Christian Science Monitor is actually a very good newspaper. Although it was founded by the Church of Christ, Scientist, it is not a religious newspaper and its coverage is actually a lot more diligent than a lot of what gets called "reporting" these days.
I like two spaces between sentences. I think it looks better, and flows better.
But if you typed two spaces between those two sentences, nobody reading your post will see it as two spaces, because HTML doesn't work that way. It still renders as one space unless you intentionally put in non-breaking spaces.
A requirement that one must maintain a 3.5 GPA doesn't seem unreasonable, until one is victimized by a few bad professors who relish handing out F's to people they just plain don't like regardless of or perhaps even because of merit, or weed-out classes where the game is to be tough on everyone to get rid of the weak students and never mind whether they're being fair with the tough love, or a department that is so afraid of grade inflation that almost no one receives an A even when they have earned it.
I have experience with the "weeder classes" at my local community college (one that actually has a reputation as being one of the best community colleges in the country).
I was averaging a low B in Chem 101 and I didn't feel comfortable about the trend -- I felt I probably wouldn't get much better grades on the next couple of tests and my grade might actually slip. The class was 5 hours per week of lecture hall, plus an additional 5 hours per week of lab, even though you didn't get any units of credit for the lab work, and the lab also had its own homework, quizzes, midterms, and final. So it was 10 hours per week just for that one class, plus homework and study time. Because I was at danger of ending the semester with a C, I decided to talk to one of my instructors during office hours about possibly dropping the class.
To my amazement, the teacher was surprised that I would even consider dropping with the grade I was getting. "That's a good score, even a C is a passing grade," he said. He told me, "This department doesn't just hand out C's for nothing. If you get a C in this class, you're prepared to study chemistry at Berkeley, Stanford, or any school in the world." (The Chemistry department loved saying things like this.)
I said that was all well and good, but I wasn't at Berkeley, I was at a community college. In order to study chemistry at Berkeley, I'd have to get accepted at Berkeley as a transfer student, and with a fat, five-unit C on my transcript, that would never happen. I may be "prepared," but by damning me with this grade, they'd basically be ending my education right here.
My teacher advised me, again, to take the C. "Whatever you do," he said, "if your transcript shows up and you got a C in this class, don't try to re-take the class. You'll just get another C. I've seen it countless times -- people are unhappy with their grade and they go through the whole thing all over again and just end up with the same grade. The fact is, there's a lot of material in this class and people can't really retain it all. If you study the stuff you forgot this time, you'll probably just forget the other half. So try your best, maybe you'll get a B, but if you don't, take the C and be happy with that."
I said, wait a minute. You're telling me this department actually teaches Chem 101 in such a way that it's impossible for students to actually retain the material? And that's expected? It's actually a desired outcome? And you pride yourselves on that? He had no answer for me. (And I did end up with a C, after all -- but what could I do?)
FWIW, you should only put two spaces after a period if you're typing in a monospaced font (like on a typewriter). For a proportionally spaced font, it's always one space.
This list is entirely about Richard Stallman. He doesn't apologize, doesn't inquire about the feelings of the other person, he states directly what he needs, and that's it. A lot of people will take that to be self-centered and arrogant.
What's arrogant is asking someone to do something for you -- for free -- but not being willing to accommodate what they want in return.
Maybe you're old. If you talk to teenagers or even college students these days, you can't say, "A, B C." You have to say, "A, and how do you feel about A? B, and what do you want about B? C, and is C alright for you?" If you don't take the other person into consideration, it will often be interpreted as arrogant.
Ah, youthful inexperience. What you've mistaken for arrogance is actually contempt. You'll figure it out when you grow up.
Again, this depends on the programmer who wrote the code, not the language.
Sure, but all the Perl documentation I've ever seen (Camel Book, etc.) encourages Perl coders to concentrate on the result foremost, even at the expense of the process. Thinking about how to write well-structured code seems to be actively discouraged in the Perl community. Once it works, you're done.
The Python community were among the first point this out: Sure, there may be "more than one way to do it," as the Perl hackers like to say, but there's probably one good way to do it. If you don't even bother to think about what way that might be, you're going to tend to produce crappy code.
