I wouldn't say the most productive language, but it's certainly the most productive language at that level. Higher-level languages like Python will always beat lower-level languages like Objective-C for productivity.
I find that practically everybody who talks about how awful Objective-C is has turned their nose up at it without trying to use it for any substantial period of time. Yes, it can look weird and verbose when you first start using it, but once you catch on to the patterns, it's a very pleasant language to use. It also helps that the system frameworks are really well designed. It's verbose, sure, but it's also very regular and self-documenting too.
I used Android phones exclusively from 2008-2012, and the one thing that they all seemed to have in common was that IO blocked the UI, making for an incredibly sluggish experience. Got an application installing in the background? Well get ready for a multiple-second delay for touches.
It's all very well talking about the specs, but I've used phones with good specs before that have felt like some of the slowest phones I've ever seen because of factors other than raw horsepower.
What's the actual value (not market value, actual value) of BlackBerry? What are they going to get for that ~$5bn? It seems to me BlackBerry aren't competitive in the handset market any more and don't stand any chance of becoming so any time soon. They are pushing BBM for other platforms now, are they trying to pivot and become a messaging company? Again, I don't see how they are competitive or how they will make money.
However, a video on inBloom's Web site suggesting what this techno-utopia might look like may give readers of 1984 some pause. In one scene, a teacher with a tablet crouches next to a second-grader evaluating how many words per minute he can read: 55 words read; 43 correctly.
Since when is the idea of a teacher evaluating a student's abilities an Orwellian concept? Or does it magically become Orwellian just because a tablet is involved?
Of course the idea is inherently flawed. It is based on the premise that the reason these kids in these poorly performing schools are not learning is because they don't have access to electronic devices and that if they do have access to electronic devices, like the richer kids, they will perform better. The flaws in this premise are so obvious that only a Marxist/socialist progressive can't see them.
I read all four articles this submission linked to and none of them mentioned this as the motive for the programme. As far as I can tell, it's something you have made up; a straw-man you constructed just so you could knock it down. Can you offer a source that indicates this is their motivation?
There is no benefit to this other than to be able to claim that the school districts new and modern.
What's your basis for this claim? Do you actually know this or are you guessing?
There's lots of reasons why distributing learning materials electronically has advantages. I shouldn't really need to spell them out on Slashdot. And tablets - particularly iPads - are about as friendly to non-computer users as you can get.
Now, there may be some very good reasons why this particular rollout was flawed, but the idea of distributing tablets to kids is not inherently flawed. Do you have details on why this particular rollout was flawed?
So FTP (ftp:) and Email (mailto:) and Gopher (gopher:) are all the WWW?
Anything with a URI is on the WWW.
The WWW is the service that uses hyperlinks and URLs (which point away from the WWW).
URIs do not point away from the WWW, they reference resources on the WWW. Anything with a URI is part of the WWW, a URI pointing "away" from the WWW doesn't make sense. By giving something a URI, you are incorporating it into the WWW.
Since I can't follow a hyperlink from my POTS phone, it's not part of the WWW.
No, it just means that it's a leaf node. You can't follow a hyperlink from a JPEG image, does that mean that there are no JPEG images on the WWW?
Even Berners-Lee described it as a service running on the internet.
The Web is a universal information space. It is a space in the sense that things in it have an address. The "addresses", "names", or as we call them here identifiers, are the subject of this article. They are called Universal Resource Identifiers (URIs).
An information object is "on the web" if it has a URI.
Of course. It's a tautology - the WWW is the WWW. That doesn't contradict anything I said and I'm not sure what you think you are pointing out.
tel URLs may be part of 'the web' in the sense that you may put tel:-links in your web pages -- but that doesn't make tel: or ftp: or telnet: or gopher: whatever other protocol identifier you may have "the web".
Anything addressable by URI is part of the web. All of those things are leaf nodes in the information space that is the web.
By listing those things, it sounds like you are thinking that the WWW is HTTP. The WWW is not a protocol. It's an abstract information space. This is the misconception I was trying to clear up in my earlier comment. HTTP is not the defining technical aspect of the web - URIs are, and URIs are not limited to HTTP.
The Web was invented at Cern, not the Internet - the Internet has been around long before then.
I know this. This doesn't contradict anything I said. The fact that something predates the web does not mean that the web cannot encompass it. Would you say that The Colosseum isn't in Italy because it existed before Italy?
I really don't think you understood what I was trying to explain. The WWW is an information space that describes a web of interconnected resources. Just because something is older than the web or just because it uses a particular protocol that isn't HTTP, it doesn't mean it can't be an entity in that information space. Read Architecture of the World Wide Web for more information on this.
