I believe none of you actually programmed in C. A string terminated by \0 can be represented by a single pointer and an have any length. You can also easily let the string keep growing (until the allocated memory is finished.) That is the epitome of KISS.
And a written language with just two letters in the alphabet is simple too, right? So, let's do that!
There's KISS and then there's KISS. C strings aren't the right kind of KISS.
When you don't have friends, cards are really just a stack of colored paper. That's the problem I've always had with Dungeons and Dragons and multi-player games like that. When I was a kid I used to buy D&D books and modules and be fascinated with the lore and how much fun it all sounded. But when the realization hits you that you don't have anyone to play it with, it all becomes pretty useless.
I ran into a similar issue. (1) Very small circle of friends. (2) None of them interested in playing role playing games like D&D. (3) People get married, buy houses, start pumping out kids, and aligning schedules becomes near impossible.
You're not alone in being alone. I recommend something like an MMORPG where you can meet people and develop online friendships. My favorite has always been EverQuest.
A Roth 401(k) [wikipedia.org] is to a traditional 401(k) as a Roth IRA is to a traditional IRA.
...
Roth 401(k): Post-tax contributions; money grows tax free; withdrawals are not taxed; employers are legally allowed to do the same things as with a traditional 401(k); same contribution limits as a traditional 401(k) [technically the contribution limit applies to the sum of all 401(k) contributions, traditional and Roth alike].
Excellent information; thanks! I had no idea such a thing existed. I wonder how many employers offer Roth 401(k) plans. I don't think mine does; then again, 10 minutes ago, I didn't know that Roth 401(k) plans even existed. Thanks for educating me. I should have looked it up before assuming it didn't exist; I'm sorry about that.
tl;dr Roth retirement accounts let you pay a 0% tax rate on all capital gains as long as you pay tax on "principal contributed" instead of "principal withdrawn" (because you're paying tax on the principal either way), unlike traditional retirement accounts, which make you pay tax on all gains. Why would the average person go traditional?
I don't know what a "Roth 401(k)" is -- I've never heard of that before. My understanding is as follows:
Traditional IRA: Pre-tax contributions; money grows tax free; withdrawals are taxed; fairly limited yearly maximum contributions.
Roth IRA: Post-tax contributions; money grows tax free; withdrawals are not taxed; fairly limited yearly maximum contributions.
401(k): Pre-tax contributions; money grows tax free; withdrawals are taxed; sometimes employers contribute extra as a benefit; much higher maximum yearly contributions.
In the room next door I have a DEC VT240 from around 1990 which is capable of displaying text and vector graphics using the ReGIS instruction set. I'm so happy to see that, 24 years later, Google is reviving the graphical dumb terminal.
Except that web browsers are not dumb terminals. Web browsers can do local processing. In fact, many Chrome apps run entirely offline.
Your post isn't insightful, it's just plain an invalid and flawed analogy.
I'm typing this on a nine-year-old Dell Latitude D410 running Windows XP. I've got a current version of Firefox, current versions of all of the plugins I use on a regular basis
Your fully patched browser and plugins still make heavy use of operating system DLLs, and those DLLs are no longer getting security updates. This puts you at risk.
Continuing to use old hardware is fine, as long as the OS is updated and secure. I have a similarly old machine that I put Linux on.
I'm afraid your highly modded comment might make non-technical people think using XP to browse the web is still OK. It's not. Even with a fully updated and patched browser.
I have a Wii-U. I consider the tablet bulky and inconvenient, without offering enough advantage in exchange for the inconvenience. It often needs to be plugged in, making it even more inconvenient.
The closed iOS ecosystem is about the worst thing Apple ever did to their customers
Whoa now, that just ain't true. Not at all.
Techies tend to forget how ridiculously hard it is for non-techies to administer their computers. Apple's iOS frees its customers from complexity, it frees them from stress and worry about viruses and Trojans, it frees them from the repercussions of being successfully hacked.
Sure, for your typical geek-o-matic here, OMG-I-don't-have-root-and-I-can't-allow-that! But for regular people, Apple's walled garden is a blessing.
