Over the past year I've (for the first time) used Mac OS X on my laptop, I find it much less useful, and frankly much less user friendly, than Gnome 3 (and even Gnome 3 hides too much information because it assumes its users are technophobes).
One can understand Microsoft and Apple designing user interfaces primarily for technophobes, because in the modern world the majority of their users are people for whom the full power of a computer system is too complex for them to understand, much less use; and, seeing that they have in effect a duopoly, the fact that their more technically able users are not well served by their user interfaces doesn't matter, because there aren't enough of us to be a significant market, and most of us will be told what to use at work in any case.
But I really don't understand the Gnome designers' reasons for hiding so much, for making even moderately technical things so awkward. In practice, almost everyone who chooses to use Gnome is a geek. Having said that, if it really annoyed me I could either switch to something else or get under the hood and modify it, and I don't.
For me, Gnome 3 works with niggles. MacOs X is really annoying, but I can use it. Windows 7 is tolerable. Windows 10? Just let's not go there.
Seriously, there is a limit to the width of a column of text that it's comfortable to read, so for continuous text on large screen there may be reasons for having large amounts of whitespace. And, again, for continuous text, having a proportion of white space around the text is easier on the eyes. There can be good ergonomic reasons for using significant whitespace in design.
Good responsive design is hard; to have the same page layout on a two inch wide mobile phone screen as on a 24 inch monitor, and have it attractive and easy to work with on both requires a great deal of thought, and often some compromise. Making the compromises at the small end of the range doesn't work because on a very small screen pages that are not well adapted are completely unusuable, whereas if you make the compromise at the big end of the range you end up with a page that looks ugly but still works.
But the challenge of responsive design is to respond to a wide range of screen sizes and be functional and elegant on all. It's a significant challenge, and too many designers design to one fixed size or a small range of fixed sizes.
If it's true that the passwords have been harvested by malware which uploads the victim's browser's password cache, then this is not just Twitter. It's every site you use. The lesson, if you create websites which require authentication, outsource the authentication function to OpenID providers who have three factor authentication (e.g. Google) - or implement three factor authentication infrastructure yourself, which is not trivial.
... which was about as expensive twenty years ago, when I bought it, as an Apple Watch is now.
Every four years, it needs its battery changed. And that's all.
'Smart' watches are a bit like DAB radio, or, in their day, WAP phones. They're not horrendously expensive, but the user experience is just so much worse than the technology it replaces that no-one's going to buy it. I don't want to take my watch off and recharge it every night. And there is no 'killer app' that I've seen so far that is better on a wrist display than on your phone.
The Pebble, with its low energy monochrome display, is probably a better device than the Apple, but all this generation of 'smart' watches are bulky, ugly, made of non-premium materials, and will have short life; and they're competing on price against beautifully made precision mechanical watches which do the primary job (time keeping) equally well but are built to last a lifetime and require very infrequent attention.
There may be better fourth or fifth generation smart watches in about five years time which compete on quality and charge duration; there may, one day, be a killer app. But at present I see no compelling reason to buy.
It downloads unknown executable code from the Internet, and then executes it. Fortunately the Internet is a very safe place on which no-one would ever dream of posting malicious code.
The nature of mobile devices is that the data connection is of varying quality and reliability, and in some places either slow, intermittent, or non-existent. Relying on apps in the cloud means that your device is fundamentally a brick whenever you go into an underpass or a basement or into mountains and forests. Of course, if you live your whole life in urban areas this may not matter, but for many people it does.
Not that this is a criticism of Cortana, or of Microsoft. Google's and Apple's voice services are cloud-backed as well. But for 'the network is the computer' to work, the network has to be ubiquitous and immanent, and for mobile devices it isn't.
What happens to your 'standard' linked lists solution when you have ten values scattered over an array which is 1000! (factorial 1000) in each dimension?
For most genuinely sparse arrays, a hashmap is a better approximation of an efficient implementation. Of course, there will be corner cases where you want to do something different, but linked lists strike me as an extremely poor solution except in arrays where more than about 10% of cells have data.
I should have read the linked questions before replying...
Stupid, stupid, STUPID! Why have numRows and numCols in a sparse array? Things with unnecessary, arbitrary bounds annoy me. My implementation of Conway's Game of Life runs on a sparse array precisely because that allows the world to stretch arbitrarily in any direction a glider goes, limited only by the capacity of the bignum library and the total store available to the program.
