I think people who play online poker are crazy. The whole point of the game is making judgements about the cards people are holding from their behaviour. Perhaps you should learn a little bit about poker before making such declarations about the sanity of others. Physical tells are a very small component of the game.
It's much easier to catch colluding cheats online than in a live game.
Online poker sites have vast quantities of forensic evidence - complete hand histories, including the actions and hole cards of all players involved, for every hand ever played. Easy to datamine for suspicious patterns, and sites like PokerStars have people doing that full time. Surveillance video of live games isn't as complete, isn't stored for as long, doesn't include hole card data, and is vastly more difficult to review.
I routinely play for thousands of dollars both live and online. I'm not too concerned about being cheated in either, but I'm more concerned about the live games than the online ones on trusted sites.
They want legalization and regulation, so they can get a piece of the pie. They're currently supporting legislation requiring a "study" of online gambling, as a preliminary to repealing the ban.
Right now online gambling is a booming international industry, but American companies can't reap any of the profits, despite what should be a very strong competitive position with their strong brands. The potential gain of locking in American gamblers to land-based casinos is negligible by comparison.
They made it into a "moral issue," but that's just bullshit that they can sell to a few Evangelical hicks.
That's not the cover story - it's the whole story. Banning online gambling has been a plank of the Republican Party platform since at least 2004:
The most recent anti-online-gambling law, the Unlawful Online Gambling Enforcement Act, was railroaded through the Senate (as a last-minute amendment to a must-pass bill) by Bill Frist. Bill Frist, at the time, was a hopeful for the Republican presidential nomination, and as such needed to shore up support among the moral conservative types.
One really wonders why the hell these kids chose to do a student project on slot machines, when by their own admission the closest they've ever been to a slot machine is watching one on an episode of The Simpsons. The article is full of urban myths and unsourced nonsensical claims.
"Casino planners know that slot players love to see and hear other people winning on nearby machines, because players hold it as evidence that money can be made on the machines. Thus casinos are designed to have the loosest machines in prominent areas"
Do you really believe a casual observer can tell the difference between a 95% slot and a 98% slot? It'd take dozens of hours of nonstop play before the difference in the results would become statistically significant - and the authors are suggesting that passersby will be influenced by a highly visible slot being looser over a stretch of a few seconds or minutes!
I've played in casinos where games returning 90% sit a few feet away from identical games returning 95%, and very few of even the most regular players, who spend many hours a week in front of the machines, show any sign of recognizing that one is better than the other.
"Studies have shown that carpeting is often purposefully jarring to the eyes, which draws customers' gaze upwards toward the machines on the gambling floor."
First of all, *everything* in a casino is jarring to the eyes! I have no idea to what "studies" they refer, and God forbid they give a source, but they overlook the most obvious reason for the carpets - casino carpets are filthy! They're heavily trafficked and routinely have drinks spilled on them. A busy pattern helps disguise the stains.
"It is nearly impossible not to feel as though one is being almost forced to spend money the moment one sets foot in a casino."
Really? Because my reaction has always been to get to where I'm going as soon as possible to get away from the noise and smoke. Stop projecting.
That's a widespread misconception. The online gambling industry has been pushing for the US to allow them to set up shop within their borders. They're currently lobbying for a House bill which establishes a committee to investigate legalizing, regulating, and taxing onling gambling. Most of the companies involved would rather pay US tax than operate in the current climate of legal uncertainty and intimidation of customers in their largest market.
However, our legislators will have none of it, chirping about the children and saving us from ourselves. It's not a tax play, since they have an easy easy route to collecting a lot more in taxes than they do now, and they're rejecting it. All I can think of is that it's partly ignorance about the industry - people actually buying the "shady unregulated offshore fly-by-night operations" line when a lot of these sites are multi-billion-dollar companies under strict regulations traded on the London Stock Exchange - and partly pandering to the Religious Right.
The only reason that the gov't HATES online gambling is because it doesn't get paid tribute.