I'm typing this on an Asus Vivobook S200E ultraportable (i3-3217U, 4GB, 11.6", aluminum chassis, USB 3.0, $430 new + $80 more for a nice SATA-III SSD to upgrade with; basically what I call a "better MacBook Air than a MacBook Air")
I only took a quick glance, but it looks like the MacBook Air is half the weight, has a better CPU, better graphics, more USB 3.0 ports, much better battery life, lots of useful built-in apps, etc.
Exactly how did you compute that your Asus Vivobook S200E "ultraportable" is a "better MacBook Air than a MacBook Air"?
But seriously, hopefully Microsoft will benefit from him and become a bit more popular amongst nerds.
Why do you hope for that? Microsoft pretends to reinvent itself regularly, but one thing remains constant through the decades: Their goal has unswervingly been lock-in from top to bottom, while trying to nickel and dime you the whole way.
For nerds, this means locking you into their programming languages (e.g., VB or C#), or if not that, at least lock you into their APIs (so that you're as good as locked in, even if you're using C or C++). It means abandonment of entire domains that no longer suit them (look up how woefully out-of-date and ignored the C part of their C/C++ compiler is).
It means locking you into their platforms, whether that be the operating system (Windows) or the browser (Internet Explorer).
It means high prices (have you seen the prices on Windows Server and/or Microsoft Azure lately?), which is not-at-all nerd-friendly. It means guaranteed stagnation in those domains where they achieve dominance. It means product churn for the sake of profits. It means ignoring customers and forcing bad implementations on them (*cough*Metro*cough*) and then taking forever to admit it was a mistake and fix it (when is Windows 9 due out? Next year sometime?).
Just because some new-boss-same-as-the-old-boss is singing some unicorns-and-rainbows song doesn't mean the core of Microsoft is going to change. They're still after the same things they've always been after: Lock-in so severe that the pain of escape ensures most people remain slaves, and profits, profits, profits.
12 cents won't affect me one bit. It certainly won't change my driving habits. The poor on the other hand.. well, let's just say if you're living on a fixed income and/or are already below the poverty line a nice big regressive tax might sting a little...
Well, let's think about that for a minute. Let's guess that on average filling up your tank from near empty to near full is around 13 gallons. An extra 12 cents per gallon will come to around $1.50.
If people fill up weekly, that'll be about $6/month. I don't think that'll impact the poor so very much...
Also, wealthy people tend to drive bigger vehicles, such as SUVs, and tend to commute longer distances from expensive suburbs. This will certainly cost wealthier people more money (but still probably not enough to matter).
This proposed 12 cents per gallon tax increase is peanuts, but be prepared for republicans in congress to scream and holler and shout about how it'll destroy America, cause more homosexuality, etc.
Just tried it and clicking + fully maximised on every application but Chrome which for some reason has incremental sizing on it. What applications don't work for you?
OS X has what's called the Zoom button, not a Maximize button. It's supposed to size the window to best fit the content. Sometimes it does the same as Maximize does, sometimes it doesn't. Often it doesn't.
Source: My wife switched to OS X about 4 1/2 years ago. The lack of a Maximize button is, indeed, an annoyance. In OS X Mavericks, there's a full screen feature, but that's not quite the same. We frequently merely struggle a bit to manually maximize windows.
It's not the comments that have decreased in quality, it's the moderation. Ever since the whole beta thing people seem be less willing to spend time moderating and meta-moderating the site.
I would moderate more if I could, but (1) I browse/. on my iPad a lot, (2) I use the standard desktop view of the site on my iPad, not the mobile view, and (3) When I open stories in new tabs, it forgets that I'm logged in, thus I can't moderate.
If/. ever fixes that long-standing bug, I would be happy to try to do my part to moderate posts objectively and fairly.
It often happens in a conversation about one thing, particularly a complex and nuanced thing, that it will bring up other similar things because they are related in some way. The resistance of some to this natural conversational process never made much sense.
I could speculate that you have a loyalty to Google that you cannot realistically expect them to reciprocate (you do know that, right?), except I've seen lots of people display this tendency who obviously had no such motivation. Some people just like to complain.