Sparse array entries, in general, are not necessarily immutable, although they may be so in this case. Most spreadsheets are implemented as sparse arrays, for example. But your point about the benefit of a map is well made.
Close to where I live are large intertidal mudflats. Every other summer some tourist drives a brand new four by four out there and gets stuck. And then, of course, the tide comes in. When the vehicles are recovered two or three tides later, they are insurance write-offs - the electrics, interior, and engine are all beyond repair.
You do not want to immerse something complex and expensive in salt water unless you really, really have to.
One of those occasions where I wish I had mod points but don't. Mod the parent post up!
Seawater is extremely corrosive. Engineering the rocket engine to survive sudden immersion in seawater when very hot would add a great deal to the complexity and cost (and probably weight). And that's before you add the cost of engineering the rest of the vehicle to resist corrosion.
The reason English is is widely spoken around the world is not just that England had a long period of aggressive expansionism. It's also because English is an extremely flexible and expressive language, with a rich literature - literally millions of texts, many tens of thousands of which are fine works of art. Of course, this is true of many other well-established natural languages, from Farsi to Mandarin. But it isn't, and cannot be, true of any new artificial language.
I'd guess it would take any artificial language at least a thousand years of hard use by millions of people before it could become a contender to supplant a natural language, and by that time it would have mutated into a natural language.
As an extremely experienced and decidedly wrinkly developer, I don't give a shit provided it's consistent. I tend to use tabs myself (yes, on UN*X), but if I'm modifying a file written by someone who preferred spaces, I'll use spaces.
Either you're good at your job (and if you've been doing it for twenty-five+ years you almost certainly are), or you're not. If you're good and experienced, you won't have any troubled getting an interesting job at a high salary. In my present employment, I was specifically recruited to mentor (and teach software engineering discipline to) a group of good but inexperienced junior developers.
When I was starting out in this game, thirty years ago, the person who fulfilled the role I now have in the team I was then working in was Chris Burton, who, as an apprentice, worked on the build of the Manchester Mark One, and who (after his retirement) led the rebuild of it. He was one of the best software people I've ever worked with, and he was already in his sixties when I met him.
Nothing breaks immersion so much as the player character being killed. Suddenly you're jerked out of your game world and you're just a sad individual sitting in front of a computer again. It is epic fail for anyone who's trying to build a world in which players are expected to become immersed to allow the player character to be killed.
This isn't to say I think there shouldn't be setbacks, and that they shouldn't be severe. Of course they should. You get beaten in a boss battle and you should expect to lose all your accumulated weapons, armour, loot. You should expect to be left for dead, and have to crawl until you can find herbs, salves, bandages or aid. It could even leave you with permanent scarring or disabilities which make future battles a bit harder to fight, or have an impact on what endgames are available to you. It should be an outcome which motivates you highly not to lose the next battle. If a non-player-character companion is killed in a battle, their death should be permanent, no matter how important they are to the plot. But you should not die.
If you die, it isn't you who have failed. It's the designer.
Five square metres of solar panel on every single domestic roof in the USA would produce a very significant energy change. 125 million houses * 5Kw is 625 gigawatts. Germany has 23 gigawatts of domestic solar panels, which, on a sunny day, is sufficient to power the whole country. Yes, obviously, it doesn't work twenty-four hours a day, or in bad weather. Yes, obviously, you need to find some way of storing energy, such as compressed air, hydrogen hydrolysis, pumped storage or whatever. None of this is rocket science.
Bottom line: the USA could power its whole economy, including road vehicles, on domestic solar panels alone.
I don't have a Rolex. In fact, I actually had to look to discover that it's a Tissot. It's been on my wrist for getting on for thirty years, and I have no doubt at all that it will go on 'til the end of my life without any problems. If, when I die, one of my heirs decides they want it, it will go on 'til the end of their lives, too. It needs a new battery once every three years or so, and it needs the date reset at the end of every month with fewer than thirty-one days, and, err, that's it. It tells the time. It just works. And I don't have to think about it.
If I amortised it over the time years I've had it already, it's cost me about £15 a year; if I amortise it over the time it's likely to be useful, that drops to about £4 a year. By contrast, a 'smart' watch - any smart watch, I'm not making a dig at Apple - will be obsolete in three years, so that's about £100 for each year you own it, or £2 a week. And I'd have to take it off every night to charge it, or if I forgot it would run out of battery just when I needed it most.
