I say I have been doing agile for decades - since the turn of the century at least. But for me, agile means getting working software in front of users as frequently as possible. By working, I mean using some version of TDD and continuous integration to ensure you're not just serving up steaming shit to your users. No mention of user stories, pair programming or daily stand up scrums, which may or may not be appropriate for various circumstances. Agile is all about incremental development, and a conversation between the stakeholder and developer.
This answer is somewhat foreshortened over my previous attempt - for some reason slashdot lost my previous draft when I logged in.
This meant that during the bad days of IE-only websites, I was simply unable to access some websites, which meant frustrating calls to company's or government departments:
Are you using Internet
Yes, of course I'm using the internet
I mean did you click on the blue 'e'
There are many blue links with the letter 'e' - which one did you mean?
The one on the toolbar
What toolbar?
Look I'm using Netscape Navigator if that helps.
Oh, I heard about that one. Why don't you try Internet Explorer?
Yeah, I heard about that, but there isn't a version available for my operating system.
But its available for both PC and Mac.
I don't have access to either - I'm running Slackware...
Eh, what's that.
Linux
What's leenooks??
Never mind - please send me a paper form I can fill in, sign and fax back to you.
What's a fax?
At least with Chrome, I could always use it on Linux for just those rare occasions needed.
The EFF got it right in their report. It is irrelevant whether half the 'net is transported over https, as some other protocol may well displace it and http (eg whatever netflix uses for streaming its movies).
Is it just me,or do other people find Chrome's UI sucks? For example, click on the window title, which normally raises a window, and - nothng happens. Try to resize the window, aqnd it suddenly jumps to full screen mode - even when trying to reduce the size.
I use Chrome when I have to (one of my client's software only works in Chrome and Chrome's development tools are pretty cool). Otherwise, I use Seamonkey, as I can find everything I need. I'll use Firefox when a web site refuses to serve Seamonkey (looking at you Slack), but otherwise the lack of menu items to find things like "Open file", or "open new window" makes it a bit annoying for my main browser. Ya, probably this is me not being used to the Firefox way of doing things, but anyway.
I get good mileage from a NUC. Highly portable performant CPU module. Doesn't have battery option, but for me I'd only use it with power available. Myself, I use a laptop and ethernet cable to vnc into the NUC, however I can sometimes borrow monitors/keyboards, so I usually throw in an HDMI cable into my kitbag.
You already have travel monitor/keyboard worked out so this might be an option for you, so long as you don't mind being tethered to power.
I normally develop on Linux, but need to port my products to MacOSX. That means being able to compile and test on MacOSX, including testing on non-developer MacOSX machines. What I really need are MacOSX virtual machines, just like my Windows virtual machines, for which I'm quite happy to pay good money, just like my Windows virtual machines.
Sadly, Apple make it virtually impossible to set up and run a virtual machine on my main development machine. I've had some success at running Snow Leopard by installing my distribution disk on a Virtual box on an aging Mac mini, booting it, then copying the running but saved Virtual Machine image over to my development machine. Rebooting the computer involves a copy of the system to the mac, reboot, then copy back, with multi GB of data being copied, is not a speedy process. I do a somewhat similar thing with Sierra, after exploiting Hackintosh tools and techniques in order to install Sierra on a Virtual Machine running on the Mac.
It was all incredibly painful, time-consuming and utterly necessary. I would much rather give Apple a few hundred bucks, and spend the time spent farting around Apple's ridiculous restrictions on actual productive work that pays me money. But I can't, because Apple won't.
My smart TV was connected to the internet only during the first months of its operation. The manufacturer did not update any of the apps, and the ones supplied were not interesting. So I have now left the TV unplugged.
So I bought a Chromecast, and plugged it into a spare HDMI socket. So for an extra $50, I had a true smart TV, one that works on WiFi leaving my ethernet cables I pulled through the walls obsolete. Now it looks like I dodged a bullet with respect to this security vulnerability.
Chromecast is not the only option - there's a variety of similar products around. And if one gets dropped by it manufacturer and has a security vulnerability, its simple and cheap to replace with a competing product. No need to lay out big bucks buying another "smart" TV.
We had significant problems with ABC iView a couple fo weeks ago. It would display the leading advertisement, then go into an endless download loop, needing the chromcast to be power cycled. This happen 3-4 times, after which time (half an hour wasted), we gave up trying to watch that episode. Haven't used chromecast since - maybe the A/B testing is our problem?
Hal was an early contributer to the Everything list, set up to discuss the ensemble everything theories of Max Tegmark and others like him.
