Fuck, most of the geeks and techs I know don't give a fuck about open/closed source.
It depends. I'd say that most of the geeks that I know tend to prefer open source - but not at the expense of something that actually works. Choosing something open but broken (and broken far beyond the "it needs a 3LOC tweak to be great" level) just isn't particularly useful for most people most of the time.
If you RTFA and not just the synopsis, you'll see that he's only trying to critique the one class, and the only "general" comments are of the flavor of, "Other online courses should make sure not to make this easy mistake X."
Nokia’s PureMotion HD+ is the company’s name for its tweaks to the display, including blur-free scrolling.
Why isn't this not only standard, but the only acceptable state these days? When will people (Android, I'm looking at you here) figure out that getting the basics so completely solid that nobody thinks about them is the kind of work that people should expect from their OS/Environment provider? Watching a video talking about how many cores the latest whatever has with jittery scrolling is just embarrasing.
I got to the point where I really just wanted to get my job done, and linux was getting in my way more than it was helping me.
That's it in spades. The fact that "read the documentation" on obscure command-line commands is still (in this thread no less) used as the standard response to common tasks being impossible (sharing files from Linux OS to Linux OS using a GUI was that particular example) is huge. And yet people will continue to maintain that working on OSX (or even modern Windows) is "impossible," regardless of the fact that millions of people do so with every evidence of success and, at least in the case of OSX, happiness...
Lets say that I have a file on one machine, and I want to get it on another machine via the network. I can of course use Secure shell (SSH) to do that. But what if I want to use Samba to do that. [....] Dolphin (KDE), either one of those will throw an error.
I use 'fish' and 'smb' protocol kioslaves with Dolphin every day. Dolphin ain't perfect and neither is Samba, but you really should try reading the documentation...
I think that's the point. The idea of a desktop (as opposed to kernel-level support) was that stuff like that just work without having to read the documentation to do something as esoteric as move a file between machines. In 2012.
So now I'm a mac user and I get all that UNIX-y goodness and none of the open source drama queen bullshit.
True. Now Apple will take care of your decisions for you so that you don't have to be exposed to that "drama queen bullshit".
And as long as they're reasonable decisions, what's the problem with that? Some folk prefer to spend time using their computers to do stuff, rather than configuring their computers to do stuff. There's a surprisingly big difference between those two words.
And I don't think I need to explain why "you just need to upgrade" is not a valid reply, do I?
captcha : "adopts"? kinda fitting
Depends. A lot of people do Java development just fine on Snow Leopard and other older versions. And, quite frankly, when you start quibbling over a $20 upgrade fee for a professional development environment, most just don't care. Maybe we should - but we don't (again, in general). In the real world, Java development on OSX is both common and effective.
Right, because Yugos eventually (and wrongly) leaked into the consumer mindset that ALL cars are shit.
If those early Yugos had looked almost exactly like Fords, to the point that Yugo's own counsel mistook a Ford for one of their own products, then Ford would have indeed been concerned that their brand value had been diluted...
Do we have the capacity to make the semiconductors, resistors, capacitors, and build the circuit boards that we rely on for our "smart" military? Could that capacity be ramped up as quickly as we ramped up our industrial manufacturing capacity during WWII? A single chip fab can take billions of dollars and years to bring online - and probably relies on many foreign imports to make it run.
This is why you get projects like the "$50K toilet" that people love to bash - the military has blueprints for building almost everything (indeed, high-dollar normal items like that generally represent the costs to fully design, source, and create an assembly line, amortized over the 100 or so items they then build to make sure that they've got the process down correctly).
And there's the crux. For most people I've ever talked to, cost is not *the only* factor that matters for transportation for them. For those that it is, they make many compromises, living either "trapped" in a metro area and not having a car, or driving "junkers" that no one else even would want - and constantly putting money into them to fix them while missing work etc to go to the shop.
Yup. And the response I was replying to was:
Something is inherently wrong with the society when a person with USD2 a day income is even considering to spend half of his daily income on fruit ninja
In other words, the stated issue was that us spending money on things that bring us pleasure makes sense. Other people spending money on different things that bring them pleasure is "inherently wrong". That was what I was referring to.
Personally, I want my browser to retrieve and render dynamic websites as accurately and as fast as possible. It should handle clicked URLs, have easy access to the search engine of my choice, and deal appropriately with hand-entered URLs. Maybe offer some rudimentary bookmarks as well.
From a web-developer standpoint (rarer in the world), I'd like a JS console and DOM modification/inspection, plus a usable 'net' view of the current page.
Beyond that, they should offload almost everything else - presentation, controls, gestures, codecs (print, sound, and video), &c - to the underlying operating system and window manager for consistency with the rest of my system.
