Well, that's cool, I think we're in agreement. To be fair to your choice of words, I can't deny that that review could have been more concise, but that would mean removing all the stuff that made it entertaining and awesome.
Yes, the handwriting recognition is terrible, but there is no need to use it. There is a stylus keyboard and a full-screen virtual finger keyboard, and the finger keyboard is definitely faster than graffiti. For math and diagrams, however, I can just write directly, which is why the N800 beats a netbook for notetaking. I just wish I had time to give Xournal some love, or at least make it auto-save.
If you like taking notes using a Palm PDA, I would assume you'd like using an N800 at least as much. I take notes using Xournal for Maemo, using a combination of zoom and scrolling to compensate for the smallness of the screen compared to paper. The software isn't perfect, my main complaint being that I have to manually save often to avoid data loss in the case of an occasional hardware or software crash, but it's good enough to keep up with what's on the board, and it probably rivals paper, while still fitting in my pocket.
Take that up with the profs. I would welcome this, if my profs actually released such material. In classes where slides or notes are released that closely line up with the lectures, I don't take notes.
I second this. It seems possible that the submitter hasn't actually watched the Episode 1 review he linked to. Anyone who thinks it couldn't possibly be worth 70 minutes of their time will realize they are mistaken after 5-10 minutes.
You have made the mistaken assumption that the techniques used to modify the corn and other plants works exactly as well in practice as it should in theory. The proteins that GMO foods are engineered to produce are already regulated as a food additive, but that's not enough to conclude that such products are safe. Unfortunately, Monsanto lobbied hard to ensure that they wouldn't have to prove the overall safety of the GM plants they were selling, just the safety of the specific proteins they were introducing. They've also done everything they can to ensure that studies that are critical of their products are suppressed. Without any new coverage of science specifically showing that their products are unsafe, they have successfully convinced the public (i.e. you) that their products should be safe in theory. "The World According to Monsanto" should be required viewing for people participating in this debate, it's a documentary about Monsanto's lobbying and litigation tactics, which have a history that goes further back than GM foods. For a much shorter read, see Árpád Pusztai
The last article on aviransplace.com (Windows GodMode features) was copied from CNet. Slashdot could have found a less ad-laden website to send traffic to this time around.
You can save yourself from having to decide when to load these plugins by loading them for specific file types. You can make files like ~/.vim/ftplugin/filetype.vim (i.e. c.vim, cpp.vim, python.vim) that contain a few lines to source your script when those filetypes are loaded. You may need to set a variable to ensure that the sourcing happens only once.
If a given 12 year old isn't motivated to learn Python, they're probably not going to be motivated to learn much else, which would make the whole argument moot. See http://www.pygame.org/docs/tut/chimp/ChimpLineByLine.html for a short justification of this.
Because Python is more popular, isn't tied to a proprietary vendor's toolchain and runtime, has various modern features that make it rather powerful, has a wide selection of standard and third party libraries, and can interoperate C or C++ as needed later on.
Scrum is a good way to force programmers to be conscious of how well they can estimate the time taken to do things (a good thing), while also helping to document where people spent their time. I don't think that necessarily makes it good for measuring developer productivity. The problem is that any high level productivity estimate will fail to take into account the quality of the work, at least in the short term.
Yes, that's the point I was trying to make. The original poster suggested that this was like playing god, and my point was that if you notice that this amounts to selective breeding of music, then such a comment makes sense.
Inheritance doesn't result in vtables, virtual functions result in vtables. How often have you seen a non-trivial C program that doesn't use function pointers somewhere? C++ doesn't force you to use virtual functions, and neither does the STL. The whole point of templates is to allow the compiler to perform the specialization at compile time.
Also, your generalizations about threading in relation to the STL are completely misinformed. The manual for libstdc++, for example, says that:
All library objects are safe to use in a multithreaded program as long as each thread carefully locks out access by any other thread while it uses any object visible to another thread, i.e., treat library objects like any other shared resource.
Thus, as long as STL objects aren't shared by more than one thread, no locking is required. If not for the niche subject area, and your low/. UID, I'd think you were trolling. Even if your opinions are valid in relation to past experience, they are extreme, and certainly misplaced today.
