However, when you get down to actually typing in itwell, it's not as verbose as Java, but there's some real RSI danger there. With it's simple core come decisions like "not only will we not give you foo++, we won't even give you foo+=1". Try typing things like "frameCounter = frameCounter + 1" many times and you'll start to scream.
Which, for me, immediately raises the question "Are there any good Lua IDEs?". I mainly code in Java, and it's true that it can often read like the Book of Deuteronomy -- but fortunately I don't have to type all that shit out, because NetBeans autocompletes a lot of it for me. Is there anything similar for Lua?
Come on man, its a hobby. When a dude puts together a 1000 piece puzzle you don't pee all over it by claiming you can buy a poster of the same picture and thats a better choice because you don't have to put it together... That kind of misses the point.
Right. So in your analogy Raspberry Pi are selling posters, not jigsaw puzzles. And a bunch of people are complaining that this poster-printing company does not sell a jigsaw puzzle of their poster.
And, to complete the analogy -- if you want a jigsaw puzzle of this particular poster so badly, and none of the other puzzles on the market will do, there's a simple solution: buy the poster, paste it to a board, and chop it up yourself.
A critical detail absent from the summary is that these tweets took place weeks before their trip -- they weren't done at the airport. So whereas previously one could not make a joke at the airport, now one may not make a joke anywhere, anytime.
Thank you; this point seems to be getting missed in this discussion. It's even worse than that, though: as has been repeatedly pointed out, this wasn't a joke; it was simply a figure of speech. So, in fact, not only can you not make a joke, you can't say anything which may be construed by the DHS to have a meaning related to terrorism.
In fact, few sensible Brits would knowingly make a Twitter joke about terrorism, after what happened to Paul Chambers.
This is like calling that guy selling strawberries on the street corner "Safeway's competition." He may have good strawberries, but he's not going to make a dent in Safeway's business. He simply couldn't handle that kind of volume.
Sure, but -- to stretch your analogy a little -- if he gets enough people talking about his strawberries, he might get bought out by another huge business which wants to complete with Safeway, and which does have the resources to scale up whatever it is that makes his strawberries so good.
If you have any interest in politics or world affairs: The Economist. Most news these days is like candyfloss; by comparison, the Economist is like a huge, succulent steak. Don't be fooled by its thinness: it's the only magazine I've ever come across where I actually want to read 90% or more of the articles in each and every issue. There's just a lot less of the fluff, filler, and advertising which pads out many thicker magazines.
A decision to not prosecute does not necessarily mean that a crime was not occurring. It may mean that the evidence is not strong enough to get a conviction worthy of the resources spent on it or that the potential downside of continuing the prosecution (as of a journalist) outweighs the punitive measure against the accused.
It's a fair point -- but in the Wentz-Graff case, the police never stated to her or anyone else what crime she was suspected of. The police seem to be running with "oops, we didn't know she was a journalist", which seems implausible given the clearly visible press card in the photographs of her arrest.
Of course, any one case can be put down to incompetence, but this isn't just one case. The SJS editorial linked from the TFA gives other examples, as well as a fairly measured commentary which takes into account the difficulties faced by police.
I agree with you that the explosion of "citizen journalists" creates a bit of a grey area here, but most of the cases under discussion seem to involve salaried, credentialled, professional journalists and reporters taking pains to advertise their status.
Maybe it is just incompetence all round, but the effect is the same whether or not this is a planned policy: journalists are discouraged from reporting on protests by fear that they will be arrested.
Freedom of the press is about publishing without interference, not about being able to go anywhere one wants.
It was my understanding that the "occupy" protests, in general, have been occurring in public spaces (this is certainly the case in my city). I don't understand why it would be illegal to go to a public space in order to report on a protest happening there.
If you're talking about cases where journalists have committed illegal trespass, then perhaps I could see your point. But I assume that the press freedom rankings are based on arrests of journalists not committing trespass. I'm thinking about people such as Kristyna Wentz-Graff; since she was released without charge, it would appear that she was not committing a crime when she was arrested.
