The ++ operator doesn't exist because it's so convenient - it exists because ++ would translate to a faster opcode than regular addition. Python isn't compiled to machine code, so it's pointless to have it. It also occurs much less often in Python, because it doesn't use C's stupid "for" loop. The main (only?) argument for having it is because C has it.
P.S.
(result1, result2)[condition] or, if you prefer a special syntax, result1 if condition else result2.
I'll bet that Microsoft could roll out a standards compliant browser in 60 days or less
And they did. IE 8 supports standards just fine. You don't have to convince anyone that Microsoft is teh suxorz just to make them see your site. Of course, you could still do that, but it would be somewhat disingenuous.
I don't think 3d pie charts by themselves are evil.
It's the people who use 3d pie charts when they should have used a bar chart, and then decide to use random, but very similar colors to encode 9 data points instead of just putting the labels near the slices.
I think bigger problems are C++'s complexity, the presence of pointers, the use of include files, and the lack of garbage collection.
Funny - I see all of those things as advantages.
I get why you'd like pointers and the lack of GC, and there might something good about include files as well (could you please tell me what, btw?), but what's so great about complexity?
"Complex" and "powerful" aren't the same. "Complex", in this context, basically means "hard to understand". Why's that so great? Scares off the n00bs?
Disease is just your body's way of letting you know that some part of the body is going rotten. Diagnosing something as a disease does not invalidate the cause nor does it cure what is rotten.
Of course, that doesn't apply to autoimmune or psychiatric diseases, where the body is hurting itself for imaginary reasons.
You're right, @font-face doesn't has to be a licensing problem, just like P2P doesn't have to be a copyright problem. After all, you could only download public domain works. Licensing issues are much simpler - non-existent, even, for non-commercial work. Unfortunately, most of the important fonts are owned by commercial entities that don't feel like giving up their livelihood.
Designers don't want to use random freeware fonts - they want to use Bodoni, and Frutiger, and a bunch of other, well known fonts. And the makers of those fonts would (actually they already do) try to protect themselves with DRM and EULAs. And you, the unsuspecting user, would get those fonts, without ever asking for them, simply by wandering into some site.
So, yeah, it's the designer's choice. And it's the font foundries' choice. But so what?
You are free to use it as you please[0]. You are free to make use of the output of the program[1]. But again you are not allowed to redistribute the program without the permission of the copyright holder.
The licensing is simple and clear, and I see no reason that anyone should think it "a nightmare".
Simple, clear, and completely unacceptable to the companies who make money selling those fonts.
Why buy a $30 font if you can go to a website that uses it, and download it for free?
You can only prevent it with a special "font EULA", or some DRM scheme - both count as "licensing nightmares" in my book.
This, however, is not a clever way of "enhancing" web pages. We have the information we need, and we're satisfied. No need to put bells and whistles on it. If it were up to me (which it isn't), there would be no such thing as "web design".
Then this discussion is not for you. If you don't like web design, it's trivial to disable CSS in your browser, or just use Lynx.
In the USA, the DESIGN of a font is something you cannot copyright
I'd like to add that even in countries where you can copyright font designs, it's still very hard to prove such copyright violations. Fonts, or, at least, readable modern fonts, are pretty similar to each other, by their very nature. As in your example, you can take Arial, make a couple of trivial modifications and voila, you have Helvetica:)
In Israel, where I live, that basic difficulty allowed what amounts to wholesale plagiarism of fonts by certain local foundries. A talented designer creates a nice font, it becomes famous, and, lo and behold - a large local type foundry releases a very close copy, and sells it as part of its large "bundles". The only real force that counters this is the small size of the local design community, and their basic human decency.
Because you didn't download an image, you download a program that generates images.
I know that calling a font a "program" is a somewhat ridiculous, but bear with me for a second. A user downloads a font, and he can't distribute that font to anyone else, fine. But the user can still use the font, without paying any licensing fee.
The web page in the example really has no place specifying the exact font which should be used, as people with visual impairments, people with low-res portable devices, or people whose native language isn't based on a latin script, might have extreme difficulty reading it. However, if you specify that the title is to be in a cursive font, then browsers could simply ship with nice cursive font settings by default
What's the point? All of those fine-grained definitions (that, IMHO, don't include "fantasy" or "futuristic" - those probably fall under "decorative", no?) matter to graphic designers, but mean little to the general public. And a graphic designer doesn't choose a font just because it's "transitional serif font", or even because it's a font with a certain x-height or a certain typographic color - he chooses it because it looks good in a certain situation, something that often comes down to specific letter shapes.
In my opinion, serif, sans-serif (and maybe you could add slab-serif) are good enough, because a layman can easily tell those apart. Defining fonts as "humanist serif" or "modern serif" doesn't really matter to the users (who can't tell the difference), and is equally useless to the designers (who just want Garamond or Bodoni).
