I find on a 1080p screen (of course I would prefer 1200), I can comfortably fit three editor colums side by side, each of which is about 100 columns wide.
I tried two columns. No, I do not like it: I prefer to have only one editor window open (per virtual screen). If I need two files side by side, horizontal split works for me better, since then I do not have problems with the long lines.
Now that I mentioned side-by-side, the only thing which to me actually gained usability from wide screen is the side-by-side diff. No need to resort to tiny font sizes anymore.
That doesn't waste any space at all, and is very comfortable to work with.
I can't imagine that to be ever comfortable to me.
You must use (very) small font size. To me Courrier New or Andale Mono @14pt is the "normal" working font size. Anything less makes my eyes ache during prolonged coding sessions.
In particular for development, I personally find the 4:3 screens better than the widescreen ones. And that is one of mine biggest complains with the modern laptops as development goes. I want to see more lines of the source code on the screen. In the end one buys 24" external display - sufficiently tall to fit more lines of code - only to waste 20-30% of the screen space on the sides.
They should introduce something like "tall screen." And if keyboard is OK, I might even consider buying it.
That's not going to work in long term. Probably it already doesn't.
LO folks have spent about a year converting the code base to use standard libraries (most notably STL) instead of the old home-brew stuff OO.o still relies upon. That was a major clean-up done by LO people which allowed them to make code cleaner and accessible to new developers. But also made LO quite incompatible to OO.o.
Due to that, many features already cannot be ported between the two without some effort.
Better point them at the easygoing admins, who connected the business/mission critical network of PCs to Internet.
Especially now, when there are carpload of solutions for not having everything connected to the same network and yet being able to access the Internet.
If the prof says, "Turn to page 256 and look at illustration 3," you will not spend minutes trying to find the correlating page in your cheaper book. It will BE page 256, and the illustration will be what the prof is referring to.
Interesting question: are page numbers copyrightable or not? To me, IANAL, not: they are merely a way how content is accessed, they are not part of the content itself. But knowing you crazy US legal system I wouldn't be much surprised if that would turn out to be so.
Textbooks are pricey. Sure. But this guy works hard putting out the best in his field every year. He and his staff spend a lot of time and effort creating the best product. These companies are blatantly violating copyright on a level that I think few slashdotters would be able to justify.
It's easy to get emotional - and biased - when friends are involved.
Broader question would: why the books are SO fscking expensive? Do they really have to be the "best product" - while consumers would have been pretty satisfied with "mediocre product which doesn't cost an arm and a leg"?
Or the same old beaten "think of children" argument is going to be called for here too?
P.S. 10+ years ago I had friends working in mobile telecom industry. They drove expensive cars and owned expensive houses - and 1 minute of talk time cost more than (converting from old money) 1€ and a "cheap" mobile phone with 2y contract was going for only ~300€. And they complained about gov't regulations, their drive to create competition and other persecutions. But, you know, they are good guys! They are there to provide me with the *best* service!! It is impossible to provide such great service at lower price!!! Competition would totally destroy the mobile market!!!! Or so they said.
Firefox gets in your face every time it updates, and only recently stopped constantly telling you that some of your plugins wouldn't work with the latest version.
Chrome doesn't have, and never has had, either of these problems.
Well, yes, Chrome doesn't tell or ask anything - it just updates. And occasionally breaks stuff. Silently.
I have seen at least one update to new major version which broke several extensions. (One which I wanted precisely at the time to install. Top comment, few hours old, was: "do not install, Chrome would crash!")
I have seen at least one breakage in HTML rendering. (Some form elements + label tag were dysfunctional in some cases.)
Oh yes, the problems disappeared week or so later. But heck, that's me noticing it, who uses Chrome less than once a week and that only because it is very simple to create a shortcut for private browsing session. It basically replaced to me the Opera as second browser - the browser where I keep rarely visited websites in the otherwise empty bookmark bar.
For some things indeed Perl is pretty slow. But unlike Python, if you code in Perl tutorial examples, you would never have to wait minutes for them to finish. Python? Love that range() function which can easily eat gigabytes of RAM. Love that dynamic function/method look-up - on every f-ing call. In Perl, though I have seen slowness, I yet to encounter any corner as stupidly implemented as in Python.
