Actually using a programming language, instead of a markup language? HTML can be complex, unintuitive and finicky on occasion, but it's not code. (Admittedly many sites these days use JavaScript and such to extend what HTML can do, and that can be code, or it can be just a matter of finding and plugging in the right pre-written program for the job.)
Re:Betteridge's law of headlines says ... no
on
Do We Need More Emojis?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Several of these really need to be generalized. We're getting male/female/black/white/asian/etc. variants of everything, needlessly complicating the system. Unicode has inflection support - just mark that 'male' or 'female' is an inflection, like an accent mark. Combined characters, for one glyph.
And yes, that means the 'standard' is gender and race neutral. People might make assumptions; deal with it. It's better than doing 'this is a smiley, and this is a female smiley'.
Except that the $300 cable isn't grounded on either end, and shows a high level of crosstalk. So the arrows on this cable are just to make people think it's worth the $300.
This cable is better than a $2 cable: It's well built, and meets the specs - barely. But you can get $10-$20 cables that are as well built, and meet the specs with less margin for error (these literally tested as 'within the specs' by less than the margin of error on the testing device) easily.
If the submitter is working with Kinesis keyboards, remapping is built in to the keyboard. They probably don't want to remap to Control - the Kinesis Advantage keyboards have them in a thumb key array, which is actually awesome - but I find swapping it with the backtick/tilde key is very useful.
(Kinesis Advantage keyboards have a mostly QWERTY layout (or mostly Dvorak, if you buy that option), but split the keys into two sections, and have separate key clusters under each thumb - putting space directly under the right thumb and backspace directly under the left. Exact layout of Control/Windows/Command/Opt/Alt depends on which model you buy: Windows, Mac, or Other, but they are clustered around the thumbs.)
It should also be noted that bed nets can be rendered ineffective by such things as rolling over or throwing an arm out in your sleep. If the net is touching the skin, the mosquitoes can bite right through it. Proper use requires a good bed and a well-built house, so that you can suspend it around the bed. (And the bed can't be overloaded - if there are several people in the bed you're more likely to touch the sides of the net.)
Bed nets are common in the areas affected. But they are finicky, annoying, and intrude on your life. A bed net is fine and good - but so is sitting on the porch drinking a beer with your friends while you watch the sunset. (Which will put you at risk.) A vaccine which could effectively knock down a large portion of the risk, and possibly reduce the infected pool for the mosquitoes to draw from, would be much better in the long run.
Yeah, that's the problem with that description. I could give mine as: Mac Pro 2 2.66GHz 2 Core CPUs 1.3TB Storage 10 GB RAM NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT
And at quick look it would seem like I'm not far behind the OP. But that's a 2008 Mac Pro, and that storage is distributed across three internal disks, only one of which is an SSD. (I'm not counting the external.) I'm stuck with 10.7 as my os. I'd love to upgrade, but I don't have the money.
(Note that the box is fairly heavily upgraded from when new - I've added about 6GB of RAM, and replaced all the disks since I've bought it. This is also the third graphics card I've had in it. But all those updates were done a while ago, when I had a job. On the other hand, it's still faster than my parent's much newer MacBooks and iMac, because I've upgraded intelligently. If it wasn't for the 32-Bit BIOS it would still be a decent computer for 95% of current software.)
1: People care about what brands of coffee they drink. 2: Limiting choices there makes them look like the bad guy.
They think (and may well be right...) that by making this apology and opening up the choices on what coffee people make using their coffeemakers, that people won't notice that they're still limiting their choices on coffeemakers.
They've learned to pick their battles and manipulate opinion.
True, but on the other hand many, if not most, OEMs never update their Android phones. A delay while OEMs work out details and stuff would be acceptable, if not ideal. But in practice the updates just don't exist unless you buy a new device - and then only if you buy a phone with a more recent version of the OS. (And a lot of phones are shipped with an out of date OS!)
It has gotten a bit better - especially for 'flagship' devices - but it's still not good. I thought the 'Google One' edition phones were a good push towards trying to solve the problem (if only by shaming the OEMs), but they've died off.
But Apple does at least have a fairly dependable support schedule: The most recent 2 generations of devices in a line are supported, possibly with some loss of functionality. (Typically functionality that depends on new hardware.) Past that is occasionally supported, but don't count on it. (Admittedly this support schedule is not official - it's just what has happened in practice for the life of iOS.)
