Agreed. I've been happily using SurfacePro as my sole machine for the past six weeks. I guess I don't need a "powerful machine" -- my use is limited to just being a developer on the Visual Studio team at Microsoft, and a bunch of photoshopping of screenshots, and it's plenty good enough for that.
(I'm sure that video games would be more demanding. Haven't tried them yet.)
Because the ability to think algorithmically is MORE important in the internet age than most of the rest of high school maths and basic sciences.
It gives kids the ability to examine, use, experiment with the data that's thrown at them from news and magazines rather than just consuming it - yes, even writing a little app to automate one aspect of their journeyman trade perhaps. I thought LOGO to 9th, 10th and 11th graders as an introductory computer class and was delighted when the kids, for their final projects, used it for their own interests, even a Cosmo-style "how good is your boyfriend?" quiz.
Also, it gives kids the ability to better navigate a world where so much of what they interact with - store clerks, web sites, tech support people, tax forms - are more algorithm than human.
Out of curiosity, which tasks took too many steps as compared to Windows 7?
I found that once I installed StartIsBack, there was only one single task I did which took longer, and that was launching a control panel thing (it took one extra keystroke now than it did in Windows 7)
As part of representative democracy, if people get tired of ads (or in general if they want a general level of regulatory regime), they'll tell that to their representatives via letters or votes or even just opinion polls, and it'll be regulated.
Maybe you don't like to use the "democracy machinery" when there's perfectly good "capitalism machinery" to do the same thing? That's a fair enough view. If you don't like the way that society is currently organized, I suggest you try to change it. You could try to change it using the "democracy machinery" available to you (!!!!) - by persuading people on message boards and voting. Or you could try to change it by using the "capitalism machinery" available to you - with large political donations. Let us know which machinery you pick.
Here's an experiment. Search for "Lowes Stud Finder" on Google while in the US.
WITH ADVERTISING: first four results are: [ad] www.lowes.com [ad] www.amazon.com/tools [ad] www.franklinsensors.com www.lowes.com/Tools/Layout-Measuring/Stud-Finders/_/N.../pl
WITHOUT ADVERTISING: first four results are: www.lowes.com/Tools/Layout-Measuring/Stud-Finders/_/N.../pl www.lowes.com/pd_274870-317-SS+EDGE_0__?...stud+finder... www.lowes.com/pd_197656-317-SS+E50_0__ www.lowes.com/pd_197653-317-MS+I520_0__
In the version without advertising, I got the results I wanted straight await (first the category-page at Lowes about stud finders, and then individual stud finders). In the version with advertising, the first three results were ads that weren't specific enough, and only the fourth one was what I wanted.
You might argue that you're happy doing the work to scroll down, to counteract the distraction produced by the irrelevant ads, that those first three ads only look "mostly" like search results rather than "completely" like search results. But they take up screen real estate, they take up attention, and they should be counted when judging quality.
So: with advertising scores 1/4 in quality of results, without advertising scores 4/4, which is a considerable improvement.
PRIVACY? I can't give you reproducible experiments here. But whenever I see the top link as "your friend read this article" then I hate it, because it's not what I was looking for. Again a degradation of quality.
Equally important, and admittedly a little strange to some, it to ask about their personal programming projects. Nothing work related, nothing school related, just things that they sat down and programmed motivated by their own personal needs or curiosity.
Would you hire a doctor based on how many "hobby appendectomies" the candidate has performed in their garage? No.
I think your suggestion biases you towards "developer as tinkerer/craftsperson", rather than "developer as professional". I think there's room and need for both.
What Kindle doesn't provide: orientation lock on WindowsPhone. Makes it impossible for me to read books in bed. I gave up on my kindle purchases a year ago and switched completely over to epub.
