It's a Synaptics trackpad. Nobody says that PC manufacturers couldn't include them, too. Also, in Linux you can set it up so that three fingers on the touchpad is a middle-click. Neat!
WTF is Minicity? I haven't bothered to follow the links 'cause I'm not in the habit of clicking on things I don't recognize.... Any ideas on why there's so much spam about it lately?
I was mostly just making a joke at Microsoft's expense there, but I completely agree with you. This is why after one really bad client I always make mine give me a complete spec in writing. It actually deters a lot of clients who I guess were counting on the ability to pull a fast one with me but the ones who are willing to sit down with me and work out exactly what they want before I start working are really the only ones I want. If their wishes change later on in the project, they can write addenda and we'll both sign off on them. It seems like a lot of trouble to go through when I'm basically a one-man shop over here, but in exchange for the effort I get to keep my sanity.
And before you ask, when I was working for an agency I had clients like that too, but they just had to pay a lot more money.
Everything is designed or by some kind of engineer. If you're an engineer and you notice something like a light that's not timed "right" in your opinion . . . just shut up about it unless the problem you're noticing actually does fit under your specialty.
A green light laser would certainly be capable, particularly after refracting into the cockpit through the windscreen glass, of blinding a pilot or coming very close. Also, they'd be able to find the source of the laser because green light laser beams are clearly visible in most conditions.
Yes. Consistently. Until the Moon finally breaks free of Earth's gravity (and even after that, as the Sun also produces tides) we will always have tides and they will always be predictable. You forgot about wave power, too, which isn't precisely the same thing.
Seriously though, about solar . . . no. You see, you probably live somewhere that's sunny enough to do that. I used to live somewhere pretty sunny (northern California), and solar heat was actually used pretty extensively throughout my town, but it still would not be viable as a sole power source. Living in the Windy City now, I feel like my favourite option of late has been wind turbines on top of buildings (we have some here; they seem to work pretty well) and some kind of fuel cell storage in the basement. But even this, while it would help, would not be useful as a sole source of power. In the end, you need a reliable, constant source of power, like nuclear.
I'm torn . . . your code looks nicer because the ">" isn't included in the filename and because a $variable is used for the file handle, both of which I think throw a lot of people off, but . . . but . . . it just doesn't look like perl!
As well as in your LISP example, this is ugly enough to be avoided whenever possible:)
When used judiciously, it can actually lead to succinct, readable code. Take for instance, in perl, the opening of a file:
open SOME_FILE, ">some_filename.foo" or die("Some kind of error occurred");
Using short-circuit operators like &&, ||, or ?: can actually greatly simplify your code if you don't go overboard with them, particularly if you can call them "and" and "or". Having more than two such statements in one big expression I would say is ill-advised if you ever want to read your code successfully again. Although, for many of us perl programmers, that's never something we worry about;-P
In lower-level languages like C, though, they become a multiway branch, which, when converted to machine code, results in fewer branch instructions. In C code, a good switch statement, particularly in a block of code that's already looped or gets called often, can save you a lot of pipeline flushes.
In high-level languages of *course* it's syntactic sugar, since there are some languages sophisticated enough to convert serial if/elsif/else blocks into multiway branches. Perl is all about that sort of thing though. That's why there's always six different ways to do a given thing in perl, and one of the reasons why it's such a great language. Also, I dunno about you, but I'm lazy and I like to write multiway branches instead of a bunch of if/else statements. That way in most languages it's pretty clear that the entire block is talking about the same variable. Was it Donald Knuth, Alan Perlis, or Edsger Dijkstra who said "Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon"?
There was an interesting post on Penny Arcade a few days ago about just exactly this sort of mentality. Now, I'm not going to be an asshole about it like Tycho was, but really you're missing the point. And I say this as an avid player of Guitar Hero who has had seven years of formal spanish classical guitar training. The two are similar exercises, and I feel sometimes when I'm playing Guitar Hero that I instinctively play like I play a real guitar, but it's not really the same and both are satisfying for different reasons to me (like, for instance, it's hard for me to rock out with my friends if they don't play proper guitar or can't sing; guitar hero takes down those boundaries).
