What do you mean, "why"? Why do you think? It's the same reason anyone invents a programming language.
If they didn't want to make the best programming language they could, they never would have invented Python in the first place. They would have just stuck with Perl or something.
I get those IRS scammer calls too. I only have a cellphone. Scammers don't care what kind of phone you have; it's not like they're worried about following the law when they're impersonating a Federal agency.
They're doing it because they want to make the language better, and they're the experts, so they probably know best how to do that. If you were an expert on language design, you'd be making your own language, but you're not, so you're just an armchair quarterback.
It doesn't look to me like they're having any trouble keeping their userbase.
If you don't like it, you can either stick with the older version, or you can switch to another language. The language maintainers are under zero obligation to make you happy.
I haven't noticed the problem with appetizers, but I don't order those anyway, but for those few times I'm with someone who does, they always come out well before the meal. Maybe that's a problem with certain restaurants, or just lousy timing from the kitchen that night.
For the obnoxious waiter, the only thing I can suggest there is give him a 10% tip and write a note on the check about the lousy, rushed service. That's the one really good thing, in theory, about the US custom of tipping: lousy service can be compensated for. (The problem with tipping is that too many customers don't tip or tip extremely poorly, even when service is good. Then you wind up with things like waiters doing anything they can to avoid serving black people because they, as a group, don't tip well, which of course really sucks for the black people who aren't like this. Also, you get horror stories that go up on Reddit where some poor waiter gets a $20 bill for a tip from a Christian, and it turns out to not be a $20 bill at all, but actually some stupid religious paper telling him he doesn't need money for eternal salvation or somesuch.)
First, I'll state that I'm not an expert at Python by any means, and only started using it in the last few months when a project was dumped in my lap. It's all Py3. So I have zero experience with Py2, and haven't researched what actually changed, and how hard it is to migrate a Py2 codebase to Py3.
But the standard argument, I think (and this was brought up somewhere else in this discussion by someone talking about PHP) is that if you allow backwards compatibility like that, then people won't bother migrating at all because it takes work, and breaking compatibility forces them to migrate and adopt the new language and its features and abandon the old cruft. The other issue is likely that (a Py3 language maintainer would probably be able to talk more authoritatively here) it's far too much work for the language maintainers to try to shoehorn all that in, and that keeping the old features while also allowing access the new stuff without it breaking something is asking too much from the language maintainers. Of course, you could just make it an either-or thing, but in that case you might as well just maintain a separate Py2 installation and not burden Py3-only users with all that extra stuff.
Yes, unfortunately this frequently results in users maintaining old Py2 installations, but hopefully they'll eventually migrate. If they don't, that's their problem; you can't please everyone all the time, and you can't maintain perfect backwards compatibility. Just look at Windows for instance: Win10 has allegedly broken a lot of things, and for a long time now, as I understand it, running really old Windows code in Windows actually makes it run under WOW (Windows On Windows), basically a VM, so they're hauling around a bunch of baggage just so some curmudgeons don't have to bother fixing their code and recompiling (or because they stupidly bought some old proprietary closed-source software and refuse to switch to something newer and better and insist on the sources).
Personally, I'd just push to make everything use the newest version and abandon the old one if I were in charge, and where I do have power, that's exactly what I do.
There is less financial risk to shipping buggy code than there is to shipping buggy processors, which is why during my time at Intel, the validation teams were typically FIVE TIMES LARGER than the design and architecture teams combined.
I was at Intel too. But what they told me was that it wasn't always that way: Intel didn't invest that heavily into validation until the infamous Pentium FDIV bug (I came in years after this).
and then MS subsidizing college education, which led to the movement away from the Linux/GNU tools.)
From what I could tell (I was in EE, not CS), colleges didn't jump on the Linux bandwagon until later; for a long time it was just certain students who were big adopters. In the early 90s, it seemed that colleges were big users of Unix (usually Sun) and its associated proprietary tools, not GNU.
If you equate Sennheiser studio headphones to Bluetooth audio, you're a fucking moron. But I guess I shouldn't expect less moronic thinking from an Apple fan.