A reasonable quality mechanical watch is a very long way from obsolete; and, despite their price, they are very, very inexpensive to own, because you're only ever going to need one.
My current laptop, an ASUS ZenBook, is dying because it has a damaged power input port - the motherboard is cracked, and it is becoming increasingly unreliable. In the past year, two tablets in my household have died because the micro-USB ports which serve as their power connectors had ceased to work - presumably due to wear. And now Apple are bringing out a new laptop with just one port which is technically similar to a USB connector. How durable is it? How will it stand up to knocks and accidental falls? If that port fails, the machine is dead - and replacement of the port inevitably means soldering the motherboard, which is skilled and consequently expensive work.
The nature of a laptop which is used on the move is that it has a hard life. The Apple MagSafe connector is a brilliant design because it is not susceptible to wear and relatively invulnerable to knocks, trips and falls. I had already made up my mind that my next laptop would be a MacBook, simply because of the MagSafe connector. So I'm aghast at the decision to abandon it. It seems perverse!
It actually doesn't matter whether it's man made or not. If our cities and our farmland are going to be flooded and rendered unusable, we have to respond. Climate change could be 100% down to aliens from the Planet Bolg, and we'd still have to take action. Pretending it isn't happening, or claiming it's not our fault, is not adult behaviour.
Are we all going to die from it? No, so quit making it seem scary.
The overwhelming majority of our grandchildren and great-grandchildren are going to die - not directly of global warming, but of the war, pestilence, famine and general destruction which will ensue when coastal cities flood, the area of agricultural land (much of which, globally, is also low lying) reduces, and the temperate bands move towards the poles.
Not everyone will die, no. And probably the big die-off won't happen in the lifetime of anyone now alive. But if we don't halt global warming soon, the population of the Earth is going to fall very sharply, probably by an order of magnitude.
Solar works effectively every day of the year in Scotland, which is a lot cloudier and a lot further north than Florida. It's simply inconceivable that it doesn't work a whole lot better in Florida.
Slashdot Mirror
Agree.
Over the past year I've (for the first time) used Mac OS X on my laptop, I find it much less useful, and frankly much less user friendly, than Gnome 3 (and even Gnome 3 hides too much information because it assumes its users are technophobes).
One can understand Microsoft and Apple designing user interfaces primarily for technophobes, because in the modern world the majority of their users are people for whom the full power of a computer system is too complex for them to understand, much less use; and, seeing that they have in effect a duopoly, the fact that their more technically able users are not well served by their user interfaces doesn't matter, because there aren't enough of us to be a significant market, and most of us will be told what to use at work in any case.
But I really don't understand the Gnome designers' reasons for hiding so much, for making even moderately technical things so awkward. In practice, almost everyone who chooses to use Gnome is a geek. Having said that, if it really annoyed me I could either switch to something else or get under the hood and modify it, and I don't.
For me, Gnome 3 works with niggles. MacOs X is really annoying, but I can use it. Windows 7 is tolerable. Windows 10? Just let's not go there.
Then it's poor responsive design.
Seriously, there is a limit to the width of a column of text that it's comfortable to read, so for continuous text on large screen there may be reasons for having large amounts of whitespace. And, again, for continuous text, having a proportion of white space around the text is easier on the eyes. There can be good ergonomic reasons for using significant whitespace in design.
Good responsive design is hard; to have the same page layout on a two inch wide mobile phone screen as on a 24 inch monitor, and have it attractive and easy to work with on both requires a great deal of thought, and often some compromise. Making the compromises at the small end of the range doesn't work because on a very small screen pages that are not well adapted are completely unusuable, whereas if you make the compromise at the big end of the range you end up with a page that looks ugly but still works.
But the challenge of responsive design is to respond to a wide range of screen sizes and be functional and elegant on all. It's a significant challenge, and too many designers design to one fixed size or a small range of fixed sizes.
If it's true that the passwords have been harvested by malware which uploads the victim's browser's password cache, then this is not just Twitter. It's every site you use. The lesson, if you create websites which require authentication, outsource the authentication function to OpenID providers who have three factor authentication (e.g. Google) - or implement three factor authentication infrastructure yourself, which is not trivial.
It had been sitting on the bookshelf since before Christmas; I picked it up at the weekend and pressed the menu button and... still working.
I don't actually use it much!
... which was about as expensive twenty years ago, when I bought it, as an Apple Watch is now.
Every four years, it needs its battery changed. And that's all.