This is a common misconception. The WWW is not merely stuff transmitted over TCP port 80 on the Internet. It's an information space that has the ability to use the Internet as a transport mechanism. It's not a subset of the Internet, it's a higher level abstraction than the Internet.
Anything addressable by URI is a node in the WWW. For instance, POTS telephone numbers are leaf nodes because you can address them with tel:. They are on the WWW but they aren't on the Internet. Something can be on the WWW and not on the Internet and vice-versa.
Would the iPhone 5C exist if Android wasn't around?
Yes, of course it would. The 5C is essentially an iPhone 5 with a slightly bigger battery and different case. It's been a long-standing strategy for Apple to retain the previous year's model, so it's not something unusual that needs explaining by pressure from Android. The only real change is the new branding, and the colours have precedents with iPods and iMacs. I don't see anything that's a direct response to Android as opposed to Apple doing what Apple have always done.
Are you under the impression that the 5C is a budget model intended to compete with the low-end Android phones? Those were the rumours a couple of months ago, but the rumours were wrong.
Linux games that run well across multiple distributions have been out since when, the original Unreal Tournament? Perhaps even earlier? I'm talking about commercial games of course, if you go to the free software offerings the list gets larger.
Slightly earlier. There's two companies in particular that really gave a boost to commercial games on Linux - iD Software and Loki Software. It always seemed to be a bit of a hobby with iD, but Loki made their bread and butter porting games like Civ:CTP and they developed a cross-distro installer/updater they used for all of their games.
The UK Official Secrets Act applies to all British subjects
This is not true. There are some parts that only apply to government workers, and there are some parts that apply to everybody, regardless of nationality.
Also, practically nobody is a British subject these days, and this has been the case for over 30 years. People with british nationality are British citizens, not subjects. British subjects are a different category and there's hardly anybody in that category. It's mostly just a historical technicality that the category even exists.
You missed my point. Just because you can see that some multitasking occurs, it doesn't mean that apps can't be killed in the background and then restarted transparently to the end user.
Look at what I was responding to:
I am never certain my apps have not exited in the background and will launch from scratch
Even if you can show a composited screen with some of your apps running at the same time, it doesn't mean that when you close that view, some of them aren't killed, or that others that aren't visible aren't being killed.
This is a practice that desktop operating systems are moving towards for efficiency reasons. There are clear gains to be had here for mobile operating systems, and it's reasonable to assume that any mainstream mobile OS does this to some extent.
Yet generally, I do not seem to suffer from bad battery life or memory management issues on my N9 compared to the Android phones I have. Could it be that running closer to the silicon with C, C++ and Qt apps compared to Android's virtual machine compensates for some of that putative running-in-the-background inefficiency?
Possibly. Or it may simply be the case that the apps on your Nokia phone are exiting in the background and you just aren't aware of it. I'm not familiar with the way apps running on your N9 work in this respect, but I'm an iOS developer, and I've lost count of the number of iOS users I've talked to who think that apps are running just because they appear in the app list when you double tap the home button. You can make quitting and restarting pretty seamless on iOS, the only perceptible difference from a user's perspective in most cases is a slight delay. There's no reason your Nokia couldn't be doing the same.
On Android and iOS, apart from the fact that it is much slower to switch between apps, I am never certain my apps have not exited in the background and will launch from scratch and you have to jump some serious UI hoops if you actually want to force an app to restart.
Alternative viewpoint: If apps are constantly running in the background, they are using up resources, and if you feel the need to force apps to restart, there's something wrong with them.
So Elop left Microsoft to head up Nokia, where he made supposedly very idiotic changes that had the effect of destroying Nokia's share price. Microsoft then buys Nokia at a fraction of the cost it would otherwise have been, and Elop returns to a prestigious role at Microsoft, where he's in with a shot at the CEO role.
It has been reported that it accesses/ect/password
Contrary to popular assumptions,/etc/passwd doesn't contain any passwords these days. What it does contain is a mapping of UIDs to usernames. This means that even such benign utilities such as ls access/etc/passwd. That's how ls -l can show you usernames instead of UIDs. Skype can't get your passwords from/etc/passwd and there are some very ordinary reasons for it to be accessing/etc/passwd.
The point you were trying to make is that links being important is actually something that came later, and you tried to argue this point by saying you read his early work and blogs and it wasn't mentioned.
I am pointing out that it was a central theme right from day one. It was mentioned in his thesis published in 2000, and it's also ludicrous once you recognise the fact that REST is a description of the architecture of the WWW, which clearly revolves around links. It's not plausible that you could ever understand REST but not understand how important links are to it.