At first glance, I agreed that the original poster looked like flamebait, but there is actually some sense to what is being said. In natural evolution, selection happens as a result of the environment, which determines if and when creatures die or reproduce. In this case, people rate music, deciding how successful each loop is. If people were doing this with creatures and not music, it would be fair to call it selective breeding.
I think that at least with the version control, it smells of serious NIH that the developer would reinvent that wheel instead of basing the product on an existing system. Looking at the FAQ only makes the smell stronger:
Features provided by fossil that one does not get with other DVCSes include:
1. Integrated wiki. 2. Integrated bug tracking 3. Immutable artifacts 4. Self-contained, stand-alone executable that can be run in a chroot jail 5. Simple, well-defined, enduring file format 6. Integrated web interface
The extra features seem orthogonal to version control, and designing them all together in one system seems to only make it easier to be sloppy about separating concerns.
It's probably better to separate as much of the implementation as possible from the business logic, e.g. by factoring out the view logic. You don't want to over-engineer anything, but at the same time, if you know certain code is likely to change, you want to factor out the parts of it that aren't likely to change as frequently. Comments are probably still useful, but they aren't a replacement for abstraction, where it's warranted.
Mod parent up! I think that comments should tell you 'what', as well as 'why', in cases where 'what' isn't synonymous with 'how'. When changing existing code, I like to know what the original author's intent was, so I can tell if certain aspects of the existing behaviour are coincidental side effects of how the code was written, or deliberate choices by the author.
I already use git to manage any files in my home directory that I want to follow me to different machines, as well as to synchronize source code between machines. The OP is highly encouraged to do it this way, you can do the synchronizing over ssh or rsync. Anyone considering cvs or svn for the same thing should use git instead, otherwise they will be stuck syncing from each machine to their cvs/svn server, and not between machines arbitrarily.
Like other replies have stated, you completely misunderstood the post you replied to. However, what's worse is that the website in your signature is the epitome of what I and most other websurfers hate about flash. The layout is broken (it's a fixed-size rect in the middle of the page), there are no deep URLs into the "site", and the back button is broken because the the navigation is hidden in flash. Instead of posting polemic comments on slashdot, you should just accept that there are reasons why flash is hated and act accordingly.
I think being able to install into/usr/share is the first convincing argument I've seen for FatELF, because package management doesn't provide a reasonable alternative for this.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, that's cool, I think we're in agreement. To be fair to your choice of words, I can't deny that that review could have been more concise, but that would mean removing all the stuff that made it entertaining and awesome.
Yes, the handwriting recognition is terrible, but there is no need to use it. There is a stylus keyboard and a full-screen virtual finger keyboard, and the finger keyboard is definitely faster than graffiti. For math and diagrams, however, I can just write directly, which is why the N800 beats a netbook for notetaking. I just wish I had time to give Xournal some love, or at least make it auto-save.
If you like taking notes using a Palm PDA, I would assume you'd like using an N800 at least as much. I take notes using Xournal for Maemo, using a combination of zoom and scrolling to compensate for the smallness of the screen compared to paper. The software isn't perfect, my main complaint being that I have to manually save often to avoid data loss in the case of an occasional hardware or software crash, but it's good enough to keep up with what's on the board, and it probably rivals paper, while still fitting in my pocket.
Take that up with the profs. I would welcome this, if my profs actually released such material. In classes where slides or notes are released that closely line up with the lectures, I don't take notes.
I second this. It seems possible that the submitter hasn't actually watched the Episode 1 review he linked to. Anyone who thinks it couldn't possibly be worth 70 minutes of their time will realize they are mistaken after 5-10 minutes.
You have made the mistaken assumption that the techniques used to modify the corn and other plants works exactly as well in practice as it should in theory. The proteins that GMO foods are engineered to produce are already regulated as a food additive, but that's not enough to conclude that such products are safe. Unfortunately, Monsanto lobbied hard to ensure that they wouldn't have to prove the overall safety of the GM plants they were selling, just the safety of the specific proteins they were introducing. They've also done everything they can to ensure that studies that are critical of their products are suppressed. Without any new coverage of science specifically showing that their products are unsafe, they have successfully convinced the public (i.e. you) that their products should be safe in theory. "The World According to Monsanto" should be required viewing for people participating in this debate, it's a documentary about Monsanto's lobbying and litigation tactics, which have a history that goes further back than GM foods. For a much shorter read, see Árpád Pusztai
I'm probably feeding a troll, but suffice it to say that that's blatantly false.
