Well, you may be right for all I know. But if you're going to waste enough of your time to post the above vitriol, you may as well post some sources. Got any?
You're missing the point. I certainly COULD do everything you described. Doing that stuff doesn't scare me in the least. But, how much of that I get done is a function of time. The amount of time I spend on something is proportional to how important it is to me. And being able to conveniently shove programs to a DVD in bulk is nice, not important.
And actually, I haven't seen the "Green Screen" you described and I haven't see the power on/off cycle either. It's probably because I don't hack the product and I've always used it as it's intended. Barring the 30 second skip button hack, I use it exactly the way it's designed.
I was looking for a simple way to shove programs to a DVD or PC. Maybe there isn't such a thing yet. Probably, the simplest way to go would be to simply hook up a DVD recorder to the TiVo so I can send out programs that way. Do you have any thoughts on how to make it simpler without tearing the thing apart?
I'm with you on that one. TiVo presents a high realiability AND high quality experience. My only complaint is that I'm slowly filling up my TiVo with content that I don't want to delete.
Is there an easy way offload that content from a series 2 TiVo without submitting to the "load tape in VCR, record shows one by one until tape is full (including overrun errors), get next tape, repeat" cycle?
I don't have a web-cam handy, so if someone could give this a spin a let us know how well it works, that would be very much appreciated.
If it works well enough, I would definitely use something like this to replace my mouse for everyday tasks. It wouldn't replace the keyboard, but it's always been the mouse that's caused most of my RSI-like symptoms.
I don't know anything about Quartz, so this has piqued my curiosity. By "PDF-like", do you mean to say that Quartz is based on Postscript? And it's fast???
"Love to Learn Linux" has an employer who is willing to be decent with him and train him into the position. And you want him to tell them that they were wrong to treat him like a human being instead of as an interchangeable cog???
What are you on?!
I personally encourage my clients to show their employees loyalty. Employees will fall all over themselves to make a company successful when that company's leadership gives the employees what they need to succeed, treats them like human beings, and challenges those employees to excel without slave-driving.
There are worse pains that a company can suffer besides admin snafus. Even a completely irrecoverable server configuration does less damage to a company than disgruntled/disloyal employees.
Linux isn't just an operating system. At a minimum, it's the center-piece of a community/sub-culture. At the extreme end of the scale, it's the figure-head of a new software religion.
And like all religions, it will have its fanatical adherents. Fanatics aren't exactly known for a "live and let live" mentality. The problem is exacerbated by Microsoft's historically anti-competitive behavior. Because Microsoft was so aggressive, all the fanatics believe that they are entitled, no obligated, to exterminate Microsoft at any cost. So now, Microsoft isn't just the market leader to beat. In the eyes of those who feel Microsoft's influence and products are evil, they are to be exterminated at any cost.
If you want to be neutral in this debate, you'll just have to ignore all the inflammatory blathering on both sides. Those of us who know better will eat the lunch of those who cannot dispose of, or otherwise keep their technological religions on the back burner. I believe that the rising popularity of Open Source products of any kind keeps the spurs on companies like Microsoft, IBM, and others. The rising quality of proprietary products in turn keeps the spurs on the Open Source community to keep being better than they are. It's a complete symbiosis for now, and I hope it continues in this vein for a long time to come.
Linux isn't just an operating system. At a minimum, it's the center-piece of a community/sub-culture. At the extreme end of the scale, it's the figure-head of a new software religion.
And like all religions, it will have its fanatical adherents. Fanatics aren't exactly known for a "live and let live" mentality. The problem is exacerbated by Microsoft's historically anti-competitive behavior. Because Microsoft was so aggressive, all the fanatics believe that they are entitled, no obligated, to exterminate Microsoft at any cost. So now, Microsoft isn't just the market leader to beat. In the eyes of those who feel Microsoft's influence and products are evil, they are to be exterminated at any cost.
If you want to be neutral in this debate, you'll just have to ignore all the inflammatory blathering on both sides. Those of us who know better will eat the lunch of those who cannot dispose of, or otherwise keep their technological religions on the back burner. I believe that the rising popularity of Open Source products of any kind keeps the spurs on companies like Microsoft, IBM, and others. The rising quality of proprietary products in turn keeps the spurs on the Open Source community to keep being better than they are. It's a complete symbiosis for now, and I hope it continues in this vein for a long time to come.