Back in the late '90s when this all took place? Back when our choices were Communicator (please god no), IE5.5, or IIRC, a paid version of Opera? While it's true that IE did offer an ActiveX container to let sites run custom controls, it's not like that couldn't have been implemented by anyone else (whether it would have been a good idea or not is an entirely different story.)
I'm not really referring to ActiveX, I'm talking more about IE's screwball implementation of Web standards. Back in those days, people prided themselves on how effective their JavaScript browser detection routines were, so they could load quirky code to get results in different browsers. In enterprise settings, a lot of people just said "screw it," and wrote their sites to work with IE (which meant they wouldn't look right in standards-compliant browsers). Some people interpreted it that Microsoft's browser just sucked because Microsoft couldn't be bothered to write a good one, but some people saw it as "embrace and extend," just like Microsoft tried to do with Java.
Bullshit. OEMs can pre-install web browsers, and there are other ways to get a web browser on the computer that don't involve an Internet connection. It's not like you need a web browser to download something over an Internet connection either.
Tell it to the EU. I'm not arguing that it''s physically impossible to install a Web browser without downloading it over the Web. I'm just saying what the EU mandated.
When we talk about anti-competitive things, the original problem was that, when user installed Windows, he got IE icon right there and ready to go, whereas other browsers had to be installed.
True to a point -- but to me that angle always seemed a little thin. I think a bigger part of the anti-competitive thing was that IE was a shitty browser that did things in divergent ways, but its market share threatened to steer the development of third party Web sites and applications toward an IE-only Web. A lot has changed since then, though. Downloading and installing stuff is now the norm (as opposed to the days when Netscape came on CD-ROM), IE isn't actually a terrible browser anymore, and Microsoft claims to be a big supporter of Web standards (including for Metro and JavaScript scripting for applications). So to me, being able to purge the blue icon completely from my system isn't really all that big a deal.
So, as far as bundling goes, this is good enough to solve the problem.
Well almost. If I'm not mistaken, in Europe the deal was that on first run Windows had to present you with an options screen, allowing you to use IE or optionally download and install one of the other browsers. Because the Catch-22 is that if you just say "no IE," naturally there's no way to download anything else! (Which is where the whole thing starts to get a little silly, if you ask me.)
That's the point - it's not dependent on IE (the browser app), it's dependent on Trident (the engine - shdocvw.dll & mshtml.dll). In Windows 7, in editions where you could uninstall IE, it left the engine DLLs in place to satisfy the dependencies.
Which to me is not anything like the same thing as actually being able to "uninstall IE." How much code does it take to write the UI for IE versus the amount of code that goes into the rendering engine? For my money, IE has been a tightly integrated component of Windows all along, and naturally so, since you can hardly expect any modern OS vendor to ship an OS without an HTML engine. Even in those versions when Microsoft had to go through the song-and-dance of letting you "uninstall IE," all you were really doing was deleting the launcher icon that invoked the UI for the rendering engine.
And it's all moot anyway, because if you look at TFA, the actual quote from Microsoft is:
Asked whether it is possible to uninstall IE 10 from Windows 8... “We have nothing more to share about IE10 at this time beyond what in the guides and the IE Blog,” the spokeswoman said via e-mail.
So that's a big fat "we don't comment on unreleased products" and nothing conclusive whatsoever about whether the options for IE will be any different in Windows 8 versus Windows 7. The whole blog post is a speculative whine that isn't based on any kind of insider knowledge. Much ado about nothing.
If they merely wanted to re-use the code, then write it into Win8 so that Win8 can natively support the extra features and have IE10 leverage it off there.
Isn't that essentially what they're doing? IE has always been a DLL that you can embed in other programs. A friend of mine once embedded it in a Macromedia Director movie with about four lines of code. The only difference seems to be that now they're back to making it impossible to uninstall -- which is only logical, since they're building the new Start menu (Metro) out of HTML and JavaScript. In fact, to tell the truth I always thought the idea that you could "uninstall IE" was a sham that was just for show, to comply with the court rulings. The IE browser is just Microsoft's HTML and JavaScript engine with some chrome around it. Metro is the same engine with different chrome, and other applications that embed the engine use different chrome, and so on. Or am I missing something?
Fine, fine, and I built PCs from components I bought off folding tables at the computer swap, too. But I don't think I ever owned a laptop that didn't come with Windows.
