When a gui editor can create easily read code that loads faster than something I can do in the same amount of time with notepad
Notepad? Seriously? I mean, I can understand not wanting to use a GUI editor since they all suck, but you're only hurting yourself if you insist on using the second most primitive tool available. (Why not go the whole hog and use EDLIN?)
There are a whole load of things in between that provide conveniences like indentation, tag/attribute completion, on-the-fly validation, etc while still letting you write the HTML yourself the way you want it. You should be using one. It will make you more productive and increase the quality of the web pages you produce; and if you are really refusing to do so, then you, sir/madam, are no more a professional than a "carpenter" would be who insisted on planing wood with a sharpened screwdriver.
It is 2012, not 1962. Am I seriously reading someone asking what the problem would be with disenfranchising "impoverished and minority voters"?
A few of the poor might be civically involved and responsible, such as yourself.
"I say, boy! You are not like those other poors who are all lazy and stupid! Well done. Have a pat on the head."
But on the average, poor people have been shown to have bad decision-making skills.
By whom? Citations please, preferably to studies that show that middle- and upper-income people are significantly better at making decisions. (Because it sure looks like a lot of rich folk have made some pretty shitty decisions recently. It wasn't poor people who invented subprime mortgages!)
Or do you mean that it's self-evident from the fact that they're poor? Because that would be your privilege talking, not your brain. It is not, in general, straightforward to pull oneself up by one's bootstraps. Being able to make good decisions doesn't help if none of the available options is good.
Also, "minority"? Are you serious?
I don't know about hir, but I am. Yes, of the people receiving state support in the USA today, proportionally more are from minority backgrounds, and skewing the voter pool in favor of the majority ethnic group would be a problem.
You're playing the structural racism card, and that's not a healthy way to play.
Why not? Structural racism is a thing. Pointing out that the policy you are advocating would be a terrible idea because it would disproportionately disenfranchise people who already suffer from the racism endemic in this nation is hardly unhealthy. It's ignoring the problem that would be unhealthy.
Oh no, we can't increase our standards, or else a group that is disproportionately represented in the lower score will be disadvantaged.
Come back and try this argument again when you have a shred of evidence that shows that letting poor people vote is bad for democracy.
Oh, and you're a racist, because the only logical conclusion of your argument is that white people are smarter than any other race. Burned any good crosses lately?
Played one way, why can't they be like Asians, who suffered prejudice and came out ahead?
"Gee whillikers them yellers sure are smart, ain't they? Damn good at math I tell you! And they work real hard, not like those lazy nigfood stamp recipients! Nosiree I am not racist what made you think that."
Played another way, why don't we extend the franchise to undocumented Hispanics, who may have just as much stake in our country as we do?
ultimately these restrictions serve no real purpose and just waste a lot of money in the form of time lost by both IT, administrative and research staff.
I'd be interested to see what evidence you have to support this claim. Dealing with e.g. the malware infestations and DMCA threats inevitably caused by people taking advantage of a network not blocking sketchy websites would probably also waste a lot of money and time.
Are you really claiming that there are more researchers legitimately investigating porn websites than there are horny frat boys who just want to jerk off in their dorm rooms and then steal a movie for later? More software companies who have not figured out a better way to deliver their product than emailing it to random employees than random employees who would install every "screensaver" emailed to them by a criminal? Really? Because that sure sounds pretty implausible to me.
Random Online Comp Shop Inc. isn't going to get the volume license discount that Dell/Lenovo get for shipping millions of licenses
See my post below. HP considers the additional cost of an OEM Windows license to be US$75 (Home Premium) or $100 (Professional).
Last I checked, HP was the single biggest PC manufacturer in the world. If there's a good volume discount going, I'm guessing they get it.
Now, maybe HP don't add as much crapware as more consumer-focused OEMs. But, well, I don't know how much the shovelware authors pay for each installation, but I really doubt it's more than a few dollars at most per program, and even Dell doesn't ship that many programs. They won't be offsetting a full $100 by any means. That, my friend is why the Microsoft tax is a real thing that costs real people real money if they don't want to use Windows. And that's terrible.