In particuar the notion of the quantum theory of immortality received a lot of discussion. Hal followed the absolute SSA interpretation, which means he didn't believe in the quantum theory immortality. However, if he's wrong, I hope he didn't stay locked in for long!
It will happen, and usually sooner rather than later.
Problem is that instantly replacing said phone does not teach the right lessons to the kid either.
I first gave my son a mobile phone when he was about 10, when he started at a distant school involving taking public buses to get there. It was an old brick (late '90s nokia), and attached by a string to his schoolbag for the first few years. Even so, he still managed to lose it a couple of times (fortunately we always recovered it, even if it took several weeks).
Now at age 15 he's pretty good about it, so he gets a modern smart phone.
Having worked for one team that had a large, detailed coding standard - 100s of items, references to books that introduced another few 100 items, plus a whole bunch of undocumented standards that get discovered in code review, I can say that even after a year in the place, my coding performance was impacted, and coding reviews spent an enormous amount of time on style things.
In another place I worked at, there was perhaps only a dozen coding style items, every developer had their own style of working, and the crazy thing was it worked. You got used to the other coders' "accents" after a while, and the good thing was you didn't need to think too hard about the coding standard, nor waste much time in reviews.
They seem to be way overestimating the Windows numbers, and underestimating the Mac numbers
For many years, I've seen Windows share (as measured on various websites I own) hover around 70%, with MacOS climbing to around 20%. Linux has been stable in the range 5-10% - the remaining 1-2% is usually classified as "unknown".
My website data may be atypical, but it can't be _that_ atypical.
MSOffice works pretty well under wine. I do use it that way, as the native OS of my laptop is Linux, but one of my customers requires the use of MSOffice (not LibreOffice).
I use a small display (1000x600). Using a virtual desktop gets around this limitation. KDE has workspaces, but this is not as good. The toolbar at the bottom of the screen takes up valuable space. It took me ages to figure out how to turn off the mandatory screen lock (required renaming the kde locker executable so that it couldn't run).
Fvwm2 does all I need, plus runs rings around KDE performance-wise. The only thing it doesn't do (which might be handy), is support multiple screens properly.
Just because one might believe in a Multiverse, doesn't make one not care about the future of one's current self. Your future states are what you should care about, not the other selves in the other universes - they're effectively different people, and because they're outside your causal influence, you should care less about them than people you are in causal contact with.
Still, as other posters have commented, the real reason why (some) physicists are mad, is the seeming giving up on scientific testibility. I think this is wrong - that scientific testibility is possible, in principle and practice, and the ontological benefits of a Mulitverse are worth it. I could recommend David Deutcsh's book "Fabric of Reality" for an excellent discussion, or my own book "Theory of Nothing" (gratutitous plug warning).
The title of this posting is wrong. The original article says that "free programs are not always cheaper".
There are, of course, plenty of situations where this is true: an example might be in the area of digital video editing, where free software is still inferior to turnkey solutions, and requires a lot more effort and patience to set up.
Conversely, there are plenty of situations where the per-seat license of proprietry software is crippling compared with using free software. High performance computing clusters are a classic example of this.
Both of these seemingly contradictory statements satisfy the original article's statement: "free programs are not always cheaper".
To keep a youngster interested and motivated, try Scratch or Alice. These make it really easy to generate some flashy graphics, and do teach real programming concepts. My 10 yo son has done quite a bit of Scratch programming, mostly self-taught.
Alternatively, get him doing Lego robotics. This is a bit more expensive, but loads of fun.
Once they're hooked on programming and computers, that's when they'll have the patience to do "real" programming languages like C++ etc, like we cut our teeth on (actually mine was Pascal, but that just shows how long my teeth are). But not everyone will get to that stage. In the meantime, the experience with Scratch (or Alice) will always be useful, provided they don't develop unrealistic expectations on how easy programming is.
Was I the only one to think of
Thinking Machines Corporation? All the connection machines in Australia (well the CM5 ones anyway) ended up being merged into one big CM5 in Adelaide, and finally turned off in early 2002. I last used it during 2001 to run some legacy code to get a baseline of what it did for a porting project.
I used one old thinkpad as a large display clock (using xclock resized to the entire screen) for my elderly mother-in-law. Trouble is, the machine needed resetting everytime the power went out (batteries were cactus).
After she died, the same machine was repurposed as as a firewall/router/bids-login machine for my home network, until replaced by a $78 job WiFi router from D-Link that did the same think more reliably.