Sadly, no. That might almost make sense. However, there are numerous online gambling sites that would love to set up shop in the US - even with the taxes - and our government has no interest. Last year North Dakota tried to pass a bill to make it explicitly legal to run an online poker site within the state, attracting much-needed tax revenue and jobs - the Department of Justice came in and squashed the whole notion, claiming any such business would be illegal under federal law, and promising to fight it.
I really don't know what the true motivation of the anti-online-gambling crowd is. It can't be fighting money laundering or terrorism, as the DoJ claims - no one believes that. It can't be protecting tax revenue, since we're *losing* huge amounts of potential revenue with it. It can't be protecting gamblers from themselves, or from perceived moral lapses, since the very same people generally make no effort to stop offline gambling. They occasionally say it's to protect gamblers from those shady unregulated offshore outfits, but these days, those outfits are more likely than not multi-billion-dollar operations traded on the London Stock Exchange, and more reputable than the vast majority of e-commerce sites.
Really, the only explanation I can think of is that some of them are corrupt (taking money from shortsighted land-based gambling interests), and the others are stubborn and/or stupid.
Re:Use your own suggestion -- LVM
on
Unionfs for Linux?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I use LVM with reiserfs on all my boxes - resizing both the volume and the filesystem is easy. For instance, if I want to grow my MP3 volume by 10G: "umount/riaa; lvextend -L +10G/dev/quadcuda/riaa; resize_reiserfs/dev/quadcuda/riaa; mount/dev/quadcuda/riaa/riaa". Done. Shrinking is just as easy, but in that case the filesystem resize happens before the volume resize instead of vice versa.
Looks like you could do the same with ext2 and resize2fs if you wanted. If I recall correctly, when I set up my first box with LVM, resize2fs had lots of "beware, this is somewhat experimental code" warnings and I was reluctant to use it, which was one reason why I used reiserfs instead. Maybe a couple more years of testing have increased confidence in the utility, since those warnings aren't there now. I'd rather use reiserfs anyway.
Several split keyboard designs, including the Kinesis Contour and the FingerWorks Stealth, have an embedded numeric keypad in the right-hand home keys. For instance, the numeral 1 is available either in its usual location, or as a chord with the "Number" modifier and the J key. Same way you get a capital letter by chording with the "Shift" modifier.
I don't have much use for easier access to numbers, but I do use the embedded punctuation pad on my Stealth. AltGr-K emits underscore, for instance. AltGr-Y emits double-slash, for URLs or C++/Java comments.
I did something similar many years ago when I was using a Kinesis, abusing the reprogramming features to completely redefine the "numeric keypad". HJKL became arrow keys, left-hand home keys became tab and escape and such, other keys became various punctuation.
Another way to make more characters easily accessible is to use gestures more heavily in combination with typing, in the same physical area. The FingerWorks devices do this, as do some PDA input methods which combine virtual keyboards and gesture strokes, but there's a lot more to explore in this area...
Why wouldn't MS be welcome? I mean, of COURSE they're going to come with something Linuxey.
RTFA. "Right now, exhibitors at the Microsoft booth are planning on demonstrating products which feature Microsoft's Windows XP embedded technology. Houston emphasized that they have made great strides in the embedded space of late and Microsoft is eager to demonstrate those products to the attendees of the LinuxWorld Expo."
You're right - white noise can help you sleep. Unfortunately, the noise generated by computer fans is not white noise - it's far from uniformly distributed in frequency. Most small fans are very whiny. Good small fans are still slightly whiny.
On occasion, I've left a box fan running to mask incidental noises and mild tinnitus and help me sleep - but computer fans, in my experience, usually make the problem worse. My current case is equipped with the quietest, least whiny components I could find, and it's still occasionally annoying.
You're in for a pleasant surprise. The Perl6 interpreter will automagically recognize Perl5 libraries and use them unchanged. Perl5 main programs will, at worst, require a -5 command-line switch. In other words, they already plan to do everything you're asking for!
Yes, we do need another regexp format. Larry spends several pages explaining why, if you'd read the article.
