The best meal can be ruined if it comes to you looking like pig slops. "The first bite is with the eyes," as the saying goes, right?
But a box can be more than just something that your items come in.
Consider the boxes that Apple used WAY back, when it was first launching the Mac. The boxes were designed so that one of the first things you took out of the box was the mouse--and this was a time when the mouse was brand new. People didn't know what it was or how it worked. You wanted the mouse to come out first so the user had time to take it out, handle it, and figure it out. It had a button, and a ball on the bottom. The cord obviously plugged into something.
The Mac was not the first thing you saw because it was important that you kind of grok the mouse, even if you'd never seen one before.
This isn't just flighty mumbo-jumbo, this stuff makes a big difference to people. If you're in a rage by the time you actually make it to your device, you're associating that bad feeling with the device. Cutting into those sealed plastic packages that some electronics come in makes me insane. I regret ever buying the item. My first experience with whatever I bought is generally kind of terrible.
Things that are well packaged at the very worst don't alter my mood at all. I can approach them and use them with a clear mind. This isn't just about Apple stuff, it's about anything. The act of unboxing is something that most of us living in the west have grown up enjoying, so it makes sense to leverage that if you're a company that sells things like Apple. It's like Christmas every time you get something new.
And look! They've got extremely high satisfaction rates, customer retention that most companies would kill for, and fanatics that defend even their most indefensible actions. I see a lot of complaints about the Apple 'sheeple', but the reality is that they've managed to convert a tonne of people in a way that most companies can't even comprehend. So yeah, maybe the box matters. Stop bashing Apple for caring about how they present their products to consumers and try to learn from it.
YOU don't see anything wrong with it. YOU aren't offended by it. That's very nice and all, but
a) it speaks to an institutionalised sexism that women find hard to avoid; and b) it's not about you.
You SHOULD be offended, just like you should be offended if the programmer found a way to make a racial slur into a hex number and sneak it into the code.
I realise the number doesn't translate to 'women suck' or 'girls r bitches' or something explicitly offensive, but what you fail to realise is that the day-to-day life of a woman is much different than yours. They're under pressure to look good, but not TOO good. Women with big breasts are often treated like they're brainless, regardless of their actual qualifications. If they're cool and a bit detached they're called 'frigid' or 'bitchy', too friendly and they're 'slutty'. Man, I don't even have time to get into all the ways that women can and are treated differently from their male counterparts in tech. Or, honestly, how they're treated differently in an office environment, period.
But WE should be better than that. The fact that we're scientists and programmers and geeks should bind us together more than gender puts us apart.
So while it doesn't bother you, that's extremely besides the point. It may bother what few women we actually have working alongside us and make them uncomfortable. I don't know why some (most?) men think that's okay. I LIKE the women I get to work with; the last thing I want to do is make them uncomfortable to be around me or in the office at all.
I think you're misinterpreting the judgement. What I'm getting from it is that whatever technology is being used for the item at hand—in this case, a movie— must not be any more onerous than if you owned a physical copy. Companies will still have the right to try and prevent you from creating an unlimited number of copies and profiting off of that, but if you're using it in your own home, it is unreasonable for them to make it significantly difficult for you to enjoy your own property.
The other thing that I got out of the decision is that the movie is actually your property, not the property of someone else with a revocable licence that can be withdrawn at any time. They sold it to you, like they could sell you a movie on a VHS tape. That tape was yours. This judgement effectively states that the medium of transmission doesn't impact your ownership. Downloading the video (after you paid for it) was just a different way of getting the content into your hands; it's not a fundamentally different entity than the VHS tape.
There are parts of the Charter that are immune from notwithstanding tampering, like women's equality rights. The notwithstanding tool is very powerful, but even it has its limits.
Actually, Edmonton hits -40C probably once a year. Or gets close to it. It's a strange year where it doesn't dip below -30C for a week, and -35C is bitterly fucking cold, but you kind of expect it. The only month where they've never recorded snow in Edmonton is July.
25-28C is July temperatures; 28C is a bit high, most of the time.
Anyway, it's fucking cold in Edmonton, which is why I laugh when people tell me it's cold where I live now, Montreal. I've seen it hit -29C exactly once, for a day, and I still rode my bike to work.:)
It won't be a problem. The Conservative government isn't really interested in Climate Change or, in fact, any scientific research at all. If the problems are based on something that has scientific research backing it, they'll just ignore it and wait for the Denial Faeries to come and make the problem go away.
Yeah, that's fair. My best friend is a nurse, and she says the single best thing for a person to do--if they can--is get up and walk. Even when she was working in the cardiac ward with people just out of heart surgery, they tried to get them to be up and walking within a week. It's just good to make the blood flow.
Well, I got two answers to this post: yours, and avandesande. They make the good point that complete immobility is probably not what we're looking for; that's usually bad for body parts. Fair enough.
