Well, you can't learn it by shoving one version after another out the door, sitting in front of a computer and waiting for "feedback." You can't learn it by reasoning and arguing and honing your theories to a razor-sharp edge, and you can't learn it by reading other theories written by other people.
You can, however, learn a hell of a lot by sitting behind a half-dozen users and watching them use your app with no assistance. It's just that very few people get to work that way.
"Just hacking shit until it kinda works okay" is one way of seeing the initial phases of development, when you're trying to understand all the factors in play.
If you take an analytical approach from the start, you're going to start with some incorrect assumptions. Just one slightly incorrect assumption can result in a badly broken solution. Then you correct that assumption and start your calculations all over again. This is really wasteful and frustrating and usually results in the analytical guy giving up, throwing up his hands, and declaring that he "did it right," so the problems must be elsewhere.
Programming starts with research, and one form of that is "just hacking shit until it kinda works ok." Then you might have a sound basis for a formal design process, mathematical modeling, or whatever "doing it right" means to you.
Unfortunately, you rarely find one person who works well both ways. (I like to think I can, but I might be fooling myself. I program for a living, and it's not like they let you keep going after it "kinda works okay.") You're far better off with a guy hacking randomly without formal calculations than with a guy who thinks he can "do things right" without any random hacking.
Which has the effect of people who dislike confrontation falling behind. But, at the same time, people who can stand up to him but who have flawed ideas, their ideas don't make it.
If you expose anyone to any kind of abuse, and they manage to survive it, they often come to think that it was actually for the best, that they were improved by it. This is true whether it actually had a good effect (soldiers learning to perform physically for days on end under mental and emotional stress) or a bad effect (women being slapped around by husbands, football players sodomized by their teammates.)
Someone needs to inform Mr. Gates that being able to present a technical idea in the face of arbitrary abuse is not a valuable skill.
Also, the idea that abuse will sift out the confident from the unsure, thus sussing out a presenter's true opinion of his own idea, is horseshit. You just get people who can take the same kind of abuse you can -- people with similar formative experiences and similar personality types -- exactly the people who feel familiar and trustworthy, even when you don't know anything about them.
Now, if you take the time to evaluate the merits of others' ideas, and deal out ridicule in a just and appropriate manner, then it becomes significant whether a person flinches or not. But if you evaluate ideas on their merits, then you're just a smart technical guy who doesn't have extraordinary insight into other people's character, aren't you? And that's exactly the mystique that most techies who end up running companies desperately want to establish. (Yes, it's compensation. No, it's not a terribly deep insight on my part. I am a programmer, after all.)
For drivers my main concern is for the margins. Obviously the mainstream stuff is well-supported, but coverage of niche, low-volume, and brand-new hardware will continue to lag until hardware makers make sure there are Linux drivers before offering the hardware for sale at all, like they do for Windows.
Linux has come a long way, and it does continue to improve. But the open source community needs to establish some procedures that ensure that new versions are tested on a wide variety of platforms and circumstances before deeming them ready for widespread use, and platform-specific incompatibilities like that one should be considered at least "severe" bugs so they receive high priority.
I think this is a great idea, and Ubuntu is a step in the right direction. One difficulty is that the lack of a large number of users who are truly intolerant of fiddling causes a chicken-and-egg problem; even distros like Ubuntu end up caving to demand and including items that aren't polished enough for unsophisticated users. A Linux distro that effectively steers users away from the rough edges will have a hard time maintaining a user base.
Perhaps this can be worked around by a decent classification program that labels packages as "trouble-free," "causes compatibility issues," "requires fiddling," or "developers only." As far as I know, the only distros that have attempted to make such distinctions have used them to exclude packages altogether instead of providing guidance for users.
The formula is, and please take this with the utmost respect, an absolute requirement for anyone doing intricate graphics work.
You shouldn't have to look at it and type it out every time. Talk about a massive violation of Don't Repeat Yourself! All that extra typing will surely cause a few bugs, and God help you if you ever have to change the orientation of the array.
C++ handles this pretty well by letting you express it as image(i, j). The translation to image.data[j*x + i] inlines easily, and you can templatize your image class to turn bounds checking on and off on individual instances at compile time. Some people would prefer to express it as image[i,j] which C++ doesn't allow, but surely image(i,j) (which I prefer anyway) is an acceptable compromise.
I do the same as you, but I would never give up my crappy old laptop running Windows XP, because OpenOffice isn't absolutely bug-for-bug compatible with MS Office. I still have to go to the Windows machine occasionally to open a file.
The rest of the "not ready for the desktop" stuff people talk about is a bunch of red herrings. What's missing is not technical capabilities in the kernel, UI slickness in the applications, or games but the massive entrenchment that Microsoft relies on to make Windows look magical: OEM installs, reliable drivers provided by hardware vendors, and a decade of user familiarity. No amount of work on applications or task schedulers will ever begin to address those issues. Linux-on-the-desktop fans should look for ways around those problems instead of obsessing over programming.