Furthermore, 80% of your existing Perl5 regexps will work unchanged in Perl6. *, +, *?, +?, (), ?, all unchanged. Most of the backslash-letter character classes, unchanged. Dot and ^ and $ are the same for most purposes, trivial to port when they aren't. 80% of the remaining cases can be ported by changing [] to <[]> and escaping spaces or replacing them with \s or \h (which they often should have been anyway).
I'd rather spend half an hour every fifteen years to learn something new than put up with the inferior old scheme for another decade or more. Unreadability of regexps is one of the biggest complaints people have about Perl, and this addresses those concerns head-on.
(Incidentally, people made all these same complaints the last time Perl changed regexps, when Perl5 came out. And now virtually every other popular language has recognized that the Perl5 design is better than its predecessors, and has adopted a Perl-compatible regular expression syntax or library. Larry's got a pretty good track record here.)
(BTW, the preceding incomplete post was a slip of the mouse. Mods, please kill it.)
Yes, we do need another regexp format. Larry spends several pages explaining why, if you'd read the article.
Furthermore, 80% of your existing Perl5 regexps will work unchanged in Perl6. *, +, *?, +?, (), ?, all unchanged. Most of the backslash-letter character classes, unchanged. Dot and ^ and $ are the same for most purposes, trivial to port when they aren't. 80% of the remaining cases can be ported by changing [] to <[]> and escaping spaces or replacing them with \s or \h (which they often should have been anyway).
I'd rather spend half an hour every fifteen years to learn something new than put up with the inferior old scheme for another decade or more. Unreadability of regexps is one of the biggest complaints people have about Perl, and this addresses those concerns head-on.
(Incidentally, people made all these same complaints the last time Perl changed regexps, when Perl5 came out. And now every other language in existence has recognized that
No, Perl6-style regexps are going to be simpler than Perl5-style regexps, and Perl5-style regexps will still be supported both through the:p5 flag and the p52p6 translator. (As you'd know, if you had read the article.)
It's amusing that the same people who criticize Perl based on its unreadability, largely thanks to heavy use of traditional regexps, then go on to bash Perl6 for tackling the regexp readability/complexity issue head-on and devising something better.
Re:Perl's had it's day - It's become like COBOL
on
Apocalypse 5 Released
·
· Score: 2
The language of the future you describe - a language that learns from Perl, but doesn't have to drag around 15 years of built-up kludges and poor design decisions, a language which provides needed building blocks to write code that does what you say using the techniques most appropriate for the given job - is Perl6.
I just received my Touchstream today. The strip in the middle isn't a ribbon. The whole thing is a single rigid piece - either metal or hard plastic - and the sensors are mounted on that plate.
The keys don't usually scratch the screen, but they do touch, causing skin oils to transfer from your fingers to the keys to the screen, leaving marks that are often mistaken for scratches. Occasionally swiping the screen with a microfiber cloth takes care of the problem.
The build quality of the Rev. B has significant improvements over the Rev. A - it's not stellar, but it's not bad, either.
The 10-20% performance difference between laptop models is nothing compared to the ergonomics and quality of the hardware. Remember, this isn't a box sitting under your desk which you can connect any keyboard or monitor to - once you buy it, you're going to have that box sitting on your lap, be staring at that screen, and be using that keyboard for hours per day. (Unless you're using it docked all the time, in which case it's more like a luggable desktop.)
That's why laptop owners are so religious about their machines - this is an area where idiosyncratic unexplainable personal preference really is the most important factor. It's also why comparative laptop reviews are generally useless. Go out and get your hands on a bunch of different machines - that'll tell you more than any magazine article.
That said, PC Magazine's Support and Satisfaction Survey will give you some useful hard data on laptop reliability, and reading lots of comments on epinions can give you a dim impression of common trends in owner experience.