Those were stupid videos, and I feel stupid for having watched them. To save everyone else the waste of their time:
VIDEO1 - The speaker talks about the OIC, Organization of Islamic Cooperation, and argues that (1) it's a huge powerful organization with real influence, (2) it talks of spreading human rights but uses this as code for spreading Sharia law. If the OIC had as much real-world influence as the speaker claims, he could have shown the real-world impacts of that influence, but instead his justification for (1) comes solely from semantic analysis of the OIC's "About Us" webpage! Curiously, the justification of (2) is based on a blatant misreading of a public declaration, a blatant misreading that's returned to again and again. The declaration lists human rights, then qualifies them by saying that it's only concerned with human rights that don't contravene Sharia. The speaker again and again misreads this as denoting all of Sharia whenever the phrase "human rights" appears. I gave up watching after 15 minutes.
VIDEO2 - a nicely presented video. It assumes that (3) it would be just and fair, for the U.N. to issue a number of condemnations of a state in proportion to the number of deaths caused by the apparatus/military/something of that state. It says that the ratio for Israel is higher than the ratio for many other countries with higher death tolls. It goes on to explain that (4) this high condemnation rate for Israel is due to a 1975 pact between communist and Muslim countries to condemn Israel, which benefitted the Muslims by making Israel look bad, and benefitted the communists by making America look bad as Israel's ally. Assumption (3) is bizarre. Claim (4) is hard to understand given the continued condemnations in a post-communist world, and doesn't account for all the Western democracies that also condemn Israel. There are more efficient explanations of the observations - e.g. that people are genuinely appalled at Israel's mishandling of Palestine.
Google is providing you a service. You're "paying" for that service by allowing Google to monetize your personal information ON YOUR BEHALF. It's a sort of barter agreement. Google will give you something at no monetary cost in exchange for the opportunity to sell your data to third parties.
That's a clever analysis, though I think a summary of Google has to include the ads!...
Google offers a bundled package: they will (1) monetize your personal data, (2) take the proceeds, (3) use it to subsidise free services that you want, and (4) force you to watch ads that you don't want. It's a complete take-it-or-leave it package.
For me, the ads are such a negative that I'm mostly willing to reject the entire package. For instance the price of their email service (i.e. monetizing my personal data and forcing me to watch ads) isn't as good value for me as other email providers where I pay cash.
He doesn't understand how to write concurrent code?...
I know only four people who can write concurrent code correctly. Although, come to think of it, one of them can't write concurrent code correctly and two others I don't actually know.:)
With US defense spending at 23% of the federal budget and welfare 11%, I wonder why you choose to call it a "welfare state" rather than a "military state"?
Then there are the *good* people, the ones who believe you should vote in the best interests of those less fortunate than themselves. I'll always vote in the interests of the poor and I support the 99% movement, even though I'm in the 1% myself and will lose out. Romney has to persuade people like me that it's fine to be selfish but he failed.
I switched to Office365 for this. $8/month for unlimited storage and good bandwidth.
I used to use mbox format on a regular Linux web host (pair networks) from 1995 which worked fine. But they weren't scaling up their storage allowance as technology progressed, so as my archive grew bigger, I was paying too much for it. Tipping point was about 2005.
Next I switched to maildir format on an opensuse box running in my basement, 1tb RAID2 hard disk backed up automatically to a 1tb Usb drive, and also mirrored (using unison) to an offsite machine. My email archive was important to me and I never wanted to lose it.
But this was a pain. It was a pain to administer the system, a pain to make sure I had spare disks for when they failed, a pain to be sure my software RAID would even work, a pain to make sure my firewall was always open to inbound IMAPS, a pain to periodically move email from pair networks to this archive every year.
Also I provide email for my family on the other side of the Atlantic, and this basement server wasn't suitable for them (not enough uptime when e.g. rewiring my house).
Office365 wound up being cheaper for my family than pair networks. It has an "unlimited" $8/month plan for me, and 25gb $4/month for my family. It has a decent enough webclient and great (fast) online search, far faster than any searching I did with mbox or maildir servers. I feel more secure with its reliability and uptime. And being a Microsoft employee (C#/VB language design team, unrelated to Office) I use Windows devices and email clients, which generally work better with Exchange than IMAP.
Yeah, there is something off about that rich man. He is being an asshole. Over the years, he managed to INVENT and CREATEa particular relationship and expectation, and then he breaks it on a whim. It's like shipping aid to a hungry country for a decade, thus undercutting and destroying its indigenous farming industry, and then abruptly ceasing that aid leaving people to starve.