Your iPhone 4 just misses that cut (6 is the current, 5s one gen back, 5 is two), and your iPad is about 4 generations past that cut. Each did get updates regularly during it's product life cycle - it's just that you've continued to use them past that life cycle. That contrasts dramatically with Android OS phones which often ship with out of date versions of their software, and are usually never updated.
I'd argue that the solution to a problem is a lot easier to understand if you're given a context where the solution is needed FIRST. Starting with a degenerate problem that reduces to a trivial application serves to obscure the 'point' of the solution method.
This isn't the teaching materials. This is a test question. Yes, the teacher should teach the concept with a better example and explain it fully - but the question is enough to show if the student understands the concept and can apply it correctly. It's also quick to explain and short to answer, both good things for a test question.
This isn't the starting point - this is an ending point. (The end of the class.) The question is enough for that.
One of the big advantages of pallets over boxes or containers is that they are cheap enough that shipping them back isn't something you need to worry about in many cases. Yes, if there's a load (or a regular truck) going back to where they need to be loaded it's often better to ship back and re-use, but if they are delivering something and there's no load going back any time soon, they are cheap and easy enough to take apart that they can be discarded and used for other purposes.
Just because we think the suit should continue to it's end doesn't mean we support DRM. Or even that we think the plaintiff should win. There is precedent to be set in this case, and continuing the suit to set it may well be a better outcome then getting it dismissed on a technicality.
'Busy' and 'constructive use of time' are separate concepts. If you just want people to busy to rebel, making them work on non-constructive projects is ideal: You'll never run out, and they'll never be done.
The second is a fair point: the main problem with coal and other fossil fuels is the external cost exported to society at large. (CO2 and other emissions.) If you could factor in that cost - and make the generators pay it - the cost of electricity from fossil fuels would go way up. (And, if they can afford to pay it - actually clean up their emissions to the point where they aren't harmful to the environment - then we don't actually have a problem with fossil fuels, except for the limited supply.)
Actually, at this point it's exactly a share taxi. I wonder when Americans will realize they've just re-invented a form of semi-formal public transport that's common in undeveloped countries without real public transport.
Ditto; just tested to be sure - my email from my self-hosted domains gets through just fine. This is not a 'Comcast is blocked' problem. This is a 'submitter's IP address is blocked' problem.
I actually think the 'I Robot' movie is anti-Asimov. One of the reasons the 'I Robot' stories are so famous is because Asimov treated robots as machines: They generally work as designed, but break or have flaws in their design that need to be fixed, and can be. They are complex machines, so they have complex flaws, but the flaws are the same types of flaws that you have in other complex machines, and the robots do not become monsters because of those flaws. Robot stories before him (and many after him, and nearly all in Hollywood...) tend to either treat robots as monsters, just waiting to get lose from their creators, or gods, able to fix all problems. The movie 'I Robot' is a prime example of the 'monster' archetype.
(People tend to bring up a couple of later stories he wrote when I bring up this argument - stories where his robots do start to evolve into fitting the god archetype. But: 1 - it's 'evolve', they were machines that were being perfected, not instant fixes, and 2 - they were later stories, where Asimov was subverting expectations about his own writing.)
Depends on which books, and where in his career he was. He got fairly blatant around mid-career, although rarely actually explicit. When they say 'Foundation Series' it's open to interpretation on which books are likely meant - The original three were early in his career, and didn't really have much sex in them. The later two (mid-career) at the end have sex as a major plot driver/enabler, and the two prequels (end-career) feature it without making it a huge point. So it depends somewhat on where they start. I'm betting they'll start with the prequels - they have a strong central character, and can lead into the rest without much issue even after he dies. (And a fair amount of sex if they want it.)
The other point I'd be worried about is violence - the Foundation Series is about the fall of an empire and the rise of a new one, but actual fighting doesn't occur often. There are several places where it looks like it's about to, but then the forces of history make it unnecessary. (Or the populace gets mind-controlled, in one case...) It'd be very tempting for a director of a drama series to ramp up the violence, but it would change a large part of the point of the stories.
Oh, and in response to a couple levels up: They didn't use robots for sex in the stories. They didn't use robots for anything, in fact. There was a complete ban on higher-level AIs and on humanoid machines, to the level of taboo. (Although there were a few characters who where extremely humanoid robots in the prequels and sequels - and were basically the reason for the bans.)
Setting up SPF correctly for your domain does have the side-effect of stopping a lot of bounceback spam (where they forge your address and send it to someone else, so you get the rejection), and can be useful for that reason alone.
But yeah, incoming mail it's not really a big discriminator. Worth looking at slightly, but not really all that useful. (Which means in general it's just more work you'll need to do to set up an email server, which doesn't have much benefit.)