Also, unlike Python, in Perl there is a workaround for some cases: one can generate on the fly and eval a dedicated subroutine. That works well if you have lots of data coming from the configuration which does not change over the program life time. E.g. last time I used it was to improve implementation of a black list. Originally, black list was supposed to be very short - few entries, probably with regexps. But later, on some tasks it was needed to be as large as an input, leading to O(n^2), which was unbelievably slow in Perl. Rewriting the match against the black list into an eval'ed function literally removed the bottleneck. It's still O(n^2), but nobody notices that anymore.
Wow. If I would sum it up all, I do not think I have sat down before TV for that long in past ten years.
As I'm concerned, consoles were dead to me for very long time: I'm simply not the type who sits before TV and swallows everything what's airing. Got spoiled by the internet and by the freedom of choice long time ago. (But I do watch some TV shows on internet on my PC or laptop.)
And if yes, how long do you think would it take for black hats to adopt it to DDoS SSH servers using an army of zombie PCs?
Competition between the entertainment forms
on
The eBook Backlash
·
· Score: 2
offering a menu of distractions that can fragment the reading experience, or stop it in its tracks.
People try to make it news that users can't organize themselves? For years I have read e-books on my laptop just fine. Not even in the full-screen mode. On one side.
On the other side, IMO it is more about the fact that most of the books are at best mediocre. So when given a choice, and e-book+tablet gives that choice, brains say "I'd rather watch cat videos on the YouTube." When I'm reading an interesting book on my e-book reader (not tablet), with laptop being readily available at hand, I rarely have the impulse to do something else. Because the book is interesting.
It is an open competition between the entertainment forms for the free time (and money) of the user. Many books (just like many movies or games), sadly, lose to the cat videos in entertainment value. And that's nothing new.
But I can image that some have missed the fact that books became predominantly an entertainment form - and have much less cultural value than they had say few decades before. That is rather normal: book publishing become cheaper and many things which previously were not deemed before to be worth the paper, now are published. Especially with e-books, literally anything can be published cheaply. And thus everything gets published. But that, unlike some time ago, doesn't give automatically everything published the same value as the books of the masters.
Have seen few years ago a review of such sites by an author. The picture is not as rosy as you paint it. IIRC in the end, yes it is easier and cheaper to host it yourself. What is still not that simple for the most non-IT-savvy people.
Also, in some countries, with strong book "piracy" background (e.g. ex-USSR) many authors publish their books themselves on such local "illegal"/"semi-legal" sites. Culture preservation sentiment is very strong and litigation is a risk of angering the readers. IOW, the practice is uncommon, but not unheard of.
Due to licensing policies, I do not have Visio installed on my corporate desktop. I used in past for many purposes the OO Draw and I find it pretty OK for the diagrams and whatnot.
Many people also praise the Dia, though I have no personal experience with it. Specifically, several interns I knew actually complained that for the labs they needed to use the Visio, while Dia was much better tool for the job.
Iran is a "phantom" only to those who didn't bother to read about the country. E.g. Wikipedia has pretty good coverage.
Iran is a "menace" only to the two groups of people: people who read too much into the public speeches of their president (who can't even mobilize the army; so much for a president) and politicians who want to prevent Iran from becoming a superpower in the region (and potentially in the world).
OK. I confess. The bashing of Iran become much less interesting to me, once I took time to learn about the country. Talk about the evils of the education.
It is more like: Some people lack the ability to write clean Perl code, and fear the clean code as it might make look the job too easy.
Perl is indiscriminate at making things easy, even if that is writing crappy code.
Unreadable Perl code isn't the problem of the language, it is the problem of the developers. Trying to fixing it at the language level is wrong and redundant, because in the end it would become Visual Basic or Java or Python. And we already have them.
Up-to-date, portable and well documented Qt bindings.
Place of portable GUI toolkit for Perl was always kind of empty. Many tried - but none remained maintained sufficiently long to become de facto standard. Most are abandoned. Few are managing to stay afloat, but sorely lack Perl-specific documentation. And I will not go with every little question to the mail lists.