My personal experience: I bought a ThinkPad T21 about a year ago, but I found the keyboard painful to use and had to sell it. (Which is a shame, considering how good previous IBM and ThinkPad keyboards have been.) Compaq has a good keyboard, but Compaq sucks for build quality, reliability, and service. I tried HP and Toshiba models at a local store and was unimpressed with their ergonomics and general quality. I recently used a Dell Inspiron 4100 for a month - it was cheap, and the three-year CompleteCare service plan is awesome, but I found the machine itself to be mediocre in every way. Mediocre build quality, mediocre ergonomics, mediocre screen, a little too heavy, and really ugly.
I'm now using a PowerBook G4 - it has a few quirks, the main one being that it's not i386/Linux:-), but aside from that it's a a pleasure to use. Lightweight, excellent quality, gorgeous screen, and everything Just Works smoothly out of the box with a tolerable operating system, unlike the many hours I usually spend getting all the random quirky hardware in a PC laptop working under Linux. And there's no Windows Tax.
Unfortunately, you get one smooth GUI, and if you don't like it, you're stuck. Such are the joys of closed systems.
I tried MacOS X on a TiBook for a full day. The window management and (lack of) keyboard shortcuts were, to me, impossibly clunky. While preferences in keyboard vary, I found that the keyboard hurt my hands much more than my ThinkPad 600 or various Dell laptops - and because it's Apple, I don't have a wide choice of hardware. So, regrettably, I went with an ugly Dell Inspiron 4100 instead.
Re:They'll never get me
on
Penguin2Apple
·
· Score: 2
No, it boils down to "the default window management is massively less efficient than other systems and cannot be configured." You acknowledge that your preference in window-switching isn't all that efficient, and maybe it works for you, but it doesn't work for everyone. Window management was a major problem for me when I used OS X for a day.
This goes straight to the heart of the problem with proprietary systems like MacOS X. You can't change them. You can get any window management behavior you want under Linux; under MacOS X you're stuck with Apple's defaults.
Any GUI application for OSX, and most other applications as well, are going to call the closed-source parts of the system. For all practical purposes, it's a closed-source system. Quite a nice one, but just as unmodifiable and prone to vendor lock-in as any other proprietary OS.
And because it's Apple, the vendor lock-in is for not only the software but the hardware as well. While the current Mac hardware is nice, it doesn't meet everyone's needs; if it did, I'd be typing this on a PowerBook G4 and not an Inspiron 4100.
I'd like to see a book about using OCaml, or Lisp, or Scheme, or some other functional language with a free implementation, to address real-world programming problems. (OCaml would be nice; it's widely recognized as a great language, but there's no English-language text.)
While the audience may be limited, I think there's a screaming need for such a book within that audience; almost all existing FP texts are way off in theory-land, and most predate the huge boom of the web, which is a natural environment for functional languages.
An added benefit for a publisher is that this particular technology landscape changes slowly, so the book will have a long shelf life, and is at no risk of being obsolete before it's released.
Nintendo does not lose money selling consoles. They've stated that they expect to lose a little bit on each launch GameCube, but get costs down to the point where they're making a profit per machine by early 2002. That's well in advance of when they'll have to cut prices to stay cheaper than the competition.
I've ripped and encoded about 1000 CDs. Lessons learned:
1) Ripping requires significant manual work if you want good results - in particular, cleaning up missing or incorrect or inconsistent data from FreeDB/CDDB, and cleaning/repairing/retrying discs that you can't get a clean rip from the first time. (And normalizing if you want that.) Even if you could reduce manual CD-changing to zero, it'd still be a tedious process.
2) Ripping isn't easy. You really want a player with fast reliable DAE and software you can trust to detect possible errors. Ripping a large collection is enough work that you don't want to redo it because you eventual discover sporadic errors in your first results.
3) CDROM drives are cheap and well-supported. CD changers are expensive and require kludges. Instead of messing with a changer, it makes a lot more sense to stick a few extra CDROM drives in your system. Borrow some good drives and an extra IDE or SCSI controller, or buy/sell them on eBay to effectively get a cheap rental. Then rip the discs four or five at a time at 15-20x using cdparanoia.