Your speculation is incorrect. Pointing out that Google may have issues in no meaningful way adds to the discussion regarding Facebook's well known issues. It's a rhetorical trick to distract from the fact that Facebook has issues.
I'm happy to discuss Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc. But when someone clearly points out people don't trust Facebook, and for good reason, no value is added to the conversation when someone says, "But... Google!"
By now, a professional organization would have at least acknowledged the complaints. Slashdot hasn't yet, and I'm willing to bet they never do. For a site that posts so many stories complaining about what other people do, they're remarkably slow to admit when they make a mistake.
Continue to turn the comments threads into a trash heap to drive people away. And don't forget to turn on your ad blocker. Do what you can to get their attention until they publically acknowledge that this is a mistake -- because they're not going to pay attention otherwise.
I can't even get them to give us an option to turn off fucking autorefresh. It seems rather hopeless.:(
Except that in that brave new future, the keypresses are navigating a round trip - see "google instant search" or just about any textbox now having "completion suggestions" which respond to each keypress...
But that's just one potential solution, it's not the fault of the technology itself. In addition, at least your key presses show up instantly, rather than making a round trip before they show up. Low latency is nice.
I stand by my assertion that equating X11 and the web is wrong, not that it stops the haters and/or the ignorant from parroting it (and getting modded up for it).
In the brave new future, we're now going to run our software on virtual cloud servers while the display goes over the Internet to our web browser, using Javascript instead of X11.
And the difference is enormous. HTML / CSS / JavaScript can do a lot. Even something as seemingly minor as key presses not having to navigate a round trip is a huge win.
It's popular to equate X11 and the web, but it's wrong to do so.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe none of you actually programmed in C. A string terminated by \0 can be represented by a single pointer and an have any length. You can also easily let the string keep growing (until the allocated memory is finished.) That is the epitome of KISS.
And a written language with just two letters in the alphabet is simple too, right? So, let's do that!
There's KISS and then there's KISS. C strings aren't the right kind of KISS.
When you don't have friends, cards are really just a stack of colored paper. That's the problem I've always had with Dungeons and Dragons and multi-player games like that. When I was a kid I used to buy D&D books and modules and be fascinated with the lore and how much fun it all sounded. But when the realization hits you that you don't have anyone to play it with, it all becomes pretty useless.
I ran into a similar issue. (1) Very small circle of friends. (2) None of them interested in playing role playing games like D&D. (3) People get married, buy houses, start pumping out kids, and aligning schedules becomes near impossible.
You're not alone in being alone. I recommend something like an MMORPG where you can meet people and develop online friendships. My favorite has always been EverQuest.
A Roth 401(k) [wikipedia.org] is to a traditional 401(k) as a Roth IRA is to a traditional IRA.
...
Roth 401(k): Post-tax contributions; money grows tax free; withdrawals are not taxed; employers are legally allowed to do the same things as with a traditional 401(k); same contribution limits as a traditional 401(k) [technically the contribution limit applies to the sum of all 401(k) contributions, traditional and Roth alike].
Excellent information; thanks! I had no idea such a thing existed. I wonder how many employers offer Roth 401(k) plans. I don't think mine does; then again, 10 minutes ago, I didn't know that Roth 401(k) plans even existed. Thanks for educating me. I should have looked it up before assuming it didn't exist; I'm sorry about that.
tl;dr Roth retirement accounts let you pay a 0% tax rate on all capital gains as long as you pay tax on "principal contributed" instead of "principal withdrawn" (because you're paying tax on the principal either way), unlike traditional retirement accounts, which make you pay tax on all gains. Why would the average person go traditional?
Indeed. This merits more investigation. Thanks!
I don't know what a "Roth 401(k)" is -- I've never heard of that before. My understanding is as follows:
Traditional IRA: Pre-tax contributions; money grows tax free; withdrawals are taxed; fairly limited yearly maximum contributions.
Roth IRA: Post-tax contributions; money grows tax free; withdrawals are not taxed; fairly limited yearly maximum contributions.
401(k): Pre-tax contributions; money grows tax free; withdrawals are taxed; sometimes employers contribute extra as a benefit; much higher maximum yearly contributions.