On many occasions, even Xaw-level toolkit would have been more than satisfactory - if portable. Even if primitive, there is nothing like that available.
P.S. Many insisted that Perl/Tk works well. Indeed, applications written with it work well. Now go and try to find any documentation which isn't "but it's just like in Tcl/Tk!" and describes anything more complicated than a hello world exit button app. I have found couple of decent tutorials - only to realize 5 minutes later that I'm missing a decent reference. Because Perl isn't Tcl, lots of stuff really differs and doing it in Perl like in Tcl is very counter-productive. And there is no Perl specific reference documentation.
P.P.S. But that in itself will not solve the problem that perlxs is a stinking pile of ****. I'd love Perl community to invest into a simpler, probably not so powerful interface.
In its hay days during the Late 90's and Early 2000's there was a lot of PERL Development, but it seems it has dropped off and PERL lost its shine.
Frankly, Perl got it all more or less right already in early 2000s. So obviously there is not much development happening: Perl already works pretty well. Most new releases have mostly bug fixes - but also some minor syntax improvements and features from the Perl6.
IOW, Perl lost its shine only in the eyes of those who are after shiny. Perl is pretty down to earth tool to get the job done.
But back in the day every time you tried to find an open source program to do something it required PERL
Perl defines portability properly and allows one to access quite a lot of system-specific resources - in the system-specific way. Thus it was (and in some areas still is) quite popular as the language for install scripts of all sorts.
Even now, Perl remains one of the few power tools to be most commonly included in the fresh UNIX system installs (including Debian and Mac OS X). There is no other language/tool which is as stable and as portable: that's why it is possible and useful to include it into the OS install.
Not so much of this any more, is it because I have changed how I look for software or is it because PERL is no longer as popular as it was before.
IMO, Perl greatest weakness is the interface to other libraries (the PerlXS). It is not an easy task to make a Perl binding. It's fscking hard and includes lots of copy-paste. That's why Perl lacks many up-to-date bindings to many up-to-date libraries, what makes it not so suitable for many up-to-date tasks. Even Perl6 went on and pretty much excluded the XS/etc from the spec. What sucks and makes Perl6 worse (and useless to me) than the Perl5, because on top of general problem with bindings, Perl6 adds fragmentation: extensions written for different Perl6 implementation are incompatible with each other.
One of my past employers used the MegaUpload and similar services, when there were needed to deliver to customer an urgent software update - but Outlook/Exchange was kindly blocking the attachment since it was an executable file. Or the file was too large for the attachment. Updates were incremental, thus it was deemed to be OK to upload them on such services.
That's just impossible: highly educated people tend to be libertarian.
Citation??? There are so many important philosophers, economists, scientists, etc... who were not Libertarian. Now if you had said that "highly educated people tend to be less religious" then sure... but Libertarian? Do you not realize how many highly educated socialists there are?
Sorry, I haven't realized that thanks to US political propaganda the word is so loaded.
But Mohammed created a religion that divides the world into "us" and "not-us" (dar al-Islam and dar al-Harb) with a primary mode of interaction consisting of antagonism and violence, and that's the perspective by which the Iranian theocrats view anyone who isn't of their particular sect of Islam.
Iranian fundamentalism is being fed with constant sanctions from the other side. One has to also consider that Iran as a whole not yet completely over the Iran-Iraq war. And we in West are not helping Iran to get over.
Otherwise, the dar al-Islam and dar al-Harb doesn't seem to be much different from jew and goy, a non-jew.
Yes. Iran gov't found it to be very tricky business. On one side - improve education to match the standards of the developed nations. On the other side - keep people contained to Islamic dogmas.
That's just impossible: highly educated people tend to be libertarian.
But at least one thing Ayatollah got right is to not try to forcefully prevent the brain drain nor prosecute or condemn those willing to leave Iran.
Slashdot Mirror
I find on a 1080p screen (of course I would prefer 1200), I can comfortably fit three editor colums side by side, each of which is about 100 columns wide.
I tried two columns. No, I do not like it: I prefer to have only one editor window open (per virtual screen). If I need two files side by side, horizontal split works for me better, since then I do not have problems with the long lines.
