Most people speak at under 150 wpm, anyway, and...
The future here is not using your hands, but is 100% in the speech-to-text area. My phone does a pretty amazing job today, all things considered. Just the tip of the iceberg.
What would you prefer -- a funky keyboard and reams of training, or a tiny microphone and no training?
Seriously, the future of computer interfacing lies in Speech-to-Text, in-eye displays, and something ranging from an earphone to a bone conduction implant. And that's just until they tie the things right to your nervous system.
I love my keyboard, and I'm really, really fast and accurate with it, but I know its time is going to come.
While the technologies and tools underlying this transformation can make development work more powerful and efficient
...and they can also bury them in irrelevancy. It can make them depend on debuggers instead of good coding practices and skills and self-checking that tend to make the debugger an uncommon go-to. It can isolate them further from the hardware so that the difference between what is efficient and what can only be said to work becomes a mystery to the new-style programmer. It can turn what should really be a one-programmer project into a team effort, where "team" should carry the same negative connotations as "committee." It can move critical portions of projects into the black boxes of libraries and objects sourced from outside the primary development effort, and in so doing, reduce both the maintainability and the transparency of the overall result. Languages with garbage collection can create much looser coupling between performance and system capacity, reducing the range of what can actually be done with them. Worst of all, with all the wheel spinning and checking code in and out and the testing methodology of the month, it can make them feel like they're really doing something worthwhile in terms of time spent and results obtained, when what it really boils down to is something far less efficient and effective overall.
There's another factor, too; the industry really wants young programmers. The costs are less for remuneration, insurance, and vacation; the families are smaller or non-existent, and these people will work much longer hours based on nothing more than back patting and (often empty) promises. One of the consequences here is that some of the deeper skill sets are being lost because they simply aren't around the workplace any longer.
I think there is no question that all of this has changed the face of coding. An interesting exercise is to ask yourself: When was the last time you saw a huge project hit the market. Now ask yourself how many little does-a-couple-of-things projects you've seen hit the market in the same time frame. My contention is that there are very few of the larger projects being undertaken at this point, or at least, being finished.
Why would I want them? my LAN here isn't the same as the WAN; but my router does what it needs to do to translate the port and IP to the right machine. I send other kinds of realtime data peer to peer; it works fine.
If, however, you've buried yourself behind stuff that won't pass ports and/or IPs around, then this won't work, but you should fix that, really.:)
I am sure that the most recent version of XCode doesn't have the ability to target PowerPC Macs, and I believe that has been true for at least 2 or even 3 major revisions of XCode.
A) I didn't say a word about PPC macs; the mini I am referring to is a fully loaded multicopre Intel mini. Likewise Intel dual core, my 17" supposedly high-end Macbook pro cannot run Mavericks either. But truly, that's ok. I don't need it to run Mavericks. I just wanted Aperture to load the RAW images from my camera. But they tied that ability (yes, the ability of Aperture to load image files) to the OS level. So after paying for three separate versions of Aperture, I ended up with no camera support because Aperture can't load those files under 10.6, and no way to get it on the mini or the laptop with Aperture, because Apple won't let Mavericks run on that CPU, which I repeat, is not a PPC, but a pretty vanilla Intel multicore. I did, btw, buy Lightroom, which works fine. Unfortunately it kind of sucks compared to Aperture, and of course my investment in Aperture is 100% lost money now.
B) The development toolchain under 10.6 can generate applications that run under 10.6 and all the way up to Mavericks. So, if one wanted to develop something that wasn't automatically obsolete under anything but the latest, and one doesn't actually need features from the latest, there's no reason not to use the 10.6 toolchain. In fact, I use it every day. Works pretty well, all things considered, and my stuff works under all levels of the OS going up. Also, speaking of PPC macs, 10.6 retains the PPC emulation, so all the old PPC stuff works too. Pretty nice OS, really. Other than the nonworking features, of course, like UTF-8 printing via lpr.
C) The OS bug I refer to is a consequence of a broken compiler, which they have fixed. All it would take is a recompile of a very small part of the printing portion of 10.6 and it would work as designed. They refuse to do so. I find this both despicable and inexcusable.
Face it. Time marches on, and we really are talking about an Architecture that Apple discontinued NINE years ago. Hard to believe; but it's true.
No, that's not what we're talking about, and it isn't true.