The size of the contributions you can make to Roth IRAs are very limited, making them useless as your sole retirement investment vehicle.
401(k)s let you put in much bigger contributions, and grow tax free. Only withdrawals are taxed.
I wish your comment wasn't posted anonymously, it deserves to be modded +5, Insightful.
In the room next door I have a DEC VT240 from around 1990 which is capable of displaying text and vector graphics using the ReGIS instruction set. I'm so happy to see that, 24 years later, Google is reviving the graphical dumb terminal.
Except that web browsers are not dumb terminals. Web browsers can do local processing. In fact, many Chrome apps run entirely offline.
Your post isn't insightful, it's just plain an invalid and flawed analogy.
I'm typing this on a nine-year-old Dell Latitude D410 running Windows XP. I've got a current version of Firefox, current versions of all of the plugins I use on a regular basis
Your fully patched browser and plugins still make heavy use of operating system DLLs, and those DLLs are no longer getting security updates. This puts you at risk.
Continuing to use old hardware is fine, as long as the OS is updated and secure. I have a similarly old machine that I put Linux on.
I'm afraid your highly modded comment might make non-technical people think using XP to browse the web is still OK. It's not. Even with a fully updated and patched browser.
1. Grab Tablet.
I have a Wii-U. I consider the tablet bulky and inconvenient, without offering enough advantage in exchange for the inconvenience. It often needs to be plugged in, making it even more inconvenient.
Notepad++ is windows-only.
You can, if you want, run it under WINE.
The closed iOS ecosystem is about the worst thing Apple ever did to their customers
Whoa now, that just ain't true. Not at all.
Techies tend to forget how ridiculously hard it is for non-techies to administer their computers. Apple's iOS frees its customers from complexity, it frees them from stress and worry about viruses and Trojans, it frees them from the repercussions of being successfully hacked.
Sure, for your typical geek-o-matic here, OMG-I-don't-have-root-and-I-can't-allow-that! But for regular people, Apple's walled garden is a blessing.
I'm typing this on an Asus Vivobook S200E ultraportable (i3-3217U, 4GB, 11.6", aluminum chassis, USB 3.0, $430 new + $80 more for a nice SATA-III SSD to upgrade with; basically what I call a "better MacBook Air than a MacBook Air")
I only took a quick glance, but it looks like the MacBook Air is half the weight, has a better CPU, better graphics, more USB 3.0 ports, much better battery life, lots of useful built-in apps, etc.
Exactly how did you compute that your Asus Vivobook S200E "ultraportable" is a "better MacBook Air than a MacBook Air"?
But seriously, hopefully Microsoft will benefit from him and become a bit more popular amongst nerds.
Why do you hope for that? Microsoft pretends to reinvent itself regularly, but one thing remains constant through the decades: Their goal has unswervingly been lock-in from top to bottom, while trying to nickel and dime you the whole way.
For nerds, this means locking you into their programming languages (e.g., VB or C#), or if not that, at least lock you into their APIs (so that you're as good as locked in, even if you're using C or C++). It means abandonment of entire domains that no longer suit them (look up how woefully out-of-date and ignored the C part of their C/C++ compiler is).
It means locking you into their platforms, whether that be the operating system (Windows) or the browser (Internet Explorer).
It means high prices (have you seen the prices on Windows Server and/or Microsoft Azure lately?), which is not-at-all nerd-friendly. It means guaranteed stagnation in those domains where they achieve dominance. It means product churn for the sake of profits. It means ignoring customers and forcing bad implementations on them (*cough*Metro*cough*) and then taking forever to admit it was a mistake and fix it (when is Windows 9 due out? Next year sometime?).
Just because some new-boss-same-as-the-old-boss is singing some unicorns-and-rainbows song doesn't mean the core of Microsoft is going to change. They're still after the same things they've always been after: Lock-in so severe that the pain of escape ensures most people remain slaves, and profits, profits, profits.
12 cents won't affect me one bit. It certainly won't change my driving habits. The poor on the other hand.. well, let's just say if you're living on a fixed income and/or are already below the poverty line a nice big regressive tax might sting a little...
