mod_dir will work fine but doesn't give any extras - all the details will need to be in the filename and if you release often will become a big list - probably the first in a long series of upgrades will be adding directories. I'm sorry, I don't count 'mkdir' as a new feature worthy of mention. I understand that it was once -- there were, once, OSes which had only a single directory. But even DOS supports subdirs.
As time goes by you will probably want to add extras, such as release notes, documentation etc. all adding tasks to the initial project. And all of which could easily be handled within the initial project -- inside that source control. Come on, release notes? Grab files called README, CHANGELOG, etc, rename them with the version appended. If you're any kind of software developer at all, it'll take you, what, five minutes to turn that into a script? Ten, maybe?
Alternatively, you go to sourceforge, create your project, add a few blurbs and you are ready to roll. It's the time and irritation you'd waste later that bothers me.
The structure is there for documentation, help, forums etc. to scale as you need How much infrastructure is there for scripting, though? Can it ever get to the point where I can type something like "cap release 0.5.3" and have everything you described done automatically?
Now, I admit, I'm a web developer, so this kind of stuff is easy for me. But I do think that most of it should be easy for everyone -- and yes, you are going to have to make some HTML of your own, somehow.
Nothing more frustrating than a SourceForge page with no website and no real docs, just a tarball and, if I'm lucky, CVS access where I can read a README. Those are the kind of projects I tend to avoid.
Remember, OSX is for the "It Just Works(TM)" crowd.
I realize there is a group of users who will absolutely hang on everything Steve Jobs does. But I'd assumed there were that many, or more, who have absolutely no clue -- who will actually believe them when they do things like brag about the G5's "Intel-crushing performance", right before they announce the switch to Intel -- assuming they even know what Intel is.
There are certainly people out there -- exactly the kind of people who need Time Machine, and need it to be shiny and 3D just to get them to do their backups -- and these people need to be sold on 10.5. I mean Leopard, which has Time Machine, and Spaces, and... You see?
The reason Apple doesn't need version numbers is that they're geniuses of marketing -- they have other reasons to upgrade than a new number.
Offtopic, but has anyone noticed how absolutely unreadable most news sites have gotten?
I just measured, and in a fixed-width page -- meaning yes, the assholes did this deliberately -- the actual content takes up 30%. The rest is ads, navigation, ads, promotion, ads, and ads.
Hey, PC World, want to know why you can't withstand the Slashdot effect? I don't know, maybe it's all those fucking ads!
The point is that most smaller domains use VHOSTs because their hosting provider puts them and twelve other domains on the same server with the same IP. That's the part I wasn't assuming. Interesting.
Using the same domain instead of subdomains can help solve the problem for big companies, though it means that instead of being able to distribute load through subdomains, you have to distribute it with load balancers and beefier server infrastructure. No, it doesn't, for the very simple reason that if you've split something off into a subdomain to "distribute load", it's going to be on a separate IP address anyway. Otherwise, you're not "distributing load", at least not by making it a subdomain.
Only exception would be if load balancers are somehow cheaper if they only look at the hostname, and not the URL. Certainly, software balancers like nginx are trivial to configure either way, so that foo.com/mail/ goes to a separate cluster than foo.com/forum/, and so on.
then you are naive. Religions force people to believe that god created Man in his image and we are the center of the universe because of it. And science pretty much forces religion to back the fuck off, every time -- see Galileo. Sure, it takes time, but eventually, religion adapts so that it can still theoretically be right, even when things it used to hold as core beliefs are completely disproven.
Do you really think that there are enough religious nuts in control of enough of the world who, say, haven't seen Star Trek? For that matter, do you honestly think that it's easier to hide "the truth" from the world than to simply declare that we're made in the image of God, and these aliens aren't?
as well as Outlaw Star which Firefly draws pretty heavily on It draws on a lot of things, but yes, the girl in the box seemed pretty direct. Still, even if it was a complete ripoff, I'd love to see a live-action Outlaw Star!
Another good one is Cowboy Bebop.
For some reason, in a world without God, I could see the purpose in making others happy, but I don't see any purpose in my own life. That requires a bit of hedonism. For my own life, I like to be happy.
as a good Christian boy at University I wasn't too into the whole heavy drinking scene as 95% of Scottish students seem to be, so I didn't really socialise with my classmates beyond our group projects. I never drink, but it doesn't often stop me from socializing. Drunk people are fun! And the fact that they forget half of what happened means you can make up stories later to scare them...
I guess that depends whether they respect that you're not going to drink -- or not as much. The people I ended up socializing with did respect that -- they offered, and when I said no, that was good enough.
The fact I can appreciate things like art and music is the type of thing that would make me think about God again, but I guess there's nothing wrong with that:p No, nothing wrong with that.
Nothing about art and music requires that you believe in divine inspiration. If anything, I believe people can be 'divine'.
But nothing wrong with being reminded, either, especially when so much art and music is devoted to religion, for better or worse.
Anyway I'm probably far too open and rambling Ordinarily yes, but I have no problem with it. The only question is whether you're alright with all of it going up into a public forum like this.
Strangely at the moment I feel I'd be better off thinking about things by myself. I know that it would probably be good to talk to another Christian properly at some point Either way, it's good that you are thinking about it.
The reason I suggest having a talk with a Christian is to remind you of whatever truths there might be in your religion, and why you've had faith in the first place. Even if you leave, it is good to know where you are coming from.
Going off in a completely different direction, we talked about Pascal's Wager before. I have something similar that I live by: Any God who is good and compassionate to where I would worship Him, is surely able to forgive me for my doubts. Any God who demands blind faith is not worthy of my faith. So if a deity exists -- or a pantheon, or any great, supernatural power -- I am still right to disbelieve without proof.