Otherwise, my only gripe with the current round of laptops (including my dv6, but every single machine I looked at) is the incredibly crap LCD screens, that have a vertical viewing angle of approximately 0 degrees before either washing out or inverting.
Well, I guess I'm glad (?) it's not just me. But it's not "LCD screen tech" -- I'm looking at an LED monitor on my desk right now and it has a great picture with none of the color-shifting and washing-out issues of my HP laptop. It may be something to do with how you have to engineer an LED panel for a hinge-type laptop case, or maybe power consumption issues -- but those are only guesses.
I am not saying that you can't find a laptop, but it is truly becoming like pulling teeth. The entire industry outside of Apple has decided to jump on the Windows bandwagon.
I'm not sure what mythical age you're referring to when PCs didn't come pre-bundled with Windows.
What does seem to have changed, though, is that laptops now seem almost completely homogeneous. You can pick from just a few screen sizes -- 14" and 15.6" seemingly being the two most popular. But guess what? Whichever size you pick, they all have the same resolution: 1366x768. For the majority of models, the graphics will be powered by Intel onboard graphics -- which, by the way, are now actually integrated into the CPU dies. You can pick from a few different hard drive sizes -- 320GB, 500GB, and now 640GB being typical. Those will be 5400rpm drives, BTW. And the drive sizes will be closely tied to the CPU speed for pricing reasons -- so you might find a Core i3 with a 500GB drive, but if you want a Core i5 for just $50 more or so, it will come with a smaller drive. If you want the whole shebang, you'll have to pay more, plus they'll throw in something extra you didn't want (like WiMax or something).
Basically it's just an all-out price war, where all the manufacturers are producing virtually identical models while trying everything in their power to undersell the other guys. That means most of them are cutting a lot of corners. One reasonable shopping strategy is to find a configuration you like, list all the specific models that have those exact specs, and decide which brand you trust not to build a complete piece of shit -- but you can't even rely on brands these days, it seems.
Speaking as someone who is not a particular Mac/Apple fan these days, but who does own a cheapie HP laptop, I second this sentiment. My laptop quite definitely does not have the best touchpad on any laptop currently available; in fact, it's a total piece of crap. (A lot of that is down to garbage drivers, though -- it's possible it would work better with Linux.) The unit is light enough and the battery life is good, but the overall build quality is crappy and slipshod. (Example: There are two USB ports on the right side but they're so close together that you can't actually use both at the same time because the dongles/cables won't fit.) The only possible advantage that I can see of going with mainstream PC hardware is that, particularly as Intel integrates more and more stuff into its CPU/chipset packages, laptops are becoming more and more generic; the chance that you'll have some oddball SATA controller or something is pretty slim. But the same is true of Mac hardware, since the models/specs are so tightly controlled.
I'm actually pretty baffled that people are still pissed about this "real name policy." Even more confused that people think this is really the reason people aren't flocking from Facebook to Google+.
I might use Google+ if it offered me something Facebook didn't, full stop.
As it stands, why switch? That's sort of like saying, "Why don't you change phone numbers? The 241 prefix is so much better than the 547 prefix you have now."
If all my friends were on Google+, I might use Google+ more than I use Facebook. They're not. In fact, the ones who have Google+ accounts don't do anything there. So there's not much reason for me to waste any time on it, either. I don't know what makes this so hard to understand. It kind of feels like Google is ashamed to admit it's not offering anything compelling with Google+. In this scenario, Facebook is Google and Google+ is Bing, it's just that simple.
With mine, sometimes it seems like you have to swipe it, and other times it will pick up with just a tap on the button. It's possible that if you're actively using the phone when it rings, you don't have to swipe, but if it's locked you do -- but the fact that I'm still not sure is kind of a UI failure. But not a major one, honestly.
Slashdot Mirror
I was in RS yesterday for a battery for the stupid wireless doorbell that came with my house
Sounds like your house came with a built-in "maker" project for you to try your hand at (and it ain't replacing a battery).
Christian Science Monitor is actually a very good newspaper. Although it was founded by the Church of Christ, Scientist, it is not a religious newspaper and its coverage is actually a lot more diligent than a lot of what gets called "reporting" these days.
I would never back down from some mexican with a machete.
You just fucked with the wrong Mexican.
Who decides these rules?
Printers. Typographers.
I like two spaces between sentences. I think it looks better, and flows better.