You didn't read his work. You admit you didn't read his thesis, and although you claim you read blogs by him at the time (2004 or so), he didn't start blogging until 2008. You are now citing some webpage you found by googling REST, but you conveniently don't mention which one, why it would contradict the things we know he has been saying from 2000 onwards, or why you think reading some webpage you found with Google counts as actually reading the relevant material.
REST has a precise definition that includes linking, just as "Java" has a precise definition that is distinct from "JavaScript", despite a lot of people misunderstanding that. You say that words change, but you are helping to cause the change whenever you mislabel something as REST, so to hold your hands up to say that you can't do anything about it rings as hollow as your claims to have read the material at the time.
Slashdot Mirror
Give the editors a break, they miss JonKatz.
I wouldn't say the most productive language, but it's certainly the most productive language at that level. Higher-level languages like Python will always beat lower-level languages like Objective-C for productivity.
I find that practically everybody who talks about how awful Objective-C is has turned their nose up at it without trying to use it for any substantial period of time. Yes, it can look weird and verbose when you first start using it, but once you catch on to the patterns, it's a very pleasant language to use. It also helps that the system frameworks are really well designed. It's verbose, sure, but it's also very regular and self-documenting too.
I used Android phones exclusively from 2008-2012, and the one thing that they all seemed to have in common was that IO blocked the UI, making for an incredibly sluggish experience. Got an application installing in the background? Well get ready for a multiple-second delay for touches.
It's all very well talking about the specs, but I've used phones with good specs before that have felt like some of the slowest phones I've ever seen because of factors other than raw horsepower.
What's the actual value (not market value, actual value) of BlackBerry? What are they going to get for that ~$5bn? It seems to me BlackBerry aren't competitive in the handset market any more and don't stand any chance of becoming so any time soon. They are pushing BBM for other platforms now, are they trying to pivot and become a messaging company? Again, I don't see how they are competitive or how they will make money.
Since when is the idea of a teacher evaluating a student's abilities an Orwellian concept? Or does it magically become Orwellian just because a tablet is involved?
It's not just a problem for small screens - I'm on a 27" screen and more than half of the screen width is just blank space.
This redesign looks like a shitty Wordpress theme. Get a good, experienced designer please.
No, don't dodge my question. You said:
Saying that they cost $800 and are fragile does not support this claim. Do you have a basis for this claim or are you just making things up?
I read all four articles this submission linked to and none of them mentioned this as the motive for the programme. As far as I can tell, it's something you have made up; a straw-man you constructed just so you could knock it down. Can you offer a source that indicates this is their motivation?
What's your basis for this claim? Do you actually know this or are you guessing?
There's lots of reasons why distributing learning materials electronically has advantages. I shouldn't really need to spell them out on Slashdot. And tablets - particularly iPads - are about as friendly to non-computer users as you can get.
Now, there may be some very good reasons why this particular rollout was flawed, but the idea of distributing tablets to kids is not inherently flawed. Do you have details on why this particular rollout was flawed?
Anything with a URI is on the WWW.
URIs do not point away from the WWW, they reference resources on the WWW. Anything with a URI is part of the WWW, a URI pointing "away" from the WWW doesn't make sense. By giving something a URI, you are incorporating it into the WWW.
No, it just means that it's a leaf node. You can't follow a hyperlink from a JPEG image, does that mean that there are no JPEG images on the WWW?
Go read Architecture of the World Wide Web , which was part-authored by Tim Berners-Lee. Or read some of his earlier work that this document was based upon, for instance Universal Resource Identifiers -- Axioms of Web Architecture , where he writes:
Of course. It's a tautology - the WWW is the WWW. That doesn't contradict anything I said and I'm not sure what you think you are pointing out.
Anything addressable by URI is part of the web. All of those things are leaf nodes in the information space that is the web.
By listing those things, it sounds like you are thinking that the WWW is HTTP. The WWW is not a protocol. It's an abstract information space. This is the misconception I was trying to clear up in my earlier comment. HTTP is not the defining technical aspect of the web - URIs are, and URIs are not limited to HTTP.
I know this. This doesn't contradict anything I said. The fact that something predates the web does not mean that the web cannot encompass it. Would you say that The Colosseum isn't in Italy because it existed before Italy?
I really don't think you understood what I was trying to explain. The WWW is an information space that describes a web of interconnected resources. Just because something is older than the web or just because it uses a particular protocol that isn't HTTP, it doesn't mean it can't be an entity in that information space. Read Architecture of the World Wide Web for more information on this.
This is a common misconception. The WWW is not merely stuff transmitted over TCP port 80 on the Internet. It's an information space that has the ability to use the Internet as a transport mechanism. It's not a subset of the Internet, it's a higher level abstraction than the Internet.