But I'm obviously not a one-or-the-other person. Consoles cannot replace PC gaming, and PCs don't replace consoles.
I do have to agree when it comes to some games. My Splinter Cell example is probably the exception because the experiences often aren't the same, even for the same game. Return To Castle Wolfenstein for example is a great PC game. It sucks on the XBOX. Prince of Persia is a great game on the XBOX, but it isn't as good on the PC (mostly because of the lack of a good gamepad on the PC, but I'm not buying a gamepad for just that game).
I see your cost reasoning and I agree with your logic. It's a good approach. HOWEVER, it's based upon being reasonable and being willing to wait to upgrade. You might wait 6 months or so to upgrade everything, but many will not. If you were less reasonable about your choice of when to upgrade, you would wind up dropping a lot more on the hardware than you otherwise would AND you would have to put up with early adopter pains (driver issues, MB incompatibilities, BIOS incompatibilities, etc) than you otherwise would.
Get an XBOX. Play these games on the XBOX. Honestly, the experience is just about as good if you're not going to worry about comparing a console experience to a high end PC experience. The gaming experience/fun factor is what counts.
For example, I was playing Splinter Cell on my XBOX for a while. Fun stuff.. I was having a blast. Then I found a cheap copy of it for the PC too, so I gave that a spin. It's the same game! It's the same experience. It's just as much fun either way. In fact, one could argue that the console experience is even better: I don't have to dork around with my machine to either upgrade it, or to even install the game. It just works.
So, if you want to get off the upgrade hamster wheel, just use a console. Heck, for $200 (which is what a shiny new ATI 9800 Pro card will run you), you can buy two of the three major consoles! And they'll never need upgrading!
I suppose that solution is too simple though. People seem to like to suffer in this respect. Oh well, enjoy!;)
I agree with you, but you're still completely wrong.
What you're missing here is that different people play games for different reasons. Your statement applies to folks who play games for the challenge and resulting rewards. I like to be challenged too, but the limited amount of time I have to spend on games means I can only put up with a limited amount of in-game setbacks. After about the 20th time of attempting a mission/segment/save point where each attempt takes probably at least 20 minutes, I'm done. That sucker is going to be cheated on, or it's going in the waste bin.
Once you have more limited time to put into gaming, the rewards you seek from gaming change. So, it's still somewhat about the challenge for me, but I'm primarily looking to be entertained. Sometimes I get really lucky, and I'll find a game that also educates me. If I can find a game that entertains me, helps me to grow as a person, AND gives me some challenge and reward; I'm in hog heaven. BTW - There aren't too many games that can do all that. Actually, I can't think of any off hand.
You know, you really got my curiosity. You put me on your foes list yesterday, and I've never even talked with you. Weird. "I wonder who this joker is?" I say to myself. So, I go find out. I find out that not only are you NOT a/. troll, you even work in the same geographical area as me. We work within about 10 miles of each other. So, I go read some of your other stuff. I'm curious and I can't help myself. I keep wondering why a reasonable and intelligent guy would bother to make me into a foe.
So, I go tripping through some of the stuff you have out there for work. Then I figured it out. In particular, I don't think you liked the following comment I made in this post:
If Mr. Sowell truly wants a simplified experience he should just go use Apple products, which are already dumbed down and streamlined. But he should be prepared to shell out the extra cash to support Apple's entirely proprietary architectures.
I'm reasonably certain that's the comment that earned your ire based on the kinds of projects I see you have on the web site. It's understandable.
So, let me correct myself:
1. While Apple products probably deserve to be called streamlined, I did go a bit far in calling them dumbed down. I wasn't thinking when I said that, and I was allowing myself to play the stereotype without examining it. The last time I used a Mac was in about 1995, so my impressions of it are out of date and irrelevant by now.
2. Apple's DOES have a proprietary architecture in the sense that I have to buy their hardware to run their OS. There just no denying that. I would be all over OS X if I could run it on x86 and other machine architectures and I didn't have to buy their hardware to use it. Even Microsoft doesn't have as much control over my computing environment as does Apple.
3. HOWEVER, Apple is most definitely not proprietary by virtue of their new OS architecture. You know far more about this than I, but even I can appreciate how having a Unix-like OS under the hood allows a lot of cross-over to and from the open source world.