I'd go as far to say that 99.99% of humanity thinks that censorship is a good thing as long as they get to pick what is censored from the rest. Nice to feel special.
I think that censorship is never a good thing, when applied by a central authority. The only kind of censorship I can see working is a community, web-of-trust kind of censorship, and even then, only advisory, not mandatory.
In other words, while I have strong doubts about Freenet ever working technically -- and I can't be bothered to run a node myself -- I do believe a working Freenet would be a good thing.
If you can't figure out what stuff does without a video tutorial, then it is *by definition* not discoverable. Fixed it for you.
But that's really bickering over semantics -- the real question here is whether it's usable. Discoverability is orthogonal to usability -- it's better if you can have both, but I would trade discoverability for long-term usability any day.
But I like bickering over sematics:
Intuitive \In*tu"i*tive\, a. [Cf. F. intuitif.]
[1913 Webster]
1. Seeing clearly; as, an intuitive view; intuitive vision.
[1913 Webster]
2. Knowing, or perceiving, by intuition; capable of knowing
without deduction or reasoning.
[1913 Webster] Note: It says "capable of knowing", not "capable of learning" -- and it also says "without deduction or reasoning", not "without training".
Simple example: I find that middle-click to paste is intuitive, as are multiple desktops on a spinning cube -- they make sense without having to reason about them. But to someone raised on Windows, that's not going to be at all what you expect -- no one wakes up expecting that their nice, comfortable 2D workspace is actually just one face of a cube, and they can use the other faces, too.
Disclaimer: I haven't actually used Blender, but I really do prefer the Gimp UI to Photoshop.
Question: How much more CPU time will this require than Google currently uses to search the entire fucking Internet?
I bookmark https://mail.google.com/, for when I'm forced to use Gmail. I've got no sympathy for the extra CPU and money they have to spend to prevent people from intercepting my session.
It is impossible to use virtual hosts with separate certs via https on the same IP address. Fixed it for you.
This has pretty significant ramifications in terms of the number of additional IP addresses it would require for everyone to switch to https. Use IPv6. Problem solved.
Oh, and there is a spec to allow multiple vhosts on the same address with SSL enabled. I can't help but wonder if that's really more likely to get universal adoption than ipv6, though.
But really, how hard is it to simply use the same domain? I generally see vhosts as multiple addresses for the same company -- mail.google.com, images.google.com, etc. And when they are, there's no good technological reason they can't simply move those subdomains into suburls -- google.com/mail, or google.com/images.
Well, alright, there is a good reason -- in the case of Google, those are likely different IP addresses -- but that completely negates the whole virtual host problem anyway.
Well, that, and the fact that the issue is often confused by people calling it "theft". It can be a bad thing without being the same as theft.
And the fact that they prosecute entirely the wrong people, with pretty close to zero evidence. It is troubling that they probably could just pick someone out of the phone book at random and find that they're sharing files, but we're supposed to have something called "due process".
Once you are signing/verifying documents like that, you are already expending 95% of the effort to perform the encryption in the first place. So, might as well encrypt anyway IMO. Signing can be cached for static pages. Crypto can't.
JUST SAY NO to isp's that do this shit to you and don't give you at least an opt-out from it. "Just saying no" may not be enough. This is a bit like the pharmaceutical industry -- nothing is stopping you from selling whatever herbal remedies you like, but at the very least, you have to include an FDA warning that it's not really medicine.
Oh, and they do offer an "opt-out" -- in the form of a website that you have to visit in the clear (no https), and fill in your information, resulting in... a cookie.
Which means that you now have to make sure to opt-out in every browser you ever use, including wget and lynx. Anything which doesn't support cookies is fucked. In particular, not everyone uses XML for AJAX -- some people use XHTML for their web services. And not all web service clients are browsers that you can stick cookies in.
And, for that matter, how are they checking the cookie? Only way I can think of would be to insert some sort of hidden iframe on every page, linking to their domain, which can then check the cookie. Therefore, even if the cookie is present in every appropriate HTTP request, they're still having to fuck with most of the internet to even be able to check that cookie.
So, to summarize: They offer "opt-out", but not really. And support net neutrality legislation.
Ack! No paragraphs... Alright.
Anyway, I was reading a bit about nihilism and such on wikipedia last night as I feel it's basically what I've been leaning towards all my life, and Nietzsche points out that Christianity basically boils down to Nihilism anyway Nihilism is a start, I think. Most of what I have been telling you is how to deal with the universe being meaningless. It doesn't have to be depressing -- it can be inspiring.
I've also often wondered if I wouldn't be quite such a 'moral' person if I weren't a Christian, for example when it comes to sexual things, my hormonal urges aren't that easy to fight off. Well, urges to do what, though? What would you otherwise do, that you see as a bad thing?
I find nothing wrong with sexuality. The kind of ethics that I think apply here are mostly about the other person -- for example, no means no.
I think I'm going to try writing down my thoughts soon and see what I come up with. Then I might send them off to one of the most visibly intelligent and evangelical ministers in the country and see what he thinks. Better, find someone in a small church, who has the time to sit down and talk to you in person.
Either way, listen to them at least as much as you've listened to me. Not everything they say will be true, or something you can agree with, but some things will be intelligent, and some things may help you to find that meaning in your life, even if it ends up not being directly related to the church.
And even if I do decide that it all isn't true, in the end religion almost seems like something people need to be mentally healthy? Well, depends on the person. There are a lot of atheists and agnostics who are pretty much healthy.
No doubt I missed out some options, but I thought that Christianity was a pretty safe bet back then. The problem is that there's an infinite number of possibilities. Everything you can think of could be the truth of life after death.
the idea of there being no God does scare me shitless, and also makes me sad for humanity.. Have you seen Firefly? Or Serenity? (If not, get them now. Today.)