However, I pine for the day when I can just do epublatex document.tex or taggedpdflatex document.tex and get awesome output. I don't want to have to rasterize my graphics either... I just want it to work. It's coming, I'm sure.
Take a look at ConTeXt -- epub support there is far from complete, but seems to be coming along more quickly than it is for LaTeX. epub information on ConTeXt wiki
Every time I read the word "Maker" I hear a distant "ka-ching" from the direction of O'Reilly's corporate HQ.
Also, it makes me think of a guy with a goatee and thick-rimmed glasses hot-gluing cogs to a colander to make a steampunk helmet. ("Workshop" makes me think of places where actual useful stuff happens...)
O'Leary is a master at using trolling for free publicity (see his previous proposals for standing-room-only flights and charging passengers to use the toilet, which as far as I know have not come to pass). This is just more free advertising for Ryanair.
Also I'd love shove the guy who keeps pushing the term "Maker" in a locker.
I'll hold the door for you.
I'll photograph and document the process and write up a 24-part Instructable (later to to be republished in Make magazine) on how to shove irritating twats into lockers.
Plain old water's less of a problem since it will just evaporate over time, and grease is non-conductive -- stout is both more conductive and harder to get out of nooks and crannies, alas. Maybe lots of rinsing and patient drying would have done the trick in my case...
It tasted a bit funny after I'd fished the phone out too.
I miss my old 3310... dropped onto floors, flung across rooms, trodden on, rained on... frequently used as a bottle opener. Nothing bothered it until I accidentally dropped it into a pint of stout. Not even a 3310 will stand for that. I know people still using theirs after ten years.
My replacement 1110 is OK, but it's too rounded to open bottles.
Fuck yeah, someone gets it. I'd wager that most of the critics do not spend their lives on the road. If you mostly stay in the same place, you create your own comfort zone: food, sleep schedule, the people you hang out with, every aspect of your daily routine. And of course you take it for granted after a while.
If, as with RMS, your life consists to a significant extent of travelling to strange cities to give speeches to hundreds of strangers at a time, you really don't have much of a comfort zone -- even the bed you sleep in and the food you eat are alien. And interacting with large numbers of strangers is tiring for most of us. Obviously you want to try to streamline the whole process a bit in advance, and maybe expand your mobile comfort zone a few inches... two cans of Pepsi isn't exactly prima-donna territory.
And the "political" riders -- "don't call it Linux" etc. -- anyone is free to take issue with those, but you'd be daft to claim they were born of some "prima-donna mentality" rather than the fact that RMS is an uncompromising political firebrand with very strongly held views.
FFS, he travels economy and brings his own teabags...
Thank you, you beat me to it. I know that Hiroshimas are the standard unit of explosive force, but it's nice to state TNT equivalent just in case there happen to be any nerds reading this site.
This is far worse for The Register itself. It has - quite rightly - been a prominent critic of companies or organisations who fail to protect personal data. And now - even though the breach is at the lowest end of the severity scale - it's gone and done it itself. Fairly or not (and it's probably not, since I doubt it was one of the actual writers who was responsible for this), their own credibility is tarnished.
Back when I read The Reg, they seemed to use humorous self-deprecation to deflect any and all criticism (slightly like Private Eye or Mad Magazine). This was back when Wikipedia was relatively new and controversial, and there would regularly be exchanges along the lines of:
Reg article: "'Pediaphile makes mistake in article, proves Wikipedia is shit and wiki-fiddlers are all cocks". Reader email: "But the Reg is full of factual errors..." Reg response: "Yeah hurr hurr we're just a bunch of boozy old hacks in it for shits and giggles, what did you think we were a proper news site you big spastic?"
At which point I started wondering why the hell I was reading a website which was neither informative nor entertaining. Still, the Sun is the UK's most popular newspaper with no support from me, and I'm sure El Reg are doing very well without my eyeballs too.
In other words, there should be 100,000+ people on Slashdot who could write a University-grade paper on everything the original poster asked.