But if you typed two spaces between those two sentences, nobody reading your post will see it as two spaces, because HTML doesn't work that way. It still renders as one space unless you intentionally put in non-breaking spaces.
A requirement that one must maintain a 3.5 GPA doesn't seem unreasonable, until one is victimized by a few bad professors who relish handing out F's to people they just plain don't like regardless of or perhaps even because of merit, or weed-out classes where the game is to be tough on everyone to get rid of the weak students and never mind whether they're being fair with the tough love, or a department that is so afraid of grade inflation that almost no one receives an A even when they have earned it.
I have experience with the "weeder classes" at my local community college (one that actually has a reputation as being one of the best community colleges in the country).
I was averaging a low B in Chem 101 and I didn't feel comfortable about the trend -- I felt I probably wouldn't get much better grades on the next couple of tests and my grade might actually slip. The class was 5 hours per week of lecture hall, plus an additional 5 hours per week of lab, even though you didn't get any units of credit for the lab work, and the lab also had its own homework, quizzes, midterms, and final. So it was 10 hours per week just for that one class, plus homework and study time. Because I was at danger of ending the semester with a C, I decided to talk to one of my instructors during office hours about possibly dropping the class.
To my amazement, the teacher was surprised that I would even consider dropping with the grade I was getting. "That's a good score, even a C is a passing grade," he said. He told me, "This department doesn't just hand out C's for nothing. If you get a C in this class, you're prepared to study chemistry at Berkeley, Stanford, or any school in the world." (The Chemistry department loved saying things like this.)
I said that was all well and good, but I wasn't at Berkeley, I was at a community college. In order to study chemistry at Berkeley, I'd have to get accepted at Berkeley as a transfer student, and with a fat, five-unit C on my transcript, that would never happen. I may be "prepared," but by damning me with this grade, they'd basically be ending my education right here.
My teacher advised me, again, to take the C. "Whatever you do," he said, "if your transcript shows up and you got a C in this class, don't try to re-take the class. You'll just get another C. I've seen it countless times -- people are unhappy with their grade and they go through the whole thing all over again and just end up with the same grade. The fact is, there's a lot of material in this class and people can't really retain it all. If you study the stuff you forgot this time, you'll probably just forget the other half. So try your best, maybe you'll get a B, but if you don't, take the C and be happy with that."
I said, wait a minute. You're telling me this department actually teaches Chem 101 in such a way that it's impossible for students to actually retain the material? And that's expected? It's actually a desired outcome? And you pride yourselves on that? He had no answer for me. (And I did end up with a C, after all -- but what could I do?)
FWIW, you should only put two spaces after a period if you're typing in a monospaced font (like on a typewriter). For a proportionally spaced font, it's always one space.
This list is entirely about Richard Stallman. He doesn't apologize, doesn't inquire about the feelings of the other person, he states directly what he needs, and that's it. A lot of people will take that to be self-centered and arrogant.
What's arrogant is asking someone to do something for you -- for free -- but not being willing to accommodate what they want in return.
Maybe you're old. If you talk to teenagers or even college students these days, you can't say, "A, B C." You have to say, "A, and how do you feel about A? B, and what do you want about B? C, and is C alright for you?" If you don't take the other person into consideration, it will often be interpreted as arrogant.
Ah, youthful inexperience. What you've mistaken for arrogance is actually contempt. You'll figure it out when you grow up.
Again, this depends on the programmer who wrote the code, not the language.
Sure, but all the Perl documentation I've ever seen (Camel Book, etc.) encourages Perl coders to concentrate on the result foremost, even at the expense of the process. Thinking about how to write well-structured code seems to be actively discouraged in the Perl community. Once it works, you're done.
The Python community were among the first point this out: Sure, there may be "more than one way to do it," as the Perl hackers like to say, but there's probably one good way to do it. If you don't even bother to think about what way that might be, you're going to tend to produce crappy code.
Back in the late '90s when this all took place? Back when our choices were Communicator (please god no), IE5.5, or IIRC, a paid version of Opera? While it's true that IE did offer an ActiveX container to let sites run custom controls, it's not like that couldn't have been implemented by anyone else (whether it would have been a good idea or not is an entirely different story.)