To put it more concisely: Slashdotters are programmers; programming is the hammer; widespread desktop adoption of Linux is the problem; and no, it is not a nail.
The phones they were comparing it with, besides regular crappy cell phones, were phones with stylus-based interfaces. For them, the biggest difference was pinching in and out on the iPhone vs. the ways that other phones deal with pages that are too large to display readably. I worry more about browser limitations and occasionally running into sites that either can't be rendered or can't be conveniently navigated. I've never seen an n95, but the first video I found shows the n95 not doing quite as well as the iPhone and the n800 (a device I've had my greedy eyes on for months now). The reviewer can't get the n95 to display full versions of certain web pages instead of "mobile" versions. He tries to use touch with the n95 and n800 but quickly reverts to using the stylus on the n800 and the buttons on the n95. (Oops! I have the video running now, and the reviewer just demonstrated a web page that the n95 can't render because of lack of memory.)
You can also see that with the n800 and n95, the reviewer has to use two hands to use certain browser features. That can be awkward if you don't have anything to put the device down on. The iPhone can be operated just fine with one hand.
Heh, the reviewer just tried using touch again on the n800 and immediately switched back to the stylus. I cringe every time he reaches for the stylus. I don't understand why stylus interfaces suck. It defies common sense. They should be really nifty, but it just doesn't work out that way.
Anyway, back on topic, judging from the video, the n95 seems a lot like the very best cell phones I've seen, maybe a bit better. Almost everything works, but it takes a little extra care and effort to do fundamental things, you run into limitations, and you have to learn a handful of tricks to keep things working right. (The reviewer says he had successfully loaded the normal, non-mobile version of gmail on the n95, but he couldn't demonstrate it for the review because he couldn't remember how.)
For me, that just doesn't cut it. Every time you consider pulling out your phone and checking out something on the web, there's a little voice in the back of your head that asks, "Is it worth the effort? Is it going to piss you off and ruin your day if you spend half an hour trying to work around some limitation of the phone and never get to see what you wanted?"
With the iPhone, you don't worry about running into any limitations or needing to clutter up your mind with tricks and techniques for using the browser. You just pull it out and use it. That, for me, is the threshold of acceptability for a web browser.
I think this is a rift between different groups of users. Some are better served than others. If you exclude Blackberries and PDAs, US phone companies have been concentrating on two overlapping categories of users:
Socially oriented children and teenagers
Spend a lot of time trapped in classrooms, in transit, and in other situations where they don't have access to computers.
Fashion conscious.
Can't afford a sexy laptop and/or shun laptops as too big and dorky.
Gadgetphiles
Love any and all "features," the more the better, and will drool over them no matter how poorly implemented and unusable they are.
See #1.
See #1.
No other users get any love. I am flabbergasted that people have considered cell phone web browers as something that was already available before the iPhone. Some people think the web has been available on phones for years. They're insane. Web browsing on phones just barely arrived with the iPhone. The iPhone browsing experience is... decent. Which is REVOLUTIONARY.
Yes, decent is revolutionary. Unfortunately, marketers and tech journalists typically get bored of cell phone features long before they become reasonably usable, and the cell phone companies don't bother putting any work into a feature they can't brag about. Instead they leave it in an barely usable half-baked state and start working on the next feature. Does this make it clear why people have been asking for "just a phone?" We don't want phones bloated with piddly unusable features that only teenagers and gadget freaks can get excited about. Kudos to Apple for polishing a few essential features instead of adding a dozen half-assed bullet points.
All major phone manufacturers have lines of smart phones with specs that surpass the iphone by far.
Phone makers have been cramming more and more features into their phones, but they've made very little progress with usability. Actually, the phone makers seem to think exactly like you do, where each feature is just an item on a checklist instead of something that can be done well or poorly.
Computing power in cell phones is ample these days. It is no longer impressive to pile on application after application. The UI is the limiting feature, and the iPhone simply embarrasses every other phone on the market in that category. I'm too much of a cheapskate to ever buy an iPhone, but I'm looking forward to the effect it will have on cell phone UI design. Maybe in five years I can buy a decent imitation of an iPhone without paying fashion trendoid prices.
The iPhone is more about UI innovation than features
As far as I'm concerned, if you never want to use a feature, it doesn't exist. Everybody I know has a phone with some web browsing "feature," yet everyone's first reaction to the iPhone is, "Wow, that's amazing, you can actually browse the web on that. It isn't miserable and useless like the browser on my phone."
The distinction between "UI" and "features" only matters for marketing and bragging rights, not for real users. The iPhone deserves credit for lots of firsts that other companies laid claim to years ago on the basis of features that were so poorly implemented that most users ignored them.