Calling someone an "Einstein" or an "Egghead" is not purely a compliment even among geeks and nerds
To be fair, it's an insult because it's sarcastic, so it actually implies that when people think "smart", they think "Einstein". The moment people start using some creationist "scientist"'s name in that context, you'll know you're in trouble:)
As far as I understood it, the Russians just said to the Kazakhs "disarm, or else", and the Kazakhs didn't have any choice. Obviously, they had nukes, but Russia had a shitload more, and was several times larger as well. It was a wise choice, but it's not really the same kind of nuclear disarmament as with Russia and the US.
Never was anything like you just described suggested.
Um, unless Slashdot is misbehaving again, that's the post you replied to:
Imagine yourself stepping out of your $2.1M toy and saying that to someone whose children have died of starvation. Does that give you a slight moral twinge?
Now, I see how my reply is appropriate, but how does your example of two car owners talking to each other, have anything to do with it?
Wow, +5 Insightful... lots of angry middle-class moderators today.
Anyway, that's not really true. Even a homeless guy who tells a starving person to "stop being so jealous" is an incredible asshole. But driving a $2M toy while doing so brings the douchebaggery to epic levels. Replace it with a beat-up piece of crap from the late '80s, and it wouldn't have the same effect.
'til recently, high wages were justified with the insane responsibility managers have
I don't know about justified... For me, it always seemed like a bit of nonsensical propaganda. A surgeon (who probably makes a comfortable living, but it's peanuts compared to what some managers make) has a lot more personal responsibility, and requires much more unique skills and education to boot.
Not all communist regimes are equal, Cuba certainly has a better environmental record then most capitalist nations
Did I say "every single communist regime"? Yeah, small island nations with no real industries can be pretty clean (I'm taking your word for it - although I do wonder how the Veyron compares to the American cars from the 1950s the Cubans drive). But China, and especially the USSR, have done quite enough damage.
So keep the FUD to yourself please.
Aye aye, comrade. Anyway, when talking about communist regimes, there's quite a lot of F, but no UD to speak of - most of their crimes are well documented.
What is so green about starting WW2? Perhaps Hitler was "green" in the old fatherland, but he spread environmental disaster everywhere else.
Absolutely nothing. His actions inflicted quite a lot of damage on Germany as well. Nazi rhetoric, OTOH, was pretty "green". That's why I said, "in theory".
Slashdot Mirror
OK... In this case it was more about Python, though.
Ah OK I see what you mean.
Well, there's always the += operator, and Python has it.
Btw, what do you mean by "complicated expressions" in this context? Can you give me an example?
The ++ operator doesn't exist because it's so convenient - it exists because ++ would translate to a faster opcode than regular addition. Python isn't compiled to machine code, so it's pointless to have it. It also occurs much less often in Python, because it doesn't use C's stupid "for" loop. The main (only?) argument for having it is because C has it.
P.S.
(result1, result2)[condition] or, if you prefer a special syntax, result1 if condition else result2.
If the shopping site is Amazon, the customer's reaction would be, "where's the download link?".
Facebook and youtube dumped IE6. That didn't trigger a mass migration to their competitors, AFAIK.
I'll bet that Microsoft could roll out a standards compliant browser in 60 days or less
And they did. IE 8 supports standards just fine. You don't have to convince anyone that Microsoft is teh suxorz just to make them see your site. Of course, you could still do that, but it would be somewhat disingenuous.
Disclaimer: I'm a web developer. Fuck IE6/7.
I don't think 3d pie charts by themselves are evil.
It's the people who use 3d pie charts when they should have used a bar chart, and then decide to use random, but very similar colors to encode 9 data points instead of just putting the labels near the slices.
Honestly, did anyone manage to read that chart?
I think bigger problems are C++'s complexity, the presence of pointers, the use of include files, and the lack of garbage collection.
Funny - I see all of those things as advantages.
I get why you'd like pointers and the lack of GC, and there might something good about include files as well (could you please tell me what, btw?), but what's so great about complexity?
"Complex" and "powerful" aren't the same. "Complex", in this context, basically means "hard to understand". Why's that so great? Scares off the n00bs?
Disease is just your body's way of letting you know that some part of the body is going rotten. Diagnosing something as a disease does not invalidate the cause nor does it cure what is rotten.
Of course, that doesn't apply to autoimmune or psychiatric diseases, where the body is hurting itself for imaginary reasons.
You're right, @font-face doesn't has to be a licensing problem, just like P2P doesn't have to be a copyright problem. After all, you could only download public domain works. Licensing issues are much simpler - non-existent, even, for non-commercial work. Unfortunately, most of the important fonts are owned by commercial entities that don't feel like giving up their livelihood.
Designers don't want to use random freeware fonts - they want to use Bodoni, and Frutiger, and a bunch of other, well known fonts. And the makers of those fonts would (actually they already do) try to protect themselves with DRM and EULAs. And you, the unsuspecting user, would get those fonts, without ever asking for them, simply by wandering into some site.
So, yeah, it's the designer's choice. And it's the font foundries' choice. But so what?
You are free to use it as you please[0]. You are free to make use of the output of the program[1]. But again you are not allowed to redistribute the program without the permission of the copyright holder.
The licensing is simple and clear, and I see no reason that anyone should think it "a nightmare".
Simple, clear, and completely unacceptable to the companies who make money selling those fonts.