Does anyone honestly think that retailers would charge you $50 less (or whatever the cost of the Windows License is, probably closer to $15) if Windows wasn't installed?
Well, how about we ask the retailers?
I am looking right now at HP's "configure your laptop" screen in their online store.
The OS selection options they are offering me are:
Genuine Windows 7 Professional 32 [add $0.00]
Genuine Windows 7 Professional 64
Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium 64 [subtract $25.00]
FreeDOS [subtract $100.00]
So, if you are right - if the cost of a Windows license is just $15 or so, there is no Microsoft tax, and computers are subsidized by Windows-only crapware - why is HP willing to refund me $100 on the spot if I choose not to have Windows?
That's the precise problem. 1. the language was never designed, it accreted, and is mathematlcally impossible to describe fully in most sensible formats. 2. we can't throw it away because there's billions of words of text in it accumulated over ten years. 3. we can't throw it away because the existing editor base demand it stay because they're used to it.
Wait, are you talking about MediaWiki templating or PHP?
The ruling class of Japan is freaking the fuck out because they can't get their people to have kids.
That would be because the ruling class of Japan is a bunch of racists obsessed with the purity of Japanese blood.
So is a good chunk of Europe.
See above, but substitute "European culture".
Stop giving them fodder for their factories and machines.
And watch in amazement as they simply loosen immigration restrictions instead, and millions of Mexicans gladly rush northwards to a better life!
Seriously, the only reason Japan is hurting is because they make it so damn difficult for anyone else to settle there (even Chinese and Koreans, let alone anyone with a different eye shape or skin color), and the only reason western Europe is hurting is because so many of the immigrants offering cheap labor have the unfortunate habit of wearing a turban or headscarf. But it's the poor people in America who are virulently racist against Latin@s, not the rich...
For example, just this morning I replaced Debian on my computer with the Twitter API. It works great, boot times are much faster. Now I'm going to uninstall Firefox and just access the web via the Facebook API.
Re:Lots of Irritating Superfluous (curly) Parenthe
on
ISO Updates C Standard
·
· Score: 1
But wouldn't variables declared in the middle of the function still have function scope anyway?
Not in the sense you appear to have in mind. This is C, not Javascript or Python. A variable declared halfway through the function has a scope half the size of one declared at the start, and cannot be accidentally read before it has been initialized.
And safer, too, since it means you can always see at a glance that every variable is being initialized properly before it's used.
(Also it is not always possible, or even desirable, to break code into functions of a few lines. Anyone who claims otherwise is a puritan fanatic whose assertions should be taken with a very large pinch of salt; it is unlikely they have experience with a broad range of complex real-world programming situations.)
OK, let's refine the statement, then: you should not use MSVC if you can avoid it because it is non-free and perfectly usable free alternatives are readily available.
Seems quite reasonable and consistent now. The alternatives are also better, since they implement C language features standardized less than 20 years ago!
"For a decades-old version of the standard that was made obsolete before the end of the last millenium,..."
I don't even know what you're trying to argue. Mixed declarations and code is standard C and has been for over a decade. It is not a GCC extension. It is a basic part of the standard C programming language that any modern compiler should implement.
Age has nothing to do with that. I cut my teeth on 8-bit BASIC, but Microsoft had nothing to do with the implementation. And while I did use Windows for a while in my teens before I matured into a *nix user, those were the days before Microsoft's monopoly abuse had quite destroyed all competition in the markets they chose to enter, so I was able to choose from a range of development tool providers (and chose Borland).
No, it's not. Do Slashdotters really believe this? Clang/LLVM is the driving free-as-in-speech compiler suite these days.
Hahahahahahahahahahahahaha.
Clang is the up-and-coming challenger, and it looks pretty inevitable that it's going to win eventually. But the world moves slower than you might like. Right now, clang is so far from taking over from GCC that it's not even funny.
Just because Apple uses something doesn't mean it dominates everything else in the world. Everywhere I look that isn't Apple, I see either GCC or ICC. In much of industry, people are only just starting to migrate from old vendor compilers to GCC as part of the slow ongoing UNIX-to-Linux shift.