FWIW - I didn't start out liking Windows and I don't particularly like what Microsoft does in the name of competition. I was a die hard Amiga lover when I hit the marketplace and I spent 5 years in the market hating the tools I needed to use for my employers before the tools were at least high enough quality to make stop missing the Amiga. I suppose OS X would, given its quality today, spoil me again and again make me dissatisfied with Windows. But I'm not sure I can afford that now.
I don't know what I'm trying to accomplish here. I really don't care if you keep me on your foes list. But, I do hate it when I stick my foot in my mouth. I like to correct myself when I do that. Your opinion of me may not change because of this, but I've done what I can to correct myself.
I do wish you hadn't posted as AC, it's a well stated point of view. Anyway, you are right of course. I made an overly broad statement by claiming what I did. Only indirectly is the statement correct. Bill would seem to be a very competitive guy and he merely did what he had to do in order to "win" by monopolizing the market. And he could only win by improving usability enough to make Windows a product everyone could stand enough to let it spread. That's all I meant.
Oy... I am not an idiot. The very same things you're claiming about Bill Gate's interchangeability could probably be as easily said about George Eastman. Or did you think that Mr. Eastman was such a genius that photography was destined to remain difficult forever?
"Difficult" industries are often simplified by an iconic figure. The identity of that figure is going to be almost irrelevant. If Bill Gates had not served as the catalyst for making PCs easier to use and, as a result, much more ubiquitous, then someone else would have. You're thinking that I'm trying to claim Bill is some glorious figure in the PC industry because of his role in its development. I don't claim that, and I don't even care about that question.
Other than slamming me and calling me an idiot (gee, using that word must mean you automatically win the argument because it OBVIOUSLY makes you the bright one right?) you have said nothing.
Will slashdot ever drag itself into the year 2004 and provide the ability to edit posts?
I sure hope not. Now being able to add an addendum, I could agree with. But, even that is risky.
Consider for a moment that there are always active trolls who repost previously 5 star posts just to get karma from unaware mods. Now take the case of an editable post. You can get the post modded to 5 then swap the contents out with a porn troll. Not pretty.
I read the article, and I was unimpressed with the author's pain. Perhaps he doesn't know what it USED to take to use a computer? Does he have any idea?! This is what Bill Gates really succeeded at: making computers easy enough for the masses to use. Why else would 90%+ of all PCs be running Windows? Why else does at least 50% of America have a computer? Personal computing as we know it today would not be nearly as ubiquitous as it is if Bill Gates had failed.
Maybe Mr. Sowell and his "guru" are right in that there is definitely room for improvement. But, I would prefer thankyouverymuch that ALL computers not be dumbed down any more than they are so a "guru" like the one Mr. Sowell employed can go home for dinner on time. How does he know that I do not use the features he considers useless? Why should I be stuck with a crippled product because other users get easily intimidated by the product's other features? If Mr. Sowell truly wants a simplified experience he should just go use Apple products, which are already dumbed down and streamlined. But he should be prepared to shell out the extra cash to support Apple's entirely proprietary architectures.
I suppose it depends on the artist. I do listen to some independent artists, but not all. Many of the CDs I listen to are arranged in a specific order by someone (if not the artist) to either tell a story or show a progression of some sort. In any case, the order of the songs on a CD are never an accident. At the very least, the order should be meant to enhance the listening experience, don't you think? I mean, it's not like they have to enhance the marketability at that point; they already have my money if I'm listening to the CD.
I think you should speak for yourself perhaps. We all tend to find those things that reinforce what we believe of ourselves. I, for one, find that I am more patient and more willing to dig into complex topics that aren't a complete waste of my time. I often watch multi-hour programs (without the commercials thanks to TiVo), read complex books that require actual thinking, and even have taken up writing again (which can take a lot of time). I even listen to music CDs front to back without skipping around in order to get the effect of the arrangement that was intended by the artist. Why/how did I do this? Because I want to. I decided it was going to happen and it did.
It's really quite simple. Either these things are part of your life or they're not. You make it happen either way. Not having these things in your life doesn't make you a bad person, but it might mean that you're living an unexamined life.