I know where you're coming from. I used twm in its day up until 1996, and made the switch to Fvwm then. The virtual desktop feature is worth having, but I found the workspaces idea in KDE and Gnome not as good (and nonexistent in Windows!), so I've given up for good using these other interfaces. However KDE does seem to be good for your SO.
I have installed fvwm from sources onto other systems (Solaris, Irix and so on), so if it ever disappeared from the distro, I'd still be good to go. But it would be a bit of a pain, so its presence in Slackware keeps me coming back to it.
1. I use features of ps+latex for which pdflatex doesn't work. One has to use latex->dvips->ps2pdf.
Maybe pdflatex can handle encapsulated postscript now, but last time I tried, it didn't.
2. external hyperlinks are not the issue, since there aren't many of those. Its internal references such as links from the table of contents and the index, and \ref{} commands.
3. Its not a question of latex2html not keeping pace. The LaTeX I use hasn't changed since about 1993 (LaTeX2e), its one of the best things about LaTeX is its stability (cf MSWord by comparison!).
I think it is probably due to a bug in LaTeX2HTML. If I was interested enough, I'd get down to some serious perl debugging, but unfortunately I have some many better things to do with my time. There is no guarantee that the HTML output would look acceptable on a Kindle anyway, it was just a 2 minute experiment to see if it might work.
Slashdot Mirror
To be honest, why expect application support at all for these features? These things should be the domain of the OS, not applications.
This answer is somewhat foreshortened over my previous attempt - for some reason slashdot lost my previous draft when I logged in.
At least with Chrome, I could always use it on Linux for just those rare occasions needed.
The EFF got it right in their report. It is irrelevant whether half the 'net is transported over https, as some other protocol may well displace it and http (eg whatever netflix uses for streaming its movies).
I use Chrome when I have to (one of my client's software only works in Chrome and Chrome's development tools are pretty cool). Otherwise, I use Seamonkey, as I can find everything I need. I'll use Firefox when a web site refuses to serve Seamonkey (looking at you Slack), but otherwise the lack of menu items to find things like "Open file", or "open new window" makes it a bit annoying for my main browser. Ya, probably this is me not being used to the Firefox way of doing things, but anyway.
I get good mileage from a NUC. Highly portable performant CPU module. Doesn't have battery option, but for me I'd only use it with power available. Myself, I use a laptop and ethernet cable to vnc into the NUC, however I can sometimes borrow monitors/keyboards, so I usually throw in an HDMI cable into my kitbag. You already have travel monitor/keyboard worked out so this might be an option for you, so long as you don't mind being tethered to power.
Sadly, Apple make it virtually impossible to set up and run a virtual machine on my main development machine. I've had some success at running Snow Leopard by installing my distribution disk on a Virtual box on an aging Mac mini, booting it, then copying the running but saved Virtual Machine image over to my development machine. Rebooting the computer involves a copy of the system to the mac, reboot, then copy back, with multi GB of data being copied, is not a speedy process. I do a somewhat similar thing with Sierra, after exploiting Hackintosh tools and techniques in order to install Sierra on a Virtual Machine running on the Mac.
It was all incredibly painful, time-consuming and utterly necessary. I would much rather give Apple a few hundred bucks, and spend the time spent farting around Apple's ridiculous restrictions on actual productive work that pays me money. But I can't, because Apple won't.
So I bought a Chromecast, and plugged it into a spare HDMI socket. So for an extra $50, I had a true smart TV, one that works on WiFi leaving my ethernet cables I pulled through the walls obsolete. Now it looks like I dodged a bullet with respect to this security vulnerability.
Chromecast is not the only option - there's a variety of similar products around. And if one gets dropped by it manufacturer and has a security vulnerability, its simple and cheap to replace with a competing product. No need to lay out big bucks buying another "smart" TV.
We had significant problems with ABC iView a couple fo weeks ago. It would display the leading advertisement, then go into an endless download loop, needing the chromcast to be power cycled. This happen 3-4 times, after which time (half an hour wasted), we gave up trying to watch that episode. Haven't used chromecast since - maybe the A/B testing is our problem?
In particuar the notion of the quantum theory of immortality received a lot of discussion. Hal followed the absolute SSA interpretation, which means he didn't believe in the quantum theory immortality. However, if he's wrong, I hope he didn't stay locked in for long!
Problem is that instantly replacing said phone does not teach the right lessons to the kid either.
I first gave my son a mobile phone when he was about 10, when he started at a distant school involving taking public buses to get there. It was an old brick (late '90s nokia), and attached by a string to his schoolbag for the first few years. Even so, he still managed to lose it a couple of times (fortunately we always recovered it, even if it took several weeks).