I gave up on KDE when I discovered it is practically impossible to copy my settings from one computer to another.
Having a highly-customizable experience is great until you buy a new box and discover you're either going to waste hours reproducing your customizations manually, or try to copy things, have it break, and experience the hell of grepping for hardcoded paths in undocumented XML soup.
That's when I realized I wasn't even using much more than the window manager and the panel anyway, so I switched to FVWM2, whose configuration is stored in a single human-readable text file, and had a setup that was even more to my tastes, cloned across all my computers, in minutes.
KDE is undoubtedly awesome, but simplicity is also a feature, and it's one that the monolithic environments cannot provide -- by design.
The 4-digit PIN normally only applies to buttons that you push with your finger, where brute-force attacks are not really an option. If your bank has ATMs that permit 10,000 attempts before they swallow the card, or uses a 4-digit PIN as a password for their online services, I suggest you take your money elsewhere.
I'm looking forward to someone/some company doing something truly original.
"There is nothing new under the sun" -- some old guy who lived thousands of years ago.
Not much has changed since then.
Even the iPad is pretty much just one of those things they were using in Star Trek in the 1960s, which in turn were straight extrapolations from the clipboard, which in turn bears a remarkable functional resemblance to the clay tablets used to record the Epic of fucking Gilgamesh way back before Solomon even observed the general absence of novelty in the world.
"Innovation" means "being first to market with the obvious idea everyone is working on." It always has. Look how many people "invented" the light-bulb, or the airplane, or the tele(vision|phone), all at the same time, so their respective countries of residence have spent the last 150-odd years arguing patriotically over who reached the patent office first (hint: it was probably Edison, who literally worked there).
"Something truly new" does not, cannot, exist. It is a myth. When Apple claim to have invented something new, what they mean is that they have taken an old idea, polished it slightly, and will now use their impressive marketing machinery to make people want to buy it. This is clever, impressive, and has contributed significantly to our society's evolution in recent years, but it is not "innovation".
"The Desktop" is and has always been nothing but a very poor metaphor anyway. Get your damn desktop off my root window!;)
Damn right. The purpose of the root window is to provide something to click on to display the main menu, and somewhere to place iconified windows. Kids these days with their "shortcut icons" and "widgets"...
I can accept complains about "/opt" and "/usr/local" - they might not make much sense nowadays
Really? Where would you suggest I install software that doesn't come from my distro's repositories, then? Because I'm sure as hell not going to put it in plain/usr where it could conflict with the package manager and cause all kinds of horrible problems.
Something Fedora is missing here is that it's not the separate directories that confuse people, it's the abbreviations.
Something you're missing here is that this proposal has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with new users or anyone being "confused" by anything. This is entirely about the technical benefits Fedora believes would be provided by having all distro-controlled binaries and libraries stored within/usr.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it was a typo for "online".
Notepad? Seriously? I mean, I can understand not wanting to use a GUI editor since they all suck, but you're only hurting yourself if you insist on using the second most primitive tool available. (Why not go the whole hog and use EDLIN?)
There are a whole load of things in between that provide conveniences like indentation, tag/attribute completion, on-the-fly validation, etc while still letting you write the HTML yourself the way you want it. You should be using one. It will make you more productive and increase the quality of the web pages you produce; and if you are really refusing to do so, then you, sir/madam, are no more a professional than a "carpenter" would be who insisted on planing wood with a sharpened screwdriver.
It is 2012, not 1962. Am I seriously reading someone asking what the problem would be with disenfranchising "impoverished and minority voters"?
"I say, boy! You are not like those other poors who are all lazy and stupid! Well done. Have a pat on the head."
By whom? Citations please, preferably to studies that show that middle- and upper-income people are significantly better at making decisions. (Because it sure looks like a lot of rich folk have made some pretty shitty decisions recently. It wasn't poor people who invented subprime mortgages!)
Or do you mean that it's self-evident from the fact that they're poor? Because that would be your privilege talking, not your brain. It is not, in general, straightforward to pull oneself up by one's bootstraps. Being able to make good decisions doesn't help if none of the available options is good.