"Surely a burglar wouldn't break into my house and steal my gun collection. There's an army base just a few miles away where he could steal MUCH bigger guns."
The article's claims are absurdly overstated. Sure, some professionals have to travel a lot. Sure, most casual users want a laptop and can't justify the extra cost of a second computer. But what about the vast numbers of professionals and office workers who do most of their work at one location? Screen size, keyboard ergonomics, and body position affect productivity. Even low-wage hourly office workers get 17" LCD monitors these days, because that's the cost-effective thing to do. Laptops with 17" screens are horrendous mistakes; nobody wants to lug them around. They look dorky and make their owners look dorky as they struggle to get them out of the bag and then find room for them on the coffeehouse table.
People who do technical and/or creative jobs have an appetite for screen space that generally exceeds their ability to pay for it. Almost everyone I know who uses a computer professionally has a monitor or pair of monitors that cost more than the rest of their system put together. Nobody is going to equip a laptop with a pair of 20" screens. The only way a laptop can replace a desktop for these workers (who are not a "die-hard" minority) is by being not just a laptop but a fully dual-function machine that also works as a desktop.
And if supply is any indicator, there isn't yet much demand for machines that work that way. Laptop manufacturers simply aren't catering to people who want dual-use machines that are both mobile (light, with screens =15") and desktop-capable (sufficient outputs and graphics card power to handle dual high-resolution displays.) Heck, all the laptops that I've seen that are capable of driving a single 30" 2560x1600 display are 17+ inch monstrosities that would be extremely unpleasant to use without a large desk or table to put them on.
I doubt the people behind the adventure in Iraq are so patriotic. I'm sure the politicians and their advisors justify it to themselves in terms of US oil security, but the powerful people who are in a position to provide incentives to those politicians are interested in profits. What really matters is that a few companies (some of which, like Shell, aren't really American) get to run the oil business in Iraq -- infrastructure, extraction, processing, and sale -- with as little money as possible remaining in Iraq. It doesn't matter where the oil goes after that.
Whatever lowers oil prices (for the entire world) is good for the US (no matter how much it costs us) -- a terrible rationalization for being in bed with the oil lobby.
Please explain to me how the electoral college, legalizes bribery, and first-past-the-post electing could possibly be considered the best political system in the world.
First, bribery exists in every country. It's impossible to completely criminalize bribery and favoritism. It's a constant struggle between the zeal of reformers and the ingenuity of businessmen. Bribery is also the most egalitarian and economically efficient form of corruption. Any currency in the world can be converted to US dollars, but nothing can replace privileged birth and access to closed social circles.
As for the electoral system, that certainly isn't our forte, but you can have a lot of garbage in the mix and still be number one. Many aspects of our functioning society (as opposed to the bare legal structures) are amazingly good at keeping the peace. American political apathy is famous, as is our failure to degenerate into rioting and internecine warfare despite our "intolerable" levels of inequality. Americans are not actually that much different from other people, and our "oppressed" classes aren't actively repressed. If they felt they were living in intolerable conditions, they could easily arms themselves, disrupt society, and demand changes. Yet this idea has very rarely been pursued by capable, organized people. People all over the world are puzzled by this, or they believe that Americans suffer from a uniquely American form of apathy, or they get paranoid and credit the media or the US government with superhuman powers of control.
In my experience, people who are familiar with India are especially mystified by the United States. India is home to some fascinating and very progressive ideas about race, and Indians are often horrified by the racism they see in the United States. Then they wonder why the United States, with its terribly primitive ideas about race, does not suffer from deadly ethnic riots like India does. It must be social indoctrination into materialistic philosophies and consumeristic values! No, it's the political system. (Yes, and consumerism. And prosperity. It is complicated.) A renewed effort at school desegregation in the US is running into resistance from black neighborhoods, where residents are very happy with the status quo of being granted funding and autonomy. Not bad, eh? When political reformers attempting to help out "powerless" minority groups get plenty of support from the majority, and then find out that it isn't clear how to improve on the status quo, it must be admitted that the political system is not where the problem lies.
To the contrary, there are huge social and cultural problems in the United States, and the political system does a pretty good job of enabling literacy, prosperity, and peaceful coexistence, which are ideal conditions for working on difficult social problems. The only people pessimistic about America's ability to deal with these problems in the long term are those who believe that peaceful coexistence is an impediment to progress. The government can be faulted for not imposing solutions aggressively enough in some cases where federal-level solutions are appropriate, but it does provide citizens with autonomy and resources to devise their own solutions, so they aren't helpless in the face of government inactivity.