Oh, bullshit. std::string is a terrible library that is horribly lacking in features. Qt's QString blows it away in every way.
Honestly, IMO, C++ with the standard library is simply a terrible language that should never be used at all. It's a good language when used with a great library/toolkit like Qt, but only then.
What you *can* do with languages like PHP, where they've grown organically, is limit yourself to a subset of their features (namely, the newer ones, where developers have tried to fix up the language and make up for its past mistakes), and write everything as cleanly as possible in this newer "dialect". PHP, for instance, bolted on object-oriented capability later on, and using that can make your code a lot cleaner. The other thing you can do is use the newest version of the language, as that may have deprecated some of the older crap that was especially bad. One important thing about languages like Python and PHP is that they don't hold backwards-compatibility to be sacrosanct, so newer versions can and do make changes that break older programs, so stick with the newest language versions to avoid this as much as possible, and stay away from language features that are now or likely to be deprecated. Another thing you can do is enable any optional "strict" modes and code to those.
Let me know when your Lumia supports commonplace apps that I spend a good fraction of my smartphone use-time using.
A phone with a long battery life isn't worth much if it doesn't do half the stuff I use a modern phone for.
Commodore 64s were pretty neat computers back in 1985, but their inability to run modern software and their inability to access the internet and WWW make them pretty useless these days.
Maybe you like to haul around a laptop everywhere you go, but if I have to, for instance, sit in a doctor's office for 30 minutes and decode to look up something on Wikipedia to alleviate my boredom, I'm just going to use my phone.
You obvious are an older person, as proven by your low 6-digit UID. You're probably in your mid-40s or so.
Your error is you're assuming "senior" people are your age or older. What you're missing is that these days, a "senior" engineer/developer/whatever in tech is generally someone with maybe 10 years experience, if that. That means someone in their early 30s, and frequently in their late 20s, which is prime "hipster" range.
There's a lot of title inflation these days: people get to "senior" status pretty quickly, and then they either stay there for the rest of their career (until age discrimination knocks them out of the industry altogether) or until they turn to the dark side and become a manager. A few will become "principal engineers", but not many companies use that title. And one I worked with at a prior job sounded a lot like the OP's complaint about incompetent senior engineers.
The whole purpose of having managers is to let the programmers do what they do best: program. If you want the programmers to all learn about business and how to "speak the language of business", when what the fuck do you need managers for? You sound like a shitty manager who's blaming the programmers for not doing his job for him.
Give me a crappy handsaw and nothing else and expect me to do perfectly mitered crown molding in no time at all? You get shit.
That's not a good example. Here's a better one:
I want you to build a nice solid-wood cabinet in an ornate 18th-century style (Queen Anne?), with inlays.
I'm going to give you one tool to make it with: a hammer.
A poor craftsman blames his tools, right?
Honestly, I really hate that expression. It's beyond stupid. You need proper tools to do a job correctly; without those tools, it becomes basically impossible, and the best you can do is maybe jury-rig it.
Oh, I'm sure they do. These days, there's someone, somewhere, who will be offended by any attempt at humor at all.
I'm not so sure such people are on Slashdot though. He should open an account at Hacker News though: the people there have absolutely no sense of humor whatsoever, and any post with humor will be immediately down-modded.
Oh - hold on. Now we are talking about good audio and smartphones in the same sentence? Smartphones are like Car stereo. Usually a lot of background noise in the area, limitations on loudness. Its like a talking dog. The main thing is not that the dog speaks well, it is that the dog speaks at all. Bluetooth is just fine for that.
Sorry, but this is just plain stupid. You're making excuses now.
If I'm sitting in a very quiet place like a library, and brought my phone and headphones with me, I want top audio quality. There's no background noise in a library, and the reason to bring a phone is because it's small and light and because I already bring it everywhere anyway. Intentionally hobbling my sound quality with Bluetooth is not acceptable, nor is being forced to use special headphones instead of being able to pick any headphones I want.