But even assuming you're right, that leaves 10,000,000+ who know bugger-all about it but might nevertheless post an answer; from the fact that he asked in the first place, we can assume that the questioner will have trouble distinguishing the two.
To the OP: as the proud recipient of an A grade in A-level physics, I'd advise wrapping the baby in aluminium foil, and re-aligning the gutter to improve the flow of chi energy into your washing machine.
Hmm. According to that reference, the term "bubbled up as popular item of student jargon in the early 1950s", which seems to imply that it didn't exist before 1950 rather than that it had long currency before that. And, again, it doesn't cite any primary references.
Still, I'm sure that if the MIT sense was in use before the TMRC, some enterprising geek will eventually find an occurrence on Google Books sooner or later. I searched Popular Mechanics back to 1905 (you'd think that they'd be using it if anyone was!) but drew a blank.
You misunderstand. I don't want to see more people on the Internet claiming "hacker originally meant people who disassembled their appliances, long before computers were invented". I know there are plenty of people claiming that, not least on Slashdot, but I've never seen any evidence. I was asking for a reference to an actual primary source published before 1950 using that sense of "hacker". Google Books makes this kind of research a lot easier than it used to be, but personally I've had no luck turning up any early references to the MIT sense of "hacker".
The term "hacker" was coined long before computers... The term referred to the activities of people who were curious about the inner workings of devices and not satisfied with assuming a device was functioning to its full potential because a manufacturer told them so.
Can you show me a usage of the word "hacker" in your sense from before, let's say, 1950?
Of course you're right that the term "hacker" existed before computers; it's just that the various meanings were related to lumber and agriculture rather than opening toasters, as far as I'm aware.
Slashdot Mirror
However, when you get down to actually typing in itwell, it's not as verbose as Java, but there's some real RSI danger there. With it's simple core come decisions like "not only will we not give you foo++, we won't even give you foo+=1". Try typing things like "frameCounter = frameCounter + 1" many times and you'll start to scream.
Which, for me, immediately raises the question "Are there any good Lua IDEs?". I mainly code in Java, and it's true that it can often read like the Book of Deuteronomy -- but fortunately I don't have to type all that shit out, because NetBeans autocompletes a lot of it for me. Is there anything similar for Lua?
Come on man, its a hobby. When a dude puts together a 1000 piece puzzle you don't pee all over it by claiming you can buy a poster of the same picture and thats a better choice because you don't have to put it together... That kind of misses the point.
Right. So in your analogy Raspberry Pi are selling posters, not jigsaw puzzles. And a bunch of people are complaining that this poster-printing company does not sell a jigsaw puzzle of their poster.
And, to complete the analogy -- if you want a jigsaw puzzle of this particular poster so badly, and none of the other puzzles on the market will do, there's a simple solution: buy the poster, paste it to a board, and chop it up yourself.
A critical detail absent from the summary is that these tweets took place weeks before their trip -- they weren't done at the airport. So whereas previously one could not make a joke at the airport, now one may not make a joke anywhere, anytime.
Thank you; this point seems to be getting missed in this discussion. It's even worse than that, though: as has been repeatedly pointed out, this wasn't a joke; it was simply a figure of speech. So, in fact, not only can you not make a joke, you can't say anything which may be construed by the DHS to have a meaning related to terrorism.
In fact, few sensible Brits would knowingly make a Twitter joke about terrorism, after what happened to Paul Chambers.
This is like calling that guy selling strawberries on the street corner "Safeway's competition." He may have good strawberries, but he's not going to make a dent in Safeway's business. He simply couldn't handle that kind of volume.
Sure, but -- to stretch your analogy a little -- if he gets enough people talking about his strawberries, he might get bought out by another huge business which wants to complete with Safeway, and which does have the resources to scale up whatever it is that makes his strawberries so good.
If you have any interest in politics or world affairs: The Economist. Most news these days is like candyfloss; by comparison, the Economist is like a huge, succulent steak. Don't be fooled by its thinness: it's the only magazine I've ever come across where I actually want to read 90% or more of the articles in each and every issue. There's just a lot less of the fluff, filler, and advertising which pads out many thicker magazines.
