them (playing music, studying martial arts, hobby coding, etc). I personally classify those as "productive" activities.

    Gaming can be a good way to relax or kill time if you're bored, but in the long run I don't find it as rewarding as my other hobbies. On the other hand, if I'm a bit tired/unmotivated, and have a good game at hand, it's easy to spend all day playing it. But at the end of the day I'll be less happy than if I did something "productive".

  12. Customers on What's Keeping You On Windows? · · Score: 1

    They expect my software to run on Windows, so I'm stuck with it. Otherwise I'd gladly be free from the pain and suffering of Win32 development.

    At home, I boot to Windows once in a while for Netflix Streaming, but otherwise I'm on linux.

  13. Teach Him About Failure on How Do You Educate a Prodigy? · · Score: 1

    I'd find something for him to do that *doesn't* come easily -- it would probably have to be something outside the academic realm, maybe a sport or martial art.

    Why? Because eventually, he's going to outgrow his genius and reach a point where he needs to study and work hard in order to succeed. That seems to be the point where most child prodigies burn out. Their whole ego/self worth gets tied up with being "smart" and succeeding effortlessly -- when they fail, it can be devastating, and they may decide that they're not so smart after all and give up.

    If he experiences some failures early on, he can develop the resilience to keep working when things get tough. There's a lot of evidence that, in the long run, success has a lot more to do with effort and focused practice than innate talent.

  14. Re:Rewrite the Constitution or face default! on House Websites Jammed After Obama Debt Speech · · Score: 1

    He did put forth a plan, and it's been analyzed by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, which is where the $2.2 trillion figure comes from.

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/2chambers/post/budget-office-says-reid-plan-would-cut-deficit-more-than-boehner-proposal/2011/07/27/gIQAWPwncI_blog.html

  15. Re:Rewrite the Constitution or face default! on House Websites Jammed After Obama Debt Speech · · Score: 2

    The plan put forward by Harry Reid this weekend has about $2.2 trillion in spending cuts and *no* additional revenue. It's basically everything that the Republicans asked for at the beginning of the negotiations, and they *still* won't vote for it.

  16. I went to CTY on Fond Memories of Nerd Camp · · Score: 2

    I was like 10 or 11, IIRC. The older kids picked on me, and on the first day, one of the counselors yelled at me, made me cry, and called me a sissy. That's right, I was bullied at nerd camp. ;-)

    But otherwise it was pretty cool. I think I did programming for the whole week. When they figured out that I had a handle on BASIC, they taught me Apple II assembler, which was pretty exciting at the time.

  17. Re:First Download? on Apple Releases Mac OS X Lion, Updates Air · · Score: 1

    there is no "open" command on the Ubuntu CLI (on Apple's this is like a double click, it open the file with the program it is associated with), this is both obvious and easy (you already have the associations if you have a GUI double click);

    xdg-open is the command you're looking for. It should be available on any modern distro. There are also desktop-specific tools (gnome-open, kfmclient, etc), but xdg-open is a wrapper that identifies your desktop environment and calls the appropriate tool.

  18. Re:Absolute Garbage on Developer Panel Asks Whether AAA Games Are Too Long · · Score: 1

    Me too! Glad I'm not the only one. :)

  19. Re:Not really on Kdenlive 0.8 Adds Advanced Features for NLV Editing · · Score: 1

    I've seen demos of linux client software developed in-house at Imageworks, so they're definitely using it so some extent. But it probably varies depending on the team and job. Some of the high-end shops are almost entirely linux, others have more of a mix.

    I get out on customer visits once or twice a year, and have some phone/email interactions from time to time, too.

  20. Re:Not really on Kdenlive 0.8 Adds Advanced Features for NLV Editing · · Score: 1

    Video editing is one thing -- I agree that's mostly owned by Final Cut and Avid which run on Mac (and Windows in the latter case). But for compositing and effects work Linux is used heavily. Flame (which used to be the gold standard for compositing before Autodesk bought it and started running it into the ground) runs only on Linux, and Nuke supports Linux as well.

    If you go into a place like ILM or Sony Pictures Imageworks you'll see a lot of linux client machines. And their render farms are typically all Linux. I speak from personal experience as my employer makes good money selling Linux software to these kinds of places.

  21. Re:Is that really well tested in the real world? on GNOME To Lose Minimize, Maximize Buttons · · Score: 1

    I'm also in the maximize-everything camp, even with a 1920x1200 monitor. Even if I don't need all that horizontal space, I like to be able to focus on one task without bits of other windows distracting me.

    Plus, I can split my emacs window horizontally and look at two files side-by-side. :)

  22. Re:What a shitbag... on Teenager Tries To Hire Hitman Via Facebook · · Score: 2

    If you study martial arts seriously, you eventually internalize the moves and you don't *have* to think about them. They just happen. But it requires a serious effort -- you're not going to get to this point from a few gym classes.

    When I was in high school I studied karate and jiu-jutsu very seriously for about 4 years, with a few years of casual training before that. One night I was completely drunk, barely able to stand, and someone punched me in the face with no warning -- apparently I said something to piss him off, but in my stupor I was completely unaware of it until the punch landed.

    We both fell over. By the time we hit the ground, I had him in a jiu-jitsu "guard", with my legs controlling his body and his arms tied up so he couldn't hit me. I was drunk and surprised, and I certainly didn't have the time or wits to think about anything -- but I didn't need to think. I'd practiced the moves thousands of times and they happened pretty much automatically. (Some friends of mine were nearby and pulled us apart, so that was pretty much the whole fight).

    Of course I trained almost every day for several years. And that doesn't make me unbeatable or mean that I have a good chance against a knife or gun. But it is possible to train to fight in a way that really makes a difference in a real situation.

  23. Re:wrong OS? on Desktop Linux Is Dead · · Score: 1

    I do hate BSD's userland (seriously, it's the 21st century, parsing arguments in arbitrary order is not that hard). But I have lots of other complaints, too. :)

    • X11 support is clunky, and Carbon/Cocoa apps can't be run remotely.
    • You have to jump through various hoops to get a sane and useful Emacs installation.
    • In the terminal, many editing shortcuts that I'm used to either don't work, or are bound to some annoying feature in Terminal.app (Alt-Left/Right, Alt-Backspace, Alt-d).
    • launchd seems like a gratuitous reinvention of rc.d init scripts. It must have some cool features, but I don't know what they are because the documentation sucks.

    I could go on, but you get the idea. It's all little things, but they add up. I'd rather run Linux and have the Unix environment exactly the way I want it, even if it takes some fiddling to get the desktop side of things going. But I'm probably not a typical user. ;-)

  24. Re:wrong OS? on Desktop Linux Is Dead · · Score: 1

    Yeah, they got the desktop part right, too bad they did such a shitty job on the UNIX part.

  25. Re:As I recall... on MGM and Warner Near On Deal For Hobbit Films · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I had a similar experience, but I did eventually get through the Silmarillion. I think I read it twice, eventually.

    The first half is basically the Middle Earth version of Genesis. Most of it could probably be compressed into a genealogy chart without losing too much. The second half is a lot more interesting. But you have to slog through the first half so you know who everyone is. Otherwise you'll just get lost of in a sea of near-identical names.

    If you're a big LotR fan, it's probably worth the effort.