I used both BASIC and HyperCard - they were dramatically different approaches. If you want a modern BASIC, try Perl or Python or Ruby or - you get the picture. There are dozens of suitable replacements; simple direct languages that can write a short command-line program easily.
And you show the result to the average user out there and they won't even think it's a program. If you want a GUI - like everything out there today - you'll have to work on a major lift, some complex API that takes months to master, and days even for an experienced programmer to learn.
HyperCard could get you a simple GUI-based program in minutes, that even a beginner could do. You could actually get quite a ways without writing a single line of 'code' - though you still needed to think about the structure of how you moved through the application. It could even be argued that you can teach that structural thought easier to certain types of learners, as you get a more dramatic and visual result.
But the largest thing for a beginner that HyperCard could offer was a feeling of accomplishment: In a few minutes you had what 'felt' like a real application, with a GUI and everything. It doesn't look like a cliff to get to the point of writing a program that they can show off to their friends - even if it's a simple program.
There are roles for both, but to get someone interested in programming, I think HyperCard is probably better. Once you have that pull out the major arcania of complex API's and huge libraries.
I just had an excellent counter-argument today: Work uses one password to log into their benefits site and into the handheld scanner used on the floor. The handheld scanner has a keyboard of less than 20 keys - numbers are easy, letters are hard, capital letters are really hard, and special characters are impossible. And there's no other input.
My login to my benefits is now controlled by the password I can type into what's basically a telephone keypad. Because that's where I need to type it a couple of times a day.
Because the average human being can actually read it better off of a changing analog-style dial than they can understand a bare number. It has to do with us being well developed at judging distances for throwing and jumping. (And an analog dial allows you to read both off of one instrument.)
The other place analog (or analog-style) gauges shine is when the rate of change is more important than the value. Speedometers and tachometers are good examples: You usually care more if you are speeding up, slowing down, or keeping the same speed than whether you are going 65 or 66mph.
Depends on what PHP is doing. If it makes a call to system(), anywhere... No, you are not. (Assuming you have bash as/bin/sh - the BSD's don't, and some Linux distros don't.)
If it stays entirely within PHP, then you are. But that'd be a lot of work to double check - You need to check every line of code you run, and the php interpreter itself to see where it calls out.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually using a programming language, instead of a markup language? HTML can be complex, unintuitive and finicky on occasion, but it's not code. (Admittedly many sites these days use JavaScript and such to extend what HTML can do, and that can be code, or it can be just a matter of finding and plugging in the right pre-written program for the job.)
Several of these really need to be generalized. We're getting male/female/black/white/asian/etc. variants of everything, needlessly complicating the system. Unicode has inflection support - just mark that 'male' or 'female' is an inflection, like an accent mark. Combined characters, for one glyph.
And yes, that means the 'standard' is gender and race neutral. People might make assumptions; deal with it. It's better than doing 'this is a smiley, and this is a female smiley'.
Except that the $300 cable isn't grounded on either end, and shows a high level of crosstalk. So the arrows on this cable are just to make people think it's worth the $300.
This cable is better than a $2 cable: It's well built, and meets the specs - barely. But you can get $10-$20 cables that are as well built, and meet the specs with less margin for error (these literally tested as 'within the specs' by less than the margin of error on the testing device) easily.
If the submitter is working with Kinesis keyboards, remapping is built in to the keyboard. They probably don't want to remap to Control - the Kinesis Advantage keyboards have them in a thumb key array, which is actually awesome - but I find swapping it with the backtick/tilde key is very useful.
(Kinesis Advantage keyboards have a mostly QWERTY layout (or mostly Dvorak, if you buy that option), but split the keys into two sections, and have separate key clusters under each thumb - putting space directly under the right thumb and backspace directly under the left. Exact layout of Control/Windows/Command/Opt/Alt depends on which model you buy: Windows, Mac, or Other, but they are clustered around the thumbs.)
It should also be noted that bed nets can be rendered ineffective by such things as rolling over or throwing an arm out in your sleep. If the net is touching the skin, the mosquitoes can bite right through it. Proper use requires a good bed and a well-built house, so that you can suspend it around the bed. (And the bed can't be overloaded - if there are several people in the bed you're more likely to touch the sides of the net.)
Bed nets are common in the areas affected. But they are finicky, annoying, and intrude on your life. A bed net is fine and good - but so is sitting on the porch drinking a beer with your friends while you watch the sunset. (Which will put you at risk.) A vaccine which could effectively knock down a large portion of the risk, and possibly reduce the infected pool for the mosquitoes to draw from, would be much better in the long run.