It's a truly amazing show in its own right, and certainly is not anti-religious propaganda -- Shephard Book makes a good preacher, I think.
But Joss Whedon is an Atheist, and so is Mal Reynolds... And I think the movie, especially, has a powerful message of faith in people.
so many people thinking there is something more, but in reality we live, we die, and there really is no higher meaning to anything. It's almost more difficult to express this as it is to express religious faith...
We make the higher meaning. If there's no God, there's nobody to stop us from inventing a purpose. We can have lives that are as rich and as deep and as meaningful as if we were living for God -- perhaps moreso.
I can understand why it might make you sad that so many people devote themselves to a God, if that God doesn't exist. It's a depressing thought. But it doesn't mean that their lives are meaningless.
Gandhi taught the art of peaceful resistance to the world. He worked for Indian independence, and for peace.
Martin Luther King learned from Gandhi, and taught the blacks (and, really, all minorities) in the US to resist, but peacefully. And he showed us a dream of brotherhood and love -- that one day, we can judge and be judged not by the color of our skin, but by the contents of our character. And I believe he has succeeded.
Both had strong religious convictions. I am sure that on some level, they believed they were doing this for God. And that's alright -- it's alright even if there is no God -- because what they have done has meaning.
Anyway -- watch Firefly, and especially, at least, watch Serenity. If you've seen them, watch them again.
One can take it a step further and also conclude that stricter languages with more static checking are also preferable, since the compiler can rule out certain classes of bugs independent of the quality of developer. I would argue that the rest of the code isn't going to be "independent of the quality of developer", and I tend to find that most such strict languages also aren't as concise or as fun to work in as a high-level, highly dynamic language.
For what values of recently? PHP has existed since 1995. "Basic, but workable OO" was added five years later, so of course it was tacked on, compared to a language designed from the ground up for OO -- like, oh, Python or Ruby, both of which existed before PHP had its first OO.
And that's supposed to adversely affect my coding how? Good question. This was in response to a criticism of Perl having more syntax than PHP...
Maybe I'll have to think about it next time I want to write a function called 'strcmp' or 'md5' Or maybe 'mail'?
Remember, three thousand reserved words. If you never hit them, you're lucky -- I'd rather not take my chances. I'd rather go with a language that has good, solid namespace support, baked into the standard library, from the beginning, so I never need to keep more than maybe twenty words in my head at a time.
Not to mention TFA is about new features of PHP6 / 5.3, including namespaces. Yay! After 13 fucking years, you finally get namespaces!
Do any of PHP's competitors lack namespaces? Have they ever? Even Javascript has namespaces, or at least the constructs needed to build them. And PHP is finally getting them in 2008.
Who wants to bet how much of the core library is still going to be crapped over the global namespace?
Maybe you can offer some proof that putting these functions in the core library adversely affects PHP's performance? It increases RAM usage, and is necessarily going to take more time to compile -- compile your program, that is -- at the very least. That's a given -- suggesting otherwise is like saying "Maybe you can offer some proof that putting a call to factorial(5000) in the middle of our view adversely affects our app's performance?"
Now, maybe if you said "significantly adversely affects performance"...
Oh, and does PHP support structs? 1) Is there any reason I should care? This was in response to someone claiming a strength of PHP as being that you can copy/paste C code and only tweak it a little bit. If you don't support structs, that makes it a bit difficult.
What about function pointers? Yup, they're called 'callbacks' in PHP. Ok... So you can create a function, given a name, and then pass that name around. And you pretend that's a function pointer? What?
So... That's going to add a lot of complexity for things like this:
some_array = ['one', 'two', 'three'] some_array.each do |item|
puts (item + 's') end
Admittedly, you can do this with a for loop -- provided you know it's actually an array you're dealing with. Iterators like 'each' are a lot more flexible.
It's also going to make some things actually impossible. How would you do this:
def generate_add(first)
Proc.new do |second|
first + second
end end
add_two = generate_add(2)
add_two.call(2) # 4 add_two.call(5) # 7
generate_add(5).call(5) # 10
I admit that, as written, these are contrived examples. That's because they're examples. This kind of stuff is useful in practice, and even JavaScript supports it.
But... you know what, never mind. Lack of support for closure scope means you could never do something like the above anyway.
The other thing to keep in mind is that the OO was tacked on, badly.
Contrast this with Perl OO, which was tacked on fairly well, and done in a Perl-ish way, so that if you already knew Perl, the OO would make sense to you.
Or with Python or Ruby -- Python was OO since the beginning, and Ruby is pervasively OO, in that absolutely everything can be coerced into some kind of an object, and you can call methods on it, or add some of your own.
Example: nil (null, really) is an object, and you can define your own methods on it. So are integers, and you can subclass Integer if you like. (The one drawback is that a lot of this expressive power can let you do evil, twisted things, that might make the interpreter crash badly, like attempting to define true as false and false as true.
My new favorite way of describing PHP is "training wheels without the bike."
Ok, sure, intellisense is nice if, for some strange reason, I forget what has_many is called.
But for the rest of it, you'd have to know that the second argument,:comments, is meant to be the plural of another model class. If that Comment class already existed, in theory, a Rails-specific IDE could tab-complete that to:comments. Maybe.
And then there's the rest of it, which is part of the options hash -- which means that it would have to know all the options which has_many can receive. But has_many is actually receiving a hash as an argument, and then doing something with it. As it happens, Rails has some fairly standard ways for a function to specify what it accepts as "keyword arguments", but again, you'd have to design that specifically for Rails.