Of course, that looks messy and negligent, and meanwhile countries that have never grappled with problems in the first place tut-tut at our messiness. I'm thinking here of the citizens of some of the "enlightened" countries of Scandinavia, who have attitudes (regarding cultural and/or racial superiority) that have proven extremely dangerous in the United States, a multiracial superpower, but which (to all appearances) don't cause major problems in mostly homogeneous nations that have no weight to throw around.
(Footnote: You might think I have to be a conservative to talk this way, but I assure you, I'm not. I just think that in the long run, societies can't afford to disreg
In the case of Feynman and the biologists, Feynman is correct because he was able to do actual interesting biology without needing to memorise the material, catching up four years of real biology in no time.
First, he would only be correct if the biologists had memorized the muscles of the cat before needing to know them. Spending an hour memorizing the muscles of a cat would pay off rather quickly if those names were needed for communication, for example when listening to a lecture about feline locomotion, performing a cat autopsy in coordination with other students, or reading a paper about muscle activation. Having simple facts down cold is sometimes a huge advantage that frees your brain up to think about important things. It makes sense to invest in rote memorization to avoid struggling through a particular situtation where specific knowledge is needed.
Second, when the student said, "We know all that already," Feynman could have been going over aspects of anatomy that are common to most mammals. Graduate biology students have read enough papers and been in enough labs to have used those terms hundreds of times. They might have learned those things in a non-rote way.
Third, Feynman was a very fast and talented person, so his optimal balance of knowing things vs. generating knowledge on the fly would have been extremely skewed compared to the normal person.
they haven't been involved in a major war since WWII
They haven't had an official army, which conveniently lets them off the hook. Since World War II, they have relied on the U.S. military for security, and they have provided funding and accomodation for the U.S. military. Willingly or not, directly or indirectly, they have played a supporting role in every war the U.S. has been involved in. One might as well say that the District of Columbia has not been involved in any major wars. During the Korean War, Japan provided massive amounts of materiel and logistical support for the U.S. military, which helped spark Japan's economic recovery. Many Japanese took Japan's involvement in the Korean War as a sign that U.S. and Japanese leaders had decided the pacifism clause in the Japanese constitution was no longer inconvenient and would henceforth be ignored.
I think the quote was referring to education that would enable one to vote intelligently, rather than education that would motivate one to vote. I had plenty of the second kind in elementary school. That could be why I was an idealistic little kid and still am*.
Still, despite the civics classes I had in elementary school and high school, I have a hard time feeling educated when I vote. I try to read every article about local politics I see, but it's like they're written in code. I know what all the words mean, but I don't have a deep understanding of them. I find it much easier to vote on national issues than on local ones. I'm pretty sure that no amount of American effort or manpower can fix Iraq, but I have no idea whether local schools need more money. I have no idea whether property taxes are too high or too low. Sometimes I feel like I should leave voting to people who are better educated, just like the Japanese guy who was quoted.
As I get older, I am starting to figure out why young people have doubts and older adults radiate confidence. As an adult, you get used to faking things, especially things you know you won't be called on to justify. Adults talk as if they have well-grounded opinions about property taxes, school boards, water districts, and so forth, but they're really just repeating things they read or hear. My neighbor seems to know everything about local politics, and he's always enthusiastic about elections. It's intimidating to hear him talk with assurance about local issues. I feel stupid and inadequate, because my understanding of local issues is so vague I can't even articulate it. On the other hand, my neighbor talks with the same assurance about high-performance cars:
Neigbor: "Did you know the 2009 Acura C5X-9000 is going to have neodymium assploditrons? It almost makes it worth it to drive my old 2006 heap another year." Me: "What the hell is an assploditron?" Neigbor: "Some cars have assploditrons instead of wickdumpits. Wickdumpits tend to accumulate carbon residue and get bendy. Assploditrons don't have that problem. The neodymium ones will supposedly eliminate bendiness altogether." Me: "And that improves the efficiency? Or acceleration? Or handling?" Neigbor: "It improves performance." Me: "Ah. Performance." Neigbor: "Yep. You wouldn't believe the difference. You have to experience it." Me: "So what do assploditrons and wickdumpits do?" Neigbor: "Well, wickdumpits accumulate carbon residue. Assploditrons don't, especially neodymium ones." Me: "But what do they do for the car? Why are they there?" Neigbor: "Ummmmm. I'm not sure. I think they might be part of the drivetrain. Or the injection system."
It's this kind of confident fakery that causes many intelligent people to feel apathetic and inadequate when it comes to voting. Those people should vote. If there's anyone whose votes are needed, it's the people who doubt their own worthiness to vote.
* (I'm a typical American liberal who thinks the United States has the best political system in the world but hates American complacency and keeps obsessive mental lists of things we could do better and foreign examples we could learn from.)