And while I agree that the 'repetitive' part of the stress injury pertinent, it's not really as simple as that. Walking is repetitive, but we're built to walk. There's a certain range of motion that's really good for us. We don't walk enough as a culture anymore, and while you'll eventually wear down the moving parts, it's generally better for you to walk than not to walk.
I think similarly with typing, there's a range of motion that's probably not that bad for you. I use a trackball, and click with my thumb. I've done a lot of clicking, and I've never had an issue. But there are a lot of factors at play: the angle that I have to hold my finger at, the force, how much rest the finger gets when it's not clicking, etc. That's going to be true of all your fingers. You want to move them, but you want the range of motion to work with your particular configuration. With long arms and big hands, my ideal range of motion is going to be different than yours.
Also keep in mind that while playing a game like an FPS, you're doing things a bit differently than if you're typing a paper. I wager there's a difference in how hard you're pressing keys down. You're probably also holding keys down for longer; typing words is about pressing and releasing, FPS gaming is about pressing and holding. It could very well be the HOLD that's causing stress, not the PRESS.
Maybe we can agree that there aren't enough options (or that people aren't good about taking the wide range of options that are available) to reduce stress on themselves. To a certain extent, I'm sure that my improvement has a psychological aspect (which shouldn't be ignored, actually; that placebo effect might be very powerful) and the relative stress between qwerty and dvorak on our hands is within a few percent one way or another. I've probably done more to make my life better by just paying attention to the keyboard layout that I have, switching keyboards and stopping with the mouse (which was a HUGE stress on my arm; to this day, I can only use a mouse about 15 minutes without wrist pain).
I don't know that a reductionist argument works perfectly here, but ideally, what you want is to not move your fingers at all. No stress, no repetition.
After that, I would expect (though I'm NOT a physiologist) that the smaller the movement, the better. That means you want to move the muscle as little as possible and use the least amount of force. I would expect a repetitive motion of stretching a finger to apply a force to be worse than to not stretch the finger and apply a force. Obviously, I can't help but move my fingers a bit and stretch them to type full words, and so I'm not carrying out precisely the same motion every single time, but every time I do move my fingers, it's very little.
Part of that is down to the keyboard I use. It's scooped, so when I lift my fingers, the stretching is minimised.
I used to have forearm pain after typing when I was in university and using qwerty. Dvorak helped a bit, and the keyboard helped more.
Most importantly, people have really different configurations. I happen to have long, skinny fingers, and big palms. Someone with shorter, stockier fingers will have a different experience and a different optimal setup.
To bring it back to texting, I think that the experience is more uniform just because there are fewer variables to consider in the length and strength of thumbs versus that of each finger and the whole hand. Dvorak wouldn't make for a good texting experience for the same reason it IS a good typing experience.
Actually, the best solution to that problem is the Kinesis ergonomic keyboards. Ctrl, Alt and Win/Command are thumb actuated keys, as are return and backspace. I'm a long-time emacs user, and it solved a lot of those pinky issues for me.
Not cheap, though. Still, worth it if you want to preserve your hands.
The ideal smartphone layout would move letters that have similar placements in words as far apart from one another as possible.
Bat Bet Bit Bot But
That's a pretty trivial example, but it takes no effort to come up with examples where letters get confused for one another and a predictive text system has no way of knowing whether you meant to do that or not. I type 'of' or 'if' each in place of the other about a dozen times a day. It makes me nuts.
The whole keyboard is trivially reachable, so I don't think that it's worth worrying about letter frequency and how fast you can move your fingers to type. We should be trying to make the keyboard properly enhance and support predictive text systems. The faster you can type out--without errors--the first recognisable part of a word, the faster the autocorrect system can make a guess for you. Don't fight it, USE it.
Autocorrect is only makes ridiculous mistakes right now because of the way that we've got our letters grouped together. We end up sending it confusing cues, so of course it picks strange words.
This 'dextr' layout looks terrible. Not only is it huge, it doesn't actually solve the problem. The vowels are cleverly stacked on top of one another, which is probably going to lead to just as many accidental vowel replacements as before, just different kinds. Letters that can often replace one another in words are still right next to each other.
I believe there could be a better texting keyboard than qwerty, but this sure isn't it.
But wouldn't you want to hit the most frequent keys with the strongest fingers? And wouldn't you want to reduce large, stretching movements? That's the advantage of dvorak to me. My hands stay in the home row. They move very little, so the stress is smaller. My pinkies are used very little for important letters, which is good, because they're comparatively weak. My index and ring fingers are used the most, which is good because they're strong.
I've paired that with a Kinesis ergonomic keyboard so the backspace and enter keys are actuated with my thumbs--again, using the strongest finger to do the most work.
I've never been any faster with dvorak; if I wanted to be fast, I'd buy a chording keyboard. But my hands ARE less tired. Given that I'm a professional programmer, longevity is significantly more important than speed.
Intellisense is one of the first thing nearly every programmer I know turns off. On large projects, the time that it takes is prohibitive, and at least in Visual Studio 2010, it can be a major impediment to stability.