I'm not really referring to ActiveX, I'm talking more about IE's screwball implementation of Web standards. Back in those days, people prided themselves on how effective their JavaScript browser detection routines were, so they could load quirky code to get results in different browsers. In enterprise settings, a lot of people just said "screw it," and wrote their sites to work with IE (which meant they wouldn't look right in standards-compliant browsers). Some people interpreted it that Microsoft's browser just sucked because Microsoft couldn't be bothered to write a good one, but some people saw it as "embrace and extend," just like Microsoft tried to do with Java.
Bullshit. OEMs can pre-install web browsers, and there are other ways to get a web browser on the computer that don't involve an Internet connection. It's not like you need a web browser to download something over an Internet connection either.
Tell it to the EU. I'm not arguing that it''s physically impossible to install a Web browser without downloading it over the Web. I'm just saying what the EU mandated.
When we talk about anti-competitive things, the original problem was that, when user installed Windows, he got IE icon right there and ready to go, whereas other browsers had to be installed.
True to a point -- but to me that angle always seemed a little thin. I think a bigger part of the anti-competitive thing was that IE was a shitty browser that did things in divergent ways, but its market share threatened to steer the development of third party Web sites and applications toward an IE-only Web. A lot has changed since then, though. Downloading and installing stuff is now the norm (as opposed to the days when Netscape came on CD-ROM), IE isn't actually a terrible browser anymore, and Microsoft claims to be a big supporter of Web standards (including for Metro and JavaScript scripting for applications). So to me, being able to purge the blue icon completely from my system isn't really all that big a deal.
So, as far as bundling goes, this is good enough to solve the problem.
Well almost. If I'm not mistaken, in Europe the deal was that on first run Windows had to present you with an options screen, allowing you to use IE or optionally download and install one of the other browsers. Because the Catch-22 is that if you just say "no IE," naturally there's no way to download anything else! (Which is where the whole thing starts to get a little silly, if you ask me.)
That's the point - it's not dependent on IE (the browser app), it's dependent on Trident (the engine - shdocvw.dll & mshtml.dll). In Windows 7, in editions where you could uninstall IE, it left the engine DLLs in place to satisfy the dependencies.
Which to me is not anything like the same thing as actually being able to "uninstall IE." How much code does it take to write the UI for IE versus the amount of code that goes into the rendering engine? For my money, IE has been a tightly integrated component of Windows all along, and naturally so, since you can hardly expect any modern OS vendor to ship an OS without an HTML engine. Even in those versions when Microsoft had to go through the song-and-dance of letting you "uninstall IE," all you were really doing was deleting the launcher icon that invoked the UI for the rendering engine.
And it's all moot anyway, because if you look at TFA, the actual quote from Microsoft is:
Asked whether it is possible to uninstall IE 10 from Windows 8 ... “We have nothing more to share about IE10 at this time beyond what in the guides and the IE Blog,” the spokeswoman said via e-mail.
So that's a big fat "we don't comment on unreleased products" and nothing conclusive whatsoever about whether the options for IE will be any different in Windows 8 versus Windows 7. The whole blog post is a speculative whine that isn't based on any kind of insider knowledge. Much ado about nothing.
If they merely wanted to re-use the code, then write it into Win8 so that Win8 can natively support the extra features and have IE10 leverage it off there.
Isn't that essentially what they're doing? IE has always been a DLL that you can embed in other programs. A friend of mine once embedded it in a Macromedia Director movie with about four lines of code. The only difference seems to be that now they're back to making it impossible to uninstall -- which is only logical, since they're building the new Start menu (Metro) out of HTML and JavaScript. In fact, to tell the truth I always thought the idea that you could "uninstall IE" was a sham that was just for show, to comply with the court rulings. The IE browser is just Microsoft's HTML and JavaScript engine with some chrome around it. Metro is the same engine with different chrome, and other applications that embed the engine use different chrome, and so on. Or am I missing something?
My mom's Compaq with two floppies and the orange plasma screen definitely did not count as a laptop.
A quick (and ironic?) Google search would have revealed that these terms were reached and disclosed this past March.
Fine, fine, and I built PCs from components I bought off folding tables at the computer swap, too. But I don't think I ever owned a laptop that didn't come with Windows.
Otherwise, my only gripe with the current round of laptops (including my dv6, but every single machine I looked at) is the incredibly crap LCD screens, that have a vertical viewing angle of approximately 0 degrees before either washing out or inverting.