Even given that, you'd have to know that:stories corresponds to the Story class, found in app/models/story.rb. Not impossible, but very Rails-specific.
The one feature you've described that might be useful is a shortcut for getting to the documentation -- because we really would need a lot of documentation here. But that's not worth learning Emacs for, when I already have a keystroke to take me to my browser, where the Rails documentation is, and search "methods" for "has_many" -- which is probably already up anyway.
Oh, one more thing, while I'm at it -- Ruby lets you override method_missing, which is called when you try to call a nonexistent method. Rails uses this to pretend to have a lot of convenience methods on its associations. I've used it in some programs of my own -- creating a wrapper around an object, for instance.
I'm not sure if having intellisense which sort of works, sometimes, is better than not having it at all.
Maybe one day, there will be better Ruby editing tools. In the meantime, I find that the tradeoff is worth it -- that extra time spent looking up documentation is more than made up for by how quickly I can actually get things done once I know those methods.
And finally, just a nit -- meta is often mapped to alt, right? Meaning that meta-tab means alt-tab, which usually means something quite different in most window managers.
If you're working on a project with a lot of other people, having your merge diffs available right in your editor is pretty handy. Fair enough -- but better than "SVN integration" would be "use ANYTHING other than SVN" so that your merges make sense.
you can actually see on a line-by-line basis what lines of code are actually being tested by your unit tests I wonder if there's similar integration for things like Heckle, a tool for Ruby unit tests which munges the code being tested in various ways -- the theory being that if it still passes the unit tests after that, you're not testing everything.
An IDE is not entirely useless. It's not impossible to make the perfect IDE. But for most projects, the IDE simply isn't worth the hassle that it brings.
They could just buy a bunch of computers specifically for the task. That's moving out of the definition of "botnet", though, and more into the definition of "legitimate cluster."
And by the way, I really don't care what they do with their own funding, but they do NOT get to commandeer my hardware. So if it's a "botnet" in the traditional sense, then I say hell no!
Personally, I like things like integrated FTP, integrated subversion, integrated unit testing, and, most of all, an integrated server-side debugger w/ all expected function: breakpoint/play/step control, stack and heap manipulation, etc.
The debugger is the only thing I miss from a "real" IDE.
Subversion is garbage, of the "at least it's not CVS" variety. There are at least some ten or twenty distributed version control systems out there, at least one of which has got to work well for you.
FTP is garbage. Use anything else. Yes, anything else.
These are actually related. I don't really like most of the stuff you mentioned "integrated", as that usually means things like "I have a keyboard shortcut to run unit tests!" Great, but I'm comfortable on the commandline. Let me switch between my editor and terminal easily, and I'll run unit tests, run a development server, and anything else I feel like.
The other reason is that I can then switch to pretty much anything else without having to switch IDEs. I know just about everything is supported on Eclipse, but "just about" isn't everything. I don't have to choose between Git and Subversion -- I can use bzr, hg, darcs, or really whatever the fsck I want. I don't have to use FTP because it's got the prettiest interface -- I'm just as comfortable with scp -- or, when it makes sense, Capistrano -- I can even use things like KDE's fish GUI for ssh.
All of these are possible using a text editor, but you need 5 different applications
Yes, that's the Unix Way.
and none of it works together.
Wrong, wrong, WRONG!
All of it works very well together. On the occasions where it doesn't, I can hack together the glue require reasonably quickly, and be back to being as productive as I was before -- but these cases are also times when an IDE wouldn't be able to work with them at all, and I know a lot more about hacking together scripts (shell and similar) than I do about writing Eclipse plugins.
Not to mention: INTELLISENSE
Useless, unless it's linked to documentation. And then, still useless, compared to flipping over to my browser and asking Google, since I probably don't actually know what I want there.
Not that I would be against having it, but I'm not willing to fire up Eclipse (and burn all my RAM, and still have it be sloppy and inaccurate due to being a dynamic language) just for Intellisense.
And then there's workspace management, and keeping plugins in sync, and dealing with when plugins go bad -- can't start Eclipse until I figure out which plugin is making it crash, or, more likely, wipe it and reinstall from scratch -- and it'll autodetect the file as the wrong type, so now I have to go fuck with its filetype associations, and set keyboard shortcuts -- whoops, the shortcuts I want aren't there...
There's a whole new level of bullshit I'd have to deal with if I was using an IDE. I know, I was for awhile.
and DATA TYPE DISCOVERY! (on a loosely typed language that's a big help).
If I understand this, it might be a help if I had functions so massive I can actually lose track of a variable, or if you're talking about the whole built-in debugger feature.
Instead of having to basically memorize or manually lookup class names, method names, and method arguments, I just begin typing the class name, use some arrow keys, and be done w/ it.
Except that by the time I'm doing that, I probably want to know more about it. For example: Is this indexed from zero, or one? How do I create a has_many relationship with an order clause? Does that have to be a string, or can it also be some other cool data structure?
Let me know if you find an IDE that can handle Intellisense in Ruby and actually make me more productive.
Oh, also, a fair amount of what you're doing probably should fit in your head. If you're not doing PHP and needing to know things like mysql_real_
Well, I was trying for the camera achievement. How the fsck do you get the ones that are on brick walls? I did try bouncing stuff into them with the Companion Cube, and got killed a few times...
Also, wasn't timing myself precisely, and did take a few breaks to do other things. If you really want to race, I can probably do better than that.
Again I'll say that I don't think people should die for some of that stuff, but was relating what the bible says. The bible says that God can't abide any sin, no matter how small, and people deserve to die for it
And you did also state that as your own belief.
Stand up and say what you believe in. Don't hide behind the Bible. And don't be afraid to say "I don't know."