But eventually, if you are still driving a buggy, you gotta accept the fact that, at some point, you simply aren't going to be able to buy buggy whips...
I don't have a problem driving a buggy. I have a problem buying a buggy, and then when I eventually take it for a serious spin, I find out that the roof was attached with chewing gum, and it falls the fuck off, and the buggy manufacturer, as a remedy, tells me "you're going to need our new buggy, and by the way, you can't hitch those horses to it, so tough shit, sonny"
And you could have saved yourself that whole message if you'd read my entire post, instead of part of it, or skimming it.
And as for this:
"clearly you don't understand software development at all"
You're funny. I've been doing almost nothing but software development for the last 45 years. I'm single-handedly responsible for the vast majority of code in one of the most powerful image processing applications ever shipped -- WinImages F/x/Morph -- as well as several CAD programs, compilers, assemblers, paint programs, PCB routing systems, arcade video games, documentation processors, genetic AL software, aurorae analysis software and a whole bunch more I won't bore you with. Even now that I'm retired and enjoying the fruits of my labors, my current freeware, a real time SDR engine, is orders of magnitude more sophisticated -- and sizable in terns of lines of my code -- than anything most slashdotters will ever be involved with on a team, much less write by themselves. I take my own medicine; I don't write features that break previous features; I don't require later OS versions for new stuff I write -- instead I make sure that features that use new OS features doesn't appear under the older (or other, since I write multiplatform) OS, that's all. And I sure as hell fix bugs when they're reported well enough to be able to reproduce them.
But hey, don't let that affect your state of delusion. Keep thinking I know nothing about software development. It's the very best way to distance yourself from a true understanding of what you're reading here.
Thanks. So. If you hang behind a firewall/OtherWare you can't control, you lose a lot of choices overall. Protocols, ports, etc. But for the rest of us, the ones who are actually free to choose our options, no reason, then?
So short answer, Yes. However no such force has been found or postulated in any realistic fashion.
So conceptually, a drive might exist, compliant with the science we know, that does not push stuff out the back of the ship, but instead, acts on something else, somewhere else. As long as it acts on *something*, yes?
ok, but that's not really what I was asking, or at least, if it was, I'm confused.
Let me try again: Gravity acts across a vacuum without having imparted momentum to intermediary particles.
Could there not, conceptually at least, be another force that can act across a vacuum, perhaps to a local mass or a distant one, or to something else entirely, that does not require spitting particles out the spaceship's tail?
So I think the answer to what I was thinking is in the "the apple imparts the same momentum to the earth" bit.
Although... I'm having a lot of trouble seeing the apple pulling on the earth as hard as the earth is pulling on the apple. How could it?
The thrust (ah ha ha) of my question was observing there is, viewed in 3D terms, a force that acts across a vacuum without intermediary "thrown" particles. So the implication is, at least to me, that another such force might be possible. No?
...an article saying Microsoft had broken Skype for some platform(s) or something? Did I imagine that?
We still need a true peer to peer video conferencing application that doesn't depend on third party servers, or embed in a browser, or otherwise embody great fragility. Seems like it shouldn't be all that difficult, unless OS webcam APIs are horrid. Displaying moving graphics and moving them over the net is so simple as to be no barrier at all. Is that the problem? OS Webcam APIs?
currently only supported by Chrome, Chromium and Opera
Thanks, but that's not an application in the sense I meant it. Being tied to as rapidly moving a target as a/multiple browser(s) means any one version of it almost certainly is not going to work for long, and the whole idea behind what I said was to reduce third party breakage and involvement to a minimum. An application in this sense must run under the host OS, and use the absolute minimum in host APIs, and require no 3rd party software, in order to gain a significant degree of independence:
Application <-> Host OS <-> Internet <-> Host OS <-> Application
Such an approach aids portability, which is important given that there is at a minimum, Windows, OSX, and Linux to erect an app for. One could almost certainly build it in one shot using Qt.
A) The software doesn't do what it is specifically designed to do. (obvious, must fix)
Agreed. But they often don't (and in the case of my example above, didn't.) They just leave it lying around, broken, and your only remedy is to upgrade for a fix, but the upgrade itself can break other stuff pretty thoroughly, which makes it a dangerous path to take.
That's my gripe.
So if a bug-free pencil hasn't yet been made, how in the name of anything holy do you expect something millions of times more complex to be "bug free"?
