Well... thanks for the careful response. I guess I don't think Slashdot is a place to learn anything -- nonspecific online technical fora are flame-scorched wastelands -- but I'll try to be civil.
I missed your other example, which is not clichéd like with-foo. However, it doesn't require macros in a non-broken language:
sub copy_fields { my ($x, $y) = splice @_, 0, 2; $x->$_($y->$_) for @_; }
Similarly, with-foo is usually written with a lambda rather than with macros in Scheme. Don't get me wrong -- I think macros are cool and useful. What I'm saying is that most examples fall into one of a few categories, and these are often well-served by other mechanisms (lambdas) or special syntax (decorators). Uses of macros that don't have non-trivial macro-free alternatives are harder to think of.
Thank you for demonstrating one pathetic thing about "OMG MACROS" advocates: the way they always trot out the same "with-foo" example. Yeah, it's a minor syntactic improvement over try/finally, but can't you think of something else?
Matlab syntax is weird, but sometimes you are forced to work with other people who may be using Matlab.
This is the point, which the OP completely missed: In some fields, many useful algorithms are implemented in Matlab, so you need something like Matlab to run them. Plus, Python's just not that great, especially as an array language.
Octave is a great piece of software, but it has been going downhill for awhile. It used to be that you could make nice plots via gnuplot commands, but for some reason the project leaders insist on sabotaging this feature.
I meant the Carbon Emacs Package. And as for castrations... yeah, mostly the one-buffer-one-frame thing. My typical Emacs session has 40+ buffers open, and having 40 windows is just stupid. But Aquamacs also has some weird annoying mode-based color themes, and stores its preferences in some unusual semi-Apple way rather than just loading.emacs. Overall, it seems to be one of those Emacs mods that silently tweaks things all over, breaking the customization you've lovingly built up over years.
If you want an Emacs that acts like Emacs, get one of the Emacs snapshots off of Apple's site. Aquamacs has a few nice features, but mostly it just has a bunch of braindead customizations that are supposed to make it fit into the Mac environment better, and actually just castrate it.
is the way yahoo has started asking for data on their login page. "What's your zipcode?" "When do you next plan to buy a new car?" "Thanks for your input!" I guess it's no worse than the forms you get when you renew a magazine subscription, but still...
I must have missed something, because both players appeared to have two-handed interfaces (buttons on both sides of the screen). Sure, two hands is fine for a gameboy, but try jogging with both hands clutching your mp3 player.
No kidding. I made the mistake of downloading the theme song, and I think it will now be impossible to get it out of my head. Whenever I need an answering service or elevator, I'll come right to KPMG.
From what I understand, there's absolutely no way for journaling to buy you anything for mostly static data. So it comes down to luck and the fs's ability to cluster data. I am guessing that a filesystem that's been around for awhile would do better at this than a brand new one because it has had more time to be tuned, but I could be wrong about this (e.g. Reiser vs. flat directories when you have lots of files in one dir.).
Another way to look at it is "disks are cheap and Linux has software RAID".
"Can't we consider this a FAQ and refuse to answer it?" Heh. It seems like a more appropriate response to point him to an actual "FAQ" (i.e. a document discussing the advantages and disadvantages of various Linux filesystems). I'm sure several such things exist, though since ext2 is good enough for me, I don't know where to find one.
Why journal? He's serving content, so the filesystem will be mostly read-only. He's presumably not doing anything mission-critical, so an extra 10-minute fsck on (hopefully infrequent) reboots is not a big deal; if the system's staying up for ~100 days at a time, this is almost a total non-issue.
(or extract the code from those X drivers that are Open Source)
...which is precisely what they're doing -- releasing a 1.0 on top of XFree, then taking its drivers for 2.0. It's about 2/3 of the way through the article.
NewsForge exists in large part because of advertiser demand for a "serious" Linux and Open Source news site that would appeal to people who have the power to sign purchase orders,
I hadn't looked at newsforge before, but it looked identical to slashdot except for different colors, fewer posts, and more (obtrusive) ads. And it looks like we're losing that last one soon.
Subscribers get better comment filtering functionality (e.g. I want to only see posts that have been moderated up even if it's from 0 to +1).