And for quarter-inch plugs, all the high-quality headsets I've seen in the last 10+ years, such as Sennheisers, have 3.5mm plugs with 1/4-inch screw-on adapters included.
Apple's reflect this, e.g. Q2 2016 they sold 51.2 million iPhones, a 16 percent decline from the 61 million in the same quarter the year before
Not a problem. The only thing that really matters to a corporation is profits and losses, not unit sales or marketshare. All Apple has to do is jack up their prices: their loyal followers will pay nearly anything for the latest iGadget.
Nitrogen IS an inert gas, for most things. No, it's not a noble gas, and it's not completely inert, but it composes almost 80% of our atmosphere, so for any place which is designed for exposure to our atmosphere, it's pretty close to inert. It's inert to biological lifeforms (it causes no damage, though it lacks both oxygen and CO2 so respiration doesn't work), and for everything else it's pretty much inert compared to the oxygen which causes oxidation reactions (like rust). It's used in car tires these days, partly as a gimmick but supposedly it eliminates oxygen-caused degradation of the rubber, and race cars use it too.
Basically, if you pump a building full of nitrogen gas (at 1atm pressure), it's not going to cause any problems other than killing everything inside. Over time, it'll preserve everything inside better than regular air.
Don't install a bunch of questionable apps on your Android phone and you should be fine. The problem with Android is the apps are not really curated and it's more of a free-for-all; this is both good and bad. Bad because it's less safe, good because it's more free and you're not limited to what Apple deigns to allow you to have. Freedom isn't free. Honestly, I can't say I've ever seen or heard of real cases of people getting their Android phones infected with anything. The biggest danger seems to be the crap-brand ultra-cheap throwaway models (usually sold for prepaid services) that have a truly ancient version of the OS that the mfgr refuses to update, which has known vulnerabilities. On my Galaxy S5, I'm still getting regular OS updates.
Slashdot Mirror
What do you mean, "why"? Why do you think? It's the same reason anyone invents a programming language.
If they didn't want to make the best programming language they could, they never would have invented Python in the first place. They would have just stuck with Perl or something.
That's right! I use two different VoIP apps currently for calls.
I get those IRS scammer calls too. I only have a cellphone. Scammers don't care what kind of phone you have; it's not like they're worried about following the law when they're impersonating a Federal agency.
They're doing it because they want to make the language better, and they're the experts, so they probably know best how to do that. If you were an expert on language design, you'd be making your own language, but you're not, so you're just an armchair quarterback.
It doesn't look to me like they're having any trouble keeping their userbase.
If you don't like it, you can either stick with the older version, or you can switch to another language. The language maintainers are under zero obligation to make you happy.
I haven't noticed the problem with appetizers, but I don't order those anyway, but for those few times I'm with someone who does, they always come out well before the meal. Maybe that's a problem with certain restaurants, or just lousy timing from the kitchen that night.
For the obnoxious waiter, the only thing I can suggest there is give him a 10% tip and write a note on the check about the lousy, rushed service. That's the one really good thing, in theory, about the US custom of tipping: lousy service can be compensated for. (The problem with tipping is that too many customers don't tip or tip extremely poorly, even when service is good. Then you wind up with things like waiters doing anything they can to avoid serving black people because they, as a group, don't tip well, which of course really sucks for the black people who aren't like this. Also, you get horror stories that go up on Reddit where some poor waiter gets a $20 bill for a tip from a Christian, and it turns out to not be a $20 bill at all, but actually some stupid religious paper telling him he doesn't need money for eternal salvation or somesuch.)
First, I'll state that I'm not an expert at Python by any means, and only started using it in the last few months when a project was dumped in my lap. It's all Py3. So I have zero experience with Py2, and haven't researched what actually changed, and how hard it is to migrate a Py2 codebase to Py3.
