Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:WTF is the matter with you people? (Score 1) 246

it should not be mad max, since NONE of the ORIGINAL CAST, CREW, OR MEMBERS IS APART OF THIS NEW PROJECT AND PROBLLY FOR GOOD REASON.

As opposed to the Star Trek 2009 which had Nimoy alone, and in a bit part.

screw mad max, lets cal it what it is, Mad charlez, the rise of estrogen in a post apoplectic world..

Oh, you're one of those guys. OK. Thanks for clarifying; that explains a lot. I'm not a feminist (except in the "women are equal, we should treat them like people" sense), but you'd have to be a major MRA to have any problems with Fury Road. Oh, there was a strong woman character and Max had a peer and an equal. Shock! Horror! [insert eye roll here] If you can't enjoy Furiosa being as fierce of a survivor as Max, then there's something broken in you.

Comment WTF is the matter with you people? (Score 1) 246

"News for nerds." It's right up there in the tagline. Mad Max is near the top of the geek movie franchise pantheon, probably just below Star Wars and Indiana Jones. This isn't a new Fast & Furious, it's a new freaking Mad Max. You know, that thing that got a lot of us into postapocalyptic / dystopian sci-fi flicks. If this doesn't count as cultural news for nerds, I can't imagine a lot else that would.

Comment Re:Duh (Score 1) 321

Why would anyone, ever, think that me not looking at their ad should be illegal?

It goes a lot deeper than that. I am running software on a device I own. That software requests a resource from a remote service. After receiving it, the same software manipulates that resource in ways I have specifically asked it to in order to meet my needs.

The plaintiff's case is that they have a legal right to tell me how to view a resource once it's on a machine I own. Copyright etc. isn't involved; I'm consuming a properly licensed copy of the resource that they sent to me. I'm not distributing it, either in original or modified form.

There are already a million other ways I might modify that content today. I can apply my own CSS so that font sizes and contrast are to my liking. My web browser may actually be a speech synthesizer or braille reader. I may be viewing it on a mobile device that simply can't render it in its original form. But according to the plaintiffs, none of that matters: either I view it as originally intended or not at all.

If they're going to assert insane things like that, I suggest they form a W3C working group to publicize a standard way of describing what uses are acceptable for that content. Then my web browser could parse it, see "ADS_MAY_BE_REMOVED: FALSE", and give me a popup saying "This page is published by sociopaths. Continue?".

Comment Re:Which string theory? (Score 1) 148

No, I agree. If Feynmann can't follow their calculations, there's something largely amiss. Then again, that was a while ago and for all I know they might be making perfect sense now.

But I still contend that "it sounds like gibberish to laypeople" is a pretty low bar to set. It's almost impossible to describe something like QCD to non-phycisists without stopping twice a sentence - "well, not a literal color", "not 'up' like in 'gravity'", etc. - even at the high school textbook level.

Comment A year from now: TWC on Overstock.com (Score 1) 206

"Please buy me! Won't someone please buy me?" How FUBAR is TWC that they're so ready to sell to someone, anyone? Either a) they had this in the pipeline before the Comcast deal fell through, in which case how many other deals are on standby?, or b) they brokered a major corporate sell deal entirely within the last month, presumably under immense pressure.

In my opinion, TWC is desperate to sell because there's an internal house of cards that's about to fall over. Someone needs to unload it quickly so that a pending spectacular failure will be on someone else's watch.

Comment Re:If I use an IDE, does it mean I'm a bad program (Score 1) 443

Why do you assume that your IDE has features that Emacs doesn't? It's been in active development for 39 years to be a great, productive programming environment. Do you honestly believe that it's had 4 decades of worldwide contribution and not become reasonably good at helping people write software?

Without exception, everyone I've heard decry Emacs and Vim as "just text editors" has never used them beyond "open file / type / save" and has no idea what they were working with. It's like dismissing Linux because you've only used it as an AWS shell, and you feel sorry for people who won't upgrade to Windows so that they can use a web browser.

Comment Re:There can be only one. (Score 5, Insightful) 443

Longer answer: IDE? No thanks. At least, I've used Eclipse variants and various Visual Studios, but they map onto how I think about writing and managing software. I want a blank screen with lots of keyboard shortcuts, some basic autocompletion, perfect syntax highlighting, maybe some Git support, etc. I don't want code generation or any refactor-all-the-things functions; I won't be using them.

I used Emacs for years and years, only eventually switching to Sublime Text. ST was beautiful and fast but didn't have nearly the ecosystem of Emacs, plus its non-Freeness started showing when it went many months without an update. Life's too short for a proprietary editor, which is where I spent approximately 60% of my work life. I dependent on it more than any other tool and the prospect of my chosen tool dying on the vine wasn't appealing. I tried Atom for about a week, but it was slower than ST2, lacked a broad ecosystem, and, well... JavaScript.

So one day I decided to revisit Emacs. Hey! It grew a package manager! Since that afternoon, I've had zero desire to look back. Emacs will outlive me and my children, will support every new language and tool that comes along, and will always be Free. There's nothing out there good enough to make me consider switching.

PS, in concession: I could make the same cases for Vim and its grandchildren. Once you've learned them, if they do what you need then there's very little compelling reason to change.

Slashdot Top Deals

To the systems programmer, users and applications serve only to provide a test load.

Working...