"What must I do, to tame you?" asked the little prince.
"You must be very patient," replied the fox. "First you will sit down at a little distance from me-- like that-- in the grass. I shall look at you out of the corner of my eye, and you will say nothing. Words are the source of misunderstandings. But you will sit a little closer to me, every day..."
The next day the little prince came back.
"It would have been better to come back at the same hour," said the fox. "If, for example, you come at four o'clock in the afternoon, then at three o'clock I shall begin to be happy. I shall feel happier and happier as the hour advances. At four o'clock, I shall already be worrying and jumping about. I shall show you how happy I am! But if you come at just any time, I shall never know at what hour my heart is to be ready to greet you... One must observe the proper rites..."
"What is a rite?" asked the little prince.
"Those also are actions too often neglected," said the fox. "They are what make one day different from other days, one hour from other hours. There is a rite, for example, among my hunters. Every Thursday they dance with the village girls. So Thursday is a wonderful day for me! I can take a walk as far as the vineyards. But if the hunters danced at just any time, every day would be like every other day, and I should never have any vacation at all."
So the little prince tamed the fox. And when the hour of his departure drew near--
"Ah," said the fox, "I shall cry."
"It is your own fault," said the little prince. "I never wished you any sort of harm; but you wanted me to tame you..."
Religion has long had problems with name-squatting and there was an early firm of IP protection back in Old Testament days. "Thou shall not take thy Lord's name in vain."
"By comparison, China’s housing bubble is a non-bubble... There’s also nothing close to a mortgage backed securities bubble and no sub-prime lending...'You don’t see the same amount of bank stress that you see in the U.S. because the debt levels are significantly lower, both for the builders and for the buyers'."
Bush starts the warrantless wiretap thing, the reaction from the left is to fume with anger at the horrible abuse of power. Obama continues it and adds in the whole "assassinate Americans using robotic aircraft" twist, and reaction from the same people is "I support the President on this, though I have mild reservations on a few aspects".
My question is... what the heck is up with that?
What you describe simply isn't true. There isn't any significant portion of people who fumed with anger at Bush's warantless wiretap but then support Obama on the same with a few reservations.
How else can you explain how Democrats who once shredded GWB on his horrid civil liberties record, clam up and circle the wagons around Obama when Obama is even worse than GWB.
They're not. I simply don't see any significant number of Democrats who shredded GWB on his horrid civil liberties record, circling their wagons around Obama and defending his use of drone strikes or his other civil liberties problems.
Re:It's not all about power....differentiators are
on
Sony Announces the PS4
·
· Score: 1
I'm doing this comparison from the perspective of a professional who wants a lightweight device to take to work, do meetings on, wordprocessing/spreadsheets &c. It'd also apply to a casual consumer who wants something lightweight and unobtrusive for use around the house.
It also applies to someone who wants to do some computing in a home study, and their game-playing in a lounge or on a sofa.
Windows 8 systems to work well require more expensive hardware.
How so? I thought Windows 8 had lower hardware requirements than Windows 7. The windowing system for WinRT apps is certainly much less CPU-intensive than WPF was for the desktop. And lots of Windows Store apps will be aimed to work on much lower-powered devices (e.g. ARM) than Win7 desktop apps were.
Can't you just move your hands all around the keyboard?
I often do that, and type at about 90 words per minute. I'll type both code and prose without using the little finger on my right hand at all, and the ring finger only rarely. It feels much better to have my whole hands flying all over the keyboard. Fixed wrist position always seemed terrible to me from an RSI perspective.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. I've been happily using SurfacePro as my sole machine for the past six weeks. I guess I don't need a "powerful machine" -- my use is limited to just being a developer on the Visual Studio team at Microsoft, and a bunch of photoshopping of screenshots, and it's plenty good enough for that.
(I'm sure that video games would be more demanding. Haven't tried them yet.)
Because the ability to think algorithmically is MORE important in the internet age than most of the rest of high school maths and basic sciences.