I don't know about hir, but I am. Yes, of the people receiving state support in the USA today, proportionally more are from minority backgrounds, and skewing the voter pool in favor of the majority ethnic group would be a problem.
Why not? Structural racism is a thing. Pointing out that the policy you are advocating would be a terrible idea because it would disproportionately disenfranchise people who already suffer from the racism endemic in this nation is hardly unhealthy. It's ignoring the problem that would be unhealthy.
Come back and try this argument again when you have a shred of evidence that shows that letting poor people vote is bad for democracy.
Oh, and you're a racist, because the only logical conclusion of your argument is that white people are smarter than any other race. Burned any good crosses lately?
"Gee whillikers them yellers sure are smart, ain't they? Damn good at math I tell you! And they work real hard, not like those lazy nigfood stamp recipients! Nosiree I am not racist what made you think that."
Good idea. Why not?
I'd be interested to see what evidence you have to support this claim. Dealing with e.g. the malware infestations and DMCA threats inevitably caused by people taking advantage of a network not blocking sketchy websites would probably also waste a lot of money and time.
Are you really claiming that there are more researchers legitimately investigating porn websites than there are horny frat boys who just want to jerk off in their dorm rooms and then steal a movie for later? More software companies who have not figured out a better way to deliver their product than emailing it to random employees than random employees who would install every "screensaver" emailed to them by a criminal? Really? Because that sure sounds pretty implausible to me.
See my post below. HP considers the additional cost of an OEM Windows license to be US$75 (Home Premium) or $100 (Professional).
Last I checked, HP was the single biggest PC manufacturer in the world. If there's a good volume discount going, I'm guessing they get it.
Now, maybe HP don't add as much crapware as more consumer-focused OEMs. But, well, I don't know how much the shovelware authors pay for each installation, but I really doubt it's more than a few dollars at most per program, and even Dell doesn't ship that many programs. They won't be offsetting a full $100 by any means. That, my friend is why the Microsoft tax is a real thing that costs real people real money if they don't want to use Windows. And that's terrible.
Well, how about we ask the retailers?
I am looking right now at HP's "configure your laptop" screen in their online store.
The OS selection options they are offering me are:
So, if you are right - if the cost of a Windows license is just $15 or so, there is no Microsoft tax, and computers are subsidized by Windows-only crapware - why is HP willing to refund me $100 on the spot if I choose not to have Windows?
I await your explanation with interest.
Wait, are you talking about MediaWiki templating or PHP?
That would be because the ruling class of Japan is a bunch of racists obsessed with the purity of Japanese blood.
See above, but substitute "European culture".
And watch in amazement as they simply loosen immigration restrictions instead, and millions of Mexicans gladly rush northwards to a better life!
Seriously, the only reason Japan is hurting is because they make it so damn difficult for anyone else to settle there (even Chinese and Koreans, let alone anyone with a different eye shape or skin color), and the only reason western Europe is hurting is because so many of the immigrants offering cheap labor have the unfortunate habit of wearing a turban or headscarf. But it's the poor people in America who are virulently racist against Latin@s, not the rich ...
If the US cared about stealing oil, it would annex its main supplier ... which is, IIRC, Canada.
For example, just this morning I replaced Debian on my computer with the Twitter API. It works great, boot times are much faster. Now I'm going to uninstall Firefox and just access the web via the Facebook API.
Not in the sense you appear to have in mind. This is C, not Javascript or Python. A variable declared halfway through the function has a scope half the size of one declared at the start, and cannot be accidentally read before it has been initialized.
And safer, too, since it means you can always see at a glance that every variable is being initialized properly before it's used.
(Also it is not always possible, or even desirable, to break code into functions of a few lines. Anyone who claims otherwise is a puritan fanatic whose assertions should be taken with a very large pinch of salt; it is unlikely they have experience with a broad range of complex real-world programming situations.)
OK, let's refine the statement, then: you should not use MSVC if you can avoid it because it is non-free and perfectly usable free alternatives are readily available.
Seems quite reasonable and consistent now. The alternatives are also better, since they implement C language features standardized less than 20 years ago!
"For a decades-old version of the standard that was made obsolete before the end of the last millenium, ..."