The last article on aviransplace.com (Windows GodMode features) was copied from CNet. Slashdot could have found a less ad-laden website to send traffic to this time around.
Coral cache link to the rescue: http://forum.419eater.com.nyud.net:8080/forum/viewtopic.php?t=177394
You can save yourself from having to decide when to load these plugins by loading them for specific file types. You can make files like ~/.vim/ftplugin/filetype.vim (i.e. c.vim, cpp.vim, python.vim) that contain a few lines to source your script when those filetypes are loaded. You may need to set a variable to ensure that the sourcing happens only once.
If a given 12 year old isn't motivated to learn Python, they're probably not going to be motivated to learn much else, which would make the whole argument moot. See http://www.pygame.org/docs/tut/chimp/ChimpLineByLine.html for a short justification of this.
Because Python is more popular, isn't tied to a proprietary vendor's toolchain and runtime, has various modern features that make it rather powerful, has a wide selection of standard and third party libraries, and can interoperate C or C++ as needed later on.
Scrum is a good way to force programmers to be conscious of how well they can estimate the time taken to do things (a good thing), while also helping to document where people spent their time. I don't think that necessarily makes it good for measuring developer productivity. The problem is that any high level productivity estimate will fail to take into account the quality of the work, at least in the short term.
Yes, that's the point I was trying to make. The original poster suggested that this was like playing god, and my point was that if you notice that this amounts to selective breeding of music, then such a comment makes sense.
Inheritance doesn't result in vtables, virtual functions result in vtables. How often have you seen a non-trivial C program that doesn't use function pointers somewhere? C++ doesn't force you to use virtual functions, and neither does the STL. The whole point of templates is to allow the compiler to perform the specialization at compile time.
Also, your generalizations about threading in relation to the STL are completely misinformed. The manual for libstdc++, for example, says that:
Thus, as long as STL objects aren't shared by more than one thread, no locking is required. If not for the niche subject area, and your low /. UID, I'd think you were trolling. Even if your opinions are valid in relation to past experience, they are extreme, and certainly misplaced today.
At first glance, I agreed that the original poster looked like flamebait, but there is actually some sense to what is being said. In natural evolution, selection happens as a result of the environment, which determines if and when creatures die or reproduce. In this case, people rate music, deciding how successful each loop is. If people were doing this with creatures and not music, it would be fair to call it selective breeding.
Which STL classes have vtables? The T in STL stands for template.
I think that at least with the version control, it smells of serious NIH that the developer would reinvent that wheel instead of basing the product on an existing system. Looking at the FAQ only makes the smell stronger:
The extra features seem orthogonal to version control, and designing them all together in one system seems to only make it easier to be sloppy about separating concerns.
It's probably better to separate as much of the implementation as possible from the business logic, e.g. by factoring out the view logic. You don't want to over-engineer anything, but at the same time, if you know certain code is likely to change, you want to factor out the parts of it that aren't likely to change as frequently. Comments are probably still useful, but they aren't a replacement for abstraction, where it's warranted.
Mod parent up! I think that comments should tell you 'what', as well as 'why', in cases where 'what' isn't synonymous with 'how'. When changing existing code, I like to know what the original author's intent was, so I can tell if certain aspects of the existing behaviour are coincidental side effects of how the code was written, or deliberate choices by the author.
I already use git to manage any files in my home directory that I want to follow me to different machines, as well as to synchronize source code between machines. The OP is highly encouraged to do it this way, you can do the synchronizing over ssh or rsync. Anyone considering cvs or svn for the same thing should use git instead, otherwise they will be stuck syncing from each machine to their cvs/svn server, and not between machines arbitrarily.
Like other replies have stated, you completely misunderstood the post you replied to. However, what's worse is that the website in your signature is the epitome of what I and most other websurfers hate about flash. The layout is broken (it's a fixed-size rect in the middle of the page), there are no deep URLs into the "site", and the back button is broken because the the navigation is hidden in flash. Instead of posting polemic comments on slashdot, you should just accept that there are reasons why flash is hated and act accordingly.
I think being able to install into /usr/share is the first convincing argument I've seen for FatELF, because package management doesn't provide a reasonable alternative for this.
Now you have to be a FatELF genius instead. Problem solved.
*whoosh*