Why prefer GNU Emacs over XEmacs?
on
GNU Emacs 21
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
This is an honest question, not a rhetorical attempt to lure someone into a flamewar.
I've heard several accounts of advantages of XEmacs over GNU Emacs. I haven't heard anyone say "I'm familiar with both versions and I prefer GNU Emacs for technical reasons and here's why", but there must be such people. Anyone willing to step up and do a little advocacy? It might be enlightening.
Unfortunately, I'm not sufficiently familiar with Emacs and Emacs-Lisp to evaluate the differences for myself.
Slashdot Mirror
It's much easier to catch colluding cheats online than in a live game.
Online poker sites have vast quantities of forensic evidence - complete hand histories, including the actions and hole cards of all players involved, for every hand ever played. Easy to datamine for suspicious patterns, and sites like PokerStars have people doing that full time. Surveillance video of live games isn't as complete, isn't stored for as long, doesn't include hole card data, and is vastly more difficult to review.
I routinely play for thousands of dollars both live and online. I'm not too concerned about being cheated in either, but I'm more concerned about the live games than the online ones on trusted sites.
The U.S. banned international online gambling because of pressure (read: bribes) from the big domestic casinos.
i ng-association-study.htmd etail.cfv?id=9
Why does misinformation like this keep getting modded up as informative? It happens every time the online gambling issue comes up on Slashdot.
The American Gaming Association, the industry group representing those big domestic casinos, opposed legislation banning online gambling. See:
http://www.pokernews.com/news/2006/5/american-gam
http://www.americangaming.org/hillupdate/reports_
They want legalization and regulation, so they can get a piece of the pie. They're currently supporting legislation requiring a "study" of online gambling, as a preliminary to repealing the ban.
Right now online gambling is a booming international industry, but American companies can't reap any of the profits, despite what should be a very strong competitive position with their strong brands. The potential gain of locking in American gamblers to land-based casinos is negligible by comparison.
They made it into a "moral issue," but that's just bullshit that they can sell to a few Evangelical hicks.
That's not the cover story - it's the whole story. Banning online gambling has been a plank of the Republican Party platform since at least 2004:
http://www.gop.com/media/2004platform.pdf (see page 57)
The most recent anti-online-gambling law, the Unlawful Online Gambling Enforcement Act, was railroaded through the Senate (as a last-minute amendment to a must-pass bill) by Bill Frist. Bill Frist, at the time, was a hopeful for the Republican presidential nomination, and as such needed to shore up support among the moral conservative types.
One really wonders why the hell these kids chose to do a student project on slot machines, when by their own admission the closest they've ever been to a slot machine is watching one on an episode of The Simpsons. The article is full of urban myths and unsourced nonsensical claims.
"Casino planners know that slot players love to see and hear other people winning on nearby machines, because players hold it as evidence that money can be made on the machines. Thus casinos are designed to have the loosest machines in prominent areas"
Do you really believe a casual observer can tell the difference between a 95% slot and a 98% slot? It'd take dozens of hours of nonstop play before the difference in the results would become statistically significant - and the authors are suggesting that passersby will be influenced by a highly visible slot being looser over a stretch of a few seconds or minutes!
I've played in casinos where games returning 90% sit a few feet away from identical games returning 95%, and very few of even the most regular players, who spend many hours a week in front of the machines, show any sign of recognizing that one is better than the other.
"Studies have shown that carpeting is often purposefully jarring to the eyes, which draws customers' gaze upwards toward the machines on the gambling floor."
First of all, *everything* in a casino is jarring to the eyes! I have no idea to what "studies" they refer, and God forbid they give a source, but they overlook the most obvious reason for the carpets - casino carpets are filthy! They're heavily trafficked and routinely have drinks spilled on them. A busy pattern helps disguise the stains.
"It is nearly impossible not to feel as though one is being almost forced to spend money the moment one sets foot in a casino."
Really? Because my reaction has always been to get to where I'm going as soon as possible to get away from the noise and smoke. Stop projecting.