Anything addressable by URI is a node in the WWW. For instance, POTS telephone numbers are leaf nodes because you can address them with tel:. They are on the WWW but they aren't on the Internet. Something can be on the WWW and not on the Internet and vice-versa.
Yes, of course it would. The 5C is essentially an iPhone 5 with a slightly bigger battery and different case. It's been a long-standing strategy for Apple to retain the previous year's model, so it's not something unusual that needs explaining by pressure from Android. The only real change is the new branding, and the colours have precedents with iPods and iMacs. I don't see anything that's a direct response to Android as opposed to Apple doing what Apple have always done.
Are you under the impression that the 5C is a budget model intended to compete with the low-end Android phones? Those were the rumours a couple of months ago, but the rumours were wrong.
Slightly earlier. There's two companies in particular that really gave a boost to commercial games on Linux - iD Software and Loki Software. It always seemed to be a bit of a hobby with iD, but Loki made their bread and butter porting games like Civ:CTP and they developed a cross-distro installer/updater they used for all of their games.
That's a bit complicated isn't it? I know in a lot of versions, you could just hit escape and you'd be dumped onto the desktop.
I'm pretty sure it did. Visual voicemail for instance. Or a proper web browser.
This is not true. There are some parts that only apply to government workers, and there are some parts that apply to everybody, regardless of nationality.
Also, practically nobody is a British subject these days, and this has been the case for over 30 years. People with british nationality are British citizens, not subjects. British subjects are a different category and there's hardly anybody in that category. It's mostly just a historical technicality that the category even exists.
You missed my point. Just because you can see that some multitasking occurs, it doesn't mean that apps can't be killed in the background and then restarted transparently to the end user.
Look at what I was responding to:
Even if you can show a composited screen with some of your apps running at the same time, it doesn't mean that when you close that view, some of them aren't killed, or that others that aren't visible aren't being killed.
This is a practice that desktop operating systems are moving towards for efficiency reasons. There are clear gains to be had here for mobile operating systems, and it's reasonable to assume that any mainstream mobile OS does this to some extent.
Possibly. Or it may simply be the case that the apps on your Nokia phone are exiting in the background and you just aren't aware of it. I'm not familiar with the way apps running on your N9 work in this respect, but I'm an iOS developer, and I've lost count of the number of iOS users I've talked to who think that apps are running just because they appear in the app list when you double tap the home button. You can make quitting and restarting pretty seamless on iOS, the only perceptible difference from a user's perspective in most cases is a slight delay. There's no reason your Nokia couldn't be doing the same.
Alternative viewpoint: If apps are constantly running in the background, they are using up resources, and if you feel the need to force apps to restart, there's something wrong with them.
So Elop left Microsoft to head up Nokia, where he made supposedly very idiotic changes that had the effect of destroying Nokia's share price. Microsoft then buys Nokia at a fraction of the cost it would otherwise have been, and Elop returns to a prestigious role at Microsoft, where he's in with a shot at the CEO role.
That doesn't look the slightest bit dodgy at all.
"Wreckless" and "reckless" are two entirely different things. You can't be reckless and stay wreckless for long.
There are no private schools in Finland. Turns out, when you make the kids of the rich and powerful go to the same schools as everybody else, those schools turn out to be decent. Here's an article on how Finland outperforms the USA in education.
Contrary to popular assumptions, /etc/passwd doesn't contain any passwords these days. What it does contain is a mapping of UIDs to usernames. This means that even such benign utilities such as ls access /etc/passwd. That's how ls -l can show you usernames instead of UIDs. Skype can't get your passwords from /etc/passwd and there are some very ordinary reasons for it to be accessing /etc/passwd.
The point you were trying to make is that links being important is actually something that came later, and you tried to argue this point by saying you read his early work and blogs and it wasn't mentioned.
I am pointing out that it was a central theme right from day one. It was mentioned in his thesis published in 2000, and it's also ludicrous once you recognise the fact that REST is a description of the architecture of the WWW, which clearly revolves around links. It's not plausible that you could ever understand REST but not understand how important links are to it.
You didn't read his work. You admit you didn't read his thesis, and although you claim you read blogs by him at the time (2004 or so), he didn't start blogging until 2008. You are now citing some webpage you found by googling REST, but you conveniently don't mention which one, why it would contradict the things we know he has been saying from 2000 onwards, or why you think reading some webpage you found with Google counts as actually reading the relevant material.
REST has a precise definition that includes linking, just as "Java" has a precise definition that is distinct from "JavaScript", despite a lot of people misunderstanding that. You say that words change, but you are helping to cause the change whenever you mislabel something as REST, so to hold your hands up to say that you can't do anything about it rings as hollow as your claims to have read the material at the time.