Why would anyone want their browser's UI to be continuously varying?
Its a long way off. I came to the US from the UK at age 10, and had no idea what feet and inches were - yet found that when you mentioned something basic "77 cm" to someone over hear they had absolutely no idea how long that was without doing mental gymnastics. That's still true today BTW, 30 years later. People in the US outside of a few very specialized fields just don't think in metric units.
Although an amazingly large number of people in the US will happily spend half their annual income on a car that far outstrips their needs - often spreading that payment out over half a decade or more to do so. People aren't logical.
So... 23% of the world's consumers are grandmothers? Good to know, I guess.
No matter what you think, if you're developing for a commercial site 23-30% market share is still significant, and a very large percentage of the population to ignore just to be "right." Even more so if your livelihood depends on being available, especially to those corporate customers who may not even have a reasonable choice themselves.
The vast majority of users - professional and home - probably only use 3-4 applications.
Web browsing, of course. Maybe email if they're not using a web client. Possibly word and/or excel. Then the game-of-the-month. If at work, maybe 1-2 specialized corporate applications. But that's about it.
Pornography, at least, is already age-restricted. Asking ISPs to do the same level of filtering that brick-and-mortor stores do, while a little unreasonable, does make a certain amount of sense.
I would suggest, however, that any laws surrounding that be tied to pre-existing format-neutral regulations. If there's no law prohibiting someone from buying a book that promotes anorexia, for example, why make a ruling that only affects online users?
Cost to me at the time: $0 - healthcare is socialised as well - everyone pays a little (much less than I pay for health insurance in the US now, for example) and no-one ever goes bankrupt because of medical fees..
Amusingly (to me - I'm another UK expat living in the US) the tax situation isn't all that bad either. I did this math back in late 2009 so it should still be pretty current now:
I'll compare the tax burden on someone making USD 80,000 and GBP 50,000 - I know they're not completely comparable, but its a rough note. I'm ignoring a lot of minor taxes/fees here.
The US individual pays $16,188 in federal income taxes and $6,120 in FICA/Medicare taxes. This gives them a take home pay of $57,692. Their employer also pays $6,120 in FICA/Medicare taxes, for a total cost of $86,120.
The UK individual pays £9,930 in income tax, and £4,258 in NI (national insurance). This gives them a take home pay of £35,812. Their employer pays £5,668 in NI, for a total cost of £55,668.
Let's convert those UK numbers into their USD variants at the same rate, just for fun:
The UK individual pays $15,888 in income tax, $300 less than their US counterpart, and $6,812 in NI, or $692 more. This gives them a take home pay of $57,299, $392 less than the US guy (only 1/2 of 1% less). Their employer pays $9,068 in NI, for a total cost of $89,068, which is $2,948 or 3.5% more than the US cost.
The big difference here, of course, is that the US employee still has absolutely no health care. Reasonable coverage for a single person in good health easily consumes that $3,000 difference - and that's ignoring any family obligations, what happens when they're laid off, etc.
Finally, the total tax burden in the UK is about 37% of GDP, compared to about 27% in the US, but the UK numbers include comprehensive healthcare and the US ones do not. In the US, healthcare costs (including insurance company overhead) run about 17.5% of GDP (some of which is government covered, but less than half). If you add in 9% to represent a conservative estimate of non-government-paid healthcare costs in the US, then you get within 1%-of-GDP of the UK... again, pretty much the same cost.
For example, does anyone seriously believe that, if God exists, God cares one whit about who wins the Superbowl, etc...
If He does then He must, by extension, dislike one of the two teams. I forget who said it first but it is odd that winners often thank God but losers always blame themselves. You rarely here an interview with a losing quarterback (after the victor has credited God) wherein he says, "Well, we were doing well until the third quarter, when Jesus made me fumble!"
Why do the churches still make all that ruckus every hour or more, can't their followers just get an app for that?
You mean like the regular ringing of bells to mark both time and important religious events (weddings, funerals, &c)? Or is it just bad when its Muslim?
Data center power problems. They can happen, and WAN replication is slow.
Having said that, 99.999% of the DB backed applications out there can quite happily survive a 0.0001% chance of losing a transaction, and should spec their DB solutions accordingly. Honestly, even most financial systems below the banking level can - you reach a point where its cheaper to just budget $10K per record to fix a problem should the once-in-a-lifetime perfect-storm error occur rather than to try to keep getting better at making sure they don't.
Kinda like the Ford Pinto, but with much better numbers (and less death when things go wrong).
Slashdot Mirror
Fuck, most of the geeks and techs I know don't give a fuck about open/closed source.
It depends. I'd say that most of the geeks that I know tend to prefer open source - but not at the expense of something that actually works. Choosing something open but broken (and broken far beyond the "it needs a 3LOC tweak to be great" level) just isn't particularly useful for most people most of the time.