That's a pretty simple requirement that only depends on the code structure. I don't work with SQL much myself, but I imagine SQL editors should be able to handle that case automatically. There's no need for one SQL programmer to try to jigger the whitespace in such a way that it's readable to another SQL programmer. Just open the file and tell your editor to indent it in your preferred format. Of course, you're screwed if your diff tool doesn't know how to ignore meaningless whitespace changes.
I'm tired of people telling me to make terminal windows full-screen. I'm tired of having to make my web browser ~1280 pixels wide in order to see the entire page.
Yep. Widescreen monitors became popular, and I said, "Cool! Now I can put my apps side-by-side instead of maximizing them."
The web designers said, "Oh shit! We'd better fill up the whole screen with useless junk or we'll look old and unimportant." Damn right you're unimportant. I've stopped visiting several sites that decided they should look about right when maximized on a widescreen monitor and look obnoxiously cramped otherwise.
I'm all in favor of programmers relaxing a bit as memory gets cheaper and processors get faster. That's a productivity win. Web developers filling up my screen with useless junk, apparently for the sole purpose of crowding out any competition for my attention, is a different story. They can count on losing me or (if it's possible) having bits of their pages Adblocked until only the tiny useful part remains. (Yeah, I know, I should learn Javascript and use Greasemonkey.)
How do you maintain block indenting with proportional fonts!?
Blocks of identically-indented code continue to line up with each other. I suspect what you're asking is, "How do you use indentation to make two code lines that aren't part of the same indented block line up the way you want?" The answer is, you don't. If there is a very basic structural reason for them to be lined up, such as lining up successive lines in a long argument list, then a language-aware editor or IDE can handle it. If there isn't, then the lining-up can't be maintained by other programmers' tools, which means it would be a pain in the ass for other people to keep that special indentation. In such cases you should give up on special formatting rather than create visions of perfection that other people can't maintain.
It's best to write code that doesn't need special formatting to be readable. You should be able to run your code through *any* sufficiently good code formatter or indenter and have it end up readable. If that isn't possible, forget about "fixing" other programmers' fonts and tools; fix the code.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, you can't learn it by shoving one version after another out the door, sitting in front of a computer and waiting for "feedback." You can't learn it by reasoning and arguing and honing your theories to a razor-sharp edge, and you can't learn it by reading other theories written by other people.
You can, however, learn a hell of a lot by sitting behind a half-dozen users and watching them use your app with no assistance. It's just that very few people get to work that way.
"Just hacking shit until it kinda works okay" is one way of seeing the initial phases of development, when you're trying to understand all the factors in play.
If you take an analytical approach from the start, you're going to start with some incorrect assumptions. Just one slightly incorrect assumption can result in a badly broken solution. Then you correct that assumption and start your calculations all over again. This is really wasteful and frustrating and usually results in the analytical guy giving up, throwing up his hands, and declaring that he "did it right," so the problems must be elsewhere.
Programming starts with research, and one form of that is "just hacking shit until it kinda works ok." Then you might have a sound basis for a formal design process, mathematical modeling, or whatever "doing it right" means to you.
Unfortunately, you rarely find one person who works well both ways. (I like to think I can, but I might be fooling myself. I program for a living, and it's not like they let you keep going after it "kinda works okay.") You're far better off with a guy hacking randomly without formal calculations than with a guy who thinks he can "do things right" without any random hacking.
Someone needs to inform Mr. Gates that being able to present a technical idea in the face of arbitrary abuse is not a valuable skill.
Also, the idea that abuse will sift out the confident from the unsure, thus sussing out a presenter's true opinion of his own idea, is horseshit. You just get people who can take the same kind of abuse you can -- people with similar formative experiences and similar personality types -- exactly the people who feel familiar and trustworthy, even when you don't know anything about them.
Now, if you take the time to evaluate the merits of others' ideas, and deal out ridicule in a just and appropriate manner, then it becomes significant whether a person flinches or not. But if you evaluate ideas on their merits, then you're just a smart technical guy who doesn't have extraordinary insight into other people's character, aren't you? And that's exactly the mystique that most techies who end up running companies desperately want to establish. (Yes, it's compensation. No, it's not a terribly deep insight on my part. I am a programmer, after all.)
I think this is a great idea, and Ubuntu is a step in the right direction. One difficulty is that the lack of a large number of users who are truly intolerant of fiddling causes a chicken-and-egg problem; even distros like Ubuntu end up caving to demand and including items that aren't polished enough for unsophisticated users. A Linux distro that effectively steers users away from the rough edges will have a hard time maintaining a user base.
Perhaps this can be worked around by a decent classification program that labels packages as "trouble-free," "causes compatibility issues," "requires fiddling," or "developers only." As far as I know, the only distros that have attempted to make such distinctions have used them to exclude packages altogether instead of providing guidance for users.