However, our legislators will have none of it, chirping about the children and saving us from ourselves. It's not a tax play, since they have an easy easy route to collecting a lot more in taxes than they do now, and they're rejecting it. All I can think of is that it's partly ignorance about the industry - people actually buying the "shady unregulated offshore fly-by-night operations" line when a lot of these sites are multi-billion-dollar companies under strict regulations traded on the London Stock Exchange - and partly pandering to the Religious Right.
I really don't know what the true motivation of the anti-online-gambling crowd is. It can't be fighting money laundering or terrorism, as the DoJ claims - no one believes that. It can't be protecting tax revenue, since we're *losing* huge amounts of potential revenue with it. It can't be protecting gamblers from themselves, or from perceived moral lapses, since the very same people generally make no effort to stop offline gambling. They occasionally say it's to protect gamblers from those shady unregulated offshore outfits, but these days, those outfits are more likely than not multi-billion-dollar operations traded on the London Stock Exchange, and more reputable than the vast majority of e-commerce sites.
Really, the only explanation I can think of is that some of them are corrupt (taking money from shortsighted land-based gambling interests), and the others are stubborn and/or stupid.
I use LVM with reiserfs on all my boxes - resizing both the volume and the filesystem is easy. For instance, if I want to grow my MP3 volume by 10G: "umount /riaa; lvextend -L +10G /dev/quadcuda/riaa; resize_reiserfs /dev/quadcuda/riaa; mount /dev/quadcuda/riaa /riaa". Done. Shrinking is just as easy, but in that case the filesystem resize happens before the volume resize instead of vice versa.
Looks like you could do the same with ext2 and resize2fs if you wanted. If I recall correctly, when I set up my first box with LVM, resize2fs had lots of "beware, this is somewhat experimental code" warnings and I was reluctant to use it, which was one reason why I used reiserfs instead. Maybe a couple more years of testing have increased confidence in the utility, since those warnings aren't there now. I'd rather use reiserfs anyway.
Several split keyboard designs, including the Kinesis Contour and the FingerWorks Stealth, have an embedded numeric keypad in the right-hand home keys. For instance, the numeral 1 is available either in its usual location, or as a chord with the "Number" modifier and the J key. Same way you get a capital letter by chording with the "Shift" modifier.
I don't have much use for easier access to numbers, but I do use the embedded punctuation pad on my Stealth. AltGr-K emits underscore, for instance. AltGr-Y emits double-slash, for URLs or C++/Java comments.
I did something similar many years ago when I was using a Kinesis, abusing the reprogramming features to completely redefine the "numeric keypad". HJKL became arrow keys, left-hand home keys became tab and escape and such, other keys became various punctuation.
Another way to make more characters easily accessible is to use gestures more heavily in combination with typing, in the same physical area. The FingerWorks devices do this, as do some PDA input methods which combine virtual keyboards and gesture strokes, but there's a lot more to explore in this area...
You're right - white noise can help you sleep. Unfortunately, the noise generated by computer fans is not white noise - it's far from uniformly distributed in frequency. Most small fans are very whiny. Good small fans are still slightly whiny.
On occasion, I've left a box fan running to mask incidental noises and mild tinnitus and help me sleep - but computer fans, in my experience, usually make the problem worse. My current case is equipped with the quietest, least whiny components I could find, and it's still occasionally annoying.
You're in for a pleasant surprise. The Perl6 interpreter will automagically recognize Perl5 libraries and use them unchanged. Perl5 main programs will, at worst, require a -5 command-line switch. In other words, they already plan to do everything you're asking for!
Yes, we do need another regexp format. Larry spends several pages explaining why, if you'd read the article.
Furthermore, 80% of your existing Perl5 regexps will work unchanged in Perl6. *, +, *?, +?, (), ?, all unchanged. Most of the backslash-letter character classes, unchanged. Dot and ^ and $ are the same for most purposes, trivial to port when they aren't. 80% of the remaining cases can be ported by changing [] to <[]> and escaping spaces or replacing them with \s or \h (which they often should have been anyway).
