If you want a full-fledged computer, then get a full-fledged computer. This sounds exactly like what a NETbook should do.
"Netbook" is what it is called, not what it is. What it is is a fully-fledged computer that can be held in one hand and fits comfortably in a small bag. It does not have a permanent Internet connection, unless you are in the tiny minority who never, ever travel out of range of free wifi hotspots.
But Ubuntu Netbook Edition is irrelevant in any case. Who uses such things? They offer nothing of value. All these "netbook editions" were dreamed up in the brief days of 7" screens and tiny SSDs. Modern netbooks with 10" screens and hard disks can run the regular version of the OS very happily.
But only for a limited range of equations. For example, it can only calculate factorials up to 170! -- after that it stops recognising them and just does a normal search instead.
And, yes, there are plenty of cases where one might want to know the factorial of a larger number.
But making sense of them again later is a hell of a lot easier if you've got it broken up into bits in a spreadsheet.
If your spreadsheets are logically organised and present your calculations in an easy-to-follow manner, then congratulations: you are unique.
I have had to maintain other people's spreadsheets in the past. They are not easy to make sense of. It's like the worst spaghetti code ever, but in 3D, and without even a linear flow of control, let alone any semblance of structure.
Convenient for one-off calculations and graphing? Yes, slightly more convenient that $SCRIPTING_LANGUAGE and gnuplot. Maintainable? Har har hardy har.
And yet, for some reason, living in Britain I feel perfectly safe at home alone without a gun. I feel perfectly safe walking down dark streets alone without any kind of weapon at all. Even the police don't bother to carry lethal weapons unless they are actually responding to a specific incident which requires it.
Turns out that when guns are outlawed, outlaws don't need them either.
Ignore the cost of the phone. Everyone has a phone (well, everyone who counts, anyway, and soon that will be everyone for all practical values of "everyone").
Everyone has a phone. Relatively few people have iPhones.
Do you really think Apple is going to let iPad apps interact with Symbian, Android, or Windows Mobile devices?
Yeah, before you get too excited, you might like to remember that "unlimited" simply means "we're not going to tell you what the limit is until you hit it".
Release? For me, Mass Effect 2 isn't released till tomorrow. It's sitting on my hard disk, encrypted, while Americans enjoy the game. If they want me to buy games, why are they artificially preventing me from playing a game I've bought?
If I'd pirated it instead of paying for it, I could be playing it too. And they wonder why piracy is a problem.
No, the simple solution is to use spaces for indentation, because then they appear the same everywhere automatically, without forcing you to individually reconfigure every single program you ever use.
Besides, tabs have other purposes. Configuring my shell to display tabs as 2 spaces would break programs that actually use them for their intended purpose, i.e. displaying tables.
You seriously think we should give semantic meaning to colours and formatting? What possible advantage could that provide that would outweigh the massive and obvious disadvantages, such as the impact on blind programmers?
And if you prefer to look at 2 or 4 spaces per tab, you're hosed.
And if you seriously care about code being indented one space more or less, then maybe you need to get over yourself. Formatting is not actually a big deal. You can get used to any indentation width in a few days once you stop kicking and screaming. Be grateful your code base has indentation at all; I've seen plenty that didn't, or that apparently chose indentation levels according to the phase of the moon.
In any case, indentation width is only one of many style settings. Using tabs instead of spaces doesn't shift braces around, or add/remove space around operators/parentheses, or rename functions to use underscores or camel case.
Try a photo of one side of a real house, and it can work just as well as the sideways arrow.
No, I really don't think so. If I'd seen that realistic "house" icon out of context, I wouldn't have had a clue what it was. My best guess would have been some kind of agricultural building, or maybe a sawmill. It doesn't look remotely like any house I've ever lived in.
See, even if you insist that all supposedly-unviersal depictions are learned, the fact remains that some depictions are more universal than others. The stereotypical American house looks very different from the stereotypical British house or the stereotypical Japanese house. But once you get down to the level of "box with roof and a door", you have thrown away most of the cultural expectations about size, layout, and choice of building materials, so you have a symbol that works well in many countries.
Someone mod this guy up. Yes, it's heresy to say the iPod interface isn't perfect, but that doesn't mean it's not true.
I tried to use an iPod a few weeks ago. First portable media player I have used since an original Walkman twenty-odd years ago, so I had no expectations and no preconceptions. The thing was a total nightmare. After 10 minutes I figured out how to choose a track, but then somehow I'd got it into shuffle mode and didn't have a clue where to look to change that.
This is "intuitive"? Thanks, but I'll stick with unintuitive interfaces, then. Reading a simple manual saves me time. Playing silly games like "guess what the designer guessed I'd guess" wastes it.