The truth is that not knowing what is out there really is quite a scary prospect.
I went to a few Landmark Education seminars awhile back. A lot of people on Slashdot seem to think that's a cult -- I strongly disagree, but whatever, this part was useful.
They have everyone in the room close their eyes... And they walk you through it, step by step. How, deep down, you're afraid of everyone. They walk you through circles of influence -- how you really don't know that much about everyone else. How much of your life is influenced by that fear.
I can't really reproduce that effectively here. I don't remember it in enough detail, and there is a specific script that they go through -- and there is something about being there.
Then, they turned it around.
Once you finally get, really and truly, how afraid you are of everyone -- you actually open up and let that fear in, until you're almost shaking in your seat... You pretend you're not, but you're absolutely fucking terrified of every single other person on the planet...
Then you can appreciate the fact that every single person on the planet is terrified of you.
And they walk you through the whole thing... Remember how you were really afraid of the cab driver, and the people at lunch, and all of those people? They're just as afraid of you.
Now, that may not help you as much with your problem -- this works because we're just talking about other people. But it is a kind of fear of the unknown. And it can be paralyzing... or not.
Maybe the unknown fears you as much as you fear the unknown.
But maybe it helps to be afraid of that -- and then look at what scares you about your life here, and find it isn't so bad.
Anyway, I'm glad we both were able to talk without getting too heated about all this, my apologies for the previous post, it's what happens when I think about stuff too much, someone ends up being on the receiving end of me being a jerk.
Hey, I asked for it.
I used to talk with my gf about it and we both thought it was still the most 'plausible' out of any possible explanations for everything.
Because you were taught that way, so it's the most comfortable to believe. Complete meaninglessness is just as plausible, really.
I haven't studied eastern philosophy in depth no, it definitely (as opposed to just maybe with some other religions) is the result of human ideas
Human ideas are very, very powerful. I hope I've started to give you some insight into that.
Oh, and that means your ideas can be powerful, too.
If I were a gambling man and life was just a game, I'd probably bet on the bible being made up. The risks to that are high, especially when the idea of hell has been drilled into me all my life.
Well, that's Pascal's Wager. The original goes something like this:
Either God exists, or He does not. Either I believe in God, or I do not. If God exists, and I believe, I go to Heaven. If God exists, and I don't believe, I go to Hell. If God doesn't exist, it doesn't matter what I believe. So if I believe, I'll either go to Heaven, or nothing will happen. And if I don't believe, I'll either go to Hell, or nothing will happen. I'd rather believe, because then there's a chance of Heaven, instead of a risk of Hell.
Not sure why I wrapped that it quote tags, since that's probably nothing like what he actually wrote, but the idea is the same.
The fallacy, of course, is that there are more than just those two possibilities. Either God exi
Slashdot Mirror
Now, I admit, I'm a web developer, so this kind of stuff is easy for me. But I do think that most of it should be easy for everyone -- and yes, you are going to have to make some HTML of your own, somehow.
Nothing more frustrating than a SourceForge page with no website and no real docs, just a tarball and, if I'm lucky, CVS access where I can read a README. Those are the kind of projects I tend to avoid.
Remember, OSX is for the "It Just Works(TM)" crowd.
I realize there is a group of users who will absolutely hang on everything Steve Jobs does. But I'd assumed there were that many, or more, who have absolutely no clue -- who will actually believe them when they do things like brag about the G5's "Intel-crushing performance", right before they announce the switch to Intel -- assuming they even know what Intel is.
There are certainly people out there -- exactly the kind of people who need Time Machine, and need it to be shiny and 3D just to get them to do their backups -- and these people need to be sold on 10.5. I mean Leopard, which has Time Machine, and Spaces, and... You see?
The reason Apple doesn't need version numbers is that they're geniuses of marketing -- they have other reasons to upgrade than a new number.
Offtopic, but has anyone noticed how absolutely unreadable most news sites have gotten?
I just measured, and in a fixed-width page -- meaning yes, the assholes did this deliberately -- the actual content takes up 30%. The rest is ads, navigation, ads, promotion, ads, and ads.
Hey, PC World, want to know why you can't withstand the Slashdot effect? I don't know, maybe it's all those fucking ads!
Only exception would be if load balancers are somehow cheaper if they only look at the hostname, and not the URL. Certainly, software balancers like nginx are trivial to configure either way, so that foo.com/mail/ goes to a separate cluster than foo.com/forum/, and so on.
Do you really think that there are enough religious nuts in control of enough of the world who, say, haven't seen Star Trek? For that matter, do you honestly think that it's easier to hide "the truth" from the world than to simply declare that we're made in the image of God, and these aliens aren't?
Another good one is Cowboy Bebop. For some reason, in a world without God, I could see the purpose in making others happy, but I don't see any purpose in my own life. That requires a bit of hedonism. For my own life, I like to be happy. as a good Christian boy at University I wasn't too into the whole heavy drinking scene as 95% of Scottish students seem to be, so I didn't really socialise with my classmates beyond our group projects. I never drink, but it doesn't often stop me from socializing. Drunk people are fun! And the fact that they forget half of what happened means you can make up stories later to scare them...
I guess that depends whether they respect that you're not going to drink -- or not as much. The people I ended up socializing with did respect that -- they offered, and when I said no, that was good enough. The fact I can appreciate things like art and music is the type of thing that would make me think about God again, but I guess there's nothing wrong with that
Nothing about art and music requires that you believe in divine inspiration. If anything, I believe people can be 'divine'.