I'd rather spend half an hour every fifteen years to learn something new than put up with the inferior old scheme for another decade or more. Unreadability of regexps is one of the biggest complaints people have about Perl, and this addresses those concerns head-on.
(Incidentally, people made all these same complaints the last time Perl changed regexps, when Perl5 came out. And now virtually every other popular language has recognized that the Perl5 design is better than its predecessors, and has adopted a Perl-compatible regular expression syntax or library. Larry's got a pretty good track record here.)
(BTW, the preceding incomplete post was a slip of the mouse. Mods, please kill it.)
Yes, we do need another regexp format. Larry spends several pages explaining why, if you'd read the article.
Furthermore, 80% of your existing Perl5 regexps will work unchanged in Perl6. *, +, *?, +?, (), ?, all unchanged. Most of the backslash-letter character classes, unchanged. Dot and ^ and $ are the same for most purposes, trivial to port when they aren't. 80% of the remaining cases can be ported by changing [] to <[]> and escaping spaces or replacing them with \s or \h (which they often should have been anyway).
I'd rather spend half an hour every fifteen years to learn something new than put up with the inferior old scheme for another decade or more. Unreadability of regexps is one of the biggest complaints people have about Perl, and this addresses those concerns head-on.
(Incidentally, people made all these same complaints the last time Perl changed regexps, when Perl5 came out. And now every other language in existence has recognized that
No, Perl6-style regexps are going to be simpler than Perl5-style regexps, and Perl5-style regexps will still be supported both through the :p5 flag and the p52p6 translator. (As you'd know, if you had read the article.)
It's amusing that the same people who criticize Perl based on its unreadability, largely thanks to heavy use of traditional regexps, then go on to bash Perl6 for tackling the regexp readability/complexity issue head-on and devising something better.
The language of the future you describe - a language that learns from Perl, but doesn't have to drag around 15 years of built-up kludges and poor design decisions, a language which provides needed building blocks to write code that does what you say using the techniques most appropriate for the given job - is Perl6.
Enjoy it.
I just received my Touchstream today. The strip in the middle isn't a ribbon. The whole thing is a single rigid piece - either metal or hard plastic - and the sensors are mounted on that plate.
The keys don't usually scratch the screen, but they do touch, causing skin oils to transfer from your fingers to the keys to the screen, leaving marks that are often mistaken for scratches. Occasionally swiping the screen with a microfiber cloth takes care of the problem.
The build quality of the Rev. B has significant improvements over the Rev. A - it's not stellar, but it's not bad, either.
The 10-20% performance difference between laptop models is nothing compared to the ergonomics and quality of the hardware. Remember, this isn't a box sitting under your desk which you can connect any keyboard or monitor to - once you buy it, you're going to have that box sitting on your lap, be staring at that screen, and be using that keyboard for hours per day. (Unless you're using it docked all the time, in which case it's more like a luggable desktop.)
:-), but aside from that it's a a pleasure to use. Lightweight, excellent quality, gorgeous screen, and everything Just Works smoothly out of the box with a tolerable operating system, unlike the many hours I usually spend getting all the random quirky hardware in a PC laptop working under Linux. And there's no Windows Tax.
That's why laptop owners are so religious about their machines - this is an area where idiosyncratic unexplainable personal preference really is the most important factor. It's also why comparative laptop reviews are generally useless. Go out and get your hands on a bunch of different machines - that'll tell you more than any magazine article.
That said, PC Magazine's Support and Satisfaction Survey will give you some useful hard data on laptop reliability, and reading lots of comments on epinions can give you a dim impression of common trends in owner experience.