'Smart' watches are a bit like DAB radio, or, in their day, WAP phones. They're not horrendously expensive, but the user experience is just so much worse than the technology it replaces that no-one's going to buy it. I don't want to take my watch off and recharge it every night. And there is no 'killer app' that I've seen so far that is better on a wrist display than on your phone.
The Pebble, with its low energy monochrome display, is probably a better device than the Apple, but all this generation of 'smart' watches are bulky, ugly, made of non-premium materials, and will have short life; and they're competing on price against beautifully made precision mechanical watches which do the primary job (time keeping) equally well but are built to last a lifetime and require very infrequent attention.
There may be better fourth or fifth generation smart watches in about five years time which compete on quality and charge duration; there may, one day, be a killer app. But at present I see no compelling reason to buy.
It downloads unknown executable code from the Internet, and then executes it. Fortunately the Internet is a very safe place on which no-one would ever dream of posting malicious code.
The nature of mobile devices is that the data connection is of varying quality and reliability, and in some places either slow, intermittent, or non-existent. Relying on apps in the cloud means that your device is fundamentally a brick whenever you go into an underpass or a basement or into mountains and forests. Of course, if you live your whole life in urban areas this may not matter, but for many people it does. Not that this is a criticism of Cortana, or of Microsoft. Google's and Apple's voice services are cloud-backed as well. But for 'the network is the computer' to work, the network has to be ubiquitous and immanent, and for mobile devices it isn't.
What happens to your 'standard' linked lists solution when you have ten values scattered over an array which is 1000! (factorial 1000) in each dimension? For most genuinely sparse arrays, a hashmap is a better approximation of an efficient implementation. Of course, there will be corner cases where you want to do something different, but linked lists strike me as an extremely poor solution except in arrays where more than about 10% of cells have data.
I should have read the linked questions before replying...
Stupid, stupid, STUPID! Why have numRows and numCols in a sparse array? Things with unnecessary, arbitrary bounds annoy me. My implementation of Conway's Game of Life runs on a sparse array precisely because that allows the world to stretch arbitrarily in any direction a glider goes, limited only by the capacity of the bignum library and the total store available to the program.
And this is how we teach computer science?
Sigh.
Sparse array entries, in general, are not necessarily immutable, although they may be so in this case. Most spreadsheets are implemented as sparse arrays, for example. But your point about the benefit of a map is well made.
Sometimes, on Slashdot, it's impossible to tell irony from stupidity.
Close to where I live are large intertidal mudflats. Every other summer some tourist drives a brand new four by four out there and gets stuck. And then, of course, the tide comes in. When the vehicles are recovered two or three tides later, they are insurance write-offs - the electrics, interior, and engine are all beyond repair.
You do not want to immerse something complex and expensive in salt water unless you really, really have to.
Remember: seawater ruins everything.
One of those occasions where I wish I had mod points but don't. Mod the parent post up!
Seawater is extremely corrosive. Engineering the rocket engine to survive sudden immersion in seawater when very hot would add a great deal to the complexity and cost (and probably weight). And that's before you add the cost of engineering the rest of the vehicle to resist corrosion.
The reason English is is widely spoken around the world is not just that England had a long period of aggressive expansionism. It's also because English is an extremely flexible and expressive language, with a rich literature - literally millions of texts, many tens of thousands of which are fine works of art. Of course, this is true of many other well-established natural languages, from Farsi to Mandarin. But it isn't, and cannot be, true of any new artificial language.
I'd guess it would take any artificial language at least a thousand years of hard use by millions of people before it could become a contender to supplant a natural language, and by that time it would have mutated into a natural language.
As an extremely experienced and decidedly wrinkly developer, I don't give a shit provided it's consistent. I tend to use tabs myself (yes, on UN*X), but if I'm modifying a file written by someone who preferred spaces, I'll use spaces.
I turn 60 this year. And your problem is?
Either you're good at your job (and if you've been doing it for twenty-five+ years you almost certainly are), or you're not. If you're good and experienced, you won't have any troubled getting an interesting job at a high salary. In my present employment, I was specifically recruited to mentor (and teach software engineering discipline to) a group of good but inexperienced junior developers.
When I was starting out in this game, thirty years ago, the person who fulfilled the role I now have in the team I was then working in was Chris Burton, who, as an apprentice, worked on the build of the Manchester Mark One, and who (after his retirement) led the rebuild of it. He was one of the best software people I've ever worked with, and he was already in his sixties when I met him.