But nothing wrong with being reminded, either, especially when so much art and music is devoted to religion, for better or worse. Anyway I'm probably far too open and rambling Ordinarily yes, but I have no problem with it. The only question is whether you're alright with all of it going up into a public forum like this. Strangely at the moment I feel I'd be better off thinking about things by myself. I know that it would probably be good to talk to another Christian properly at some point Either way, it's good that you are thinking about it.
The reason I suggest having a talk with a Christian is to remind you of whatever truths there might be in your religion, and why you've had faith in the first place. Even if you leave, it is good to know where you are coming from.
Going off in a completely different direction, we talked about Pascal's Wager before. I have something similar that I live by: Any God who is good and compassionate to where I would worship Him, is surely able to forgive me for my doubts. Any God who demands blind faith is not worthy of my faith. So if a deity exists -- or a pantheon, or any great, supernatural power -- I am still right to disbelieve without proof.
I think that censorship is never a good thing, when applied by a central authority. The only kind of censorship I can see working is a community, web-of-trust kind of censorship, and even then, only advisory, not mandatory.
In other words, while I have strong doubts about Freenet ever working technically -- and I can't be bothered to run a node myself -- I do believe a working Freenet would be a good thing.
Probably far too many, but the difference is, in the US, we're raised on stuff like "Freedom of Speech" and "Give me liberty or give me death!"
In China, they are raised on entirely different principles.
But that's really bickering over semantics -- the real question here is whether it's usable. Discoverability is orthogonal to usability -- it's better if you can have both, but I would trade discoverability for long-term usability any day.
But I like bickering over sematics: Intuitive \In*tu"i*tive\, a. [Cf. F. intuitif.]
[1913 Webster]
1. Seeing clearly; as, an intuitive view; intuitive vision.
[1913 Webster]
2. Knowing, or perceiving, by intuition; capable of knowing
without deduction or reasoning.
[1913 Webster] Note: It says "capable of knowing", not "capable of learning" -- and it also says "without deduction or reasoning", not "without training".
Simple example: I find that middle-click to paste is intuitive, as are multiple desktops on a spinning cube -- they make sense without having to reason about them. But to someone raised on Windows, that's not going to be at all what you expect -- no one wakes up expecting that their nice, comfortable 2D workspace is actually just one face of a cube, and they can use the other faces, too.
Disclaimer: I haven't actually used Blender, but I really do prefer the Gimp UI to Photoshop.
Question: How much more CPU time will this require than Google currently uses to search the entire fucking Internet?
I bookmark https://mail.google.com/, for when I'm forced to use Gmail. I've got no sympathy for the extra CPU and money they have to spend to prevent people from intercepting my session.
Oh, and there is a spec to allow multiple vhosts on the same address with SSL enabled. I can't help but wonder if that's really more likely to get universal adoption than ipv6, though.
But really, how hard is it to simply use the same domain? I generally see vhosts as multiple addresses for the same company -- mail.google.com, images.google.com, etc. And when they are, there's no good technological reason they can't simply move those subdomains into suburls -- google.com/mail, or google.com/images.
Well, alright, there is a good reason -- in the case of Google, those are likely different IP addresses -- but that completely negates the whole virtual host problem anyway.
Well, that, and the fact that the issue is often confused by people calling it "theft". It can be a bad thing without being the same as theft.
And the fact that they prosecute entirely the wrong people, with pretty close to zero evidence. It is troubling that they probably could just pick someone out of the phone book at random and find that they're sharing files, but we're supposed to have something called "due process".
Oh, and they do offer an "opt-out" -- in the form of a website that you have to visit in the clear (no https), and fill in your information, resulting in... a cookie.
Which means that you now have to make sure to opt-out in every browser you ever use, including wget and lynx. Anything which doesn't support cookies is fucked. In particular, not everyone uses XML for AJAX -- some people use XHTML for their web services. And not all web service clients are browsers that you can stick cookies in.
And, for that matter, how are they checking the cookie? Only way I can think of would be to insert some sort of hidden iframe on every page, linking to their domain, which can then check the cookie. Therefore, even if the cookie is present in every appropriate HTTP request, they're still having to fuck with most of the internet to even be able to check that cookie.
So, to summarize: They offer "opt-out", but not really. And support net neutrality legislation.
I find nothing wrong with sexuality. The kind of ethics that I think apply here are mostly about the other person -- for example, no means no. I think I'm going to try writing down my thoughts soon and see what I come up with. Then I might send them off to one of the most visibly intelligent and evangelical ministers in the country and see what he thinks. Better, find someone in a small church, who has the time to sit down and talk to you in person.
Either way, listen to them at least as much as you've listened to me. Not everything they say will be true, or something you can agree with, but some things will be intelligent, and some things may help you to find that meaning in your life, even if it ends up not being directly related to the church. And even if I do decide that it all isn't true, in the end religion almost seems like something people need to be mentally healthy? Well, depends on the person. There are a lot of atheists and agnostics who are pretty much healthy.
It's a truly amazing show in its own right, and certainly is not anti-religious propaganda -- Shephard Book makes a good preacher, I think.
But Joss Whedon is an Atheist, and so is Mal Reynolds... And I think the movie, especially, has a powerful message of faith in people. so many people thinking there is something more, but in reality we live, we die, and there really is no higher meaning to anything. It's almost more difficult to express this as it is to express religious faith...
We make the higher meaning. If there's no God, there's nobody to stop us from inventing a purpose. We can have lives that are as rich and as deep and as meaningful as if we were living for God -- perhaps moreso.
I can understand why it might make you sad that so many people devote themselves to a God, if that God doesn't exist. It's a depressing thought. But it doesn't mean that their lives are meaningless.
Gandhi taught the art of peaceful resistance to the world. He worked for Indian independence, and for peace.