My personal experience: I bought a ThinkPad T21 about a year ago, but I found the keyboard painful to use and had to sell it. (Which is a shame, considering how good previous IBM and ThinkPad keyboards have been.) Compaq has a good keyboard, but Compaq sucks for build quality, reliability, and service. I tried HP and Toshiba models at a local store and was unimpressed with their ergonomics and general quality. I recently used a Dell Inspiron 4100 for a month - it was cheap, and the three-year CompleteCare service plan is awesome, but I found the machine itself to be mediocre in every way. Mediocre build quality, mediocre ergonomics, mediocre screen, a little too heavy, and really ugly.
I'm now using a PowerBook G4 - it has a few quirks, the main one being that it's not i386/Linux
Unfortunately, you get one smooth GUI, and if you don't like it, you're stuck. Such are the joys of closed systems.
I tried MacOS X on a TiBook for a full day. The window management and (lack of) keyboard shortcuts were, to me, impossibly clunky. While preferences in keyboard vary, I found that the keyboard hurt my hands much more than my ThinkPad 600 or various Dell laptops - and because it's Apple, I don't have a wide choice of hardware. So, regrettably, I went with an ugly Dell Inspiron 4100 instead.
No, it boils down to "the default window management is massively less efficient than other systems and cannot be configured." You acknowledge that your preference in window-switching isn't all that efficient, and maybe it works for you, but it doesn't work for everyone. Window management was a major problem for me when I used OS X for a day.
This goes straight to the heart of the problem with proprietary systems like MacOS X. You can't change them. You can get any window management behavior you want under Linux; under MacOS X you're stuck with Apple's defaults.
Any GUI application for OSX, and most other applications as well, are going to call the closed-source parts of the system. For all practical purposes, it's a closed-source system. Quite a nice one, but just as unmodifiable and prone to vendor lock-in as any other proprietary OS.
And because it's Apple, the vendor lock-in is for not only the software but the hardware as well. While the current Mac hardware is nice, it doesn't meet everyone's needs; if it did, I'd be typing this on a PowerBook G4 and not an Inspiron 4100.
I'd like to see a book about using OCaml, or Lisp, or Scheme, or some other functional language with a free implementation, to address real-world programming problems. (OCaml would be nice; it's widely recognized as a great language, but there's no English-language text.)
While the audience may be limited, I think there's a screaming need for such a book within that audience; almost all existing FP texts are way off in theory-land, and most predate the huge boom of the web, which is a natural environment for functional languages.
An added benefit for a publisher is that this particular technology landscape changes slowly, so the book will have a long shelf life, and is at no risk of being obsolete before it's released.
Nintendo does not lose money selling consoles. They've stated that they expect to lose a little bit on each launch GameCube, but get costs down to the point where they're making a profit per machine by early 2002. That's well in advance of when they'll have to cut prices to stay cheaper than the competition.
I've ripped and encoded about 1000 CDs. Lessons learned:
1) Ripping requires significant manual work if you want good results - in particular, cleaning up missing or incorrect or inconsistent data from FreeDB/CDDB, and cleaning/repairing/retrying discs that you can't get a clean rip from the first time. (And normalizing if you want that.) Even if you could reduce manual CD-changing to zero, it'd still be a tedious process.
2) Ripping isn't easy. You really want a player with fast reliable DAE and software you can trust to detect possible errors. Ripping a large collection is enough work that you don't want to redo it because you eventual discover sporadic errors in your first results.
3) CDROM drives are cheap and well-supported. CD changers are expensive and require kludges. Instead of messing with a changer, it makes a lot more sense to stick a few extra CDROM drives in your system. Borrow some good drives and an extra IDE or SCSI controller, or buy/sell them on eBay to effectively get a cheap rental. Then rip the discs four or five at a time at 15-20x using cdparanoia.
This is an honest question, not a rhetorical attempt to lure someone into a flamewar.
I've heard several accounts of advantages of XEmacs over GNU Emacs. I haven't heard anyone say "I'm familiar with both versions and I prefer GNU Emacs for technical reasons and here's why", but there must be such people. Anyone willing to step up and do a little advocacy? It might be enlightening.
Unfortunately, I'm not sufficiently familiar with Emacs and Emacs-Lisp to evaluate the differences for myself.