Well, let's think about that for a minute. Let's guess that on average filling up your tank from near empty to near full is around 13 gallons. An extra 12 cents per gallon will come to around $1.50.
If people fill up weekly, that'll be about $6/month. I don't think that'll impact the poor so very much...
Also, wealthy people tend to drive bigger vehicles, such as SUVs, and tend to commute longer distances from expensive suburbs. This will certainly cost wealthier people more money (but still probably not enough to matter).
This proposed 12 cents per gallon tax increase is peanuts, but be prepared for republicans in congress to scream and holler and shout about how it'll destroy America, cause more homosexuality, etc.
Guaranteed death in a car accident -- what's not to love?
Just tried it and clicking + fully maximised on every application but Chrome which for some reason has incremental sizing on it. What applications don't work for you?
OS X has what's called the Zoom button, not a Maximize button. It's supposed to size the window to best fit the content. Sometimes it does the same as Maximize does, sometimes it doesn't. Often it doesn't.
Source: My wife switched to OS X about 4 1/2 years ago. The lack of a Maximize button is, indeed, an annoyance. In OS X Mavericks, there's a full screen feature, but that's not quite the same. We frequently merely struggle a bit to manually maximize windows.
Why can't I compile and run whatever software that will run on desktop on my phone?
Because that's not a useful feature for 99.9% of the market.
It's not the comments that have decreased in quality, it's the moderation. Ever since the whole beta thing people seem be less willing to spend time moderating and meta-moderating the site.
I would moderate more if I could, but (1) I browse /. on my iPad a lot, (2) I use the standard desktop view of the site on my iPad, not the mobile view, and (3) When I open stories in new tabs, it forgets that I'm logged in, thus I can't moderate.
If /. ever fixes that long-standing bug, I would be happy to try to do my part to moderate posts objectively and fairly.
Chrome laptops are consumption devices. They are not creative devices.
This is nonsense. There are a lot of web apps and Chrome apps for creating things.
It often happens in a conversation about one thing, particularly a complex and nuanced thing, that it will bring up other similar things because they are related in some way. The resistance of some to this natural conversational process never made much sense.
I could speculate that you have a loyalty to Google that you cannot realistically expect them to reciprocate (you do know that, right?), except I've seen lots of people display this tendency who obviously had no such motivation. Some people just like to complain.
Your speculation is incorrect. Pointing out that Google may have issues in no meaningful way adds to the discussion regarding Facebook's well known issues. It's a rhetorical trick to distract from the fact that Facebook has issues.
I'm happy to discuss Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc. But when someone clearly points out people don't trust Facebook, and for good reason, no value is added to the conversation when someone says, "But... Google!"
Neither Google nor Facebook has ever successfully built a product users will actually pay for.
You mean, other than Google Apps for Business, Google App Engine, Google Drive, etc.?
Your seething hated of Google is noted. And noted. And noted...
This article is about Facebook. Quit trying to change the subject.
By now, a professional organization would have at least acknowledged the complaints. Slashdot hasn't yet, and I'm willing to bet they never do. For a site that posts so many stories complaining about what other people do, they're remarkably slow to admit when they make a mistake.
Continue to turn the comments threads into a trash heap to drive people away. And don't forget to turn on your ad blocker. Do what you can to get their attention until they publically acknowledge that this is a mistake -- because they're not going to pay attention otherwise.
I can't even get them to give us an option to turn off fucking autorefresh. It seems rather hopeless. :(
Except that in that brave new future, the keypresses are navigating a round trip - see "google instant search" or just about any textbox now having "completion suggestions" which respond to each keypress...
But that's just one potential solution, it's not the fault of the technology itself. In addition, at least your key presses show up instantly, rather than making a round trip before they show up. Low latency is nice.
I stand by my assertion that equating X11 and the web is wrong, not that it stops the haters and/or the ignorant from parroting it (and getting modded up for it).
In the brave new future, we're now going to run our software on virtual cloud servers while the display goes over the Internet to our web browser, using Javascript instead of X11.
And the difference is enormous. HTML / CSS / JavaScript can do a lot. Even something as seemingly minor as key presses not having to navigate a round trip is a huge win.
It's popular to equate X11 and the web, but it's wrong to do so.