This would just be valuable, period. I read at +3 so that everything I see is at least good enough to be modded up by one. This has the unfortunate side-effect of making it next to impossible to see anything posted by an AC or without a bonus (like this...), since it would have to get 3 mods. Switching down to +2 to try to see more detail means putting up with a bunch of "me, too" posts by regulars and karma whores that entered the system at +2.
The best solution would probably be to just get rid of karma-based posting bonuses entirely, and rely only on moderation for scores. Regular posters would probably effectively get a bonus anyways, since looking at the author is a faster (lazier) way to moderate than actually reading the content of a post. And moderators should be browsing at 0 or -1, so it's not like this would make moderation more work than it is now. Reputation-based bonuses are annoying enough already.
(end rant)
/s
Re:When will Mozilla Innovate?
on
Mozilla 0.9.5
·
· Score: 1
how about a rendering engine that works so well that it not only renders the markup, but the entire UI.
If I were writing a web browser, this would be an interesting innovation that would perhaps make my life easier.
which also makes the entire application not only easily themeable, but also extensible
If I were screwing around with my desktop appearance, I would love the themability.
However, neither of these things changes my experience of browsing the web, which is what (in theory) the web browser is supposed to do. Gestures and tabs (apparently the running examples of "innovation") both make my browsing experience qualitatively different.
I'll grant that the extensibility may result in some innovation in the future, but that's in the hands of the people who write the plugins/modules/etc. -- simply having the possibility there does not make mozilla "innovative". And I would guess that the vast majority of extensions will not be innovative, but will simply reinvent one wheel or another (i.e. gestures, mozcalc, mozoffice).
Banner ads worsen the user experience; print ads do not.
I wouldn't be so charitable to the print ads, e.g.:
That annoying half-page they wrap around your comics on Sunday.
The nine or so pages of pure advertisement before the table of contents in most free tabloids.
The phone-sex ads near the last part of the movie and entertainment section in the same.
I find all of these things to lower the quality of my paper-reading experience. It seems that a lot of people here are remembering some print utopia that may never have been, and exaggerating the number of sites that have the incredibly annoying ads (e.g. pop-under, onClose). With the notable exception of yahoo, none of the sites I use regularly resorts to anything more annoying than the high ad ratio in the free SF Reporter.
> If I, upon legitimately obtaining copyrighted
> material, screw around with it, I'm not breaking
> the law unless I give a copy of it or the
> modified version to someone else.
So this would mean that if you run a blocking proxy, you can't let other people use it?
I think the original poster's point was that there are many needs which could be met by $100M even _without_ any innovative changes to the educational system. For example, that money could pad teachers' salaries and provide new textbooks and facilities in districts which can't afford these things. Existing initiatives, though they may not be perfect, could benefit greatly from more funding.
"Top postal officials expect that any Internet-based ventures will require partnerships with the private sector in order to succeed. They have met with a number of companies, including America Online."
At that point, for the majority of Americans, what communications channel would not be owned by AOL? Head over here for the rest.
Slashdot Mirror
As an automaton yourself, what rights do you think our constitution grants to humanoid robots?
I missed your other example, which is not clichéd like with-foo. However, it doesn't require macros in a non-broken language:
Similarly, with-foo is usually written with a lambda rather than with macros in Scheme. Don't get me wrong -- I think macros are cool and useful. What I'm saying is that most examples fall into one of a few categories, and these are often well-served by other mechanisms (lambdas) or special syntax (decorators). Uses of macros that don't have non-trivial macro-free alternatives are harder to think of.Thank you for demonstrating one pathetic thing about "OMG MACROS" advocates: the way they always trot out the same "with-foo" example. Yeah, it's a minor syntactic improvement over try/finally, but can't you think of something else?
Octave is a great piece of software, but it has been going downhill for awhile. It used to be that you could make nice plots via gnuplot commands, but for some reason the project leaders insist on sabotaging this feature.