It gives kids the ability to examine, use, experiment with the data that's thrown at them from news and magazines rather than just consuming it - yes, even writing a little app to automate one aspect of their journeyman trade perhaps. I thought LOGO to 9th, 10th and 11th graders as an introductory computer class and was delighted when the kids, for their final projects, used it for their own interests, even a Cosmo-style "how good is your boyfriend?" quiz.
Also, it gives kids the ability to better navigate a world where so much of what they interact with - store clerks, web sites, tech support people, tax forms - are more algorithm than human.
They're not an intrinsic part. They're just apps that you can uninstall/reinstall from the Store if you want.
Out of curiosity, which tasks took too many steps as compared to Windows 7?
I found that once I installed StartIsBack, there was only one single task I did which took longer, and that was launching a control panel thing (it took one extra keystroke now than it did in Windows 7)
I don't understand your premise.
I'd have expected stability to be defined by the question "as the boat heels, is there a moment to return it upright?"
That seems a natural definition of stability, ie. the boat stays stable, ie. the boat stays upright.
Why would "every point on hull experiences equal pressure" be a definition of stability? Or if it isn't, what definition are you using?
As part of representative democracy, if people get tired of ads (or in general if they want a general level of regulatory regime), they'll tell that to their representatives via letters or votes or even just opinion polls, and it'll be regulated.
Maybe you don't like to use the "democracy machinery" when there's perfectly good "capitalism machinery" to do the same thing? That's a fair enough view. If you don't like the way that society is currently organized, I suggest you try to change it. You could try to change it using the "democracy machinery" available to you (!!!!) - by persuading people on message boards and voting. Or you could try to change it by using the "capitalism machinery" available to you - with large political donations. Let us know which machinery you pick.
Here's an experiment. Search for "Lowes Stud Finder" on Google while in the US.
WITH ADVERTISING: first four results are:
[ad] www.lowes.com
[ad] www.amazon.com/tools
[ad] www.franklinsensors.com
www.lowes.com/Tools/Layout-Measuring/Stud-Finders/_/N.../pl
WITHOUT ADVERTISING: first four results are:
www.lowes.com/Tools/Layout-Measuring/Stud-Finders/_/N.../pl
www.lowes.com/pd_274870-317-SS+EDGE_0__?...stud+finder...
www.lowes.com/pd_197656-317-SS+E50_0__
www.lowes.com/pd_197653-317-MS+I520_0__
In the version without advertising, I got the results I wanted straight await (first the category-page at Lowes about stud finders, and then individual stud finders). In the version with advertising, the first three results were ads that weren't specific enough, and only the fourth one was what I wanted.
You might argue that you're happy doing the work to scroll down, to counteract the distraction produced by the irrelevant ads, that those first three ads only look "mostly" like search results rather than "completely" like search results. But they take up screen real estate, they take up attention, and they should be counted when judging quality.
So: with advertising scores 1/4 in quality of results, without advertising scores 4/4, which is a considerable improvement.
PRIVACY?
I can't give you reproducible experiments here. But whenever I see the top link as "your friend read this article" then I hate it, because it's not what I was looking for. Again a degradation of quality.
Equally important, and admittedly a little strange to some, it to ask about their personal programming projects. Nothing work related, nothing school related, just things that they sat down and programmed motivated by their own personal needs or curiosity.
Would you hire a doctor based on how many "hobby appendectomies" the candidate has performed in their garage? No.
I think your suggestion biases you towards "developer as tinkerer/craftsperson", rather than "developer as professional". I think there's room and need for both.
What Kindle doesn't provide: orientation lock on WindowsPhone. Makes it impossible for me to read books in bed. I gave up on my kindle purchases a year ago and switched completely over to epub.
Those were stupid videos, and I feel stupid for having watched them. To save everyone else the waste of their time:
VIDEO1 - The speaker talks about the OIC, Organization of Islamic Cooperation, and argues that (1) it's a huge powerful organization with real influence, (2) it talks of spreading human rights but uses this as code for spreading Sharia law. If the OIC had as much real-world influence as the speaker claims, he could have shown the real-world impacts of that influence, but instead his justification for (1) comes solely from semantic analysis of the OIC's "About Us" webpage! Curiously, the justification of (2) is based on a blatant misreading of a public declaration, a blatant misreading that's returned to again and again. The declaration lists human rights, then qualifies them by saying that it's only concerned with human rights that don't contravene Sharia. The speaker again and again misreads this as denoting all of Sharia whenever the phrase "human rights" appears. I gave up watching after 15 minutes.