Intellisense works, but it's a far cry from 'done well'. The plugins that I've seen that offer similar functionality in VS tend to be better and consume fewer resources.
Microsoft didn't invent the optical mouse. I was using them on Sun workstations in University long before Microsoft came out with one. But Microsoft's were better. But since you're trying to argue that Microsoft INVENTS things, and doesn't just take things and iterate on them a bit, that's not really any help.
The Taskbar was actually copied from NeXTStep. Y'know, Steve Jobs' company before he went back to Apple (and the fundamental underpinning of every OS X system today).
I wouldn't stake money on them being the first to be able to alter running code while debugging it. JIT systems have existed for a long time; systems that feature a live runtime (NeXTStep, again) allow live injection of code. Smalltalk effectively allows this as well.
Alt-Tab? There have been dozens of application switching methods, and lots of keystrokes to do it.
There're actually quite a few things on your list where you say 'they weren't the first'. That was the POINT of the post before yours, as I recall. Moreover, you seem to be pulling stuff out of thin air and attributing it to Microsoft without any good reason. That Taskbar thing pops to mind. (And, BTW, the NeXTStep dock is still BY FAR the best one that ever existed; far superior to both the current Microsoft and Apple versions for pure functionality. Excepting, of course, for things that require enormous horsepower, like live previewing.)
It's NOT true that Microsoft NEVER invents anything. But they DO have a track record of copying things and re-releasing them. Sometimes they do a better job, sometimes not.
1) That's not true. I can write all the apps I want as a developer. If I'm a research oriented developer, I can easily write my own software. And seeing as how I'm a professional programmer now, that's trivial. It only costs me the $99 developer license. They may never approve my app for wider release, but my iPad will run it just fine.
2) I don't need to use a keyboard? I would think that part is obvious. Maybe I don't want to type when I'm in the field. Maybe touching icons is good enough. Maybe a stylus is more appropriate, because I'm sketching, not typing.
3) Maybe I don't know all the advantages it has yet, but it's more important to be open minded than blind to the possibility that work can get done in a lot of different ways. It used to be done almost entirely on paper (quite a lot of it is still done on paper). Don't be that guy that declares that "there's nothing left to invent," as it were. Those predictions are almost invariably wrong, and only go to showcase how little foresight the commenter was capable of mustering.
I'm an adult that pays bills, and depending on the type of work, I could get it done on a portable device. So far, I've managed to avoid a position that largely involves reading and writing emails, or modifying spreadsheets, but even as a programmer, I still do a fair amount of that every day. I have to write design and specification documents. All these things are tablet-friendly tasks.
I don't write code on my iPad, but I do occasionally ssh into my home machines if I'm having a problem. It's not optimal, but it's a good emergency device.
I DO, in fact, do most of my work at a desktop computer right now. However, to claim that I'll ALWAYS do my work at a desktop computer is incredibly short-sighted. 5 years ago, I wouldn't have told you that most of my computer leisure time is now spent AWAY from my computer and instead with a tablet. If I ever transition to a more research oriented job, I guarantee that a portable device will ultimately be more effective to me than one that's effectively immobile.
Don't let your current mode of work and obvious prejudices cloud your vision of what might be possible in the future. That's what happened to Ballmer, and now look at who's the company at the top of the heap.
1) They're a solution to a problem that never should have existed. It was a ridiculous oversight to not design in type-agnostic containers.
2) Most of the functionality of templates is discovered. It was designed to do one thing and ended up doing a lot more. The template meta-programming language is Turing complete. I hear people talk about how powerful it is, and it makes me crazy. Of course it's powerful. If you slapped any scripting language onto the the side of c++ it would be enormously powerful.
Ultimately, this is my problem with c++ as a whole: most of the design is half-assed and sloppy. 10 or 11 years ago, I remember reading (right here on/.!) that, for the first time EVER, someone had written a parser that implemented the entire c++ specification. Before that, it was unclear whether it had a bad recursion hidden in it somewhere. Think about that. Not even the language designers could have told you if the specification was fundamentally correct.
The best parts of c++ are the parts that are most like c. Small and efficient. I work in the games industry and engines like unreal use c++ constructs sparingly and with great care because of size and speed restraints. Most engines write their own vector types; almost nobody uses the template library. Memory managers are written so that no programmer ever actually has to alloc anything on their own. Effectively, the engine is written to protect the programmers from the language.
Given that Apple is integrating FaceBook support into iOS 6 (I've got it on my phone right now, and the 'post' button works exactly as advertised), it seems to me that this is probably being done in no small part because Apple is doing a bunch of stuff in Obj-C anyway. I have no idea what the FB API stuff is like (or even if it's available to devs like me) but there's clearly *something* going on under the hood.
So Apple does some of the heavy lifting, and the FB programmers just piggyback off of it. At that point, why not switch?
That's wildly missing the point. The iPad has keyboard cases, too. Microsoft--for once--actually designed this for their own hardware, and made it a big step up from 3rd party options. It's not about thinking about it first, it's about doing it better. The tablet is hardly a new idea at all. Apple didn't do it first, and the Android camp obviously came even later to the party. But it doesn't matter if you do it first if your idea sucks.