Yeah, I thought of that too, but I shied away from it because it affects the maintainability of the code for other developers. The method I suggested would be harder to implement, but it wouldn't affect the source code for everyone else. Also, I think once you put together something that could work in the IDE for a given language, it would be fairly easy to tweak it for every language that IDE supports. That's a powerful idea in the case of Visual Studio.NET or another IDE that supports many languages.
Part of what you demonstrated above are macros that provide some syntactic sugar to increase productivity. I'm all for those in the right situation, but I think that's another subject entirely. Those macros would definitely work in the context of a multi-language IDE of the sort described above, but only for the language keywords and not the macro contents.
So, in your example: #define si if
If I the IDE was just using English, both of the following fragments would be valid:
if (cond) {blah;};// uses normal C keyword at compile time without macro si (cond) {blah;};// uses macro translated C keyword
Now, if I mix it up a bit by changing the IDE over to Portuguese mode, the first line of code becomes:
se (cond) {blah;};// uses normal C keyword at compile time without macro
And the second line stays the same. So you would then have a source code file on the screen that would appear in Portuguese and Spanish and would be saved as English and Spanish.
If you didn't use macros at all for language translation, it would just all be saved in compilable English and appear on the screen as whatever language the developer had selected in the IDE. Of course, you'll also note that implementing the idea as presented also means that the comments would all stay in their original language. The code would be usable in any language, but the comments would still be unintelligible to the uninitiated without help from the likes of BabelFish or another translation product, which would inevitably slaughter the translation (which may or may not be good enough). Also, the maintainer will probably want to add to or change the comments along the way, and the changes at least would probably need to be saved as their vernacular in order to be fair. And then you'll have a hodge podge of languages in one source file, which isn't good.
And that is the death of that idea. *sigh*
So, I suppose what we'll have to do instead is all use some subset of English within a project so that EVERYONE on the project can understand the comments, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, you may be right for all I know. But if you're going to waste enough of your time to post the above vitriol, you may as well post some sources. Got any?
Very cool post. Thank you! I may have to try this for myself. (Have to buy a compatible webcam first I guess!)
Hopefully someone mods you up more..
You're missing the point. I certainly COULD do everything you described. Doing that stuff doesn't scare me in the least. But, how much of that I get done is a function of time. The amount of time I spend on something is proportional to how important it is to me. And being able to conveniently shove programs to a DVD in bulk is nice, not important.
And actually, I haven't seen the "Green Screen" you described and I haven't see the power on/off cycle either. It's probably because I don't hack the product and I've always used it as it's intended. Barring the 30 second skip button hack, I use it exactly the way it's designed.
I was looking for a simple way to shove programs to a DVD or PC. Maybe there isn't such a thing yet. Probably, the simplest way to go would be to simply hook up a DVD recorder to the TiVo so I can send out programs that way. Do you have any thoughts on how to make it simpler without tearing the thing apart?
I'm with you on that one. TiVo presents a high realiability AND high quality experience. My only complaint is that I'm slowly filling up my TiVo with content that I don't want to delete.
Is there an easy way offload that content from a series 2 TiVo without submitting to the "load tape in VCR, record shows one by one until tape is full (including overrun errors), get next tape, repeat" cycle?
Here
I don't have a web-cam handy, so if someone could give this a spin a let us know how well it works, that would be very much appreciated.
If it works well enough, I would definitely use something like this to replace my mouse for everyday tasks. It wouldn't replace the keyboard, but it's always been the mouse that's caused most of my RSI-like symptoms.
More than IBM?
Just curious.
I don't know anything about Quartz, so this has piqued my curiosity. By "PDF-like", do you mean to say that Quartz is based on Postscript? And it's fast???
Now, THAT would be a thing to behold.
"Love to Learn Linux" has an employer who is willing to be decent with him and train him into the position. And you want him to tell them that they were wrong to treat him like a human being instead of as an interchangeable cog???
What are you on?!
I personally encourage my clients to show their employees loyalty. Employees will fall all over themselves to make a company successful when that company's leadership gives the employees what they need to succeed, treats them like human beings, and challenges those employees to excel without slave-driving.
There are worse pains that a company can suffer besides admin snafus. Even a completely irrecoverable server configuration does less damage to a company than disgruntled/disloyal employees.
then how did you get into trouble. ;+)
Linux isn't just an operating system. At a minimum, it's the center-piece of a community/sub-culture. At the extreme end of the scale, it's the figure-head of a new software religion.