I meant the Carbon Emacs Package. And as for castrations... yeah, mostly the one-buffer-one-frame thing. My typical Emacs session has 40+ buffers open, and having 40 windows is just stupid. But Aquamacs also has some weird annoying mode-based color themes, and stores its preferences in some unusual semi-Apple way rather than just loading .emacs. Overall, it seems to be one of those Emacs mods that silently tweaks things all over, breaking the customization you've lovingly built up over years.
If you want an Emacs that acts like Emacs, get one of the Emacs snapshots off of Apple's site. Aquamacs has a few nice features, but mostly it just has a bunch of braindead customizations that are supposed to make it fit into the Mac environment better, and actually just castrate it.
is the way yahoo has started asking for data on their login page. "What's your zipcode?" "When do you next plan to buy a new car?" "Thanks for your input!" I guess it's no worse than the forms you get when you renew a magazine subscription, but still...
/s
"...the interface will be better as well"
I must have missed something, because both players appeared to have two-handed interfaces (buttons on both sides of the screen). Sure, two hands is fine for a gameboy, but try jogging with both hands clutching your mp3 player.
No kidding. I made the mistake of downloading the theme song, and I think it will now be impossible to get it out of my head. Whenever I need an answering service or elevator, I'll come right to KPMG.
/s
From what I understand, there's absolutely no way for journaling to buy you anything for mostly static data. So it comes down to luck and the fs's ability to cluster data. I am guessing that a filesystem that's been around for awhile would do better at this than a brand new one because it has had more time to be tuned, but I could be wrong about this (e.g. Reiser vs. flat directories when you have lots of files in one dir.).
Another way to look at it is "disks are cheap and Linux has software RAID".
/s
/s
Moderators: why is this rated "insightful"?
/s
Sheesh,
/s
I hadn't looked at newsforge before, but it looked identical to slashdot except for different colors, fewer posts, and more (obtrusive) ads. And it looks like we're losing that last one soon.
/s
This would just be valuable, period. I read at +3 so that everything I see is at least good enough to be modded up by one. This has the unfortunate side-effect of making it next to impossible to see anything posted by an AC or without a bonus (like this...), since it would have to get 3 mods. Switching down to +2 to try to see more detail means putting up with a bunch of "me, too" posts by regulars and karma whores that entered the system at +2.
The best solution would probably be to just get rid of karma-based posting bonuses entirely, and rely only on moderation for scores. Regular posters would probably effectively get a bonus anyways, since looking at the author is a faster (lazier) way to moderate than actually reading the content of a post. And moderators should be browsing at 0 or -1, so it's not like this would make moderation more work than it is now. Reputation-based bonuses are annoying enough already.
(end rant)
/s
However, neither of these things changes my experience of browsing the web, which is what (in theory) the web browser is supposed to do. Gestures and tabs (apparently the running examples of "innovation") both make my browsing experience qualitatively different.
I'll grant that the extensibility may result in some innovation in the future, but that's in the hands of the people who write the plugins/modules/etc. -- simply having the possibility there does not make mozilla "innovative". And I would guess that the vast majority of extensions will not be innovative, but will simply reinvent one wheel or another (i.e. gestures, mozcalc, mozoffice).
I wouldn't be so charitable to the print ads, e.g.:
I find all of these things to lower the quality of my paper-reading experience. It seems that a lot of people here are remembering some print utopia that may never have been, and exaggerating the number of sites that have the incredibly annoying ads (e.g. pop-under, onClose). With the notable exception of yahoo, none of the sites I use regularly resorts to anything more annoying than the high ad ratio in the free SF Reporter.
/s
> If I, upon legitimately obtaining copyrighted
> material, screw around with it, I'm not breaking
> the law unless I give a copy of it or the
> modified version to someone else.
So this would mean that if you run a blocking proxy, you can't let other people use it?
/s
I think the original poster's point was that there are many needs which could be met by $100M even _without_ any innovative changes to the educational system. For example, that money could pad teachers' salaries and provide new textbooks and facilities in districts which can't afford these things. Existing initiatives, though they may not be perfect, could benefit greatly from more funding.
"Top postal officials expect that any Internet-based ventures will require partnerships with the private sector in order to succeed. They have met with a number of companies, including America Online."
At that point, for the majority of Americans, what communications channel would not be owned by AOL? Head over here for the rest.