I'm not convinced that this was a troll. I think that we might get told that we were trolled, but it's not far enough out of line with the AGW denying comments I've seen here lately.:/
Well, here's something that they neglect in 3rd grade: extra heat does cause evaporation, but it also changes the atmosphere's capacity to hold water. This is something that's readily observable in most climates as the seasons change, and we tend to look at it just as a local change that affects our comfort.
As AGW deniers seem to love pointing out, the most potent greenhouse gas is actually water. It stores heat exceptionally well. So if the atmosphere is warmer (on average), then it's holding more water. That water allows the atmosphere to hold more heat, and you have a feedback loop. Eventually the feedback loop balances out (since we obviously don't live on a planet with a runaway greenhouse effect) because water tends to precipitate out of the atmosphere if it gets a chance. Still, the effect is notable and measurable. You can certainly change the carrying capacity of the atmosphere with respect to water in climates that are currently cooler.
More problems with your overly simplistic description of the water cycle (beyond the fact that you're using a necessarily distilled version of the process that is accurate only at a distance, but accurate enough for grade school children) are that heating effects tend to cause other changes that interfere with the cycle or themselves cause heating effects. Melt the snow for slightly longer in the far north, and you get the ground absorbing more heat and reflecting less back to space; the albedo of the planet is much different when you're comparing a large snow covered area to a large dirt covered area. And then you get secondary effects, like an expanding tree-line. If the trees are there, the uniformity of the snow cover is disrupted, which ALSO modifies the albedo; a uniformly even white surface reflects more light back to space than one that is lumpy.
So, yeah. You can't rely on the models that we were taught in school because they were meant for people without any training, and just as a taste of the full subject matter. When kids learn to read and write, it doesn't mean that the simple constructs that we show them are the entirety of the English language. It's just enough for them to get by. Graduate English/linguistics classes are a far cry from the rules that we teach them. You can't criticise the literary community because their work may step beyond the stuff we teach kids.
I played a bit of Uncharted 2. Like, a few hours worth. Navigating a train car that's falling off a cliff is sort of vaguely amusing, but did 1313 have to copy that pretty much exactly? There's a certain amount of novelty to a set piece like that that wears out very quickly.
Downloading is 'legal' because there is no law against it. That levy protects you from nothing, as the bills the current Government have shown. If that law gets passed, your levy defense won't hold water.
I've said this in response to every comment like yours for years for exactly this reason. Do not complacently think that you get anything out of the levy other than an empty pocket. Most of that money you pay doesn't even go to the artists that distribute it. In fact, last I heard, it was barely distributed at all.
The levy has been terrible in every measurable sense. It made consumers poorer, it did nothing to compensate the artists that it was supposed to, it gave a false sense to consumers that someone legitimate would get the money at the end of the day, and it confused the issue of whether or not downloading was legal and for what reason.
You realise that this quotation cuts both ways, right?
It's not the government's job to make sure that prices stay low, either. They're just around to make sure the playing field is level. Before Apple came along in the book business, there's reason to believe that the playing field WASN'T level, and that Amazon was using their clout to get themselves a better deal at the expense of writers and publishers.
The price is what everyone is focussed on, but that's just a number. It doesn't necessarily accurately represent the state or health of the industry.
Whether Apple is actually guilty of anything or not, Amazon's tactics weren't exactly nice either. In exchange for US paying less, someone else was EARNING less. That's the only way it could possibly work. I'm pretty sure Amazon isn't dumb enough to screw themselves out of money, so the publishers and authors were the ones that took the hit. I don't know about you, but I want my favourite authors to keep writing, and the (book) publishing industry isn't exactly the sort of place you go if you want to earn a quick buck. The bulk of the costs of a book are NOT tied up in the physical, paper product. There's so much other work involved with publishing. We need to stop feeling like books should be cheap just because they're digital. The new format hasn't changed that someone has to put a lot of work into actually WRITING those few hundred pages that you're reading, and then someone has to edit it, and typeset it, and so on and so forth.
I mean, other than the fact that you personally are paying more, higher prices are not actually in and of themselves a bad thing.
The prices were artificially depressed before. YOU were paying less, but that also means someone on the other end was necessarily earning less. That might seem great to you, but I'm sure the writer wasn't super hyped about it. Neither was the publisher.
You don't have a RIGHT to low prices, though you have a right to only pay what you think is fair. If the prices are too high, stop buying. If everyone thinks the prices are too high, they'll stop buying too. If these 'new' higher prices are what the market will bear, then THAT'S the price that we should have been paying all along.
Don't be fooled into thinking your personal desire to pay as little as possible is actually the fair or correct price to pay. It's just one of a nearly infinite number of options.
Slashdot Mirror
The best meal can be ruined if it comes to you looking like pig slops. "The first bite is with the eyes," as the saying goes, right?
But a box can be more than just something that your items come in.