The other thing you're forgetting about is that learning to play a real guitar, for adults especially, is hard. I suspect that learning in the classical style would be impossible for an adult, because so much of success as a classical guitar player is tied to how early you started. I started at six, and even though I haven't played in a couple of years I can still pick it back up any time. It's definitely not something you can just pick up, though, same as violin or piano.
From Tycho's post:
Invariably, when reasonable people are discussing Guitar Hero or Rock Band, that forum smart guy oozes in somewhere near the middle of the thread and tells people that they should be playing real instruments - presumably, like he does. Put aside that Mozart has missed the point completely (i.e., why don't you play for the real NFL, etc). The fact of the matter is that he is quite simply wrong. And not just wrong: it's that thick, unctuous kind of wrong that masquerades as erudition. He is, in fact, a yokel - and he's operating under some pretty romantic notions of what constitutes an "instrument."
I made a comment earlier about the constitutionality of banning these things on the grounds that the first amendment doesn't give you the right to a captive audience. I was hoping there'd be a lawyer/law student/someone who knows more about law than me posting who can confirm or deny this notion.
The real sad part of this is that, honestly, you wouldn't think regulation would be necessary, just like a law shouldn't be necessary to keep people from walking down the street punching strangers in the face. The idea of beaming advertising directly into people's heads is beyond the edges of common human decency and shows a complete lack of respect for people, their privacy, and the sanctity of an individual's mind. It's sad.
IANAL either, but I suspect that there is enough precedent to support the conclusion that this can't be legal. Just like how your right to freedom of speech doesn't cover yelling "FIRE" in a crowded theatre, it also doesn't give you the right to a captive audience. I would argue that unsuspecting pedestrians, motorists, bicyclists, and dogs on the street are a captive audience, because it's not immediately certain how they would know to avoid this thing.
When you are in public, yes, of course, you implicitly agree to a lot of things and essentially your actions in public cannot possibly have any expectations of privacy. However, the contents of your own skull are your own always and just as advertisers probably would be stopped if they hired people to sneak up on people in public and whisper things into their ears, this technology should not be permissible either. I actually find it kind of disgusting that anyone thought of it in the first place; didn't they realize it's creepier than hell?
I disagree with all the people who are saying smash these things with baseball bats. That's just wrong. A pair of wire cutters works just as effectively and much more peacefully.
[The elderly don't] care who wins the election, so long as their retirement benefits aren't touched.
The elderly are the only people who actually vote in this country! The AARP is a huuuuuuge lobby and anyone who wants to get elected to any position anywhere—particularly the presidency—has to cowtow to them quite a great deal. That group also includes a lot of veterans, which need constant placating as well. Never ever ever underestimate the elderly vote because those people have the highest turnout of any demographic.
Yes. And with good reason! You can't have these things goin' wild, you know.
( Seriously; I actually know other roomba owners who seem to be afraid of their roombas and I'm not entirely sure why. Mine's named Hobie and it's the best pet ever! )
Easy. Just have them provide IE, then force them to open up to other companies (like Opera, Firefox, etc.) that can pay them a reasonable fee to include their browser with the operating system. This way you don't get a bazillion browsers included on the desktop of the PC, but you still have open competition. The fee should be "reasonable" as in "reasonable enough that open-source operations like Firefox can afford to pay it".
Perhaps make them implement any standard feature which is implemented by at least 2 other browsers.
That's a pretty good idea on the surface, but just like adhering to the published standard I think it'd be hard to enforce. Decoupling IE from Windows would be a huuuuuuuge step; Microsoft abandoning it would be an even better step. What would replace it, though? I think that's the biggest problem: the fact that IE is so deeply tied into Windows that no browser could at this point take its place and it can never be removed without serious changes to the way the operating system works.
Of course, I seem to recall other antitrust suits way back when that did enjoin Microsoft against those sorts of shenanigans. What happened to those? Am I making stuff up? Am I on crazy pills?
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Andy Rooney is a commentator on 60 Minutes, a US television magazine, for those might not know.
It's a Synaptics trackpad. Nobody says that PC manufacturers couldn't include them, too. Also, in Linux you can set it up so that three fingers on the touchpad is a middle-click. Neat!