I don't even know what you're trying to argue. Mixed declarations and code is standard C and has been for over a decade. It is not a GCC extension. It is a basic part of the standard C programming language that any modern compiler should implement.
Age has nothing to do with that. I cut my teeth on 8-bit BASIC, but Microsoft had nothing to do with the implementation. And while I did use Windows for a while in my teens before I matured into a *nix user, those were the days before Microsoft's monopoly abuse had quite destroyed all competition in the markets they chose to enter, so I was able to choose from a range of development tool providers (and chose Borland).
Hahahahahahahahahahahahaha.
Clang is the up-and-coming challenger, and it looks pretty inevitable that it's going to win eventually. But the world moves slower than you might like. Right now, clang is so far from taking over from GCC that it's not even funny.
Just because Apple uses something doesn't mean it dominates everything else in the world. Everywhere I look that isn't Apple, I see either GCC or ICC. In much of industry, people are only just starting to migrate from old vendor compilers to GCC as part of the slow ongoing UNIX-to-Linux shift.
I gave up on KDE when I discovered it is practically impossible to copy my settings from one computer to another.
Having a highly-customizable experience is great until you buy a new box and discover you're either going to waste hours reproducing your customizations manually, or try to copy things, have it break, and experience the hell of grepping for hardcoded paths in undocumented XML soup.
That's when I realized I wasn't even using much more than the window manager and the panel anyway, so I switched to FVWM2, whose configuration is stored in a single human-readable text file, and had a setup that was even more to my tastes, cloned across all my computers, in minutes.
KDE is undoubtedly awesome, but simplicity is also a feature, and it's one that the monolithic environments cannot provide -- by design.
The 4-digit PIN normally only applies to buttons that you push with your finger, where brute-force attacks are not really an option. If your bank has ATMs that permit 10,000 attempts before they swallow the card, or uses a 4-digit PIN as a password for their online services, I suggest you take your money elsewhere.
lgnge nfiax paavb fxvzv abval agrrh rcjnf zvarp rnrfy agrgj
zvpju rrgrr rnirr qfvvy bfrcn pbfun lgbur oofqf ffbqp vggrz
hrwug vfprn tcagp pupee buegr vnrnf nxpty lhrau nyoay oheva
Does Chrome have the ability yet to make text a readable size without widening the page so I have to scroll sideways?
Does it have the ability to selectively stop/play animations?
No? Then I'll be sticking with Firefox a while longer, I guess. Come back when your browser's accessible and then we'll talk.
The desktop, perhaps.
The Finder, on the other hand ...
"There is nothing new under the sun" -- some old guy who lived thousands of years ago.
Not much has changed since then.
Even the iPad is pretty much just one of those things they were using in Star Trek in the 1960s, which in turn were straight extrapolations from the clipboard, which in turn bears a remarkable functional resemblance to the clay tablets used to record the Epic of fucking Gilgamesh way back before Solomon even observed the general absence of novelty in the world.
"Innovation" means "being first to market with the obvious idea everyone is working on." It always has. Look how many people "invented" the light-bulb, or the airplane, or the tele(vision|phone), all at the same time, so their respective countries of residence have spent the last 150-odd years arguing patriotically over who reached the patent office first (hint: it was probably Edison, who literally worked there).
"Something truly new" does not, cannot, exist. It is a myth. When Apple claim to have invented something new, what they mean is that they have taken an old idea, polished it slightly, and will now use their impressive marketing machinery to make people want to buy it. This is clever, impressive, and has contributed significantly to our society's evolution in recent years, but it is not "innovation".
Damn right. The purpose of the root window is to provide something to click on to display the main menu, and somewhere to place iconified windows. Kids these days with their "shortcut icons" and "widgets" ...
Really? Where would you suggest I install software that doesn't come from my distro's repositories, then? Because I'm sure as hell not going to put it in plain /usr where it could conflict with the package manager and cause all kinds of horrible problems.
Something you're missing here is that this proposal has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with new users or anyone being "confused" by anything. This is entirely about the technical benefits Fedora believes would be provided by having all distro-controlled binaries and libraries stored within /usr.