Consider the boxes that Apple used WAY back, when it was first launching the Mac. The boxes were designed so that one of the first things you took out of the box was the mouse--and this was a time when the mouse was brand new. People didn't know what it was or how it worked. You wanted the mouse to come out first so the user had time to take it out, handle it, and figure it out. It had a button, and a ball on the bottom. The cord obviously plugged into something.
The Mac was not the first thing you saw because it was important that you kind of grok the mouse, even if you'd never seen one before.
This isn't just flighty mumbo-jumbo, this stuff makes a big difference to people. If you're in a rage by the time you actually make it to your device, you're associating that bad feeling with the device. Cutting into those sealed plastic packages that some electronics come in makes me insane. I regret ever buying the item. My first experience with whatever I bought is generally kind of terrible.
Things that are well packaged at the very worst don't alter my mood at all. I can approach them and use them with a clear mind. This isn't just about Apple stuff, it's about anything. The act of unboxing is something that most of us living in the west have grown up enjoying, so it makes sense to leverage that if you're a company that sells things like Apple. It's like Christmas every time you get something new.
And look! They've got extremely high satisfaction rates, customer retention that most companies would kill for, and fanatics that defend even their most indefensible actions. I see a lot of complaints about the Apple 'sheeple', but the reality is that they've managed to convert a tonne of people in a way that most companies can't even comprehend. So yeah, maybe the box matters. Stop bashing Apple for caring about how they present their products to consumers and try to learn from it.
Augh, this is the problem in its entirety.
YOU don't see anything wrong with it. YOU aren't offended by it. That's very nice and all, but
a) it speaks to an institutionalised sexism that women find hard to avoid; and
b) it's not about you.
You SHOULD be offended, just like you should be offended if the programmer found a way to make a racial slur into a hex number and sneak it into the code.
I realise the number doesn't translate to 'women suck' or 'girls r bitches' or something explicitly offensive, but what you fail to realise is that the day-to-day life of a woman is much different than yours. They're under pressure to look good, but not TOO good. Women with big breasts are often treated like they're brainless, regardless of their actual qualifications. If they're cool and a bit detached they're called 'frigid' or 'bitchy', too friendly and they're 'slutty'. Man, I don't even have time to get into all the ways that women can and are treated differently from their male counterparts in tech. Or, honestly, how they're treated differently in an office environment, period.
But WE should be better than that. The fact that we're scientists and programmers and geeks should bind us together more than gender puts us apart.
So while it doesn't bother you, that's extremely besides the point. It may bother what few women we actually have working alongside us and make them uncomfortable. I don't know why some (most?) men think that's okay. I LIKE the women I get to work with; the last thing I want to do is make them uncomfortable to be around me or in the office at all.
I think you're misinterpreting the judgement. What I'm getting from it is that whatever technology is being used for the item at hand—in this case, a movie— must not be any more onerous than if you owned a physical copy. Companies will still have the right to try and prevent you from creating an unlimited number of copies and profiting off of that, but if you're using it in your own home, it is unreasonable for them to make it significantly difficult for you to enjoy your own property.
The other thing that I got out of the decision is that the movie is actually your property, not the property of someone else with a revocable licence that can be withdrawn at any time. They sold it to you, like they could sell you a movie on a VHS tape. That tape was yours. This judgement effectively states that the medium of transmission doesn't impact your ownership. Downloading the video (after you paid for it) was just a different way of getting the content into your hands; it's not a fundamentally different entity than the VHS tape.
IANAL, of course.
There are parts of the Charter that are immune from notwithstanding tampering, like women's equality rights. The notwithstanding tool is very powerful, but even it has its limits.
Actually, Edmonton hits -40C probably once a year. Or gets close to it. It's a strange year where it doesn't dip below -30C for a week, and -35C is bitterly fucking cold, but you kind of expect it. The only month where they've never recorded snow in Edmonton is July.
25-28C is July temperatures; 28C is a bit high, most of the time.
Anyway, it's fucking cold in Edmonton, which is why I laugh when people tell me it's cold where I live now, Montreal. I've seen it hit -29C exactly once, for a day, and I still rode my bike to work. :)
It won't be a problem. The Conservative government isn't really interested in Climate Change or, in fact, any scientific research at all. If the problems are based on something that has scientific research backing it, they'll just ignore it and wait for the Denial Faeries to come and make the problem go away.
Yeah, that's fair. My best friend is a nurse, and she says the single best thing for a person to do--if they can--is get up and walk. Even when she was working in the cardiac ward with people just out of heart surgery, they tried to get them to be up and walking within a week. It's just good to make the blood flow.
Well, I got two answers to this post: yours, and avandesande. They make the good point that complete immobility is probably not what we're looking for; that's usually bad for body parts. Fair enough.
And while I agree that the 'repetitive' part of the stress injury pertinent, it's not really as simple as that. Walking is repetitive, but we're built to walk. There's a certain range of motion that's really good for us. We don't walk enough as a culture anymore, and while you'll eventually wear down the moving parts, it's generally better for you to walk than not to walk.