And like all religions, it will have its fanatical adherents. Fanatics aren't exactly known for a "live and let live" mentality. The problem is exacerbated by Microsoft's historically anti-competitive behavior. Because Microsoft was so aggressive, all the fanatics believe that they are entitled, no obligated, to exterminate Microsoft at any cost. So now, Microsoft isn't just the market leader to beat. In the eyes of those who feel Microsoft's influence and products are evil, they are to be exterminated at any cost.
If you want to be neutral in this debate, you'll just have to ignore all the inflammatory blathering on both sides. Those of us who know better will eat the lunch of those who cannot dispose of, or otherwise keep their technological religions on the back burner. I believe that the rising popularity of Open Source products of any kind keeps the spurs on companies like Microsoft, IBM, and others. The rising quality of proprietary products in turn keeps the spurs on the Open Source community to keep being better than they are. It's a complete symbiosis for now, and I hope it continues in this vein for a long time to come.
I meant this post as a response to this post. I'll repost it there.
Linux isn't just an operating system. At a minimum, it's the center-piece of a community/sub-culture. At the extreme end of the scale, it's the figure-head of a new software religion.
And like all religions, it will have its fanatical adherents. Fanatics aren't exactly known for a "live and let live" mentality. The problem is exacerbated by Microsoft's historically anti-competitive behavior. Because Microsoft was so aggressive, all the fanatics believe that they are entitled, no obligated, to exterminate Microsoft at any cost. So now, Microsoft isn't just the market leader to beat. In the eyes of those who feel Microsoft's influence and products are evil, they are to be exterminated at any cost.
If you want to be neutral in this debate, you'll just have to ignore all the inflammatory blathering on both sides. Those of us who know better will eat the lunch of those who cannot dispose of, or otherwise keep their technological religions on the back burner. I believe that the rising popularity of Open Source products of any kind keeps the spurs on companies like Microsoft, IBM, and others. The rising quality of proprietary products in turn keeps the spurs on the Open Source community to keep being better than they are. It's a complete symbiosis for now, and I hope it continues in this vein for a long time to come.
Just use HTML tables!!!!
*duck*
(No flames please, yes I'm kidding. Sort of.)
On point though, I think that it should frighten people from trying it.
And that's why they're not releasing it yet; because average folk shouldn't use it yet.
Funny how that works....
But I'm obviously not a one-or-the-other person. Consoles cannot replace PC gaming, and PCs don't replace consoles.
I do have to agree when it comes to some games. My Splinter Cell example is probably the exception because the experiences often aren't the same, even for the same game. Return To Castle Wolfenstein for example is a great PC game. It sucks on the XBOX. Prince of Persia is a great game on the XBOX, but it isn't as good on the PC (mostly because of the lack of a good gamepad on the PC, but I'm not buying a gamepad for just that game).
I see your cost reasoning and I agree with your logic. It's a good approach. HOWEVER, it's based upon being reasonable and being willing to wait to upgrade. You might wait 6 months or so to upgrade everything, but many will not. If you were less reasonable about your choice of when to upgrade, you would wind up dropping a lot more on the hardware than you otherwise would AND you would have to put up with early adopter pains (driver issues, MB incompatibilities, BIOS incompatibilities, etc) than you otherwise would.
Get an XBOX. Play these games on the XBOX. Honestly, the experience is just about as good if you're not going to worry about comparing a console experience to a high end PC experience. The gaming experience/fun factor is what counts.
;)
For example, I was playing Splinter Cell on my XBOX for a while. Fun stuff.. I was having a blast. Then I found a cheap copy of it for the PC too, so I gave that a spin. It's the same game! It's the same experience. It's just as much fun either way. In fact, one could argue that the console experience is even better: I don't have to dork around with my machine to either upgrade it, or to even install the game. It just works.
So, if you want to get off the upgrade hamster wheel, just use a console. Heck, for $200 (which is what a shiny new ATI 9800 Pro card will run you), you can buy two of the three major consoles! And they'll never need upgrading!
I suppose that solution is too simple though. People seem to like to suffer in this respect. Oh well, enjoy!
I agree with you, but you're still completely wrong.