VIDEO2 - a nicely presented video. It assumes that (3) it would be just and fair, for the U.N. to issue a number of condemnations of a state in proportion to the number of deaths caused by the apparatus/military/something of that state. It says that the ratio for Israel is higher than the ratio for many other countries with higher death tolls. It goes on to explain that (4) this high condemnation rate for Israel is due to a 1975 pact between communist and Muslim countries to condemn Israel, which benefitted the Muslims by making Israel look bad, and benefitted the communists by making America look bad as Israel's ally. Assumption (3) is bizarre. Claim (4) is hard to understand given the continued condemnations in a post-communist world, and doesn't account for all the Western democracies that also condemn Israel. There are more efficient explanations of the observations - e.g. that people are genuinely appalled at Israel's mishandling of Palestine.
Google is providing you a service. You're "paying" for that service by allowing Google to monetize your personal information ON YOUR BEHALF. It's a sort of barter agreement. Google will give you something at no monetary cost in exchange for the opportunity to sell your data to third parties.
That's a clever analysis, though I think a summary of Google has to include the ads! ...
Google offers a bundled package: they will (1) monetize your personal data, (2) take the proceeds, (3) use it to subsidise free services that you want, and (4) force you to watch ads that you don't want. It's a complete take-it-or-leave it package.
For me, the ads are such a negative that I'm mostly willing to reject the entire package. For instance the price of their email service (i.e. monetizing my personal data and forcing me to watch ads) isn't as good value for me as other email providers where I pay cash.
He doesn't understand how to write concurrent code? ...
I know only four people who can write concurrent code correctly. Although, come to think of it, one of them can't write concurrent code correctly and two others I don't actually know. :)
With US defense spending at 23% of the federal budget and welfare 11%, I wonder why you choose to call it a "welfare state" rather than a "military state"?
Then there are the *good* people, the ones who believe you should vote in the best interests of those less fortunate than themselves. I'll always vote in the interests of the poor and I support the 99% movement, even though I'm in the 1% myself and will lose out. Romney has to persuade people like me that it's fine to be selfish but he failed.
PS. My archive is 26gb at the moment.
I switched to Office365 for this. $8/month for unlimited storage and good bandwidth.
I used to use mbox format on a regular Linux web host (pair networks) from 1995 which worked fine. But they weren't scaling up their storage allowance as technology progressed, so as my archive grew bigger, I was paying too much for it. Tipping point was about 2005.
Next I switched to maildir format on an opensuse box running in my basement, 1tb RAID2 hard disk backed up automatically to a 1tb Usb drive, and also mirrored (using unison) to an offsite machine. My email archive was important to me and I never wanted to lose it.
But this was a pain. It was a pain to administer the system, a pain to make sure I had spare disks for when they failed, a pain to be sure my software RAID would even work, a pain to make sure my firewall was always open to inbound IMAPS, a pain to periodically move email from pair networks to this archive every year.
Also I provide email for my family on the other side of the Atlantic, and this basement server wasn't suitable for them (not enough uptime when e.g. rewiring my house).
Office365 wound up being cheaper for my family than pair networks. It has an "unlimited" $8/month plan for me, and 25gb $4/month for my family. It has a decent enough webclient and great (fast) online search, far faster than any searching I did with mbox or maildir servers. I feel more secure with its reliability and uptime. And being a Microsoft employee (C#/VB language design team, unrelated to Office) I use Windows devices and email clients, which generally work better with Exchange than IMAP.
Yeah, there is something off about that rich man. He is being an asshole. Over the years, he managed to INVENT and CREATEa particular relationship and expectation, and then he breaks it on a whim. It's like shipping aid to a hungry country for a decade, thus undercutting and destroying its indigenous farming industry, and then abruptly ceasing that aid leaving people to starve.
