Thanks for the contrarian perspective. Sure, there's the pain of dealing with drivers and settings and tweaks with Windows, even with Win7, but it's certainly not any worse than getting Linux to work.
I don't mean to nitpick, but that is one thing I don't find to be true.
Comparing W7 install to Linux Mint, Mint won by landslide on my laptop.
Disregarding the horrorshow of a partition layout from the manufacturer that I had to fix, the mint install was much, much faster and easier, with full support from the get-go.
The drivers thing really is an important point, and even when my Windows install was fully completed, the fact I had to cope with the horrible ASUS shell to use keyboard functions has caused me to not even boot W7 for months.
I use arch on my other machines, and naturally that is a whole other story I wouldn't even dare tell a less tech-savvy person.
> What if the nightmare imagined by George Orwell in 1984 were real? What if you had to live in a country where radio dials were fixed to a single government station? Where the surroundings were entirely black-and-white except for the red lettering of the propaganda signs? Where you were required to keep a large portrait of the president on your living room wall and bow to it on national holidays?
This sounds like an incredible read. I just ordered a copy from Amazon. Thanks for the recommendation!
What if the nightmare imagined by George Orwell in 1984 were real?
In the absence or near-absence of Facebook and email and internet browsing and private cars and smart phones, I suspect (in fact I'm certain) that North Koreans have far more privacy from their government than we Americans do.
As the author of this post points out, there have been about twenty releases since Perl 5.6, when the book was published. Features like the "switch" and "state" keywords have been introduced. If you look away too quickly, another database interface crops up, or people are doing objects differently. Perl changes so often that writing about it is like trapping a unicorn.
It's impressive that users of a 25-year-old language are not afraid to improve upon it (with the caveat that it stays backwards compatible). But since I started using $OTHER_LANGUAGE I don't have to worry about keeping up to date because language features change twice a decade.
That's a terrible straw man. Everything changes. Javascript is morphing into this weird "Coffee" thing before our eyes. Python pushed a completely new language and is currently supporting two of them. Even python 2.6 looks absolutely nothing like 2.0. People fled whole-hog from perl and python to ruby (another hardly static language) a few years ago, and most of those same people are now retraining their brains on that JavaCoffee thing I mentioned.
C++? Yeah, brand new version out with whole new metaphors (An... rvalue reference?! And what is that -> operator doing there?).
If you want compatibility, you have it. 15 year old perl scripts run fine on 5.14. If you want the community to not invent new stuff... dig yourself a hole I guess.
Perl changes so often that writing about it is like trapping a unicorn.
Not really. I document things with staying power. For example, I documented only the parts of smart match that are easy to explain. Everything else is up for debate, and thus not really worth recommending. (Besides, I'm not trying to replace the documentation.)
Yes, I'm so happy that Java, er, $OTHER_LANGUAGE, changes so (incredibly) slowly :-)
Perhaps there is a happy medium somewhere between these extremes, though.
(there seems to be just a bit of sarcasm in the above post, though -- writing about the moving Perl target is hard, but having a non-moving base one is employed to build on has its own "joys", as well)
Zapfino is actually much more complex than what this is doing. Zapfino has glyph variants - that is, it can display the same set of glyphs multiple ways. Ligatures just combine specific successive glyphs into a new glyph.
The issue is less about the UN trying to take control of Internet authority, it is more about what seems to be growing discontent with the US having all of the control. See the Chinese RFC about "internal internets" mentioned yesterday.
This seems to come up every few years ago, then there's buzz about it, and then everyone realizes that the Internet works just fine and everything goes back to normal.
I'm always amazed that a country which refuses to properly educate its people in math and science is able to pull off technological feats such as jamming GPS and distributing malware.
That is interesting, I was under the impression the North keeps up education for a decent amount of its people. I thought they were one of those countries that forced its people into engineering and science as a facet of its national security policy.
Assuming that you are referring to the USA, our policy is to have by far the largest and most advanced military on the planet, with the ability to extend force to remote corners of the globe within hours. Also, our policy is to have a massive nuclear armament which can be used at any time to destroy any country or even the population of the entire planet. I don't think we need to be directing any more of our media studies graduates into the engineering just to help out our armed forces.
So when we have to buy all the electronics in them from China and have the software designed in India and we can't get them to any of the remote corners of the Earth because our schools have been teaching that the Earth is flat and was created in 4004BC
Neither of which is very difficult. Most likely they didn't write the malware - most malware distributors don't. And narrow spectrum GPS jamming is pretty straightforward (and not very useful unless your goal is to annoy civilians).
On to more complex things... how many medium range ballistic missile tests have they failed? They've been trying to extend seventy year old German technology (by way of Russia and China) for decades now without much success. That's not very impressive, IMO.
I found the Google+ "what's hot" feed interesting too, until they went through yet another redesign and I couldn't find it anymore. I didn't have enough interest to ask the Internet how to find it again, so I slowly just forgot about it. Now I don't felt like I've lost any utility from not giving it three minutes of my time every day.
Unless you disabled it there are hot posts every half dozen posts in your home stream. The hot stream itself has it's own link in the left hand sidebar called explorer.
Funny anecdote: I wrote a GM script a loong time ago to block the FB ads. And promptly forgot about it.
So I was a bit confused when people would mention FB ads, and I was like: where are you people seeing these ads? This confusion reigned for a long time until recently, when one day I opened up my GM userscript manager panel and saw the FB ad blocker. Oops! So, for me, ads are not an issue (so far).
Part of it is certainly the novelty factor. You can only be "paired" with exactly 1 other person.
Part of it (for me), is that communications with my wife are via a separate stack, separate notifications that are easier to manage, and the ability to share more than you can in MMS (a silly sketch, or a map location).
Pair cuts out all the "noise" of other systems and gives you something that makes you feel like communications with that one other person are something more unique and "out of band" than all your other notification streams.
Personally, I haven't figured out if Pair is a product or a feature, but that doesn't really matter to me right now.
Not too much, but it makes people feel nice by having an app that they know is shared with one other person. All the features within it can be replicated by using a combination of other apps(Draw Something, SMS, some kind of social-shared to-do list, etc.) but Pair brings it together nicely. The last girl I dated and I used it, and it was silly fun.