I think similarly with typing, there's a range of motion that's probably not that bad for you. I use a trackball, and click with my thumb. I've done a lot of clicking, and I've never had an issue. But there are a lot of factors at play: the angle that I have to hold my finger at, the force, how much rest the finger gets when it's not clicking, etc. That's going to be true of all your fingers. You want to move them, but you want the range of motion to work with your particular configuration. With long arms and big hands, my ideal range of motion is going to be different than yours.
Also keep in mind that while playing a game like an FPS, you're doing things a bit differently than if you're typing a paper. I wager there's a difference in how hard you're pressing keys down. You're probably also holding keys down for longer; typing words is about pressing and releasing, FPS gaming is about pressing and holding. It could very well be the HOLD that's causing stress, not the PRESS.
Maybe we can agree that there aren't enough options (or that people aren't good about taking the wide range of options that are available) to reduce stress on themselves. To a certain extent, I'm sure that my improvement has a psychological aspect (which shouldn't be ignored, actually; that placebo effect might be very powerful) and the relative stress between qwerty and dvorak on our hands is within a few percent one way or another. I've probably done more to make my life better by just paying attention to the keyboard layout that I have, switching keyboards and stopping with the mouse (which was a HUGE stress on my arm; to this day, I can only use a mouse about 15 minutes without wrist pain).
I don't know that a reductionist argument works perfectly here, but ideally, what you want is to not move your fingers at all. No stress, no repetition.
After that, I would expect (though I'm NOT a physiologist) that the smaller the movement, the better. That means you want to move the muscle as little as possible and use the least amount of force. I would expect a repetitive motion of stretching a finger to apply a force to be worse than to not stretch the finger and apply a force. Obviously, I can't help but move my fingers a bit and stretch them to type full words, and so I'm not carrying out precisely the same motion every single time, but every time I do move my fingers, it's very little.
Part of that is down to the keyboard I use. It's scooped, so when I lift my fingers, the stretching is minimised.
I used to have forearm pain after typing when I was in university and using qwerty. Dvorak helped a bit, and the keyboard helped more.
Most importantly, people have really different configurations. I happen to have long, skinny fingers, and big palms. Someone with shorter, stockier fingers will have a different experience and a different optimal setup.
To bring it back to texting, I think that the experience is more uniform just because there are fewer variables to consider in the length and strength of thumbs versus that of each finger and the whole hand. Dvorak wouldn't make for a good texting experience for the same reason it IS a good typing experience.
Actually, the best solution to that problem is the Kinesis ergonomic keyboards. Ctrl, Alt and Win/Command are thumb actuated keys, as are return and backspace. I'm a long-time emacs user, and it solved a lot of those pinky issues for me.
Not cheap, though. Still, worth it if you want to preserve your hands.
The ideal smartphone layout would move letters that have similar placements in words as far apart from one another as possible.
Bat
Bet
Bit
Bot
But
That's a pretty trivial example, but it takes no effort to come up with examples where letters get confused for one another and a predictive text system has no way of knowing whether you meant to do that or not. I type 'of' or 'if' each in place of the other about a dozen times a day. It makes me nuts.
The whole keyboard is trivially reachable, so I don't think that it's worth worrying about letter frequency and how fast you can move your fingers to type. We should be trying to make the keyboard properly enhance and support predictive text systems. The faster you can type out--without errors--the first recognisable part of a word, the faster the autocorrect system can make a guess for you. Don't fight it, USE it.
Autocorrect is only makes ridiculous mistakes right now because of the way that we've got our letters grouped together. We end up sending it confusing cues, so of course it picks strange words.
This 'dextr' layout looks terrible. Not only is it huge, it doesn't actually solve the problem. The vowels are cleverly stacked on top of one another, which is probably going to lead to just as many accidental vowel replacements as before, just different kinds. Letters that can often replace one another in words are still right next to each other.
I believe there could be a better texting keyboard than qwerty, but this sure isn't it.
But wouldn't you want to hit the most frequent keys with the strongest fingers? And wouldn't you want to reduce large, stretching movements? That's the advantage of dvorak to me. My hands stay in the home row. They move very little, so the stress is smaller. My pinkies are used very little for important letters, which is good, because they're comparatively weak. My index and ring fingers are used the most, which is good because they're strong.
I've paired that with a Kinesis ergonomic keyboard so the backspace and enter keys are actuated with my thumbs--again, using the strongest finger to do the most work.
I've never been any faster with dvorak; if I wanted to be fast, I'd buy a chording keyboard. But my hands ARE less tired. Given that I'm a professional programmer, longevity is significantly more important than speed.
Intellisense is one of the first thing nearly every programmer I know turns off. On large projects, the time that it takes is prohibitive, and at least in Visual Studio 2010, it can be a major impediment to stability.
Intellisense works, but it's a far cry from 'done well'. The plugins that I've seen that offer similar functionality in VS tend to be better and consume fewer resources.