Why buy a $30 font if you can go to a website that uses it, and download it for free?
You can only prevent it with a special "font EULA", or some DRM scheme - both count as "licensing nightmares" in my book.
This, however, is not a clever way of "enhancing" web pages. We have the information we need, and we're satisfied. No need to put bells and whistles on it. If it were up to me (which it isn't), there would be no such thing as "web design".
Then this discussion is not for you. If you don't like web design, it's trivial to disable CSS in your browser, or just use Lynx.
In the USA, the DESIGN of a font is something you cannot copyright
I'd like to add that even in countries where you can copyright font designs, it's still very hard to prove such copyright violations. Fonts, or, at least, readable modern fonts, are pretty similar to each other, by their very nature. As in your example, you can take Arial, make a couple of trivial modifications and voila, you have Helvetica :)
In Israel, where I live, that basic difficulty allowed what amounts to wholesale plagiarism of fonts by certain local foundries. A talented designer creates a nice font, it becomes famous, and, lo and behold - a large local type foundry releases a very close copy, and sells it as part of its large "bundles". The only real force that counters this is the small size of the local design community, and their basic human decency.
Because you didn't download an image, you download a program that generates images.
I know that calling a font a "program" is a somewhat ridiculous, but bear with me for a second. A user downloads a font, and he can't distribute that font to anyone else, fine. But the user can still use the font, without paying any licensing fee.
The average "Web developer" knows nothing about type, and thinks "kearning" is something you do to corn on the cob.
Then why is the Web developer doing what should be the Web designer's job?
The web page in the example really has no place specifying the exact font which should be used, as people with visual impairments, people with low-res portable devices, or people whose native language isn't based on a latin script, might have extreme difficulty reading it. However, if you specify that the title is to be in a cursive font, then browsers could simply ship with nice cursive font settings by default
What's the point? All of those fine-grained definitions (that, IMHO, don't include "fantasy" or "futuristic" - those probably fall under "decorative", no?) matter to graphic designers, but mean little to the general public. And a graphic designer doesn't choose a font just because it's "transitional serif font", or even because it's a font with a certain x-height or a certain typographic color - he chooses it because it looks good in a certain situation, something that often comes down to specific letter shapes.
In my opinion, serif, sans-serif (and maybe you could add slab-serif) are good enough, because a layman can easily tell those apart. Defining fonts as "humanist serif" or "modern serif" doesn't really matter to the users (who can't tell the difference), and is equally useless to the designers (who just want Garamond or Bodoni).
What about cts-case? Does it let you to use more uppercase than usual?
Calling someone an "Einstein" or an "Egghead" is not purely a compliment even among geeks and nerds
To be fair, it's an insult because it's sarcastic, so it actually implies that when people think "smart", they think "Einstein". The moment people start using some creationist "scientist"'s name in that context, you'll know you're in trouble :)
As far as I understood it, the Russians just said to the Kazakhs "disarm, or else", and the Kazakhs didn't have any choice. Obviously, they had nukes, but Russia had a shitload more, and was several times larger as well. It was a wise choice, but it's not really the same kind of nuclear disarmament as with Russia and the US.
Never was anything like you just described suggested.
Um, unless Slashdot is misbehaving again, that's the post you replied to:
Imagine yourself stepping out of your $2.1M toy and saying that to someone whose children have died of starvation. Does that give you a slight moral twinge?
Now, I see how my reply is appropriate, but how does your example of two car owners talking to each other, have anything to do with it?
You can say that to everyone who owns a car.
Wow, +5 Insightful... lots of angry middle-class moderators today.
Anyway, that's not really true. Even a homeless guy who tells a starving person to "stop being so jealous" is an incredible asshole. But driving a $2M toy while doing so brings the douchebaggery to epic levels. Replace it with a beat-up piece of crap from the late '80s, and it wouldn't have the same effect.
'til recently, high wages were justified with the insane responsibility managers have
I don't know about justified... For me, it always seemed like a bit of nonsensical propaganda. A surgeon (who probably makes a comfortable living, but it's peanuts compared to what some managers make) has a lot more personal responsibility, and requires much more unique skills and education to boot.
Not all communist regimes are equal, Cuba certainly has a better environmental record then most capitalist nations
Did I say "every single communist regime"? Yeah, small island nations with no real industries can be pretty clean (I'm taking your word for it - although I do wonder how the Veyron compares to the American cars from the 1950s the Cubans drive). But China, and especially the USSR, have done quite enough damage.
So keep the FUD to yourself please.
Aye aye, comrade. Anyway, when talking about communist regimes, there's quite a lot of F, but no UD to speak of - most of their crimes are well documented.
I'm fed up of this "Hitler was a veggie" myth. It isn't true.
That's why I said "sort of". In any case, it was a myth that he was happy to cultivate, and was a part of his public image.
What is so green about starting WW2? Perhaps Hitler was "green" in the old fatherland, but he spread environmental disaster everywhere else.
Absolutely nothing. His actions inflicted quite a lot of damage on Germany as well. Nazi rhetoric, OTOH, was pretty "green". That's why I said, "in theory".