Nothing breaks immersion so much as the player character being killed. Suddenly you're jerked out of your game world and you're just a sad individual sitting in front of a computer again. It is epic fail for anyone who's trying to build a world in which players are expected to become immersed to allow the player character to be killed.
This isn't to say I think there shouldn't be setbacks, and that they shouldn't be severe. Of course they should. You get beaten in a boss battle and you should expect to lose all your accumulated weapons, armour, loot. You should expect to be left for dead, and have to crawl until you can find herbs, salves, bandages or aid. It could even leave you with permanent scarring or disabilities which make future battles a bit harder to fight, or have an impact on what endgames are available to you. It should be an outcome which motivates you highly not to lose the next battle. If a non-player-character companion is killed in a battle, their death should be permanent, no matter how important they are to the plot. But you should not die.
If you die, it isn't you who have failed. It's the designer.
It could take on water or rock/gravel/sand/quarry spoil as ballast, so that isn't necessarily a very serious limitation.
On this subject, a realtime (with historical replay) display of domestic solar generation in Germany. It's pretty impressive.
Five square metres of solar panel on every single domestic roof in the USA would produce a very significant energy change. 125 million houses * 5Kw is 625 gigawatts. Germany has 23 gigawatts of domestic solar panels, which, on a sunny day, is sufficient to power the whole country. Yes, obviously, it doesn't work twenty-four hours a day, or in bad weather. Yes, obviously, you need to find some way of storing energy, such as compressed air, hydrogen hydrolysis, pumped storage or whatever. None of this is rocket science.
Bottom line: the USA could power its whole economy, including road vehicles, on domestic solar panels alone.
I don't have a Rolex. In fact, I actually had to look to discover that it's a Tissot. It's been on my wrist for getting on for thirty years, and I have no doubt at all that it will go on 'til the end of my life without any problems. If, when I die, one of my heirs decides they want it, it will go on 'til the end of their lives, too. It needs a new battery once every three years or so, and it needs the date reset at the end of every month with fewer than thirty-one days, and, err, that's it. It tells the time. It just works. And I don't have to think about it.
If I amortised it over the time years I've had it already, it's cost me about £15 a year; if I amortise it over the time it's likely to be useful, that drops to about £4 a year. By contrast, a 'smart' watch - any smart watch, I'm not making a dig at Apple - will be obsolete in three years, so that's about £100 for each year you own it, or £2 a week. And I'd have to take it off every night to charge it, or if I forgot it would run out of battery just when I needed it most.
A reasonable quality mechanical watch is a very long way from obsolete; and, despite their price, they are very, very inexpensive to own, because you're only ever going to need one.
My current laptop, an ASUS ZenBook, is dying because it has a damaged power input port - the motherboard is cracked, and it is becoming increasingly unreliable. In the past year, two tablets in my household have died because the micro-USB ports which serve as their power connectors had ceased to work - presumably due to wear. And now Apple are bringing out a new laptop with just one port which is technically similar to a USB connector. How durable is it? How will it stand up to knocks and accidental falls? If that port fails, the machine is dead - and replacement of the port inevitably means soldering the motherboard, which is skilled and consequently expensive work.
The nature of a laptop which is used on the move is that it has a hard life. The Apple MagSafe connector is a brilliant design because it is not susceptible to wear and relatively invulnerable to knocks, trips and falls. I had already made up my mind that my next laptop would be a MacBook, simply because of the MagSafe connector. So I'm aghast at the decision to abandon it. It seems perverse!
It actually doesn't matter whether it's man made or not. If our cities and our farmland are going to be flooded and rendered unusable, we have to respond. Climate change could be 100% down to aliens from the Planet Bolg, and we'd still have to take action. Pretending it isn't happening, or claiming it's not our fault, is not adult behaviour.
Are we all going to die from it? No, so quit making it seem scary.
The overwhelming majority of our grandchildren and great-grandchildren are going to die - not directly of global warming, but of the war, pestilence, famine and general destruction which will ensue when coastal cities flood, the area of agricultural land (much of which, globally, is also low lying) reduces, and the temperate bands move towards the poles.
Not everyone will die, no. And probably the big die-off won't happen in the lifetime of anyone now alive. But if we don't halt global warming soon, the population of the Earth is going to fall very sharply, probably by an order of magnitude.
Solar works effectively every day of the year in Scotland, which is a lot cloudier and a lot further north than Florida. It's simply inconceivable that it doesn't work a whole lot better in Florida.