I simply stay away from "clever alignment tricks". I don't align comments up that sit at the end of my code lines, and you know what? Neither should you. They're annoying no matter the font-type because rewriting one line can make you end up re-indenting all the comments in that block and it's just such a silly waste of time.
Here's a nickel, kid, get yourself a real editor. Anything worth using will be able to do it for you at the touch of a button.
Let us say it was really a wolf. Then the very same villagers would be all over the shepherd boy. "What? There was this wolf! With claws! And teeth! And the clueless boy didn't cry wolf. When is he going to learn that wild animals are constantly attacking our herds."
Yes, that boy better keep crying wolf if he wants to be certain that people will rush to help him when a real wolf shows up.
One nice recent enhancement is that Emacs finally supports line wrapping the way everyone else does it, i.e. text that wraps on word boundaries at the edge of the window.
Users of other editors may be inclined to laugh at this point. Go ahead; it really is ridiculous that it took so long for this feature to find its way into Emacs. Let me know when your editor catches up with Emacs in every single other area imaginable.*
* Except threading and large file support, which are the two areas where Emacs is still lagging.
Emacs' UI is very discoverable. It has a menu bar by default these days. And it has online help with a decent index and decent search facilities. And about half a dozen different ways to search for the right command.
If you want to do X, where X is more complex than simply moving the cursor around and using the clipboard, then it is as easy to find out how to do X in Emacs as in any other editor, and often it is easier.
Okay, you set an average person down in front of a Windows command prompt and get them to guess the command to display the names of the files in a folder.
"DIR" might have been relatively intuitive back in the days when they were called directories, but that was, what, 15+ years ago now? And even then, I don't think most people would "intuitively" guess that the way to get a list of something's contents would be to type in the first three letters of the thing itself. Humans issue commands with verbs, not nouns.
Command prompts will never be intuitive unless they reach the level of a natural language conversation with a computer. And there's no reason to suppose that will happen for decades yet, if it even ever does.
Wow, that's a remarkably detailed strawman you constructed there. Nice job ripping it to shreds. Shame it bears little resemblance to the post you were trying to criticise, which did not contain a single insult, and did contain a direct link to a Google search that returns, as its first result, a tutorial page that directly answers both questions in a reasonably straightforward and accessible manner.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, so it's back to how it was in Civ 1, Civ 2, and Civ 3. Forgive me if I'm not bowled over by the innovation.
"Netbook" is what it is called, not what it is. What it is is a fully-fledged computer that can be held in one hand and fits comfortably in a small bag. It does not have a permanent Internet connection, unless you are in the tiny minority who never, ever travel out of range of free wifi hotspots.
But Ubuntu Netbook Edition is irrelevant in any case. Who uses such things? They offer nothing of value. All these "netbook editions" were dreamed up in the brief days of 7" screens and tiny SSDs. Modern netbooks with 10" screens and hard disks can run the regular version of the OS very happily.
How exactly do you implement a static type system with reader macros?
Yes. They're 0, 0, 0, and 0.
I can factor large primes in my head, too!
But only for a limited range of equations. For example, it can only calculate factorials up to 170! -- after that it stops recognising them and just does a normal search instead.
And, yes, there are plenty of cases where one might want to know the factorial of a larger number.
If your spreadsheets are logically organised and present your calculations in an easy-to-follow manner, then congratulations: you are unique.
I have had to maintain other people's spreadsheets in the past. They are not easy to make sense of. It's like the worst spaghetti code ever, but in 3D, and without even a linear flow of control, let alone any semblance of structure.
Convenient for one-off calculations and graphing? Yes, slightly more convenient that $SCRIPTING_LANGUAGE and gnuplot. Maintainable? Har har hardy har.
And yet, for some reason, living in Britain I feel perfectly safe at home alone without a gun. I feel perfectly safe walking down dark streets alone without any kind of weapon at all. Even the police don't bother to carry lethal weapons unless they are actually responding to a specific incident which requires it.
Turns out that when guns are outlawed, outlaws don't need them either.
Are you and your wife often wounded in desperate firefights? If so, might I cordially suggest you consider moving out of the war zone?
Perhaps you could move to a civilised country where you don't need a lethal weapon by your bedside in order to feel secure.
Everyone has a phone. Relatively few people have iPhones.
Do you really think Apple is going to let iPad apps interact with Symbian, Android, or Windows Mobile devices?
Yeah, before you get too excited, you might like to remember that "unlimited" simply means "we're not going to tell you what the limit is until you hit it".