Well, I guess I'm glad (?) it's not just me. But it's not "LCD screen tech" -- I'm looking at an LED monitor on my desk right now and it has a great picture with none of the color-shifting and washing-out issues of my HP laptop. It may be something to do with how you have to engineer an LED panel for a hinge-type laptop case, or maybe power consumption issues -- but those are only guesses.
I am not saying that you can't find a laptop, but it is truly becoming like pulling teeth. The entire industry outside of Apple has decided to jump on the Windows bandwagon.
I'm not sure what mythical age you're referring to when PCs didn't come pre-bundled with Windows.
What does seem to have changed, though, is that laptops now seem almost completely homogeneous. You can pick from just a few screen sizes -- 14" and 15.6" seemingly being the two most popular. But guess what? Whichever size you pick, they all have the same resolution: 1366x768. For the majority of models, the graphics will be powered by Intel onboard graphics -- which, by the way, are now actually integrated into the CPU dies. You can pick from a few different hard drive sizes -- 320GB, 500GB, and now 640GB being typical. Those will be 5400rpm drives, BTW. And the drive sizes will be closely tied to the CPU speed for pricing reasons -- so you might find a Core i3 with a 500GB drive, but if you want a Core i5 for just $50 more or so, it will come with a smaller drive. If you want the whole shebang, you'll have to pay more, plus they'll throw in something extra you didn't want (like WiMax or something).
Basically it's just an all-out price war, where all the manufacturers are producing virtually identical models while trying everything in their power to undersell the other guys. That means most of them are cutting a lot of corners. One reasonable shopping strategy is to find a configuration you like, list all the specific models that have those exact specs, and decide which brand you trust not to build a complete piece of shit -- but you can't even rely on brands these days, it seems.
Speaking as someone who is not a particular Mac/Apple fan these days, but who does own a cheapie HP laptop, I second this sentiment. My laptop quite definitely does not have the best touchpad on any laptop currently available; in fact, it's a total piece of crap. (A lot of that is down to garbage drivers, though -- it's possible it would work better with Linux.) The unit is light enough and the battery life is good, but the overall build quality is crappy and slipshod. (Example: There are two USB ports on the right side but they're so close together that you can't actually use both at the same time because the dongles/cables won't fit.) The only possible advantage that I can see of going with mainstream PC hardware is that, particularly as Intel integrates more and more stuff into its CPU/chipset packages, laptops are becoming more and more generic; the chance that you'll have some oddball SATA controller or something is pretty slim. But the same is true of Mac hardware, since the models/specs are so tightly controlled.
So that's what programmers at software companies do all day? Write novel algorithms?
Coulda fooled me, last software job I had I spent all day in meetings.
Apple did a similar thing a while back when they refused to sell iPhones for cash.
There's a big difference between Apple refusing to sell iPhones for cash and the government telling Apple it may not sell iPhones for cash.
I'm actually pretty baffled that people are still pissed about this "real name policy." Even more confused that people think this is really the reason people aren't flocking from Facebook to Google+.
I might use Google+ if it offered me something Facebook didn't, full stop.
As it stands, why switch? That's sort of like saying, "Why don't you change phone numbers? The 241 prefix is so much better than the 547 prefix you have now."
If all my friends were on Google+, I might use Google+ more than I use Facebook. They're not. In fact, the ones who have Google+ accounts don't do anything there. So there's not much reason for me to waste any time on it, either. I don't know what makes this so hard to understand. It kind of feels like Google is ashamed to admit it's not offering anything compelling with Google+. In this scenario, Facebook is Google and Google+ is Bing, it's just that simple.
With mine, sometimes it seems like you have to swipe it, and other times it will pick up with just a tap on the button. It's possible that if you're actively using the phone when it rings, you don't have to swipe, but if it's locked you do -- but the fact that I'm still not sure is kind of a UI failure. But not a major one, honestly.
Well, Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 never updated to Android 3.2 when the Xoom, etc., did. Maybe they're waiting for ICS but something makes me doubt it.
Without knowing about the alphabet trick, how does one know that "honeycomb" is better than "eclair"? Or that "froyo" came before "gingerbread"?
Or that "aardvark" comes before "cat" in the dictionary? That's why kids should watch Sesame Street -- so they can be computing geniuses.