I don't. Inapplicable inherent pencil shortcomings aside, I'm saying that when case (A) as you call it exists, a fully remedial and otherwise non-screws-up-everything response, as far as I'm concerned, is obligatory on the part of the vendor. If that response is not forthcoming, then the vendor has taken the low road and deserves to be taken to task for it. I don't care who the vendor is or what the product is.
If you sell product X saying it'll do Y, but in fact it doesn't do Y, and you refuse to fix it so it does, but only offer a completely different product instead that doesn't do what the original does the same way, then you suck. And that goes double if you have the deep pockets and resources Apple and Microsoft do.
The trick to making a good spaceship engine is converting energy efficiently into ship momentum. As far as we know this means creating high-momentum exhaust;
If one considers gravity in our nominal 3d space, isn't it correct to say that gravity imparts momentum without anything comparable to "high momentum exhaust"?
Serious question -- the physics are beyond me, but the curiosity isn't.:)
Because we're really, really tired of software that uselessly, needlessly, requires the "latest and greatest" operating system for no good reason at all, that's why.
If devs need a feature in a new OS -- for instance, let's say you produce something that works with Mavericks (10.9) new multiple screen features, and that's its purpose in life... ok, then the user needs Mavericks and it's perfectly reasonable for you to say "gotta have it, period."
But, say, if you have something as vanilla as an image processing application, with no real need for anything other than memory allocation and file dialogs, and lets say you add, oh, I don't know, a new RAW file format to the application, then please don't tie that capability to the latest OS. Like Apple did. That's just fracking stupid and really... straight up evil. Sure, it can be a system feature, but for the sake of all that's good and has holes in it, what the FUCK does it need the latest OS for? Can a library not maintain a simple bloody entry point? Can an image loader not be coded wholly without calling OS esoterica? Of COURSE it can. I've written HUNDREDS of them under three different major OS's without EVER having to tie even ONE of them to an OS level. So WTF do I have to change my OS in order to get my Canon camera's images to load into Aperture, you pinheaded dipshits?
While I'm at it, Apple and MIcrosoft, stop leaving broken OS's in your wake. When you sell an OS, and it doesn't work the way it was supposed to, you should fix it. Yes, even ten years later. You said it would work, you took the customer's money on that basis, and if it fucking well doesn't work the way you said it would, you need to step up to the plate and make sure it gets fixed. For instance, my Mac mini, at v10.6 can't print UTF-8 via the standard printing system from the console. I need this to print Chinese. Why can't it do this? Because there was a compiler bug in the compiler Apple used to make OSX for the mini. Said compiler bug has long since been fixed. There's nothing wrong with the actual OS code, so ALL it would take is a recompile and an update. WHICH APPLE REFUSED TO DO. No, you don't suddenly get out of saying it could print if it can't print. What you get is a fucking pie in the face and you lose a customer because you can't fucking be trusted to sell shit that does what you say it does.
You want to release a new OS? Fine. Great, even. But FIXING BUGS IN THE NEW OS DOES NOT FIX BUGS IN THE OLD OS!!!!!!
And no, everyone canNOT upgrade to the new OS. Stability is a thing people actually need. Re-testing everything can be a huge job. HUGE.
How about this: Don't release a new OS until......IT BLOODY WELL WORKS by which I mean you have NO MORE BUG REPORTS WHATSOEVER for, say, a couple months. From anyone. And all previously reported bugs are fixed.
Now THERE is a radical fucking idea. With a process like that, maybe my Mini could fucking well print like it's supposed to./rant
Yeah, Microsoft's just as bad (and linux is no slouch at leaving busted shit all over the place either although I have to note they didn't directly take anyone's money and make promises, implied or otherwise, in the process), but I've been under Apple's nasty little thumb for a while now, so, you get Apple rants. My Microsoft rants are really old now.
argh.
And hey, developers... what's the deal with no true peer to peer video comm app without third party dependencies? Ask the OS what the WAN IP is, email the bloody thing to your contact, contact enters same on other end, make connection. Would work fine for a very, very large number of people. Surely the video mavens out there can manage this? Video's not magic, it's just a bloody stream of packets like everything else.
And hey, while I'm at it... no, never mind. Never mind. Blood pressure. Need my pills.
Look, you insensitive clod. I know the aliens will come if I just add enough dimensions to my cardboard saucer. Now take off, I have to get to my Origami class so I can learn to fold space.