Now at age 15 he's pretty good about it, so he gets a modern smart phone.
In another place I worked at, there was perhaps only a dozen coding style items, every developer had their own style of working, and the crazy thing was it worked. You got used to the other coders' "accents" after a while, and the good thing was you didn't need to think too hard about the coding standard, nor waste much time in reviews.
So yeah - it depends.
Did anyone else think this was just a hole in the data? Or has the island been expunged already on GMaps.
For many years, I've seen Windows share (as measured on various websites I own) hover around 70%, with MacOS climbing to around 20%. Linux has been stable in the range 5-10% - the remaining 1-2% is usually classified as "unknown".
My website data may be atypical, but it can't be _that_ atypical.
MSOffice works pretty well under wine. I do use it that way, as the native OS of my laptop is Linux, but one of my customers requires the use of MSOffice (not LibreOffice).
Its about Bose-Einstein statistics.
Fvwm2 does all I need, plus runs rings around KDE performance-wise. The only thing it doesn't do (which might be handy), is support multiple screens properly.
Before IBM released their PC, these items were called microcomputers...
Still, as other posters have commented, the real reason why (some) physicists are mad, is the seeming giving up on scientific testibility. I think this is wrong - that scientific testibility is possible, in principle and practice, and the ontological benefits of a Mulitverse are worth it. I could recommend David Deutcsh's book "Fabric of Reality" for an excellent discussion, or my own book "Theory of Nothing" (gratutitous plug warning).
There are, of course, plenty of situations where this is true: an example might be in the area of digital video editing, where free software is still inferior to turnkey solutions, and requires a lot more effort and patience to set up.
Conversely, there are plenty of situations where the per-seat license of proprietry software is crippling compared with using free software. High performance computing clusters are a classic example of this.
Both of these seemingly contradictory statements satisfy the original article's statement: "free programs are not always cheaper".
To keep a youngster interested and motivated, try Scratch or Alice. These make it really easy to generate some flashy graphics, and do teach real programming concepts. My 10 yo son has done quite a bit of Scratch programming, mostly self-taught.
Alternatively, get him doing Lego robotics. This is a bit more expensive, but loads of fun.
Once they're hooked on programming and computers, that's when they'll have the patience to do "real" programming languages like C++ etc, like we cut our teeth on (actually mine was Pascal, but that just shows how long my teeth are). But not everyone will get to that stage. In the meantime, the experience with Scratch (or Alice) will always be useful, provided they don't develop unrealistic expectations on how easy programming is.
Was I the only one to think of Thinking Machines Corporation? All the connection machines in Australia (well the CM5 ones anyway) ended up being merged into one big CM5 in Adelaide, and finally turned off in early 2002. I last used it during 2001 to run some legacy code to get a baseline of what it did for a porting project.
I used one old thinkpad as a large display clock (using xclock resized to the entire screen) for my elderly mother-in-law. Trouble is, the machine needed resetting everytime the power went out (batteries were cactus).
After she died, the same machine was repurposed as as a firewall/router/bids-login machine for my home network, until replaced by a $78 job WiFi router from D-Link that did the same think more reliably.
I know where you're coming from. I used twm in its day up until 1996, and made the switch to Fvwm then. The virtual desktop feature is worth having, but I found the workspaces idea in KDE and Gnome not as good (and nonexistent in Windows!), so I've given up for good using these other interfaces. However KDE does seem to be good for your SO.
I have installed fvwm from sources onto other systems (Solaris, Irix and so on), so if it ever disappeared from the distro, I'd still be good to go. But it would be a bit of a pain, so its presence in Slackware keeps me coming back to it.
1. I use features of ps+latex for which pdflatex doesn't work. One has to use latex->dvips->ps2pdf. Maybe pdflatex can handle encapsulated postscript now, but last time I tried, it didn't.
2. external hyperlinks are not the issue, since there aren't many of those. Its internal references such as links from the table of contents and the index, and \ref{} commands.
3. Its not a question of latex2html not keeping pace. The LaTeX I use hasn't changed since about 1993 (LaTeX2e), its one of the best things about LaTeX is its stability (cf MSWord by comparison!).
I think it is probably due to a bug in LaTeX2HTML. If I was interested enough, I'd get down to some serious perl debugging, but unfortunately I have some many better things to do with my time. There is no guarantee that the HTML output would look acceptable on a Kindle anyway, it was just a 2 minute experiment to see if it might work.