What you're missing here is that different people play games for different reasons. Your statement applies to folks who play games for the challenge and resulting rewards. I like to be challenged too, but the limited amount of time I have to spend on games means I can only put up with a limited amount of in-game setbacks. After about the 20th time of attempting a mission/segment/save point where each attempt takes probably at least 20 minutes, I'm done. That sucker is going to be cheated on, or it's going in the waste bin.
Once you have more limited time to put into gaming, the rewards you seek from gaming change. So, it's still somewhat about the challenge for me, but I'm primarily looking to be entertained. Sometimes I get really lucky, and I'll find a game that also educates me. If I can find a game that entertains me, helps me to grow as a person, AND gives me some challenge and reward; I'm in hog heaven. BTW - There aren't too many games that can do all that. Actually, I can't think of any off hand.
You know, you really got my curiosity. You put me on your foes list yesterday, and I've never even talked with you. Weird. "I wonder who this joker is?" I say to myself. So, I go find out. I find out that not only are you NOT a /. troll, you even work in the same geographical area as me. We work within about 10 miles of each other. So, I go read some of your other stuff. I'm curious and I can't help myself. I keep wondering why a reasonable and intelligent guy would bother to make me into a foe.
So, I go tripping through some of the stuff you have out there for work. Then I figured it out. In particular, I don't think you liked the following comment I made in this post:
If Mr. Sowell truly wants a simplified experience he should just go use Apple products, which are already dumbed down and streamlined. But he should be prepared to shell out the extra cash to support Apple's entirely proprietary architectures.
I'm reasonably certain that's the comment that earned your ire based on the kinds of projects I see you have on the web site. It's understandable.
So, let me correct myself:
1. While Apple products probably deserve to be called streamlined, I did go a bit far in calling them dumbed down. I wasn't thinking when I said that, and I was allowing myself to play the stereotype without examining it. The last time I used a Mac was in about 1995, so my impressions of it are out of date and irrelevant by now.
2. Apple's DOES have a proprietary architecture in the sense that I have to buy their hardware to run their OS. There just no denying that. I would be all over OS X if I could run it on x86 and other machine architectures and I didn't have to buy their hardware to use it. Even Microsoft doesn't have as much control over my computing environment as does Apple.
3. HOWEVER, Apple is most definitely not proprietary by virtue of their new OS architecture. You know far more about this than I, but even I can appreciate how having a Unix-like OS under the hood allows a lot of cross-over to and from the open source world.
FWIW - I didn't start out liking Windows and I don't particularly like what Microsoft does in the name of competition. I was a die hard Amiga lover when I hit the marketplace and I spent 5 years in the market hating the tools I needed to use for my employers before the tools were at least high enough quality to make stop missing the Amiga. I suppose OS X would, given its quality today, spoil me again and again make me dissatisfied with Windows. But I'm not sure I can afford that now.
I don't know what I'm trying to accomplish here. I really don't care if you keep me on your foes list. But, I do hate it when I stick my foot in my mouth. I like to correct myself when I do that. Your opinion of me may not change because of this, but I've done what I can to correct myself.
Peace.
I do wish you hadn't posted as AC, it's a well stated point of view. Anyway, you are right of course. I made an overly broad statement by claiming what I did. Only indirectly is the statement correct. Bill would seem to be a very competitive guy and he merely did what he had to do in order to "win" by monopolizing the market. And he could only win by improving usability enough to make Windows a product everyone could stand enough to let it spread. That's all I meant.
Oy... I am not an idiot. The very same things you're claiming about Bill Gate's interchangeability could probably be as easily said about George Eastman. Or did you think that Mr. Eastman was such a genius that photography was destined to remain difficult forever?
"Difficult" industries are often simplified by an iconic figure. The identity of that figure is going to be almost irrelevant. If Bill Gates had not served as the catalyst for making PCs easier to use and, as a result, much more ubiquitous, then someone else would have. You're thinking that I'm trying to claim Bill is some glorious figure in the PC industry because of his role in its development. I don't claim that, and I don't even care about that question.
Other than slamming me and calling me an idiot (gee, using that word must mean you automatically win the argument because it OBVIOUSLY makes you the bright one right?) you have said nothing.
Will slashdot ever drag itself into the year 2004 and provide the ability to edit posts?