Science does not state "all proposed theories are true until disproven" -- rather, it says "don't assume a proposed theory is true until you fail to either disprove it, or come up with an easier answer".
Actually, just because you come up with an easier answer doesn't mean that the more complex / harder answer isn't right as well.
That translated into martial arts is roughly the equivalent of a 4th DAN, but for that you need longer due to 'regulations regarding examinations', waiting periods between 2 examinations.
Depends on the martial art. The most modern practice recognizes natural talent while incorporating considerable traditional technique; I assure you, everyone does not walk into their first day of training on an equal basis -- I've been teaching for decades and I think I've seen about every level of beginner skill there is. Some people are simply gifted. Certainly from there on in we see the difference between the shows-up-once-a-week and the person who seems to be there every hour they can possibly manage.
Also, more on topic, I can definitely assure anyone who is curious that you're not doing high level thinking when executing advanced martial arts techniques.
All you really need to do to understand this is think about bike riding. When you learn, you learn, you think like crazy. Which does you very little good. But eventually, you internalize the process (that's what I call it, anyway) and you can do it while carrying on a conversation with someone else, paying almost no attention at all to the activity of riding the bike. Those near-instant balance corrections, the precise amount of handlebar control and lean for cornering, all of that comes from "underneath." Same thing for advanced MA.
That whole business about finding your calm center and holding it -- that's a real thing. If you start thinking under threat or pressure, your performance will drop like a stone. The best technique comes from a relaxed, centered condition, accepting of whatever comes.
These laws are toothless. "Must answer within 20 days"... or what? With no one held immediately culpable, the law is precisely meaningless.
Heard of anyone going to jail for this?
Heard of anyone paying a fine for this?
Even heard of anyone losing their job for this?
Compare: If you don't do something the government desires you to do, there will be consequences.
This is just like the constitution: "Highest law in the land" -- violate it -- as SCOTUS and congress have done over and over -- and the consequences? Nothing.
Just so you taxpayers know your place. The laws aren't for the government. Those are just laws "for show." The real laws are just for you. Because, you know, they care about you.
How many of us have tried to do something and wished we had (at least) a third hand?
I would pay a *lot* for a third hand, as I do a lot of my own construction work (building an interior into an old church we now live in.)
I can't even guess at the number of times I've had to wait until I had someone at my side to hold, turn, twist, drill, cut, brace, etc.
This stuff is great to hear. Love the idea of extra fingers.
Although it does put me strangely in mind of that scene in Heavy Metal where a robot, after having "done" a very sexy human female, spins his fingers around with a "whiiizzz", while commenting something on the order of "human woman love sex with mechanical assistance" lol
For most programmers, recursion seems to be a tool to completely -- but unpredictably -- blow out the stack. Cynical, I know, but that's been my experience.
Although I gotta tell ya, one of my favorite recursive things is a particular area fill routine for rectangular pixels. Simple and beautiful. Just elegant as all get out. Once I understood how it does what it does, it was like someone washed my mental windshield with Windex. That was a great day.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Most people speak at under 150 wpm, anyway, and...
The future here is not using your hands, but is 100% in the speech-to-text area. My phone does a pretty amazing job today, all things considered. Just the tip of the iceberg.
What would you prefer -- a funky keyboard and reams of training, or a tiny microphone and no training?
Seriously, the future of computer interfacing lies in Speech-to-Text, in-eye displays, and something ranging from an earphone to a bone conduction implant. And that's just until they tie the things right to your nervous system.
I love my keyboard, and I'm really, really fast and accurate with it, but I know its time is going to come.
There's another factor, too; the industry really wants young programmers. The costs are less for remuneration, insurance, and vacation; the families are smaller or non-existent, and these people will work much longer hours based on nothing more than back patting and (often empty) promises. One of the consequences here is that some of the deeper skill sets are being lost because they simply aren't around the workplace any longer.
I think there is no question that all of this has changed the face of coding. An interesting exercise is to ask yourself: When was the last time you saw a huge project hit the market. Now ask yourself how many little does-a-couple-of-things projects you've seen hit the market in the same time frame. My contention is that there are very few of the larger projects being undertaken at this point, or at least, being finished.
Just one (retired) guy's opinion. :)
Why would I want them? my LAN here isn't the same as the WAN; but my router does what it needs to do to translate the port and IP to the right machine. I send other kinds of realtime data peer to peer; it works fine.