C++ handles this pretty well by letting you express it as image(i, j). The translation to image.data[j*x + i] inlines easily, and you can templatize your image class to turn bounds checking on and off on individual instances at compile time. Some people would prefer to express it as image[i,j] which C++ doesn't allow, but surely image(i,j) (which I prefer anyway) is an acceptable compromise.
Any system that lets me fall back on Windows would be fine. I just happen to have a laptop sitting around that serves the purpose.
I do the same as you, but I would never give up my crappy old laptop running Windows XP, because OpenOffice isn't absolutely bug-for-bug compatible with MS Office. I still have to go to the Windows machine occasionally to open a file.
The rest of the "not ready for the desktop" stuff people talk about is a bunch of red herrings. What's missing is not technical capabilities in the kernel, UI slickness in the applications, or games but the massive entrenchment that Microsoft relies on to make Windows look magical: OEM installs, reliable drivers provided by hardware vendors, and a decade of user familiarity. No amount of work on applications or task schedulers will ever begin to address those issues. Linux-on-the-desktop fans should look for ways around those problems instead of obsessing over programming.
To put it more concisely: Slashdotters are programmers; programming is the hammer; widespread desktop adoption of Linux is the problem; and no, it is not a nail.
You can also see that with the n800 and n95, the reviewer has to use two hands to use certain browser features. That can be awkward if you don't have anything to put the device down on. The iPhone can be operated just fine with one hand.
Heh, the reviewer just tried using touch again on the n800 and immediately switched back to the stylus. I cringe every time he reaches for the stylus. I don't understand why stylus interfaces suck. It defies common sense. They should be really nifty, but it just doesn't work out that way.
Anyway, back on topic, judging from the video, the n95 seems a lot like the very best cell phones I've seen, maybe a bit better. Almost everything works, but it takes a little extra care and effort to do fundamental things, you run into limitations, and you have to learn a handful of tricks to keep things working right. (The reviewer says he had successfully loaded the normal, non-mobile version of gmail on the n95, but he couldn't demonstrate it for the review because he couldn't remember how.)
For me, that just doesn't cut it. Every time you consider pulling out your phone and checking out something on the web, there's a little voice in the back of your head that asks, "Is it worth the effort? Is it going to piss you off and ruin your day if you spend half an hour trying to work around some limitation of the phone and never get to see what you wanted?"
With the iPhone, you don't worry about running into any limitations or needing to clutter up your mind with tricks and techniques for using the browser. You just pull it out and use it. That, for me, is the threshold of acceptability for a web browser.
Socially oriented children and teenagers
Gadgetphiles
No other users get any love. I am flabbergasted that people have considered cell phone web browers as something that was already available before the iPhone. Some people think the web has been available on phones for years. They're insane. Web browsing on phones just barely arrived with the iPhone. The iPhone browsing experience is... decent. Which is REVOLUTIONARY.
Yes, decent is revolutionary. Unfortunately, marketers and tech journalists typically get bored of cell phone features long before they become reasonably usable, and the cell phone companies don't bother putting any work into a feature they can't brag about. Instead they leave it in an barely usable half-baked state and start working on the next feature. Does this make it clear why people have been asking for "just a phone?" We don't want phones bloated with piddly unusable features that only teenagers and gadget freaks can get excited about. Kudos to Apple for polishing a few essential features instead of adding a dozen half-assed bullet points.
Computing power in cell phones is ample these days. It is no longer impressive to pile on application after application. The UI is the limiting feature, and the iPhone simply embarrasses every other phone on the market in that category. I'm too much of a cheapskate to ever buy an iPhone, but I'm looking forward to the effect it will have on cell phone UI design. Maybe in five years I can buy a decent imitation of an iPhone without paying fashion trendoid prices.
The distinction between "UI" and "features" only matters for marketing and bragging rights, not for real users. The iPhone deserves credit for lots of firsts that other companies laid claim to years ago on the basis of features that were so poorly implemented that most users ignored them.
"Surely a burglar wouldn't break into my house and steal my gun collection. There's an army base just a few miles away where he could steal MUCH bigger guns."
The article's claims are absurdly overstated. Sure, some professionals have to travel a lot. Sure, most casual users want a laptop and can't justify the extra cost of a second computer. But what about the vast numbers of professionals and office workers who do most of their work at one location? Screen size, keyboard ergonomics, and body position affect productivity. Even low-wage hourly office workers get 17" LCD monitors these days, because that's the cost-effective thing to do. Laptops with 17" screens are horrendous mistakes; nobody wants to lug them around. They look dorky and make their owners look dorky as they struggle to get them out of the bag and then find room for them on the coffeehouse table.