WTF is Minicity? I haven't bothered to follow the links 'cause I'm not in the habit of clicking on things I don't recognize.... Any ideas on why there's so much spam about it lately?
Also, solution: have a captcha for AC posts.
I was mostly just making a joke at Microsoft's expense there, but I completely agree with you. This is why after one really bad client I always make mine give me a complete spec in writing. It actually deters a lot of clients who I guess were counting on the ability to pull a fast one with me but the ones who are willing to sit down with me and work out exactly what they want before I start working are really the only ones I want. If their wishes change later on in the project, they can write addenda and we'll both sign off on them. It seems like a lot of trouble to go through when I'm basically a one-man shop over here, but in exchange for the effort I get to keep my sanity.
And before you ask, when I was working for an agency I had clients like that too, but they just had to pay a lot more money.
Everything is designed or by some kind of engineer. If you're an engineer and you notice something like a light that's not timed "right" in your opinion . . . just shut up about it unless the problem you're noticing actually does fit under your specialty.
You forgot "feature"
He wasn't riding it. He was having it shipped.
( PS - I'm a biker 'cause I ride regularly. )
( PPS - I ride a Honda. )
So is he :-P
It's like silicon doping, but instead of phosphorous you're doping things with greatness!
What about brooms? Shenanigans!!!!!!!!! *runs*
Ruby FTW!
A green light laser would certainly be capable, particularly after refracting into the cockpit through the windscreen glass, of blinding a pilot or coming very close. Also, they'd be able to find the source of the laser because green light laser beams are clearly visible in most conditions.
...tides come and go...Yes. Consistently. Until the Moon finally breaks free of Earth's gravity (and even after that, as the Sun also produces tides) we will always have tides and they will always be predictable. You forgot about wave power, too, which isn't precisely the same thing.
Seriously though, about solar . . . no. You see, you probably live somewhere that's sunny enough to do that. I used to live somewhere pretty sunny (northern California), and solar heat was actually used pretty extensively throughout my town, but it still would not be viable as a sole power source. Living in the Windy City now, I feel like my favourite option of late has been wind turbines on top of buildings (we have some here; they seem to work pretty well) and some kind of fuel cell storage in the basement. But even this, while it would help, would not be useful as a sole source of power. In the end, you need a reliable, constant source of power, like nuclear.
Just tag it "!censorship" if you disagree.
I'm torn . . . your code looks nicer because the ">" isn't included in the filename and because a $variable is used for the file handle, both of which I think throw a lot of people off, but . . . but . . . it just doesn't look like perl!
Seriously though thanks for the correction.
When used judiciously, it can actually lead to succinct, readable code. Take for instance, in perl, the opening of a file:
open SOME_FILE, ">some_filename.foo" or die("Some kind of error occurred");
Using short-circuit operators like &&, ||, or ?: can actually greatly simplify your code if you don't go overboard with them, particularly if you can call them "and" and "or". Having more than two such statements in one big expression I would say is ill-advised if you ever want to read your code successfully again. Although, for many of us perl programmers, that's never something we worry about ;-P
In lower-level languages like C, though, they become a multiway branch, which, when converted to machine code, results in fewer branch instructions. In C code, a good switch statement, particularly in a block of code that's already looped or gets called often, can save you a lot of pipeline flushes.
In high-level languages of *course* it's syntactic sugar, since there are some languages sophisticated enough to convert serial if/elsif/else blocks into multiway branches. Perl is all about that sort of thing though. That's why there's always six different ways to do a given thing in perl, and one of the reasons why it's such a great language. Also, I dunno about you, but I'm lazy and I like to write multiway branches instead of a bunch of if/else statements. That way in most languages it's pretty clear that the entire block is talking about the same variable. Was it Donald Knuth, Alan Perlis, or Edsger Dijkstra who said "Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon"?