If, however, you've buried yourself behind stuff that won't pass ports and/or IPs around, then this won't work, but you should fix that, really. :)
A) I didn't say a word about PPC macs; the mini I am referring to is a fully loaded multicopre Intel mini. Likewise Intel dual core, my 17" supposedly high-end Macbook pro cannot run Mavericks either. But truly, that's ok. I don't need it to run Mavericks. I just wanted Aperture to load the RAW images from my camera. But they tied that ability (yes, the ability of Aperture to load image files) to the OS level. So after paying for three separate versions of Aperture, I ended up with no camera support because Aperture can't load those files under 10.6, and no way to get it on the mini or the laptop with Aperture, because Apple won't let Mavericks run on that CPU, which I repeat, is not a PPC, but a pretty vanilla Intel multicore. I did, btw, buy Lightroom, which works fine. Unfortunately it kind of sucks compared to Aperture, and of course my investment in Aperture is 100% lost money now.
B) The development toolchain under 10.6 can generate applications that run under 10.6 and all the way up to Mavericks. So, if one wanted to develop something that wasn't automatically obsolete under anything but the latest, and one doesn't actually need features from the latest, there's no reason not to use the 10.6 toolchain. In fact, I use it every day. Works pretty well, all things considered, and my stuff works under all levels of the OS going up. Also, speaking of PPC macs, 10.6 retains the PPC emulation, so all the old PPC stuff works too. Pretty nice OS, really. Other than the nonworking features, of course, like UTF-8 printing via lpr.
C) The OS bug I refer to is a consequence of a broken compiler, which they have fixed. All it would take is a recompile of a very small part of the printing portion of 10.6 and it would work as designed. They refuse to do so. I find this both despicable and inexcusable.
No, that's not what we're talking about, and it isn't true.
I don't have a problem driving a buggy. I have a problem buying a buggy, and then when I eventually take it for a serious spin, I find out that the roof was attached with chewing gum, and it falls the fuck off, and the buggy manufacturer, as a remedy, tells me "you're going to need our new buggy, and by the way, you can't hitch those horses to it, so tough shit, sonny"
And you could have saved yourself that whole message if you'd read my entire post, instead of part of it, or skimming it.
And as for this:
"clearly you don't understand software development at all"
You're funny. I've been doing almost nothing but software development for the last 45 years. I'm single-handedly responsible for the vast majority of code in one of the most powerful image processing applications ever shipped -- WinImages F/x/Morph -- as well as several CAD programs, compilers, assemblers, paint programs, PCB routing systems, arcade video games, documentation processors, genetic AL software, aurorae analysis software and a whole bunch more I won't bore you with. Even now that I'm retired and enjoying the fruits of my labors, my current freeware, a real time SDR engine, is orders of magnitude more sophisticated -- and sizable in terns of lines of my code -- than anything most slashdotters will ever be involved with on a team, much less write by themselves. I take my own medicine; I don't write features that break previous features; I don't require later OS versions for new stuff I write -- instead I make sure that features that use new OS features doesn't appear under the older (or other, since I write multiplatform) OS, that's all. And I sure as hell fix bugs when they're reported well enough to be able to reproduce them.
But hey, don't let that affect your state of delusion. Keep thinking I know nothing about software development. It's the very best way to distance yourself from a true understanding of what you're reading here.
Thanks. So. If you hang behind a firewall/OtherWare you can't control, you lose a lot of choices overall. Protocols, ports, etc. But for the rest of us, the ones who are actually free to choose our options, no reason, then?
So conceptually, a drive might exist, compliant with the science we know, that does not push stuff out the back of the ship, but instead, acts on something else, somewhere else. As long as it acts on *something*, yes?
That was also very helpful to my conceptual model. Thank you kindly.
There are some very sharp people on slashdot. :)
ok, I see it now -- you're exactly right, I was seeing it as two forces. Thank you!
ok, but that's not really what I was asking, or at least, if it was, I'm confused.
Let me try again: Gravity acts across a vacuum without having imparted momentum to intermediary particles.
Could there not, conceptually at least, be another force that can act across a vacuum, perhaps to a local mass or a distant one, or to something else entirely, that does not require spitting particles out the spaceship's tail?
So I think the answer to what I was thinking is in the "the apple imparts the same momentum to the earth" bit.