Release? For me, Mass Effect 2 isn't released till tomorrow. It's sitting on my hard disk, encrypted, while Americans enjoy the game. If they want me to buy games, why are they artificially preventing me from playing a game I've bought?
If I'd pirated it instead of paying for it, I could be playing it too. And they wonder why piracy is a problem.
No, the simple solution is to use spaces for indentation, because then they appear the same everywhere automatically, without forcing you to individually reconfigure every single program you ever use.
Besides, tabs have other purposes. Configuring my shell to display tabs as 2 spaces would break programs that actually use them for their intended purpose, i.e. displaying tables.
You seriously think we should give semantic meaning to colours and formatting? What possible advantage could that provide that would outweigh the massive and obvious disadvantages, such as the impact on blind programmers?
And if you seriously care about code being indented one space more or less, then maybe you need to get over yourself. Formatting is not actually a big deal. You can get used to any indentation width in a few days once you stop kicking and screaming. Be grateful your code base has indentation at all; I've seen plenty that didn't, or that apparently chose indentation levels according to the phase of the moon.
In any case, indentation width is only one of many style settings. Using tabs instead of spaces doesn't shift braces around, or add/remove space around operators/parentheses, or rename functions to use underscores or camel case.
No, I really don't think so. If I'd seen that realistic "house" icon out of context, I wouldn't have had a clue what it was. My best guess would have been some kind of agricultural building, or maybe a sawmill. It doesn't look remotely like any house I've ever lived in.
See, even if you insist that all supposedly-unviersal depictions are learned, the fact remains that some depictions are more universal than others. The stereotypical American house looks very different from the stereotypical British house or the stereotypical Japanese house. But once you get down to the level of "box with roof and a door", you have thrown away most of the cultural expectations about size, layout, and choice of building materials, so you have a symbol that works well in many countries.
Someone mod this guy up. Yes, it's heresy to say the iPod interface isn't perfect, but that doesn't mean it's not true.
I tried to use an iPod a few weeks ago. First portable media player I have used since an original Walkman twenty-odd years ago, so I had no expectations and no preconceptions. The thing was a total nightmare. After 10 minutes I figured out how to choose a track, but then somehow I'd got it into shuffle mode and didn't have a clue where to look to change that.
This is "intuitive"? Thanks, but I'll stick with unintuitive interfaces, then. Reading a simple manual saves me time. Playing silly games like "guess what the designer guessed I'd guess" wastes it.
I'm guessing you're not familiar with Java or XML, then.
Here's a nickel, kid, get yourself a real editor. Anything worth using will be able to do it for you at the touch of a button.
Let us say it was really a wolf. Then the very same villagers would be all over the shepherd boy. "What? There was this wolf! With claws! And teeth! And the clueless boy didn't cry wolf. When is he going to learn that wild animals are constantly attacking our herds."
Yes, that boy better keep crying wolf if he wants to be certain that people will rush to help him when a real wolf shows up.
One nice recent enhancement is that Emacs finally supports line wrapping the way everyone else does it, i.e. text that wraps on word boundaries at the edge of the window.
Users of other editors may be inclined to laugh at this point. Go ahead; it really is ridiculous that it took so long for this feature to find its way into Emacs. Let me know when your editor catches up with Emacs in every single other area imaginable.*
* Except threading and large file support, which are the two areas where Emacs is still lagging.
Emacs' UI is very discoverable. It has a menu bar by default these days. And it has online help with a decent index and decent search facilities. And about half a dozen different ways to search for the right command.
If you want to do X, where X is more complex than simply moving the cursor around and using the clipboard, then it is as easy to find out how to do X in Emacs as in any other editor, and often it is easier.
It includes an X server, for one thing.
That's the C++ API. Which is completely and utterly irrelevant if you are developing in Python rather than C++.
Okay, you set an average person down in front of a Windows command prompt and get them to guess the command to display the names of the files in a folder.
"DIR" might have been relatively intuitive back in the days when they were called directories, but that was, what, 15+ years ago now? And even then, I don't think most people would "intuitively" guess that the way to get a list of something's contents would be to type in the first three letters of the thing itself. Humans issue commands with verbs, not nouns.
Command prompts will never be intuitive unless they reach the level of a natural language conversation with a computer. And there's no reason to suppose that will happen for decades yet, if it even ever does.
Wow, that's a remarkably detailed strawman you constructed there. Nice job ripping it to shreds. Shame it bears little resemblance to the post you were trying to criticise, which did not contain a single insult, and did contain a direct link to a Google search that returns, as its first result, a tutorial page that directly answers both questions in a reasonably straightforward and accessible manner.