Now that I mentioned side-by-side, the only thing which to me actually gained usability from wide screen is the side-by-side diff. No need to resort to tiny font sizes anymore.
That doesn't waste any space at all, and is very comfortable to work with.
I can't imagine that to be ever comfortable to me.
You must use (very) small font size. To me Courrier New or Andale Mono @14pt is the "normal" working font size. Anything less makes my eyes ache during prolonged coding sessions.
In particular for development, I personally find the 4:3 screens better than the widescreen ones. And that is one of mine biggest complains with the modern laptops as development goes. I want to see more lines of the source code on the screen. In the end one buys 24" external display - sufficiently tall to fit more lines of code - only to waste 20-30% of the screen space on the sides.
They should introduce something like "tall screen." And if keyboard is OK, I might even consider buying it.
That's not going to work in long term. Probably it already doesn't.
LO folks have spent about a year converting the code base to use standard libraries (most notably STL) instead of the old home-brew stuff OO.o still relies upon. That was a major clean-up done by LO people which allowed them to make code cleaner and accessible to new developers. But also made LO quite incompatible to OO.o.
Due to that, many features already cannot be ported between the two without some effort.
Better point them at the easygoing admins, who connected the business/mission critical network of PCs to Internet.
Especially now, when there are carpload of solutions for not having everything connected to the same network and yet being able to access the Internet.
If the prof says, "Turn to page 256 and look at illustration 3," you will not spend minutes trying to find the correlating page in your cheaper book. It will BE page 256, and the illustration will be what the prof is referring to.
Interesting question: are page numbers copyrightable or not? To me, IANAL, not: they are merely a way how content is accessed, they are not part of the content itself. But knowing you crazy US legal system I wouldn't be much surprised if that would turn out to be so.
Textbooks are pricey. Sure. But this guy works hard putting out the best in his field every year. He and his staff spend a lot of time and effort creating the best product. These companies are blatantly violating copyright on a level that I think few slashdotters would be able to justify.
It's easy to get emotional - and biased - when friends are involved.
Broader question would: why the books are SO fscking expensive? Do they really have to be the "best product" - while consumers would have been pretty satisfied with "mediocre product which doesn't cost an arm and a leg"?
Or the same old beaten "think of children" argument is going to be called for here too?
P.S. 10+ years ago I had friends working in mobile telecom industry. They drove expensive cars and owned expensive houses - and 1 minute of talk time cost more than (converting from old money) 1€ and a "cheap" mobile phone with 2y contract was going for only ~300€. And they complained about gov't regulations, their drive to create competition and other persecutions. But, you know, they are good guys! They are there to provide me with the *best* service!! It is impossible to provide such great service at lower price!!! Competition would totally destroy the mobile market!!!! Or so they said.
Firefox gets in your face every time it updates, and only recently stopped constantly telling you that some of your plugins wouldn't work with the latest version.
Chrome doesn't have, and never has had, either of these problems.
Well, yes, Chrome doesn't tell or ask anything - it just updates. And occasionally breaks stuff. Silently.
I have seen at least one update to new major version which broke several extensions. (One which I wanted precisely at the time to install. Top comment, few hours old, was: "do not install, Chrome would crash!")
I have seen at least one breakage in HTML rendering. (Some form elements + label tag were dysfunctional in some cases.)
Oh yes, the problems disappeared week or so later. But heck, that's me noticing it, who uses Chrome less than once a week and that only because it is very simple to create a shortcut for private browsing session. It basically replaced to me the Opera as second browser - the browser where I keep rarely visited websites in the otherwise empty bookmark bar.
The profit comes from getting paid more while providing less care, or even better - no care at all.
Probably it depends on which "mile" precisely the RTFA uses. I know you have many different ones.
For some things indeed Perl is pretty slow. But unlike Python, if you code in Perl tutorial examples, you would never have to wait minutes for them to finish. Python? Love that range() function which can easily eat gigabytes of RAM. Love that dynamic function/method look-up - on every f-ing call. In Perl, though I have seen slowness, I yet to encounter any corner as stupidly implemented as in Python.