Microsoft didn't invent the optical mouse. I was using them on Sun workstations in University long before Microsoft came out with one. But Microsoft's were better. But since you're trying to argue that Microsoft INVENTS things, and doesn't just take things and iterate on them a bit, that's not really any help.
The Taskbar was actually copied from NeXTStep. Y'know, Steve Jobs' company before he went back to Apple (and the fundamental underpinning of every OS X system today).
I wouldn't stake money on them being the first to be able to alter running code while debugging it. JIT systems have existed for a long time; systems that feature a live runtime (NeXTStep, again) allow live injection of code. Smalltalk effectively allows this as well.
Alt-Tab? There have been dozens of application switching methods, and lots of keystrokes to do it.
There're actually quite a few things on your list where you say 'they weren't the first'. That was the POINT of the post before yours, as I recall. Moreover, you seem to be pulling stuff out of thin air and attributing it to Microsoft without any good reason. That Taskbar thing pops to mind. (And, BTW, the NeXTStep dock is still BY FAR the best one that ever existed; far superior to both the current Microsoft and Apple versions for pure functionality. Excepting, of course, for things that require enormous horsepower, like live previewing.)
It's NOT true that Microsoft NEVER invents anything. But they DO have a track record of copying things and re-releasing them. Sometimes they do a better job, sometimes not.
1) That's not true. I can write all the apps I want as a developer. If I'm a research oriented developer, I can easily write my own software. And seeing as how I'm a professional programmer now, that's trivial. It only costs me the $99 developer license. They may never approve my app for wider release, but my iPad will run it just fine.
2) I don't need to use a keyboard? I would think that part is obvious. Maybe I don't want to type when I'm in the field. Maybe touching icons is good enough. Maybe a stylus is more appropriate, because I'm sketching, not typing.
3) Maybe I don't know all the advantages it has yet, but it's more important to be open minded than blind to the possibility that work can get done in a lot of different ways. It used to be done almost entirely on paper (quite a lot of it is still done on paper). Don't be that guy that declares that "there's nothing left to invent," as it were. Those predictions are almost invariably wrong, and only go to showcase how little foresight the commenter was capable of mustering.
This is bollocks.
I'm an adult that pays bills, and depending on the type of work, I could get it done on a portable device. So far, I've managed to avoid a position that largely involves reading and writing emails, or modifying spreadsheets, but even as a programmer, I still do a fair amount of that every day. I have to write design and specification documents. All these things are tablet-friendly tasks.
I don't write code on my iPad, but I do occasionally ssh into my home machines if I'm having a problem. It's not optimal, but it's a good emergency device.
I DO, in fact, do most of my work at a desktop computer right now. However, to claim that I'll ALWAYS do my work at a desktop computer is incredibly short-sighted. 5 years ago, I wouldn't have told you that most of my computer leisure time is now spent AWAY from my computer and instead with a tablet. If I ever transition to a more research oriented job, I guarantee that a portable device will ultimately be more effective to me than one that's effectively immobile.
Don't let your current mode of work and obvious prejudices cloud your vision of what might be possible in the future. That's what happened to Ballmer, and now look at who's the company at the top of the heap.
Templates are an abomination for two reasons:
1) They're a solution to a problem that never should have existed. It was a ridiculous oversight to not design in type-agnostic containers.
2) Most of the functionality of templates is discovered. It was designed to do one thing and ended up doing a lot more. The template meta-programming language is Turing complete. I hear people talk about how powerful it is, and it makes me crazy. Of course it's powerful. If you slapped any scripting language onto the the side of c++ it would be enormously powerful.
Ultimately, this is my problem with c++ as a whole: most of the design is half-assed and sloppy. 10 or 11 years ago, I remember reading (right here on /.!) that, for the first time EVER, someone had written a parser that implemented the entire c++ specification. Before that, it was unclear whether it had a bad recursion hidden in it somewhere. Think about that. Not even the language designers could have told you if the specification was fundamentally correct.
The best parts of c++ are the parts that are most like c. Small and efficient. I work in the games industry and engines like unreal use c++ constructs sparingly and with great care because of size and speed restraints. Most engines write their own vector types; almost nobody uses the template library. Memory managers are written so that no programmer ever actually has to alloc anything on their own. Effectively, the engine is written to protect the programmers from the language.
Given that Apple is integrating FaceBook support into iOS 6 (I've got it on my phone right now, and the 'post' button works exactly as advertised), it seems to me that this is probably being done in no small part because Apple is doing a bunch of stuff in Obj-C anyway. I have no idea what the FB API stuff is like (or even if it's available to devs like me) but there's clearly *something* going on under the hood.
So Apple does some of the heavy lifting, and the FB programmers just piggyback off of it. At that point, why not switch?
That's wildly missing the point. The iPad has keyboard cases, too. Microsoft--for once--actually designed this for their own hardware, and made it a big step up from 3rd party options. It's not about thinking about it first, it's about doing it better. The tablet is hardly a new idea at all. Apple didn't do it first, and the Android camp obviously came even later to the party. But it doesn't matter if you do it first if your idea sucks.