In geographic terms, you're correct. However, most people in the US live near public transportation.
Well sure, if you're allowed to take your measurements of the "most common" thickness rather than the "thickest" thickness. They all have designs such as http://shopfs.myoppo.com/uploads/images/goods/22/1339773747_33032_b.jpg with protrusions jutting out.
If you RTFA and not just the synopsis, you'll see that he's only trying to critique the one class, and the only "general" comments are of the flavor of, "Other online courses should make sure not to make this easy mistake X."
Rovio already said they're not going to make Angry Birds for this platform.
Others are following suite.
I'd certainly hope so. After all, if Zynga or Intuit started to make Angry Birds for the Windows 8 platform, I'd expect that to get its own /. article!
From TFA:
Nokia’s PureMotion HD+ is the company’s name for its tweaks to the display, including blur-free scrolling.
Why isn't this not only standard, but the only acceptable state these days? When will people (Android, I'm looking at you here) figure out that getting the basics so completely solid that nobody thinks about them is the kind of work that people should expect from their OS/Environment provider? Watching a video talking about how many cores the latest whatever has with jittery scrolling is just embarrasing.
I got to the point where I really just wanted to get my job done, and linux was getting in my way more than it was helping me.
That's it in spades. The fact that "read the documentation" on obscure command-line commands is still (in this thread no less) used as the standard response to common tasks being impossible (sharing files from Linux OS to Linux OS using a GUI was that particular example) is huge. And yet people will continue to maintain that working on OSX (or even modern Windows) is "impossible," regardless of the fact that millions of people do so with every evidence of success and, at least in the case of OSX, happiness...
I use 'fish' and 'smb' protocol kioslaves with Dolphin every day. Dolphin ain't perfect and neither is Samba, but you really should try reading the documentation...
I think that's the point. The idea of a desktop (as opposed to kernel-level support) was that stuff like that just work without having to read the documentation to do something as esoteric as move a file between machines. In 2012.
So now I'm a mac user and I get all that UNIX-y goodness and none of the open source drama queen bullshit.
True. Now Apple will take care of your decisions for you so that you don't have to be exposed to that "drama queen bullshit".
And as long as they're reasonable decisions, what's the problem with that? Some folk prefer to spend time using their computers to do stuff, rather than configuring their computers to do stuff. There's a surprisingly big difference between those two words.
And I don't think I need to explain why "you just need to upgrade" is not a valid reply, do I?
captcha : "adopts"? kinda fitting
Depends. A lot of people do Java development just fine on Snow Leopard and other older versions. And, quite frankly, when you start quibbling over a $20 upgrade fee for a professional development environment, most just don't care. Maybe we should - but we don't (again, in general). In the real world, Java development on OSX is both common and effective.
Right, because Yugos eventually (and wrongly) leaked into the consumer mindset that ALL cars are shit.
If those early Yugos had looked almost exactly like Fords, to the point that Yugo's own counsel mistook a Ford for one of their own products, then Ford would have indeed been concerned that their brand value had been diluted...
Do we have the capacity to make the semiconductors, resistors, capacitors, and build the circuit boards that we rely on for our "smart" military? Could that capacity be ramped up as quickly as we ramped up our industrial manufacturing capacity during WWII? A single chip fab can take billions of dollars and years to bring online - and probably relies on many foreign imports to make it run.
This is why you get projects like the "$50K toilet" that people love to bash - the military has blueprints for building almost everything (indeed, high-dollar normal items like that generally represent the costs to fully design, source, and create an assembly line, amortized over the 100 or so items they then build to make sure that they've got the process down correctly).
And there's the crux. For most people I've ever talked to, cost is not *the only* factor that matters for transportation for them. For those that it is, they make many compromises, living either "trapped" in a metro area and not having a car, or driving "junkers" that no one else even would want - and constantly putting money into them to fix them while missing work etc to go to the shop.
Yup. And the response I was replying to was:
Something is inherently wrong with the society when a person with USD2 a day income is even considering to spend half of his daily income on fruit ninja
In other words, the stated issue was that us spending money on things that bring us pleasure makes sense. Other people spending money on different things that bring them pleasure is "inherently wrong". That was what I was referring to.
Sounds great!
Personally, I want my browser to retrieve and render dynamic websites as accurately and as fast as possible. It should handle clicked URLs, have easy access to the search engine of my choice, and deal appropriately with hand-entered URLs. Maybe offer some rudimentary bookmarks as well.
From a web-developer standpoint (rarer in the world), I'd like a JS console and DOM modification/inspection, plus a usable 'net' view of the current page.
Beyond that, they should offload almost everything else - presentation, controls, gestures, codecs (print, sound, and video), &c - to the underlying operating system and window manager for consistency with the rest of my system.