It makes me think of the Little Prince... http://home.pacific.net.hk/~rebylee/text/prince/21.html
"What must I do, to tame you?" asked the little prince.
"You must be very patient," replied the fox. "First you will sit down at a little distance from me-- like that-- in the grass. I shall look at you out of the corner of my eye, and you will say nothing. Words are the source of misunderstandings. But you will sit a little closer to me, every day..."
The next day the little prince came back.
"It would have been better to come back at the same hour," said the fox. "If, for example, you come at four o'clock in the afternoon, then at three o'clock I shall begin to be happy. I shall feel happier and happier as the hour advances. At four o'clock, I shall already be worrying and jumping about. I shall show you how happy I am! But if you come at just any time, I shall never know at what hour my heart is to be ready to greet you... One must observe the proper rites..."
"What is a rite?" asked the little prince.
"Those also are actions too often neglected," said the fox. "They are what make one day different from other days, one hour from other hours. There is a rite, for example, among my hunters. Every Thursday they dance with the village girls. So Thursday is a wonderful day for me! I can take a walk as far as the vineyards. But if the hunters danced at just any time, every day would be like every other day, and I should never have any vacation at all."
So the little prince tamed the fox. And when the hour of his departure drew near--
"Ah," said the fox, "I shall cry."
"It is your own fault," said the little prince. "I never wished you any sort of harm; but you wanted me to tame you..."
Religion has long had problems with name-squatting and there was an early firm of IP protection back in Old Testament days. "Thou shall not take thy Lord's name in vain."
This can't be an "International" pi day. It's a US-specific pi day (Month-Day-Year). It might also extend to Japan and ISO8601 (Year-Month-Day).
Little-endian (Day-Month-Year) is common to the vast majority of the world's countries. And 3-14 doesn't exist.
China is about to have an epic crash when their real estate bubble bursts
A different view, published a week after your CBSNews report:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2013/03/11/chinas-non-bubble-housing-bubble/
"By comparison, China’s housing bubble is a non-bubble... There’s also nothing close to a mortgage backed securities bubble and no sub-prime lending...'You don’t see the same amount of bank stress that you see in the U.S. because the debt levels are significantly lower, both for the builders and for the buyers'."
Bush starts the warrantless wiretap thing, the reaction from the left is to fume with anger at the horrible abuse of power. Obama continues it and adds in the whole "assassinate Americans using robotic aircraft" twist, and reaction from the same people is "I support the President on this, though I have mild reservations on a few aspects".
My question is... what the heck is up with that?
What you describe simply isn't true. There isn't any significant portion of people who fumed with anger at Bush's warantless wiretap but then support Obama on the same with a few reservations.
How else can you explain how Democrats who once shredded GWB on his horrid civil liberties record, clam up and circle the wagons around Obama when Obama is even worse than GWB.
They're not. I simply don't see any significant number of Democrats who shredded GWB on his horrid civil liberties record, circling their wagons around Obama and defending his use of drone strikes or his other civil liberties problems.
Gaming Desktop ($1000) + TabletLite ($600) = $1600
Tablet/Laptop ($900) + Console ($500) = $1400
I'm doing this comparison from the perspective of a professional who wants a lightweight device to take to work, do meetings on, wordprocessing/spreadsheets &c. It'd also apply to a casual consumer who wants something lightweight and unobtrusive for use around the house.
It also applies to someone who wants to do some computing in a home study, and their game-playing in a lounge or on a sofa.
Windows 8 systems to work well require more expensive hardware.
How so? I thought Windows 8 had lower hardware requirements than Windows 7. The windowing system for WinRT apps is certainly much less CPU-intensive than WPF was for the desktop. And lots of Windows Store apps will be aimed to work on much lower-powered devices (e.g. ARM) than Win7 desktop apps were.
Can't you just move your hands all around the keyboard?
I often do that, and type at about 90 words per minute. I'll type both code and prose without using the little finger on my right hand at all, and the ring finger only rarely. It feels much better to have my whole hands flying all over the keyboard. Fixed wrist position always seemed terrible to me from an RSI perspective.