Monkey? I always assumed it was named after the disease teenagers get from kissing too promiscuously...

based on the parent post and hence agreeing with the grandparent's second point

I didn't personally enjoy the Enslaved demo as much as a colleague of mine did, but certainly Bayonetta was (in my opinion) a quite enjoyable game with a surprising amount of replayability and more depth to the combat system than I am coordinated enough to explore at the higher difficulty levels.

Without any useful detail I don't know why the parent poster believed those two games are awful, but publishers only want to publish games that are going to sell, and the gaming market is wide, varied and fickle enough that the most accurate predictor of "will sell" is "the previous one with the same name sold", followed closely by "the identical game by a different publisher sold".

My understanding is that if your Wii dies, you send it to Nintendo for repair. If you buy a new Wii (or they replace it themselves) then you give them the new serial number, and they transfer your purchases across.

I assume it's possible to do that for voluntary replacement too, but haven't heard anything about it either way.

(Bolding is mine)

Oh goodness gracious no! I've worked with such (usually self-) taught programmers (and been one myself before I got a degree). The difference between Computer Science and "speaking a language" is that one has the goal of being merely mutually comprehensible, and one has the goal of efficiently and meaningfully dealing with large amounts of data.

To give a more concrete idea: Being long winded or speaking only in one-syllable words can be annoying, and is simply corrected by example and further experience. Writing code that's O(2^n) or worse when there are O(log-n) solutions is not something one can learn by observing examples of code that's one or the other, unless one is the sort of naturally gifted mathematician that wouldn't have written the O(2^n) code in the first place.

I had to go look up the "Input Hypothesis" on Wikipedia, which happily led me into the associated "Monitor Hypothesis", which indicates that without conscious knowledge of the rules of a language, one cannot effectively self-correct; i.e., one cannot say why one says what one says and what one doesn't say.

It does sound a little like the "immersion" idea of language learning, which in my limited understanding is understood to be next-to-useless without a supporting framework of formal education, once you hit five and Chomsky's Language Acquisition Device switches off (or whatever the current theory on differences between adult and child language acquisition). I don't argue that immersion in good code is important, but it's not _sufficient_.

One other thing, we've here contrasted programming as a profession, with speaking a natural language. If you speak or write a natural language as a profession, then you really should be as consciously versed in the technical aspects of the language as a professional programmer should be. And vice versa, if you're just programming for fun, or relying on someone else to hand you pseudo-code to implement, then it's perfectly fine to simply produce code that works. But doing such won't make you more hirable.

the sort of person who belittles things he or she doesn't really understand or care about.

I know I do, now.

Either that, or it's Michael Larabel from Phoronix... Except the submission didn't actually have a half-dozen links back to previous articles on the same topic. But it's the same "Everyone sensible should be interested in what I'm interested in, and be bored by those things I don't understand" writing style.

From earlier in TFA:

So they mean "Australia's overseas spy agencies" not "spy agencies overseas from Australia". Specifically, they seem to be talking about giving the Attorney General more room in allowing domestic collection by ASIO of intelligence relating to foreign activities for use by and at the request of ASIS and DSD.

I haven't read TFBill though.

This is exactly the reason I use the automated checkout every time. I don't believe I should be supporting with my purchasing power the idea that we should create or maintain minimum-wage/menial jobs simply to keep people busy. We should be moving the other way as a society, removing the need to keep people employed in positions that could be better done mechanically instead.

This is partly because I may have accidentally absorbed a large chunk of Marxian economic theory into my base assumptions (from reading "The Stainless Steel Rat Joins the Army" as a youth), and partly because the more computers run things, the more computer programmers like me will have jobs to keep us busy and high on the socio-economic food chain (from reading the Paranoia background materials more recently). ^_^

Am I the only one who thinks that summary started off as a single sentence, but got a little ouroboros on itself?

That's my point, yes. The article claims to be "GUI vs CLI" but its biggest point is "Changing configuration files versus using an interactive interface".

And then gives examples of people changing bind config files, versus whatever DNS server requires you to use its GUI to change (which isn't MS's DNS server, that can be batch-modified in active directory -- or the registry for pre-Windows 2000 versions) and calls it a win for Linux.

Anyway, I thought storing config in text files (e.g., bind) was considered suboptimal compared to putting it into LDAP (e.g., MS DNS server)?

I guess if you are only ever going to have one DNS server, then text config is fine (as long as that machine's being backed up) but there's then good motivation to move to 0 DNS servers and put it in someone else's hands entirely.

Then of course you may end up with a non-scriptable interface. ^_^

Despite the heading, the article is "Things that can be scripted make batched actions easier and faster than things that cannot be scripted". The rest of the article is just strawmanning. (That's totally a word now...)

His router-changes example doesn't even use the CLI interface on the router, it has the router upload the script to a TFTP server, the admin edits it (not using a CLI, I hope, but some kind of text editing software), and causes the router to fetch it back and execute the script. Hell, a router with a web GUI doesn't even need a TFTP server, you can upload and download the file using HTTP. Or edit the script live with a handy javascript syntax checker, if your router developer's so willing...

I'm going to take this opportunity to scoff at his "lesson in IT", imperilled as I might be.

*scoff*

Actually, I dropped the ball a little on this one. PM&C has a few "Offices" within in, but the National Audit Office isn't one of them, it's actually an arm of the Parliament under the Auditor General. >_

It's worse than that. "Aussie PM Office". What they're actually talking about the "Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet", the department which holds a sort of higher-level overview position within the Australian Public Service rather than being dedicated to one particular area of government. (Like the Prime Minister herself) Hence the presence within that department of the National Audit Office, which does cross-department audits.

As for "Aussie PM" itself, that's not about self-respect. It's merely a failure to distinguish between levels of formality in speech and writing for an audience. She's the "Aussie PM" (or colloquially just "the PM") in the same way that the Queen is "Madge". But when you write formally (i.e. not transcribing speech to retain specific effect as I just did, or taking notes for oneself) then they're the "Australian Prime Minister" and "Her Majesty, The Queen" respectively.

Certainly not written by a Canberran (the actual colloquial spoken form is "PM and C", not "PM Office") and I doubt it was an Australian submission so much as an attempt to emulate the Australian vernacular.

Then again, I'd have contracted "president" to "pres", not "prezo" myself. So our vernaculars may simply differ. ^_^

Funnily enough, "Cowboys & Aliens" seems to me to be the closest to this description on the list. Then there's the other slashdot commenters who feel that "mixing two arbitrary protagonists and seeing what falls out" is the antithesis of sci-fi... I dunno. I like my sci-fi less thriller-like than most of the ones on the given list.

So, the technical director of a large carrier-grade router and packet classification equipment manufacturer is suggesting that British ISPs adopt a billing model which requires carrier-grade router and packet classification equipment to operate?

I'm not sure that an article should really be allowed to claim that something is an opinion of "experts" but quote only one (admittedly expert) person whose business would directly benefit from his prediction being accurate. I'd rather they actually asked an academic or someone else without direct economic interest (as well, not instead).

I think this article was more aimed at the ISPs going to the meeting than the rest of us: "Hey British ISPs, if you want to be able to charge more than just £x/megabyte, how about this model? We also happen to be able to sell you the equipment to implement it. You probably should get the government to agree first, if you happen to be meeting with them any time today."

You mean like some kind of nearby earthquake?