But the standard argument, I think (and this was brought up somewhere else in this discussion by someone talking about PHP) is that if you allow backwards compatibility like that, then people won't bother migrating at all because it takes work, and breaking compatibility forces them to migrate and adopt the new language and its features and abandon the old cruft. The other issue is likely that (a Py3 language maintainer would probably be able to talk more authoritatively here) it's far too much work for the language maintainers to try to shoehorn all that in, and that keeping the old features while also allowing access the new stuff without it breaking something is asking too much from the language maintainers. Of course, you could just make it an either-or thing, but in that case you might as well just maintain a separate Py2 installation and not burden Py3-only users with all that extra stuff.
Yes, unfortunately this frequently results in users maintaining old Py2 installations, but hopefully they'll eventually migrate. If they don't, that's their problem; you can't please everyone all the time, and you can't maintain perfect backwards compatibility. Just look at Windows for instance: Win10 has allegedly broken a lot of things, and for a long time now, as I understand it, running really old Windows code in Windows actually makes it run under WOW (Windows On Windows), basically a VM, so they're hauling around a bunch of baggage just so some curmudgeons don't have to bother fixing their code and recompiling (or because they stupidly bought some old proprietary closed-source software and refuse to switch to something newer and better and insist on the sources).
Personally, I'd just push to make everything use the newest version and abandon the old one if I were in charge, and where I do have power, that's exactly what I do.
Destructors are another thing you can't use in a safety-critical real-time system.
There is less financial risk to shipping buggy code than there is to shipping buggy processors, which is why during my time at Intel, the validation teams were typically FIVE TIMES LARGER than the design and architecture teams combined.
I was at Intel too. But what they told me was that it wasn't always that way: Intel didn't invest that heavily into validation until the infamous Pentium FDIV bug (I came in years after this).
and then MS subsidizing college education, which led to the movement away from the Linux/GNU tools.)
From what I could tell (I was in EE, not CS), colleges didn't jump on the Linux bandwagon until later; for a long time it was just certain students who were big adopters. In the early 90s, it seemed that colleges were big users of Unix (usually Sun) and its associated proprietary tools, not GNU.
If you equate Sennheiser studio headphones to Bluetooth audio, you're a fucking moron. But I guess I shouldn't expect less moronic thinking from an Apple fan.
Yep, you're definitely a shitty manager. Have fun in your shitty company when it goes belly-up, you fucking moron.
Oh, bullshit. std::string is a terrible library that is horribly lacking in features. Qt's QString blows it away in every way.
Honestly, IMO, C++ with the standard library is simply a terrible language that should never be used at all. It's a good language when used with a great library/toolkit like Qt, but only then.
What you *can* do with languages like PHP, where they've grown organically, is limit yourself to a subset of their features (namely, the newer ones, where developers have tried to fix up the language and make up for its past mistakes), and write everything as cleanly as possible in this newer "dialect". PHP, for instance, bolted on object-oriented capability later on, and using that can make your code a lot cleaner. The other thing you can do is use the newest version of the language, as that may have deprecated some of the older crap that was especially bad. One important thing about languages like Python and PHP is that they don't hold backwards-compatibility to be sacrosanct, so newer versions can and do make changes that break older programs, so stick with the newest language versions to avoid this as much as possible, and stay away from language features that are now or likely to be deprecated. Another thing you can do is enable any optional "strict" modes and code to those.
Let me know when your Lumia supports commonplace apps that I spend a good fraction of my smartphone use-time using.
A phone with a long battery life isn't worth much if it doesn't do half the stuff I use a modern phone for.
Commodore 64s were pretty neat computers back in 1985, but their inability to run modern software and their inability to access the internet and WWW make them pretty useless these days.
Maybe you like to haul around a laptop everywhere you go, but if I have to, for instance, sit in a doctor's office for 30 minutes and decode to look up something on Wikipedia to alleviate my boredom, I'm just going to use my phone.
From what I've seen, if it weren't for women, Apple would have gone out of business years ago.
Wrong.
You obvious are an older person, as proven by your low 6-digit UID. You're probably in your mid-40s or so.
Your error is you're assuming "senior" people are your age or older. What you're missing is that these days, a "senior" engineer/developer/whatever in tech is generally someone with maybe 10 years experience, if that. That means someone in their early 30s, and frequently in their late 20s, which is prime "hipster" range.