Although... I'm having a lot of trouble seeing the apple pulling on the earth as hard as the earth is pulling on the apple. How could it?
The thrust (ah ha ha) of my question was observing there is, viewed in 3D terms, a force that acts across a vacuum without intermediary "thrown" particles. So the implication is, at least to me, that another such force might be possible. No?
...an article saying Microsoft had broken Skype for some platform(s) or something? Did I imagine that?
We still need a true peer to peer video conferencing application that doesn't depend on third party servers, or embed in a browser, or otherwise embody great fragility. Seems like it shouldn't be all that difficult, unless OS webcam APIs are horrid. Displaying moving graphics and moving them over the net is so simple as to be no barrier at all. Is that the problem? OS Webcam APIs?
Thanks, but that's not an application in the sense I meant it. Being tied to as rapidly moving a target as a/multiple browser(s) means any one version of it almost certainly is not going to work for long, and the whole idea behind what I said was to reduce third party breakage and involvement to a minimum. An application in this sense must run under the host OS, and use the absolute minimum in host APIs, and require no 3rd party software, in order to gain a significant degree of independence:
Application <-> Host OS <-> Internet <-> Host OS <-> Application
Such an approach aids portability, which is important given that there is at a minimum, Windows, OSX, and Linux to erect an app for. One could almost certainly build it in one shot using Qt.
Agreed. But they often don't (and in the case of my example above, didn't.) They just leave it lying around, broken, and your only remedy is to upgrade for a fix, but the upgrade itself can break other stuff pretty thoroughly, which makes it a dangerous path to take.
That's my gripe.
I don't. Inapplicable inherent pencil shortcomings aside, I'm saying that when case (A) as you call it exists, a fully remedial and otherwise non-screws-up-everything response, as far as I'm concerned, is obligatory on the part of the vendor. If that response is not forthcoming, then the vendor has taken the low road and deserves to be taken to task for it. I don't care who the vendor is or what the product is.
If you sell product X saying it'll do Y, but in fact it doesn't do Y, and you refuse to fix it so it does, but only offer a completely different product instead that doesn't do what the original does the same way, then you suck. And that goes double if you have the deep pockets and resources Apple and Microsoft do.
If one considers gravity in our nominal 3d space, isn't it correct to say that gravity imparts momentum without anything comparable to "high momentum exhaust"?
Serious question -- the physics are beyond me, but the curiosity isn't. :)
Wait, you're saying a photon pause somehow culminated in the PATRIOT act?
Because we're really, really tired of software that uselessly, needlessly, requires the "latest and greatest" operating system for no good reason at all, that's why.
If devs need a feature in a new OS -- for instance, let's say you produce something that works with Mavericks (10.9) new multiple screen features, and that's its purpose in life... ok, then the user needs Mavericks and it's perfectly reasonable for you to say "gotta have it, period."
But, say, if you have something as vanilla as an image processing application, with no real need for anything other than memory allocation and file dialogs, and lets say you add, oh, I don't know, a new RAW file format to the application, then please don't tie that capability to the latest OS. Like Apple did. That's just fracking stupid and really... straight up evil. Sure, it can be a system feature, but for the sake of all that's good and has holes in it, what the FUCK does it need the latest OS for? Can a library not maintain a simple bloody entry point? Can an image loader not be coded wholly without calling OS esoterica? Of COURSE it can. I've written HUNDREDS of them under three different major OS's without EVER having to tie even ONE of them to an OS level. So WTF do I have to change my OS in order to get my Canon camera's images to load into Aperture, you pinheaded dipshits?
While I'm at it, Apple and MIcrosoft, stop leaving broken OS's in your wake. When you sell an OS, and it doesn't work the way it was supposed to, you should fix it. Yes, even ten years later. You said it would work, you took the customer's money on that basis, and if it fucking well doesn't work the way you said it would, you need to step up to the plate and make sure it gets fixed. For instance, my Mac mini, at v10.6 can't print UTF-8 via the standard printing system from the console. I need this to print Chinese. Why can't it do this? Because there was a compiler bug in the compiler Apple used to make OSX for the mini. Said compiler bug has long since been fixed. There's nothing wrong with the actual OS code, so ALL it would take is a recompile and an update. WHICH APPLE REFUSED TO DO. No, you don't suddenly get out of saying it could print if it can't print. What you get is a fucking pie in the face and you lose a customer because you can't fucking be trusted to sell shit that does what you say it does.