People who do technical and/or creative jobs have an appetite for screen space that generally exceeds their ability to pay for it. Almost everyone I know who uses a computer professionally has a monitor or pair of monitors that cost more than the rest of their system put together. Nobody is going to equip a laptop with a pair of 20" screens. The only way a laptop can replace a desktop for these workers (who are not a "die-hard" minority) is by being not just a laptop but a fully dual-function machine that also works as a desktop.
And if supply is any indicator, there isn't yet much demand for machines that work that way. Laptop manufacturers simply aren't catering to people who want dual-use machines that are both mobile (light, with screens =15") and desktop-capable (sufficient outputs and graphics card power to handle dual high-resolution displays.) Heck, all the laptops that I've seen that are capable of driving a single 30" 2560x1600 display are 17+ inch monstrosities that would be extremely unpleasant to use without a large desk or table to put them on.
I doubt the people behind the adventure in Iraq are so patriotic. I'm sure the politicians and their advisors justify it to themselves in terms of US oil security, but the powerful people who are in a position to provide incentives to those politicians are interested in profits. What really matters is that a few companies (some of which, like Shell, aren't really American) get to run the oil business in Iraq -- infrastructure, extraction, processing, and sale -- with as little money as possible remaining in Iraq. It doesn't matter where the oil goes after that.
Whatever lowers oil prices (for the entire world) is good for the US (no matter how much it costs us) -- a terrible rationalization for being in bed with the oil lobby.
First, bribery exists in every country. It's impossible to completely criminalize bribery and favoritism. It's a constant struggle between the zeal of reformers and the ingenuity of businessmen. Bribery is also the most egalitarian and economically efficient form of corruption. Any currency in the world can be converted to US dollars, but nothing can replace privileged birth and access to closed social circles.
As for the electoral system, that certainly isn't our forte, but you can have a lot of garbage in the mix and still be number one. Many aspects of our functioning society (as opposed to the bare legal structures) are amazingly good at keeping the peace. American political apathy is famous, as is our failure to degenerate into rioting and internecine warfare despite our "intolerable" levels of inequality. Americans are not actually that much different from other people, and our "oppressed" classes aren't actively repressed. If they felt they were living in intolerable conditions, they could easily arms themselves, disrupt society, and demand changes. Yet this idea has very rarely been pursued by capable, organized people. People all over the world are puzzled by this, or they believe that Americans suffer from a uniquely American form of apathy, or they get paranoid and credit the media or the US government with superhuman powers of control.
In my experience, people who are familiar with India are especially mystified by the United States. India is home to some fascinating and very progressive ideas about race, and Indians are often horrified by the racism they see in the United States. Then they wonder why the United States, with its terribly primitive ideas about race, does not suffer from deadly ethnic riots like India does. It must be social indoctrination into materialistic philosophies and consumeristic values! No, it's the political system. (Yes, and consumerism. And prosperity. It is complicated.) A renewed effort at school desegregation in the US is running into resistance from black neighborhoods, where residents are very happy with the status quo of being granted funding and autonomy. Not bad, eh? When political reformers attempting to help out "powerless" minority groups get plenty of support from the majority, and then find out that it isn't clear how to improve on the status quo, it must be admitted that the political system is not where the problem lies.
To the contrary, there are huge social and cultural problems in the United States, and the political system does a pretty good job of enabling literacy, prosperity, and peaceful coexistence, which are ideal conditions for working on difficult social problems. The only people pessimistic about America's ability to deal with these problems in the long term are those who believe that peaceful coexistence is an impediment to progress. The government can be faulted for not imposing solutions aggressively enough in some cases where federal-level solutions are appropriate, but it does provide citizens with autonomy and resources to devise their own solutions, so they aren't helpless in the face of government inactivity.
Of course, that looks messy and negligent, and meanwhile countries that have never grappled with problems in the first place tut-tut at our messiness. I'm thinking here of the citizens of some of the "enlightened" countries of Scandinavia, who have attitudes (regarding cultural and/or racial superiority) that have proven extremely dangerous in the United States, a multiracial superpower, but which (to all appearances) don't cause major problems in mostly homogeneous nations that have no weight to throw around.
(Footnote: You might think I have to be a conservative to talk this way, but I assure you, I'm not. I just think that in the long run, societies can't afford to disreg
First, he would only be correct if the biologists had memorized the muscles of the cat before needing to know them. Spending an hour memorizing the muscles of a cat would pay off rather quickly if those names were needed for communication, for example when listening to a lecture about feline locomotion, performing a cat autopsy in coordination with other students, or reading a paper about muscle activation. Having simple facts down cold is sometimes a huge advantage that frees your brain up to think about important things. It makes sense to invest in rote memorization to avoid struggling through a particular situtation where specific knowledge is needed.
Second, when the student said, "We know all that already," Feynman could have been going over aspects of anatomy that are common to most mammals. Graduate biology students have read enough papers and been in enough labs to have used those terms hundreds of times. They might have learned those things in a non-rote way.