I sure hope not. Now being able to add an addendum, I could agree with. But, even that is risky.
Consider for a moment that there are always active trolls who repost previously 5 star posts just to get karma from unaware mods. Now take the case of an editable post. You can get the post modded to 5 then swap the contents out with a porn troll. Not pretty.
I read the article, and I was unimpressed with the author's pain. Perhaps he doesn't know what it USED to take to use a computer? Does he have any idea?! This is what Bill Gates really succeeded at: making computers easy enough for the masses to use. Why else would 90%+ of all PCs be running Windows? Why else does at least 50% of America have a computer? Personal computing as we know it today would not be nearly as ubiquitous as it is if Bill Gates had failed.
Maybe Mr. Sowell and his "guru" are right in that there is definitely room for improvement. But, I would prefer thankyouverymuch that ALL computers not be dumbed down any more than they are so a "guru" like the one Mr. Sowell employed can go home for dinner on time. How does he know that I do not use the features he considers useless? Why should I be stuck with a crippled product because other users get easily intimidated by the product's other features? If Mr. Sowell truly wants a simplified experience he should just go use Apple products, which are already dumbed down and streamlined. But he should be prepared to shell out the extra cash to support Apple's entirely proprietary architectures.
I suppose it depends on the artist. I do listen to some independent artists, but not all. Many of the CDs I listen to are arranged in a specific order by someone (if not the artist) to either tell a story or show a progression of some sort. In any case, the order of the songs on a CD are never an accident. At the very least, the order should be meant to enhance the listening experience, don't you think? I mean, it's not like they have to enhance the marketability at that point; they already have my money if I'm listening to the CD.
I think you should speak for yourself perhaps. We all tend to find those things that reinforce what we believe of ourselves. I, for one, find that I am more patient and more willing to dig into complex topics that aren't a complete waste of my time. I often watch multi-hour programs (without the commercials thanks to TiVo), read complex books that require actual thinking, and even have taken up writing again (which can take a lot of time). I even listen to music CDs front to back without skipping around in order to get the effect of the arrangement that was intended by the artist. Why/how did I do this? Because I want to. I decided it was going to happen and it did.
It's really quite simple. Either these things are part of your life or they're not. You make it happen either way. Not having these things in your life doesn't make you a bad person, but it might mean that you're living an unexamined life.
Yeah, I thought of that too, but I shied away from it because it affects the maintainability of the code for other developers. The method I suggested would be harder to implement, but it wouldn't affect the source code for everyone else. Also, I think once you put together something that could work in the IDE for a given language, it would be fairly easy to tweak it for every language that IDE supports. That's a powerful idea in the case of Visual Studio.NET or another IDE that supports many languages.
// uses normal C keyword at compile time without macro // uses macro translated C keyword
// uses normal C keyword at compile time without macro
Part of what you demonstrated above are macros that provide some syntactic sugar to increase productivity. I'm all for those in the right situation, but I think that's another subject entirely. Those macros would definitely work in the context of a multi-language IDE of the sort described above, but only for the language keywords and not the macro contents.
So, in your example:
#define si if
If I the IDE was just using English, both of the following fragments would be valid:
if (cond) {blah;};
si (cond) {blah;};
Now, if I mix it up a bit by changing the IDE over to Portuguese mode, the first line of code becomes:
se (cond) {blah;};
And the second line stays the same. So you would then have a source code file on the screen that would appear in Portuguese and Spanish and would be saved as English and Spanish.
If you didn't use macros at all for language translation, it would just all be saved in compilable English and appear on the screen as whatever language the developer had selected in the IDE. Of course, you'll also note that implementing the idea as presented also means that the comments would all stay in their original language. The code would be usable in any language, but the comments would still be unintelligible to the uninitiated without help from the likes of BabelFish or another translation product, which would inevitably slaughter the translation (which may or may not be good enough). Also, the maintainer will probably want to add to or change the comments along the way, and the changes at least would probably need to be saved as their vernacular in order to be fair. And then you'll have a hodge podge of languages in one source file, which isn't good.
And that is the death of that idea. *sigh*
So, I suppose what we'll have to do instead is all use some subset of English within a project so that EVERYONE on the project can understand the comments, etc.
Err... yeah, never mind. We already do that.
*twitch*
At least it's Friday.