Yeah, that's the problem with that description. I could give mine as:
Mac Pro
2 2.66GHz 2 Core CPUs
1.3TB Storage
10 GB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT
And at quick look it would seem like I'm not far behind the OP. But that's a 2008 Mac Pro, and that storage is distributed across three internal disks, only one of which is an SSD. (I'm not counting the external.) I'm stuck with 10.7 as my os. I'd love to upgrade, but I don't have the money.
(Note that the box is fairly heavily upgraded from when new - I've added about 6GB of RAM, and replaced all the disks since I've bought it. This is also the third graphics card I've had in it. But all those updates were done a while ago, when I had a job. On the other hand, it's still faster than my parent's much newer MacBooks and iMac, because I've upgraded intelligently. If it wasn't for the 32-Bit BIOS it would still be a decent computer for 95% of current software.)
No, they've learned a few things:
1: People care about what brands of coffee they drink.
2: Limiting choices there makes them look like the bad guy.
They think (and may well be right...) that by making this apology and opening up the choices on what coffee people make using their coffeemakers, that people won't notice that they're still limiting their choices on coffeemakers.
They've learned to pick their battles and manipulate opinion.
True, but on the other hand many, if not most, OEMs never update their Android phones. A delay while OEMs work out details and stuff would be acceptable, if not ideal. But in practice the updates just don't exist unless you buy a new device - and then only if you buy a phone with a more recent version of the OS. (And a lot of phones are shipped with an out of date OS!)
It has gotten a bit better - especially for 'flagship' devices - but it's still not good. I thought the 'Google One' edition phones were a good push towards trying to solve the problem (if only by shaming the OEMs), but they've died off.
But Apple does at least have a fairly dependable support schedule: The most recent 2 generations of devices in a line are supported, possibly with some loss of functionality. (Typically functionality that depends on new hardware.) Past that is occasionally supported, but don't count on it. (Admittedly this support schedule is not official - it's just what has happened in practice for the life of iOS.)
Your iPhone 4 just misses that cut (6 is the current, 5s one gen back, 5 is two), and your iPad is about 4 generations past that cut. Each did get updates regularly during it's product life cycle - it's just that you've continued to use them past that life cycle. That contrasts dramatically with Android OS phones which often ship with out of date versions of their software, and are usually never updated.
I'd argue that the solution to a problem is a lot easier to understand if you're given a context where the solution is needed FIRST. Starting with a degenerate problem that reduces to a trivial application serves to obscure the 'point' of the solution method.
This isn't the teaching materials. This is a test question. Yes, the teacher should teach the concept with a better example and explain it fully - but the question is enough to show if the student understands the concept and can apply it correctly. It's also quick to explain and short to answer, both good things for a test question.
This isn't the starting point - this is an ending point. (The end of the class.) The question is enough for that.
One of the big advantages of pallets over boxes or containers is that they are cheap enough that shipping them back isn't something you need to worry about in many cases. Yes, if there's a load (or a regular truck) going back to where they need to be loaded it's often better to ship back and re-use, but if they are delivering something and there's no load going back any time soon, they are cheap and easy enough to take apart that they can be discarded and used for other purposes.
Just because we think the suit should continue to it's end doesn't mean we support DRM. Or even that we think the plaintiff should win. There is precedent to be set in this case, and continuing the suit to set it may well be a better outcome then getting it dismissed on a technicality.
'Busy' and 'constructive use of time' are separate concepts. If you just want people to busy to rebel, making them work on non-constructive projects is ideal: You'll never run out, and they'll never be done.
Or that that being employed makes people feel their time is being used in any way constructively.
The second is a fair point: the main problem with coal and other fossil fuels is the external cost exported to society at large. (CO2 and other emissions.) If you could factor in that cost - and make the generators pay it - the cost of electricity from fossil fuels would go way up. (And, if they can afford to pay it - actually clean up their emissions to the point where they aren't harmful to the environment - then we don't actually have a problem with fossil fuels, except for the limited supply.)
Actually, at this point it's exactly a share taxi. I wonder when Americans will realize they've just re-invented a form of semi-formal public transport that's common in undeveloped countries without real public transport.
Ditto; just tested to be sure - my email from my self-hosted domains gets through just fine. This is not a 'Comcast is blocked' problem. This is a 'submitter's IP address is blocked' problem.