A decision to not prosecute does not necessarily mean that a crime was not occurring. It may mean that the evidence is not strong enough to get a conviction worthy of the resources spent on it or that the potential downside of continuing the prosecution (as of a journalist) outweighs the punitive measure against the accused.
It's a fair point -- but in the Wentz-Graff case, the police never stated to her or anyone else what crime she was suspected of. The police seem to be running with "oops, we didn't know she was a journalist", which seems implausible given the clearly visible press card in the photographs of her arrest.
Of course, any one case can be put down to incompetence, but this isn't just one case. The SJS editorial linked from the TFA gives other examples, as well as a fairly measured commentary which takes into account the difficulties faced by police.
I agree with you that the explosion of "citizen journalists" creates a bit of a grey area here, but most of the cases under discussion seem to involve salaried, credentialled, professional journalists and reporters taking pains to advertise their status.
Maybe it is just incompetence all round, but the effect is the same whether or not this is a planned policy: journalists are discouraged from reporting on protests by fear that they will be arrested.
Freedom of the press is about publishing without interference, not about being able to go anywhere one wants.
It was my understanding that the "occupy" protests, in general, have been occurring in public spaces (this is certainly the case in my city). I don't understand why it would be illegal to go to a public space in order to report on a protest happening there.
If you're talking about cases where journalists have committed illegal trespass, then perhaps I could see your point. But I assume that the press freedom rankings are based on arrests of journalists not committing trespass. I'm thinking about people such as Kristyna Wentz-Graff; since she was released without charge, it would appear that she was not committing a crime when she was arrested.
However, I pine for the day when I can just do epublatex document.tex or taggedpdflatex document.tex and get awesome output. I don't want to have to rasterize my graphics either... I just want it to work. It's coming, I'm sure.
Take a look at ConTeXt -- epub support there is far from complete, but seems to be coming along more quickly than it is for LaTeX. epub information on ConTeXt wiki
Every time I read the word "Maker" I hear a distant "ka-ching" from the direction of O'Reilly's corporate HQ.
Also, it makes me think of a guy with a goatee and thick-rimmed glasses hot-gluing cogs to a colander to make a steampunk helmet. ("Workshop" makes me think of places where actual useful stuff happens...)
linux.xxx -- release early, release often
O'Leary is a master at using trolling for free publicity (see his previous proposals for standing-room-only flights and charging passengers to use the toilet, which as far as I know have not come to pass). This is just more free advertising for Ryanair.
Also I'd love shove the guy who keeps pushing the term "Maker" in a locker.
I'll hold the door for you.
I'll photograph and document the process and write up a 24-part Instructable (later to to be republished in Make magazine) on how to shove irritating twats into lockers.
Plain old water's less of a problem since it will just evaporate over time, and grease is non-conductive -- stout is both more conductive and harder to get out of nooks and crannies, alas. Maybe lots of rinsing and patient drying would have done the trick in my case...
It tasted a bit funny after I'd fished the phone out too.
I miss my old 3310... dropped onto floors, flung across rooms, trodden on, rained on... frequently used as a bottle opener. Nothing bothered it until I accidentally dropped it into a pint of stout. Not even a 3310 will stand for that. I know people still using theirs after ten years.
My replacement 1110 is OK, but it's too rounded to open bottles.
Good thing people never put their phones in their pockets, where they will twist in an uncontrolled an accidental way.
So why couldn't a lock feature work for a bending UI, as it does for buttons and touchscreens?
Fuck yeah, someone gets it. I'd wager that most of the critics do not spend their lives on the road. If you mostly stay in the same place, you create your own comfort zone: food, sleep schedule, the people you hang out with, every aspect of your daily routine. And of course you take it for granted after a while.
If, as with RMS, your life consists to a significant extent of travelling to strange cities to give speeches to hundreds of strangers at a time, you really don't have much of a comfort zone -- even the bed you sleep in and the food you eat are alien. And interacting with large numbers of strangers is tiring for most of us. Obviously you want to try to streamline the whole process a bit in advance, and maybe expand your mobile comfort zone a few inches... two cans of Pepsi isn't exactly prima-donna territory.