Martin Luther King learned from Gandhi, and taught the blacks (and, really, all minorities) in the US to resist, but peacefully. And he showed us a dream of brotherhood and love -- that one day, we can judge and be judged not by the color of our skin, but by the contents of our character. And I believe he has succeeded.
Both had strong religious convictions. I am sure that on some level, they believed they were doing this for God. And that's alright -- it's alright even if there is no God -- because what they have done has meaning.
Anyway -- watch Firefly, and especially, at least, watch Serenity. If you've seen them, watch them again.
Remember, three thousand reserved words. If you never hit them, you're lucky -- I'd rather not take my chances. I'd rather go with a language that has good, solid namespace support, baked into the standard library, from the beginning, so I never need to keep more than maybe twenty words in my head at a time. Not to mention TFA is about new features of PHP6 / 5.3, including namespaces. Yay! After 13 fucking years, you finally get namespaces!
Do any of PHP's competitors lack namespaces? Have they ever? Even Javascript has namespaces, or at least the constructs needed to build them. And PHP is finally getting them in 2008.
Who wants to bet how much of the core library is still going to be crapped over the global namespace? Maybe you can offer some proof that putting these functions in the core library adversely affects PHP's performance? It increases RAM usage, and is necessarily going to take more time to compile -- compile your program, that is -- at the very least. That's a given -- suggesting otherwise is like saying "Maybe you can offer some proof that putting a call to factorial(5000) in the middle of our view adversely affects our app's performance?"
Now, maybe if you said "significantly adversely affects performance"... Oh, and does PHP support structs? 1) Is there any reason I should care? This was in response to someone claiming a strength of PHP as being that you can copy/paste C code and only tweak it a little bit. If you don't support structs, that makes it a bit difficult. What about function pointers? Yup, they're called 'callbacks' in PHP. Ok... So you can create a function, given a name, and then pass that name around. And you pretend that's a function pointer? What?
So... That's going to add a lot of complexity for things like this: Admittedly, you can do this with a for loop -- provided you know it's actually an array you're dealing with. Iterators like 'each' are a lot more flexible.
It's also going to make some things actually impossible. How would you do this: I admit that, as written, these are contrived examples. That's because they're examples. This kind of stuff is useful in practice, and even JavaScript supports it.
But... you know what, never mind. Lack of support for closure scope means you could never do something like the above anyway.
The other thing to keep in mind is that the OO was tacked on, badly.
Contrast this with Perl OO, which was tacked on fairly well, and done in a Perl-ish way, so that if you already knew Perl, the OO would make sense to you.
Or with Python or Ruby -- Python was OO since the beginning, and Ruby is pervasively OO, in that absolutely everything can be coerced into some kind of an object, and you can call methods on it, or add some of your own.
Example: nil (null, really) is an object, and you can define your own methods on it. So are integers, and you can subclass Integer if you like. (The one drawback is that a lot of this expressive power can let you do evil, twisted things, that might make the interpreter crash badly, like attempting to define true as false and false as true.
My new favorite way of describing PHP is "training wheels without the bike."
For one thing, there's just entirely too much in the way of syntax hacks. Take the "keyword arguments" which are actually hashes.
As far as I know, it's actually impossible for any editor to be able to complete this statement, without actually knowing how Rails works: Ok, sure, intellisense is nice if, for some strange reason, I forget what has_many is called.
But for the rest of it, you'd have to know that the second argument,
And then there's the rest of it, which is part of the options hash -- which means that it would have to know all the options which has_many can receive. But has_many is actually receiving a hash as an argument, and then doing something with it. As it happens, Rails has some fairly standard ways for a function to specify what it accepts as "keyword arguments", but again, you'd have to design that specifically for Rails.
Even given that, you'd have to know that
The one feature you've described that might be useful is a shortcut for getting to the documentation -- because we really would need a lot of documentation here. But that's not worth learning Emacs for, when I already have a keystroke to take me to my browser, where the Rails documentation is, and search "methods" for "has_many" -- which is probably already up anyway.
Oh, one more thing, while I'm at it -- Ruby lets you override method_missing, which is called when you try to call a nonexistent method. Rails uses this to pretend to have a lot of convenience methods on its associations. I've used it in some programs of my own -- creating a wrapper around an object, for instance.
I'm not sure if having intellisense which sort of works, sometimes, is better than not having it at all.
Maybe one day, there will be better Ruby editing tools. In the meantime, I find that the tradeoff is worth it -- that extra time spent looking up documentation is more than made up for by how quickly I can actually get things done once I know those methods.
And finally, just a nit -- meta is often mapped to alt, right? Meaning that meta-tab means alt-tab, which usually means something quite different in most window managers.
An IDE is not entirely useless. It's not impossible to make the perfect IDE. But for most projects, the IDE simply isn't worth the hassle that it brings.
And by the way, I really don't care what they do with their own funding, but they do NOT get to commandeer my hardware. So if it's a "botnet" in the traditional sense, then I say hell no!
Personally, I like things like integrated FTP, integrated subversion, integrated unit testing, and, most of all, an integrated server-side debugger w/ all expected function: breakpoint/play/step control, stack and heap manipulation, etc.
The debugger is the only thing I miss from a "real" IDE.
Subversion is garbage, of the "at least it's not CVS" variety. There are at least some ten or twenty distributed version control systems out there, at least one of which has got to work well for you.
FTP is garbage. Use anything else. Yes, anything else.
These are actually related. I don't really like most of the stuff you mentioned "integrated", as that usually means things like "I have a keyboard shortcut to run unit tests!" Great, but I'm comfortable on the commandline. Let me switch between my editor and terminal easily, and I'll run unit tests, run a development server, and anything else I feel like.