There was an interesting post on Penny Arcade a few days ago about just exactly this sort of mentality. Now, I'm not going to be an asshole about it like Tycho was, but really you're missing the point. And I say this as an avid player of Guitar Hero who has had seven years of formal spanish classical guitar training. The two are similar exercises, and I feel sometimes when I'm playing Guitar Hero that I instinctively play like I play a real guitar, but it's not really the same and both are satisfying for different reasons to me (like, for instance, it's hard for me to rock out with my friends if they don't play proper guitar or can't sing; guitar hero takes down those boundaries).
The other thing you're forgetting about is that learning to play a real guitar, for adults especially, is hard. I suspect that learning in the classical style would be impossible for an adult, because so much of success as a classical guitar player is tied to how early you started. I started at six, and even though I haven't played in a couple of years I can still pick it back up any time. It's definitely not something you can just pick up, though, same as violin or piano.
From Tycho's post:
Invariably, when reasonable people are discussing Guitar Hero or Rock Band, that forum smart guy oozes in somewhere near the middle of the thread and tells people that they should be playing real instruments - presumably, like he does. Put aside that Mozart has missed the point completely (i.e., why don't you play for the real NFL, etc). The fact of the matter is that he is quite simply wrong. And not just wrong: it's that thick, unctuous kind of wrong that masquerades as erudition. He is, in fact, a yokel - and he's operating under some pretty romantic notions of what constitutes an "instrument."I made a comment earlier about the constitutionality of banning these things on the grounds that the first amendment doesn't give you the right to a captive audience. I was hoping there'd be a lawyer/law student/someone who knows more about law than me posting who can confirm or deny this notion.
The real sad part of this is that, honestly, you wouldn't think regulation would be necessary, just like a law shouldn't be necessary to keep people from walking down the street punching strangers in the face. The idea of beaming advertising directly into people's heads is beyond the edges of common human decency and shows a complete lack of respect for people, their privacy, and the sanctity of an individual's mind. It's sad.
IANAL either, but I suspect that there is enough precedent to support the conclusion that this can't be legal. Just like how your right to freedom of speech doesn't cover yelling "FIRE" in a crowded theatre, it also doesn't give you the right to a captive audience. I would argue that unsuspecting pedestrians, motorists, bicyclists, and dogs on the street are a captive audience, because it's not immediately certain how they would know to avoid this thing.
When you are in public, yes, of course, you implicitly agree to a lot of things and essentially your actions in public cannot possibly have any expectations of privacy. However, the contents of your own skull are your own always and just as advertisers probably would be stopped if they hired people to sneak up on people in public and whisper things into their ears, this technology should not be permissible either. I actually find it kind of disgusting that anyone thought of it in the first place; didn't they realize it's creepier than hell?
I disagree with all the people who are saying smash these things with baseball bats. That's just wrong. A pair of wire cutters works just as effectively and much more peacefully.
Quantum trolling! It has begun....
The elderly are the only people who actually vote in this country! The AARP is a huuuuuuge lobby and anyone who wants to get elected to any position anywhere—particularly the presidency—has to cowtow to them quite a great deal. That group also includes a lot of veterans, which need constant placating as well. Never ever ever underestimate the elderly vote because those people have the highest turnout of any demographic.
Yes. And with good reason! You can't have these things goin' wild, you know.
( Seriously; I actually know other roomba owners who seem to be afraid of their roombas and I'm not entirely sure why. Mine's named Hobie and it's the best pet ever! )
Easy. Just have them provide IE, then force them to open up to other companies (like Opera, Firefox, etc.) that can pay them a reasonable fee to include their browser with the operating system. This way you don't get a bazillion browsers included on the desktop of the PC, but you still have open competition. The fee should be "reasonable" as in "reasonable enough that open-source operations like Firefox can afford to pay it".
That's a pretty good idea on the surface, but just like adhering to the published standard I think it'd be hard to enforce. Decoupling IE from Windows would be a huuuuuuuge step; Microsoft abandoning it would be an even better step. What would replace it, though? I think that's the biggest problem: the fact that IE is so deeply tied into Windows that no browser could at this point take its place and it can never be removed without serious changes to the way the operating system works.
Of course, I seem to recall other antitrust suits way back when that did enjoin Microsoft against those sorts of shenanigans. What happened to those? Am I making stuff up? Am I on crazy pills?