Third, Feynman was a very fast and talented person, so his optimal balance of knowing things vs. generating knowledge on the fly would have been extremely skewed compared to the normal person.
By that age most people think the world was perfect when they were young and youth culture is the cause of all social problems.
Still, despite the civics classes I had in elementary school and high school, I have a hard time feeling educated when I vote. I try to read every article about local politics I see, but it's like they're written in code. I know what all the words mean, but I don't have a deep understanding of them. I find it much easier to vote on national issues than on local ones. I'm pretty sure that no amount of American effort or manpower can fix Iraq, but I have no idea whether local schools need more money. I have no idea whether property taxes are too high or too low. Sometimes I feel like I should leave voting to people who are better educated, just like the Japanese guy who was quoted.
As I get older, I am starting to figure out why young people have doubts and older adults radiate confidence. As an adult, you get used to faking things, especially things you know you won't be called on to justify. Adults talk as if they have well-grounded opinions about property taxes, school boards, water districts, and so forth, but they're really just repeating things they read or hear. My neighbor seems to know everything about local politics, and he's always enthusiastic about elections. It's intimidating to hear him talk with assurance about local issues. I feel stupid and inadequate, because my understanding of local issues is so vague I can't even articulate it. On the other hand, my neighbor talks with the same assurance about high-performance cars:
Neigbor: "Did you know the 2009 Acura C5X-9000 is going to have neodymium assploditrons? It almost makes it worth it to drive my old 2006 heap another year."
Me: "What the hell is an assploditron?"
Neigbor: "Some cars have assploditrons instead of wickdumpits. Wickdumpits tend to accumulate carbon residue and get bendy. Assploditrons don't have that problem. The neodymium ones will supposedly eliminate bendiness altogether."
Me: "And that improves the efficiency? Or acceleration? Or handling?"
Neigbor: "It improves performance."
Me: "Ah. Performance."
Neigbor: "Yep. You wouldn't believe the difference. You have to experience it."
Me: "So what do assploditrons and wickdumpits do?"
Neigbor: "Well, wickdumpits accumulate carbon residue. Assploditrons don't, especially neodymium ones."
Me: "But what do they do for the car? Why are they there?"
Neigbor: "Ummmmm. I'm not sure. I think they might be part of the drivetrain. Or the injection system."
It's this kind of confident fakery that causes many intelligent people to feel apathetic and inadequate when it comes to voting. Those people should vote. If there's anyone whose votes are needed, it's the people who doubt their own worthiness to vote.
* (I'm a typical American liberal who thinks the United States has the best political system in the world but hates American complacency and keeps obsessive mental lists of things we could do better and foreign examples we could learn from.)
I guess being honest about dicking around would be at least half as good.
That's a pretty simple requirement that only depends on the code structure. I don't work with SQL much myself, but I imagine SQL editors should be able to handle that case automatically. There's no need for one SQL programmer to try to jigger the whitespace in such a way that it's readable to another SQL programmer. Just open the file and tell your editor to indent it in your preferred format. Of course, you're screwed if your diff tool doesn't know how to ignore meaningless whitespace changes.
Yep. Widescreen monitors became popular, and I said, "Cool! Now I can put my apps side-by-side instead of maximizing them."
The web designers said, "Oh shit! We'd better fill up the whole screen with useless junk or we'll look old and unimportant." Damn right you're unimportant. I've stopped visiting several sites that decided they should look about right when maximized on a widescreen monitor and look obnoxiously cramped otherwise.
I'm all in favor of programmers relaxing a bit as memory gets cheaper and processors get faster. That's a productivity win. Web developers filling up my screen with useless junk, apparently for the sole purpose of crowding out any competition for my attention, is a different story. They can count on losing me or (if it's possible) having bits of their pages Adblocked until only the tiny useful part remains. (Yeah, I know, I should learn Javascript and use Greasemonkey.)
Blocks of identically-indented code continue to line up with each other. I suspect what you're asking is, "How do you use indentation to make two code lines that aren't part of the same indented block line up the way you want?" The answer is, you don't. If there is a very basic structural reason for them to be lined up, such as lining up successive lines in a long argument list, then a language-aware editor or IDE can handle it. If there isn't, then the lining-up can't be maintained by other programmers' tools, which means it would be a pain in the ass for other people to keep that special indentation. In such cases you should give up on special formatting rather than create visions of perfection that other people can't maintain.
It's best to write code that doesn't need special formatting to be readable. You should be able to run your code through *any* sufficiently good code formatter or indenter and have it end up readable. If that isn't possible, forget about "fixing" other programmers' fonts and tools; fix the code.
"Ad hoc" means "for a specific purpose." In this context it means the opposite of standard, general-purpose code formatting.