You want to release a new OS? Fine. Great, even. But FIXING BUGS IN THE NEW OS DOES NOT FIX BUGS IN THE OLD OS!!!!!!
And no, everyone canNOT upgrade to the new OS. Stability is a thing people actually need. Re-testing everything can be a huge job. HUGE.
How about this: Don't release a new OS until... ...IT BLOODY WELL WORKS by which I mean you have NO MORE BUG REPORTS WHATSOEVER for, say, a couple months. From anyone. And all previously reported bugs are fixed.
Now THERE is a radical fucking idea. With a process like that, maybe my Mini could fucking well print like it's supposed to. /rant
Yeah, Microsoft's just as bad (and linux is no slouch at leaving busted shit all over the place either although I have to note they didn't directly take anyone's money and make promises, implied or otherwise, in the process), but I've been under Apple's nasty little thumb for a while now, so, you get Apple rants. My Microsoft rants are really old now.
argh.
And hey, developers... what's the deal with no true peer to peer video comm app without third party dependencies? Ask the OS what the WAN IP is, email the bloody thing to your contact, contact enters same on other end, make connection. Would work fine for a very, very large number of people. Surely the video mavens out there can manage this? Video's not magic, it's just a bloody stream of packets like everything else.
And hey, while I'm at it... no, never mind. Never mind. Blood pressure. Need my pills.
> but then you could get a space jam...
That's fine as long as you have space peanut butter.
Look, you insensitive clod. I know the aliens will come if I just add enough dimensions to my cardboard saucer. Now take off, I have to get to my Origami class so I can learn to fold space.
Actually, just because you come up with an easier answer doesn't mean that the more complex / harder answer isn't right as well.
Yes, that's exactly what I mean.
Depends on the martial art. The most modern practice recognizes natural talent while incorporating considerable traditional technique; I assure you, everyone does not walk into their first day of training on an equal basis -- I've been teaching for decades and I think I've seen about every level of beginner skill there is. Some people are simply gifted. Certainly from there on in we see the difference between the shows-up-once-a-week and the person who seems to be there every hour they can possibly manage.
Also, more on topic, I can definitely assure anyone who is curious that you're not doing high level thinking when executing advanced martial arts techniques.
All you really need to do to understand this is think about bike riding. When you learn, you learn, you think like crazy. Which does you very little good. But eventually, you internalize the process (that's what I call it, anyway) and you can do it while carrying on a conversation with someone else, paying almost no attention at all to the activity of riding the bike. Those near-instant balance corrections, the precise amount of handlebar control and lean for cornering, all of that comes from "underneath." Same thing for advanced MA.
That whole business about finding your calm center and holding it -- that's a real thing. If you start thinking under threat or pressure, your performance will drop like a stone. The best technique comes from a relaxed, centered condition, accepting of whatever comes.
These laws are toothless. "Must answer within 20 days"... or what? With no one held immediately culpable, the law is precisely meaningless.
Heard of anyone going to jail for this?
Heard of anyone paying a fine for this?
Even heard of anyone losing their job for this?
Compare: If you don't do something the government desires you to do, there will be consequences.
This is just like the constitution: "Highest law in the land" -- violate it -- as SCOTUS and congress have done over and over -- and the consequences? Nothing.
Just so you taxpayers know your place. The laws aren't for the government. Those are just laws "for show." The real laws are just for you. Because, you know, they care about you.
How many of us have tried to do something and wished we had (at least) a third hand?
I would pay a *lot* for a third hand, as I do a lot of my own construction work (building an interior into an old church we now live in.)
I can't even guess at the number of times I've had to wait until I had someone at my side to hold, turn, twist, drill, cut, brace, etc.
This stuff is great to hear. Love the idea of extra fingers.
Although it does put me strangely in mind of that scene in Heavy Metal where a robot, after having "done" a very sexy human female, spins his fingers around with a "whiiizzz", while commenting something on the order of "human woman love sex with mechanical assistance" lol
For most programmers, recursion seems to be a tool to completely -- but unpredictably -- blow out the stack. Cynical, I know, but that's been my experience.
Although I gotta tell ya, one of my favorite recursive things is a particular area fill routine for rectangular pixels. Simple and beautiful. Just elegant as all get out. Once I understood how it does what it does, it was like someone washed my mental windshield with Windex. That was a great day. :)