I'm not convinced that this was a troll. I think that we might get told that we were trolled, but it's not far enough out of line with the AGW denying comments I've seen here lately. :/
Well, here's something that they neglect in 3rd grade: extra heat does cause evaporation, but it also changes the atmosphere's capacity to hold water. This is something that's readily observable in most climates as the seasons change, and we tend to look at it just as a local change that affects our comfort.
As AGW deniers seem to love pointing out, the most potent greenhouse gas is actually water. It stores heat exceptionally well. So if the atmosphere is warmer (on average), then it's holding more water. That water allows the atmosphere to hold more heat, and you have a feedback loop. Eventually the feedback loop balances out (since we obviously don't live on a planet with a runaway greenhouse effect) because water tends to precipitate out of the atmosphere if it gets a chance. Still, the effect is notable and measurable. You can certainly change the carrying capacity of the atmosphere with respect to water in climates that are currently cooler.
More problems with your overly simplistic description of the water cycle (beyond the fact that you're using a necessarily distilled version of the process that is accurate only at a distance, but accurate enough for grade school children) are that heating effects tend to cause other changes that interfere with the cycle or themselves cause heating effects. Melt the snow for slightly longer in the far north, and you get the ground absorbing more heat and reflecting less back to space; the albedo of the planet is much different when you're comparing a large snow covered area to a large dirt covered area. And then you get secondary effects, like an expanding tree-line. If the trees are there, the uniformity of the snow cover is disrupted, which ALSO modifies the albedo; a uniformly even white surface reflects more light back to space than one that is lumpy.
So, yeah. You can't rely on the models that we were taught in school because they were meant for people without any training, and just as a taste of the full subject matter. When kids learn to read and write, it doesn't mean that the simple constructs that we show them are the entirety of the English language. It's just enough for them to get by. Graduate English/linguistics classes are a far cry from the rules that we teach them. You can't criticise the literary community because their work may step beyond the stuff we teach kids.
I played a bit of Uncharted 2. Like, a few hours worth. Navigating a train car that's falling off a cliff is sort of vaguely amusing, but did 1313 have to copy that pretty much exactly? There's a certain amount of novelty to a set piece like that that wears out very quickly.
No. Do not promulgate this.
Downloading is 'legal' because there is no law against it. That levy protects you from nothing, as the bills the current Government have shown. If that law gets passed, your levy defense won't hold water.
I've said this in response to every comment like yours for years for exactly this reason. Do not complacently think that you get anything out of the levy other than an empty pocket. Most of that money you pay doesn't even go to the artists that distribute it. In fact, last I heard, it was barely distributed at all.
The levy has been terrible in every measurable sense. It made consumers poorer, it did nothing to compensate the artists that it was supposed to, it gave a false sense to consumers that someone legitimate would get the money at the end of the day, and it confused the issue of whether or not downloading was legal and for what reason.
While I know this isn't what you were answering, but it turns out that lung damage is a major factor in bat deaths near turbines.
http://www.cell.com/current-biology/retrieve/pii/S0960982208007513
You realise that this quotation cuts both ways, right?
It's not the government's job to make sure that prices stay low, either. They're just around to make sure the playing field is level. Before Apple came along in the book business, there's reason to believe that the playing field WASN'T level, and that Amazon was using their clout to get themselves a better deal at the expense of writers and publishers.
The price is what everyone is focussed on, but that's just a number. It doesn't necessarily accurately represent the state or health of the industry.
Whether Apple is actually guilty of anything or not, Amazon's tactics weren't exactly nice either. In exchange for US paying less, someone else was EARNING less. That's the only way it could possibly work. I'm pretty sure Amazon isn't dumb enough to screw themselves out of money, so the publishers and authors were the ones that took the hit. I don't know about you, but I want my favourite authors to keep writing, and the (book) publishing industry isn't exactly the sort of place you go if you want to earn a quick buck. The bulk of the costs of a book are NOT tied up in the physical, paper product. There's so much other work involved with publishing. We need to stop feeling like books should be cheap just because they're digital. The new format hasn't changed that someone has to put a lot of work into actually WRITING those few hundred pages that you're reading, and then someone has to edit it, and typeset it, and so on and so forth.
Why is that bad?
I mean, other than the fact that you personally are paying more, higher prices are not actually in and of themselves a bad thing.
The prices were artificially depressed before. YOU were paying less, but that also means someone on the other end was necessarily earning less. That might seem great to you, but I'm sure the writer wasn't super hyped about it. Neither was the publisher.
You don't have a RIGHT to low prices, though you have a right to only pay what you think is fair. If the prices are too high, stop buying. If everyone thinks the prices are too high, they'll stop buying too. If these 'new' higher prices are what the market will bear, then THAT'S the price that we should have been paying all along.
Don't be fooled into thinking your personal desire to pay as little as possible is actually the fair or correct price to pay. It's just one of a nearly infinite number of options.