And the "political" riders -- "don't call it Linux" etc. -- anyone is free to take issue with those, but you'd be daft to claim they were born of some "prima-donna mentality" rather than the fact that RMS is an uncompromising political firebrand with very strongly held views.
FFS, he travels economy and brings his own teabags...
I'm going to go out on a limb and say this guy just might be a power user.
Did you elbow your way into this thread just so you could be humerus?
Thank you, you beat me to it. I know that Hiroshimas are the standard unit of explosive force, but it's nice to state TNT equivalent just in case there happen to be any nerds reading this site.
This is far worse for The Register itself. It has - quite rightly - been a prominent critic of companies or organisations who fail to protect personal data. And now - even though the breach is at the lowest end of the severity scale - it's gone and done it itself. Fairly or not (and it's probably not, since I doubt it was one of the actual writers who was responsible for this), their own credibility is tarnished.
Back when I read The Reg, they seemed to use humorous self-deprecation to deflect any and all criticism (slightly like Private Eye or Mad Magazine). This was back when Wikipedia was relatively new and controversial, and there would regularly be exchanges along the lines of:
Reg article: "'Pediaphile makes mistake in article, proves Wikipedia is shit and wiki-fiddlers are all cocks".
Reader email: "But the Reg is full of factual errors..."
Reg response: "Yeah hurr hurr we're just a bunch of boozy old hacks in it for shits and giggles, what did you think we were a proper news site you big spastic?"
At which point I started wondering why the hell I was reading a website which was neither informative nor entertaining. Still, the Sun is the UK's most popular newspaper with no support from me, and I'm sure El Reg are doing very well without my eyeballs too.
In other words, there should be 100,000+ people on Slashdot who could write a University-grade paper on everything the original poster asked.
But even assuming you're right, that leaves 10,000,000+ who know bugger-all about it but might nevertheless post an answer; from the fact that he asked in the first place, we can assume that the questioner will have trouble distinguishing the two.
To the OP: as the proud recipient of an A grade in A-level physics, I'd advise wrapping the baby in aluminium foil, and re-aligning the gutter to improve the flow of chi energy into your washing machine.
Here you are: On the effect of a new grand minimum of solar activity on the future climate on Earth, published in Geophysical Research Letters.
Are we not coming off a solar activity peak?
Nope. In fact, solar activity has been declining for most of the last decade and we are just starting to come out of the trough, but it looks as though this cycle will be much quieter than the previous one.
Hmm. According to that reference, the term "bubbled up as popular item of student jargon in the early 1950s", which seems to imply that it didn't exist before 1950 rather than that it had long currency before that. And, again, it doesn't cite any primary references.
Still, I'm sure that if the MIT sense was in use before the TMRC, some enterprising geek will eventually find an occurrence on Google Books sooner or later. I searched Popular Mechanics back to 1905 (you'd think that they'd be using it if anyone was!) but drew a blank.
http://tmrc.mit.edu/hackers-ref.html
You misunderstand. I don't want to see more people on the Internet claiming "hacker originally meant people who disassembled their appliances, long before computers were invented". I know there are plenty of people claiming that, not least on Slashdot, but I've never seen any evidence. I was asking for a reference to an actual primary source published before 1950 using that sense of "hacker". Google Books makes this kind of research a lot easier than it used to be, but personally I've had no luck turning up any early references to the MIT sense of "hacker".
The term "hacker" was coined long before computers... The term referred to the activities of people who were curious about the inner workings of devices and not satisfied with assuming a device was functioning to its full potential because a manufacturer told them so.
Can you show me a usage of the word "hacker" in your sense from before, let's say, 1950?
Of course you're right that the term "hacker" existed before computers; it's just that the various meanings were related to lumber and agriculture rather than opening toasters, as far as I'm aware.
I'd be delighted to be corrected, though.