The other reason is that I can then switch to pretty much anything else without having to switch IDEs. I know just about everything is supported on Eclipse, but "just about" isn't everything. I don't have to choose between Git and Subversion -- I can use bzr, hg, darcs, or really whatever the fsck I want. I don't have to use FTP because it's got the prettiest interface -- I'm just as comfortable with scp -- or, when it makes sense, Capistrano -- I can even use things like KDE's fish GUI for ssh.
All of these are possible using a text editor, but you need 5 different applications
Yes, that's the Unix Way.
and none of it works together.
Wrong, wrong, WRONG!
All of it works very well together. On the occasions where it doesn't, I can hack together the glue require reasonably quickly, and be back to being as productive as I was before -- but these cases are also times when an IDE wouldn't be able to work with them at all, and I know a lot more about hacking together scripts (shell and similar) than I do about writing Eclipse plugins.
Not to mention: INTELLISENSE
Useless, unless it's linked to documentation. And then, still useless, compared to flipping over to my browser and asking Google, since I probably don't actually know what I want there.
Not that I would be against having it, but I'm not willing to fire up Eclipse (and burn all my RAM, and still have it be sloppy and inaccurate due to being a dynamic language) just for Intellisense.
And then there's workspace management, and keeping plugins in sync, and dealing with when plugins go bad -- can't start Eclipse until I figure out which plugin is making it crash, or, more likely, wipe it and reinstall from scratch -- and it'll autodetect the file as the wrong type, so now I have to go fuck with its filetype associations, and set keyboard shortcuts -- whoops, the shortcuts I want aren't there...
There's a whole new level of bullshit I'd have to deal with if I was using an IDE. I know, I was for awhile.
and DATA TYPE DISCOVERY! (on a loosely typed language that's a big help).
If I understand this, it might be a help if I had functions so massive I can actually lose track of a variable, or if you're talking about the whole built-in debugger feature.
Instead of having to basically memorize or manually lookup class names, method names, and method arguments, I just begin typing the class name, use some arrow keys, and be done w/ it.
Except that by the time I'm doing that, I probably want to know more about it. For example: Is this indexed from zero, or one? How do I create a has_many relationship with an order clause? Does that have to be a string, or can it also be some other cool data structure?
Let me know if you find an IDE that can handle Intellisense in Ruby and actually make me more productive.
Oh, also, a fair amount of what you're doing probably should fit in your head. If you're not doing PHP and needing to know things like mysql_real_
Well, I was trying for the camera achievement. How the fsck do you get the ones that are on brick walls? I did try bouncing stuff into them with the Companion Cube, and got killed a few times...
Also, wasn't timing myself precisely, and did take a few breaks to do other things. If you really want to race, I can probably do better than that.
Again I'll say that I don't think people should die for some of that stuff, but was relating what the bible says. The bible says that God can't abide any sin, no matter how small, and people deserve to die for it
And you did also state that as your own belief.
Stand up and say what you believe in. Don't hide behind the Bible. And don't be afraid to say "I don't know."
The truth is that not knowing what is out there really is quite a scary prospect.
I went to a few Landmark Education seminars awhile back. A lot of people on Slashdot seem to think that's a cult -- I strongly disagree, but whatever, this part was useful.
They have everyone in the room close their eyes... And they walk you through it, step by step. How, deep down, you're afraid of everyone. They walk you through circles of influence -- how you really don't know that much about everyone else. How much of your life is influenced by that fear.
I can't really reproduce that effectively here. I don't remember it in enough detail, and there is a specific script that they go through -- and there is something about being there.
Then, they turned it around.
Once you finally get, really and truly, how afraid you are of everyone -- you actually open up and let that fear in, until you're almost shaking in your seat... You pretend you're not, but you're absolutely fucking terrified of every single other person on the planet...
Then you can appreciate the fact that every single person on the planet is terrified of you.
And they walk you through the whole thing... Remember how you were really afraid of the cab driver, and the people at lunch, and all of those people? They're just as afraid of you.
Now, that may not help you as much with your problem -- this works because we're just talking about other people. But it is a kind of fear of the unknown. And it can be paralyzing... or not.
Maybe the unknown fears you as much as you fear the unknown.
But maybe it helps to be afraid of that -- and then look at what scares you about your life here, and find it isn't so bad.
Anyway, I'm glad we both were able to talk without getting too heated about all this, my apologies for the previous post, it's what happens when I think about stuff too much, someone ends up being on the receiving end of me being a jerk.
Hey, I asked for it.
I used to talk with my gf about it and we both thought it was still the most 'plausible' out of any possible explanations for everything.
Because you were taught that way, so it's the most comfortable to believe. Complete meaninglessness is just as plausible, really.
I haven't studied eastern philosophy in depth no, it definitely (as opposed to just maybe with some other religions) is the result of human ideas
Human ideas are very, very powerful. I hope I've started to give you some insight into that.
Oh, and that means your ideas can be powerful, too.
If I were a gambling man and life was just a game, I'd probably bet on the bible being made up. The risks to that are high, especially when the idea of hell has been drilled into me all my life.
Well, that's Pascal's Wager. The original goes something like this:
Either God exists, or He does not. Either I believe in God, or I do not. If God exists, and I believe, I go to Heaven. If God exists, and I don't believe, I go to Hell. If God doesn't exist, it doesn't matter what I believe. So if I believe, I'll either go to Heaven, or nothing will happen. And if I don't believe, I'll either go to Hell, or nothing will happen. I'd rather believe, because then there's a chance of Heaven, instead of a risk of Hell.
Not sure why I wrapped that it quote tags, since that's probably nothing like what he actually wrote, but the idea is the same.
The fallacy, of course, is that there are more than just those two possibilities. Either God exi