Comment Re:Generation Y (Score 1) 144
The property we bought for retirement is in downtown New Orleans, so probably -- in the most literal sense -- "underwater."
The property we bought for retirement is in downtown New Orleans, so probably -- in the most literal sense -- "underwater."
Eh. I couldn't imagine being unfortunate enough to have to trade 2-3 hours a day [*] sitting in a car for a yard to take care of when there's a well maintained city park across the street -- not to mention all the other amenities the city provides. I'm sincerely glad what you have is working for you but don't believe that city dwellers all feel "stuck."
[*] 2 hours/day x 5 days/week x 45 weeks/year x 10 years is 4500 hours, pretty much a full 1/2 year of dead time in the period you're talking about. Even if my public transportation commute were that long, I'd have been able to read, say, 450 books in that time.
"Remember when I suggested The Naked and Famous to you like three years ago? Oh, you don't? That's funny, this e-mail says otherwise."
Meh. The far more felicitous response is "Damn, I sure meant to." Conversations with friends -- and especially friends one is romantically involved with -- shouldn't sound like courtroom transcripts.
I keep talking to developers that code on OSX and I keep having the same question:
You're not going to be deploying any of that code on OSX, your target is almost always going to be Linux. So why not just develop on Linux?
It's a reasonable question.
For me it's really that I make money writing code; I haven't figured out how to get paid for configuring my laptop, so I'd prefer not to spend time on it. Also, work has no issues handing me an iMac but would get testy if I started running Linux on their network
If I'd ever run into serious issues moving code between Linux and OS X I'd rethink it but I'm not sure I can remember a time when functional tests passed or failed in one environment but not the other. It all gets rerun in integration testing anyway, so even if something cropped up it'd be more of a curiosity than a production issue. I wouldn't run serious load, capacity, or performance testing on my desktop no matter what the OS, so that's a wash. I could imagine cases where this isn't so easy but apparently that's not the kind of development I do.
I'm not trying to sway anyone. It works well for me and has proven a profitable choice, that's all I really care.
Macs were a great unix desktop ten years ago, now they just kind of blow.
I'm curious
I know there's a lot of talk about cost but that's irrelevant to me, $1k this way or that over the life of a computer just doesn't matter much. There seems to be discussion about the "walled garden" but at least for what I'm doing (Erlang, Scala, Ruby, Lisp, Postgres, MySQL, Emacs, &c.) I've never run into an issue. Nor has there ever been much of an issue deploying to Linux once the code's written.
So what blows?
In the same spirit as Cryptonomicon, I'd suggest:
- Thomas Pynchon: Against the Day, Gravity's Rainbow
- Anything by David Foster Wallace. Although not all his work is not directly mathematical, his interest in math influences the way he writes. Infinite Jest is a fabulous read.
- Georges Perec: Life, A User's Manual. The Oulipo movement (of which Perec's a member) let algorithms directly influence the text (as well crop up in their stories). Perec is good, Calvino, Queneau, and Mathews are also Oulipo members readily available in English.
- Paul Verhaeghen: Omega Minor
(And although not mathematical at all, if you liked Crypto, you'd probably like Eco's Foucault's Pendulum.)
Along those lines: Racket: http://docs.racket-lang.org/
It is if the twittererer (sorry, don't know this modern lingo - the guy who is twittering)
"Twat" is the term you're looking for.
And write 3x as much **production** quality code.
Oh, you mean the things that didn't work with C back in 1988 and didn't work with C++ in 1994 and didn't work with Perl in 1998 and didn't work with Java in 2003 and didn't work with C# in 2008 won't work with Ruby in 2011? Gosh, it's almost like all that prior experience is transferrable somehow, if only we could find some commonality.
I live in the south, and in general, when not in a the presence of black people, the term is still used freely as a synonym for a black person. And no...this is not a bunch of mouth breathing, uneducated rednecks. On the contrary, they are from all walks of life, and most that I am speaking off first knowledge of, are wealthy, well educated and often in places of power (yes, even governmental).
"They" may be well educated and wealthy, but "they" are also bigots. If it's not offensive, why only "when not in a the presence of black people"? What are you all afraid of?
The "it's only a word" non-argument only makes sense if the words don't have meaning. Once they're stand-ins for concepts they're no longer "just words." Didn't you learn anything about semiotics in school?
Consider a drum, xylophone, small guitar
If we can set aside the fact that this is a cult leader who likes to play dress-up (hard, I agree), it might be that his statements have some merit. I mean, Twitter isn't actual communication, the people on Facebook aren't really friends, a half a dozen regularly read blogs do not comprise a realistic worldview, and so on. There's so much technical mediation of the real world nowadays that it's not like you have to look far to find someone who doesn't believe it's true unless his phone tells him about it. (Or, worse, who can't experience something without twittering it.)
Sometimes even insane people make valid points.
None of those languages have anything like the CPAN, despite saying for years "We should build something like the CPAN."
If this were the only true assertion you made (and it's not) it's reason enough to seriously consider Perl. I'd love to use Ruby more (it's a fun language, I like the OO, distributed and multithreaded programs are easy to write) but the libraries are lacking (as is easy library management).
Makes you figure there's a reason (La)TeX is still popular too, huh?
The issue must be an interesting one
http://www.tv.com/ally-mcbeal/these-are-the-days/episode/1000/summary.html?tag=ep_guide;summary
I have worked in company where 90% of people used Emacs. And literally nobody could customize it. They had ~120K init.el from somebody else, it got copied all over the company, everybody used and nobody had a clue what was in it.
I also knew real pro Emacs user who knew pretty much all shortcuts and modes of the Emacs. But he also hardly ever tried to configure it: he tried it in past, failed and learned to live with the defaults instead.
With respect, I'm not sure either of these issues are the fault of the software.
For instance, the default Apache httpd.conf reads:
# Do NOT simply read the instructions in here without understanding
# what they do. They're here only as hints or reminders. If you are unsure
# consult the online docs. You have been warned.
I suspect that a similar warning may have been missing from the init.el that was being passed around.
Of course, emacs-lisp doesn't look much like C (or a language whose syntax derived from C), so there's certainly some getting over the parenthesis and function-first syntax. After that hurdle (and a bit of understanding what a symbol is and how to quote a list), it's just a matter of looking up unfamiliar functions (online, with C-h f), isn't it?
We are experiencing system trouble -- do not adjust your terminal.