Also, unlike Python, in Perl there is a workaround for some cases: one can generate on the fly and eval a dedicated subroutine. That works well if you have lots of data coming from the configuration which does not change over the program life time. E.g. last time I used it was to improve implementation of a black list. Originally, black list was supposed to be very short - few entries, probably with regexps. But later, on some tasks it was needed to be as large as an input, leading to O(n^2), which was unbelievably slow in Perl. Rewriting the match against the black list into an eval'ed function literally removed the bottleneck. It's still O(n^2), but nobody notices that anymore.
buy a game for $60, play for 40 hours
Wow. If I would sum it up all, I do not think I have sat down before TV for that long in past ten years.
As I'm concerned, consoles were dead to me for very long time: I'm simply not the type who sits before TV and swallows everything what's airing. Got spoiled by the internet and by the freedom of choice long time ago. (But I do watch some TV shows on internet on my PC or laptop.)
So what you say, is that two mostly Java-based platforms have the worst portability of the bunch?
Though not surprised, I find that quite ironic.
And if yes, how long do you think would it take for black hats to adopt it to DDoS SSH servers using an army of zombie PCs?
offering a menu of distractions that can fragment the reading experience, or stop it in its tracks.
People try to make it news that users can't organize themselves? For years I have read e-books on my laptop just fine. Not even in the full-screen mode. On one side.
On the other side, IMO it is more about the fact that most of the books are at best mediocre. So when given a choice, and e-book+tablet gives that choice, brains say "I'd rather watch cat videos on the YouTube." When I'm reading an interesting book on my e-book reader (not tablet), with laptop being readily available at hand, I rarely have the impulse to do something else. Because the book is interesting.
It is an open competition between the entertainment forms for the free time (and money) of the user. Many books (just like many movies or games), sadly, lose to the cat videos in entertainment value. And that's nothing new.
But I can image that some have missed the fact that books became predominantly an entertainment form - and have much less cultural value than they had say few decades before. That is rather normal: book publishing become cheaper and many things which previously were not deemed before to be worth the paper, now are published. Especially with e-books, literally anything can be published cheaply. And thus everything gets published. But that, unlike some time ago, doesn't give automatically everything published the same value as the books of the masters.
Definately.
Have seen few years ago a review of such sites by an author. The picture is not as rosy as you paint it. IIRC in the end, yes it is easier and cheaper to host it yourself. What is still not that simple for the most non-IT-savvy people.
Also, in some countries, with strong book "piracy" background (e.g. ex-USSR) many authors publish their books themselves on such local "illegal"/"semi-legal" sites. Culture preservation sentiment is very strong and litigation is a risk of angering the readers. IOW, the practice is uncommon, but not unheard of.
Even a donated book was paid for by the original owner.
Every "illegal" e-book was also paid for by the original owner (and later digitized).
And most donated books don't go into circulation, they get sold to raise cash to buy books.
That, last I heard publishers talk, is even more evil than the piracy.
Due to licensing policies, I do not have Visio installed on my corporate desktop. I used in past for many purposes the OO Draw and I find it pretty OK for the diagrams and whatnot.
Many people also praise the Dia, though I have no personal experience with it. Specifically, several interns I knew actually complained that for the labs they needed to use the Visio, while Dia was much better tool for the job.
Iran is a "phantom" only to those who didn't bother to read about the country. E.g. Wikipedia has pretty good coverage.
Iran is a "menace" only to the two groups of people: people who read too much into the public speeches of their president (who can't even mobilize the army; so much for a president) and politicians who want to prevent Iran from becoming a superpower in the region (and potentially in the world).
OK. I confess. The bashing of Iran become much less interesting to me, once I took time to learn about the country. Talk about the evils of the education.
It is more like: Some people lack the ability to write clean Perl code, and fear the clean code as it might make look the job too easy.
Perl is indiscriminate at making things easy, even if that is writing crappy code.
Unreadable Perl code isn't the problem of the language, it is the problem of the developers. Trying to fixing it at the language level is wrong and redundant, because in the end it would become Visual Basic or Java or Python. And we already have them.
Up-to-date, portable and well documented Qt bindings.