There's a lot of title inflation these days: people get to "senior" status pretty quickly, and then they either stay there for the rest of their career (until age discrimination knocks them out of the industry altogether) or until they turn to the dark side and become a manager. A few will become "principal engineers", but not many companies use that title. And one I worked with at a prior job sounded a lot like the OP's complaint about incompetent senior engineers.
The whole purpose of having managers is to let the programmers do what they do best: program. If you want the programmers to all learn about business and how to "speak the language of business", when what the fuck do you need managers for? You sound like a shitty manager who's blaming the programmers for not doing his job for him.
Give me a crappy handsaw and nothing else and expect me to do perfectly mitered crown molding in no time at all? You get shit.
That's not a good example. Here's a better one:
I want you to build a nice solid-wood cabinet in an ornate 18th-century style (Queen Anne?), with inlays.
I'm going to give you one tool to make it with: a hammer.
A poor craftsman blames his tools, right?
Honestly, I really hate that expression. It's beyond stupid. You need proper tools to do a job correctly; without those tools, it becomes basically impossible, and the best you can do is maybe jury-rig it.
Oh, I'm sure they do. These days, there's someone, somewhere, who will be offended by any attempt at humor at all.
I'm not so sure such people are on Slashdot though. He should open an account at Hacker News though: the people there have absolutely no sense of humor whatsoever, and any post with humor will be immediately down-modded.
Oh - hold on. Now we are talking about good audio and smartphones in the same sentence? Smartphones are like Car stereo. Usually a lot of background noise in the area, limitations on loudness. Its like a talking dog. The main thing is not that the dog speaks well, it is that the dog speaks at all. Bluetooth is just fine for that.
Sorry, but this is just plain stupid. You're making excuses now.
If I'm sitting in a very quiet place like a library, and brought my phone and headphones with me, I want top audio quality. There's no background noise in a library, and the reason to bring a phone is because it's small and light and because I already bring it everywhere anyway. Intentionally hobbling my sound quality with Bluetooth is not acceptable, nor is being forced to use special headphones instead of being able to pick any headphones I want.
And for quarter-inch plugs, all the high-quality headsets I've seen in the last 10+ years, such as Sennheisers, have 3.5mm plugs with 1/4-inch screw-on adapters included.
Apple's reflect this, e.g. Q2 2016 they sold 51.2 million iPhones, a 16 percent decline from the 61 million in the same quarter the year before
Not a problem. The only thing that really matters to a corporation is profits and losses, not unit sales or marketshare. All Apple has to do is jack up their prices: their loyal followers will pay nearly anything for the latest iGadget.
Um, no... Congresscritters can still breathe in there. Fill it with nitrogen and they won't.
Nitrogen IS an inert gas, for most things. No, it's not a noble gas, and it's not completely inert, but it composes almost 80% of our atmosphere, so for any place which is designed for exposure to our atmosphere, it's pretty close to inert. It's inert to biological lifeforms (it causes no damage, though it lacks both oxygen and CO2 so respiration doesn't work), and for everything else it's pretty much inert compared to the oxygen which causes oxidation reactions (like rust). It's used in car tires these days, partly as a gimmick but supposedly it eliminates oxygen-caused degradation of the rubber, and race cars use it too.
Basically, if you pump a building full of nitrogen gas (at 1atm pressure), it's not going to cause any problems other than killing everything inside. Over time, it'll preserve everything inside better than regular air.
Don't install a bunch of questionable apps on your Android phone and you should be fine. The problem with Android is the apps are not really curated and it's more of a free-for-all; this is both good and bad. Bad because it's less safe, good because it's more free and you're not limited to what Apple deigns to allow you to have. Freedom isn't free. Honestly, I can't say I've ever seen or heard of real cases of people getting their Android phones infected with anything. The biggest danger seems to be the crap-brand ultra-cheap throwaway models (usually sold for prepaid services) that have a truly ancient version of the OS that the mfgr refuses to update, which has known vulnerabilities. On my Galaxy S5, I'm still getting regular OS updates.