I actually think the 'I Robot' movie is anti-Asimov. One of the reasons the 'I Robot' stories are so famous is because Asimov treated robots as machines: They generally work as designed, but break or have flaws in their design that need to be fixed, and can be. They are complex machines, so they have complex flaws, but the flaws are the same types of flaws that you have in other complex machines, and the robots do not become monsters because of those flaws. Robot stories before him (and many after him, and nearly all in Hollywood...) tend to either treat robots as monsters, just waiting to get lose from their creators, or gods, able to fix all problems. The movie 'I Robot' is a prime example of the 'monster' archetype.
(People tend to bring up a couple of later stories he wrote when I bring up this argument - stories where his robots do start to evolve into fitting the god archetype. But: 1 - it's 'evolve', they were machines that were being perfected, not instant fixes, and 2 - they were later stories, where Asimov was subverting expectations about his own writing.)
Depends on which books, and where in his career he was. He got fairly blatant around mid-career, although rarely actually explicit. When they say 'Foundation Series' it's open to interpretation on which books are likely meant - The original three were early in his career, and didn't really have much sex in them. The later two (mid-career) at the end have sex as a major plot driver/enabler, and the two prequels (end-career) feature it without making it a huge point. So it depends somewhat on where they start. I'm betting they'll start with the prequels - they have a strong central character, and can lead into the rest without much issue even after he dies. (And a fair amount of sex if they want it.)
The other point I'd be worried about is violence - the Foundation Series is about the fall of an empire and the rise of a new one, but actual fighting doesn't occur often. There are several places where it looks like it's about to, but then the forces of history make it unnecessary. (Or the populace gets mind-controlled, in one case...) It'd be very tempting for a director of a drama series to ramp up the violence, but it would change a large part of the point of the stories.
Oh, and in response to a couple levels up: They didn't use robots for sex in the stories. They didn't use robots for anything, in fact. There was a complete ban on higher-level AIs and on humanoid machines, to the level of taboo. (Although there were a few characters who where extremely humanoid robots in the prequels and sequels - and were basically the reason for the bans.)
Setting up SPF correctly for your domain does have the side-effect of stopping a lot of bounceback spam (where they forge your address and send it to someone else, so you get the rejection), and can be useful for that reason alone.
But yeah, incoming mail it's not really a big discriminator. Worth looking at slightly, but not really all that useful. (Which means in general it's just more work you'll need to do to set up an email server, which doesn't have much benefit.)
I used both BASIC and HyperCard - they were dramatically different approaches. If you want a modern BASIC, try Perl or Python or Ruby or - you get the picture. There are dozens of suitable replacements; simple direct languages that can write a short command-line program easily.
And you show the result to the average user out there and they won't even think it's a program. If you want a GUI - like everything out there today - you'll have to work on a major lift, some complex API that takes months to master, and days even for an experienced programmer to learn.
HyperCard could get you a simple GUI-based program in minutes, that even a beginner could do. You could actually get quite a ways without writing a single line of 'code' - though you still needed to think about the structure of how you moved through the application. It could even be argued that you can teach that structural thought easier to certain types of learners, as you get a more dramatic and visual result.
But the largest thing for a beginner that HyperCard could offer was a feeling of accomplishment: In a few minutes you had what 'felt' like a real application, with a GUI and everything. It doesn't look like a cliff to get to the point of writing a program that they can show off to their friends - even if it's a simple program.
There are roles for both, but to get someone interested in programming, I think HyperCard is probably better. Once you have that pull out the major arcania of complex API's and huge libraries.
I just had an excellent counter-argument today: Work uses one password to log into their benefits site and into the handheld scanner used on the floor. The handheld scanner has a keyboard of less than 20 keys - numbers are easy, letters are hard, capital letters are really hard, and special characters are impossible. And there's no other input.
My login to my benefits is now controlled by the password I can type into what's basically a telephone keypad. Because that's where I need to type it a couple of times a day.
Because the average human being can actually read it better off of a changing analog-style dial than they can understand a bare number. It has to do with us being well developed at judging distances for throwing and jumping. (And an analog dial allows you to read both off of one instrument.)
The other place analog (or analog-style) gauges shine is when the rate of change is more important than the value. Speedometers and tachometers are good examples: You usually care more if you are speeding up, slowing down, or keeping the same speed than whether you are going 65 or 66mph.
Depends on what PHP is doing. If it makes a call to system(), anywhere... No, you are not. (Assuming you have bash as /bin/sh - the BSD's don't, and some Linux distros don't.)
If it stays entirely within PHP, then you are. But that'd be a lot of work to double check - You need to check every line of code you run, and the php interpreter itself to see where it calls out.