Place of portable GUI toolkit for Perl was always kind of empty. Many tried - but none remained maintained sufficiently long to become de facto standard. Most are abandoned. Few are managing to stay afloat, but sorely lack Perl-specific documentation. And I will not go with every little question to the mail lists.
On many occasions, even Xaw-level toolkit would have been more than satisfactory - if portable. Even if primitive, there is nothing like that available.
P.S. Many insisted that Perl/Tk works well. Indeed, applications written with it work well. Now go and try to find any documentation which isn't "but it's just like in Tcl/Tk!" and describes anything more complicated than a hello world exit button app. I have found couple of decent tutorials - only to realize 5 minutes later that I'm missing a decent reference. Because Perl isn't Tcl, lots of stuff really differs and doing it in Perl like in Tcl is very counter-productive. And there is no Perl specific reference documentation.
P.P.S. But that in itself will not solve the problem that perlxs is a stinking pile of ****. I'd love Perl community to invest into a simpler, probably not so powerful interface.
In its hay days during the Late 90's and Early 2000's there was a lot of PERL Development, but it seems it has dropped off and PERL lost its shine.
Frankly, Perl got it all more or less right already in early 2000s. So obviously there is not much development happening: Perl already works pretty well. Most new releases have mostly bug fixes - but also some minor syntax improvements and features from the Perl6.
IOW, Perl lost its shine only in the eyes of those who are after shiny. Perl is pretty down to earth tool to get the job done.
But back in the day every time you tried to find an open source program to do something it required PERL
Perl defines portability properly and allows one to access quite a lot of system-specific resources - in the system-specific way. Thus it was (and in some areas still is) quite popular as the language for install scripts of all sorts.
Even now, Perl remains one of the few power tools to be most commonly included in the fresh UNIX system installs (including Debian and Mac OS X). There is no other language/tool which is as stable and as portable: that's why it is possible and useful to include it into the OS install.
Not so much of this any more, is it because I have changed how I look for software or is it because PERL is no longer as popular as it was before.
IMO, Perl greatest weakness is the interface to other libraries (the PerlXS). It is not an easy task to make a Perl binding. It's fscking hard and includes lots of copy-paste. That's why Perl lacks many up-to-date bindings to many up-to-date libraries, what makes it not so suitable for many up-to-date tasks. Even Perl6 went on and pretty much excluded the XS/etc from the spec. What sucks and makes Perl6 worse (and useless to me) than the Perl5, because on top of general problem with bindings, Perl6 adds fragmentation: extensions written for different Perl6 implementation are incompatible with each other.
One of my past employers used the MegaUpload and similar services, when there were needed to deliver to customer an urgent software update - but Outlook/Exchange was kindly blocking the attachment since it was an executable file. Or the file was too large for the attachment. Updates were incremental, thus it was deemed to be OK to upload them on such services.
That's just impossible: highly educated people tend to be libertarian.
Citation??? There are so many important philosophers, economists, scientists, etc... who were not Libertarian. Now if you had said that "highly educated people tend to be less religious" then sure... but Libertarian? Do you not realize how many highly educated socialists there are?
Sorry, I haven't realized that thanks to US political propaganda the word is so loaded.
I meant of course "libertarian" in its original sense, not the loaded one.
To quote the dictionary:
libertarian
noun
1. a person who advocates liberty, especially with regard to thought or conduct.
[...]
But Mohammed created a religion that divides the world into "us" and "not-us" (dar al-Islam and dar al-Harb) with a primary mode of interaction consisting of antagonism and violence, and that's the perspective by which the Iranian theocrats view anyone who isn't of their particular sect of Islam.
Iranian fundamentalism is being fed with constant sanctions from the other side. One has to also consider that Iran as a whole not yet completely over the Iran-Iraq war. And we in West are not helping Iran to get over.
Otherwise, the dar al-Islam and dar al-Harb doesn't seem to be much different from jew and goy, a non-jew.
Yes. Iran gov't found it to be very tricky business. On one side - improve education to match the standards of the developed nations. On the other side - keep people contained to Islamic dogmas.
That's just impossible: highly educated people tend to be libertarian.
But at least one thing Ayatollah got right is to not try to forcefully prevent the brain drain nor prosecute or condemn those willing to leave Iran.