Why would anyone want their browser's UI to be continuously varying?
Its a long way off. I came to the US from the UK at age 10, and had no idea what feet and inches were - yet found that when you mentioned something basic "77 cm" to someone over hear they had absolutely no idea how long that was without doing mental gymnastics. That's still true today BTW, 30 years later. People in the US outside of a few very specialized fields just don't think in metric units.
Although an amazingly large number of people in the US will happily spend half their annual income on a car that far outstrips their needs - often spreading that payment out over half a decade or more to do so. People aren't logical.
Well, if by stealing you mean buying for quite a lot of money, then sure.
So... 23% of the world's consumers are grandmothers? Good to know, I guess.
No matter what you think, if you're developing for a commercial site 23-30% market share is still significant, and a very large percentage of the population to ignore just to be "right." Even more so if your livelihood depends on being available, especially to those corporate customers who may not even have a reasonable choice themselves.
People going to W3Schools (note: the statistics are purely from their own website are far less likely to be running IE than the general population.
The vast majority of users - professional and home - probably only use 3-4 applications.
Web browsing, of course. Maybe email if they're not using a web client. Possibly word and/or excel. Then the game-of-the-month. If at work, maybe 1-2 specialized corporate applications. But that's about it.
Pornography, at least, is already age-restricted. Asking ISPs to do the same level of filtering that brick-and-mortor stores do, while a little unreasonable, does make a certain amount of sense.
I would suggest, however, that any laws surrounding that be tied to pre-existing format-neutral regulations. If there's no law prohibiting someone from buying a book that promotes anorexia, for example, why make a ruling that only affects online users?
Cost to me at the time: $0 - healthcare is socialised as well - everyone pays a little (much less than I pay for health insurance in the US now, for example) and no-one ever goes bankrupt because of medical fees..
Amusingly (to me - I'm another UK expat living in the US) the tax situation isn't all that bad either. I did this math back in late 2009 so it should still be pretty current now:
I'll compare the tax burden on someone making USD 80,000 and GBP 50,000 - I know they're not completely comparable, but its a rough note. I'm ignoring a lot of minor taxes/fees here.
The US individual pays $16,188 in federal income taxes and $6,120 in FICA/Medicare taxes. This gives them a take home pay of $57,692. Their employer also pays $6,120 in FICA/Medicare taxes, for a total cost of $86,120.
The UK individual pays £9,930 in income tax, and £4,258 in NI (national insurance). This gives them a take home pay of £35,812. Their employer pays £5,668 in NI, for a total cost of £55,668.
Let's convert those UK numbers into their USD variants at the same rate, just for fun:
The UK individual pays $15,888 in income tax, $300 less than their US counterpart, and $6,812 in NI, or $692 more. This gives them a take home pay of $57,299, $392 less than the US guy (only 1/2 of 1% less). Their employer pays $9,068 in NI, for a total cost of $89,068, which is $2,948 or 3.5% more than the US cost.
The big difference here, of course, is that the US employee still has absolutely no health care. Reasonable coverage for a single person in good health easily consumes that $3,000 difference - and that's ignoring any family obligations, what happens when they're laid off, etc.
Finally, the total tax burden in the UK is about 37% of GDP, compared to about 27% in the US, but the UK numbers include comprehensive healthcare and the US ones do not. In the US, healthcare costs (including insurance company overhead) run about 17.5% of GDP (some of which is government covered, but less than half). If you add in 9% to represent a conservative estimate of non-government-paid healthcare costs in the US, then you get within 1%-of-GDP of the UK... again, pretty much the same cost.
For example, does anyone seriously believe that, if God exists, God cares one whit about who wins the Superbowl, etc...
If He does then He must, by extension, dislike one of the two teams. I forget who said it first but it is odd that winners often thank God but losers always blame themselves. You rarely here an interview with a losing quarterback (after the victor has credited God) wherein he says, "Well, we were doing well until the third quarter, when Jesus made me fumble!"
Why do the churches still make all that ruckus every hour or more, can't their followers just get an app for that?
You mean like the regular ringing of bells to mark both time and important religious events (weddings, funerals, &c)? Or is it just bad when its Muslim?
Data center power problems. They can happen, and WAN replication is slow.
Having said that, 99.999% of the DB backed applications out there can quite happily survive a 0.0001% chance of losing a transaction, and should spec their DB solutions accordingly. Honestly, even most financial systems below the banking level can - you reach a point where its cheaper to just budget $10K per record to fix a problem should the once-in-a-lifetime perfect-storm error occur rather than to try to keep getting better at making sure they don't.
Kinda like the Ford Pinto, but with much better numbers (and less death when things go wrong).