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Comment Re:in other news... (Score 1) 251

by Swizec (#29271901) Attached to: Drop in P2P Traffic Attributed to Traffic Shaping

the xIAA are targeting P2P users, so people move away from P2P. what's traffic shaping got to do with it?

All the non-techie people I know continue to use P2P like it was the year 2000. It's only the people who know their oats that use any other services or protocols, and most of those guys switched when Metallica went apeshit at the start of the century.

Nothing changed over the xIAA lawsuits, as far as I can tell.

Or, which is likelier, most peopel just switched to encrypted p2p, which means that even if they know it looks like p2p traffic, they can't sue you over it because it's illegal to prove there was something illegal inside the encrypted traffic.

Problem solved.

Comment Re:What's the point (Score 1) 123

by Swizec (#29216227) Attached to: Nintendo Working On Football Controller

Because it would suck. What happens when you slash, but your opponent blocks? Now your hands are pointing at the ground because it didn't physically stop YOU... but in the game your sword is at chest level. There are other issues as well.

One word: gyros. If they can keep a segway up, they can block a sword.

Comment What's the point (Score 4, Insightful) 123

by Swizec (#29214239) Attached to: Nintendo Working On Football Controller
Ok this is getting rather ridiculous. What's the point of having such a controller? If you're doing all that running around and stuff anyway, why not just go out and ... you know, do some actual sports?

Why are they doing all of this and still leaving behind the single best application of the wiimote - swordfights. That's the only place where I can see a benefit from doing sports electronically since it's a lot friendlier to slash at your friends with an electronic sword rather than a real one.

What's next? Everyone wears a Wiimote-shirt that can read smashing into other players so it can translate said readings into electronic caricatures of the game?

Comment Re:Multitasking just has to be done properly (Score 1) 386

by Swizec (#29188035) Attached to: Habitual Multitaskers Do It Badly
Reading off of one monitor and typing into the other is still multitasking unless you're simultaneously spellproofing your typing while reading. Not flicking your eyes to and fro, but actually reading the two inputs at once.

As for the projects, just how real-time supervision do they need? I still think it's more likely you're doing it on a time-slice basis like a CPU.

Comment Re:Multitasking just has to be done properly (Score 2, Insightful) 386

by Swizec (#29186449) Attached to: Habitual Multitaskers Do It Badly
That's exactly what I try to do. Why waste those 5 minutes when you can shorten them to 2 minutes by doing something else and letting your mind wander effectively?

The trick is to stop slacking quickly enough and it's really quite tough sometimes :P

And yes, I know it's not really multitasking, but it looks like multitasking to the outside world.

Comment Re:Multitasking just has to be done properly (Score 3, Informative) 386

by Swizec (#29186371) Attached to: Habitual Multitaskers Do It Badly

I would consider multi-tasking having multiple jobs going at once. This is a daily requirement in my field. I have to manage around 20 employees, streamline processes, stay on top of corporate projects, and still roll up my sleeves to help them with their daily work (due to cut-backs). If they want to study how people multi-task, study some people who are actually working and not just watching tv or blogging.

So you've basically set up a combination of polling and interruption events? You do your own thing and once in a while check on background processes, or give them some attention if there's an interupt?

That's not multitasking, not really anyway. Real multitasking is being able to read while pouring a cup of tea. (for example)

Comment Re:Makes sense (Score 2, Insightful) 386

by Swizec (#29186341) Attached to: Habitual Multitaskers Do It Badly

In fact, I cannot understand folks that listen to music and work -- I do like having my headphones on, but that's only because it blocks out the external noise that's distracting.

I'm one of those people who can't work in quiet places. How do you do it? How do you keep your paranoia of something jumping you from behind so low as to be able to concentrate in a quiet environment?

Personally I need something loud to shut out the outside world, I don't actually process what I hear, I just use it to swamp my audio input so I can't hear myself think (for some reason I hate listening to my internal dialogues) and so I can disregard any audio input as simply being part of the din, thus being able to focus very well.

I think this is partly because most animals (humans are animals) have an instant override in their brain for sudden audio input, since that increases the likelihood of survival in a dangerous situation.

Comment Multitasking just has to be done properly (Score 4, Insightful) 386

by Swizec (#29185849) Attached to: Habitual Multitaskers Do It Badly
I multitask a lot, but I've only been doing it after learning how a computer does it - you know, that same computer INCAPABLE of real multitasking? Yeah, humans should do it like that as well.

The trick is to use a divide and conquer algorithm on your tasks and divide them into chunks of just the right size - too small and you'll have too much overhead switching processes, too little and you'll essentially reach a dead-lock situation where everything is waiting for you to finish that one thing.

What works for me is, for example, reading a chapter of a textbook, followed by a few minutes on slashdot and whatnot, then going back to the book and so forth ad nauseum.

This way you're always multitasking without actually multitasking and you get a lot more done than just focusing on one task for a few hours, then on another for a few more hours and so on.

Comment Re:Poll has a bit of ambiguity (Score 1) 303

by Swizec (#29176715) Attached to: While Coding, How Often Do You Refer To Language Docs?

>> Why would I always be interested in the tree structure of my project?

>Does it get in your way so much?

Yes it does, I'm not interested and it's taking room away from code, therefore it bothers me and the only reason I keep it open is because it's still better than tabs for working on 30+ files at once

>> Then again, what's this "project" business. Why is it I have to have a project per se, how does this simplify what I'm doing?

>Projects mean that I rarely ever need make files. They simplify a lot for me, except for the simplest projects (small p).

See, but I primarily work with scripting languages and automatic make or ant files mean nothing to me. So why do I need a project before I can open a bloody file? And why when I just want to open a file am I given a stupid wizard to make a project? And why when I create a new file it wants a million stupid configurations so god forbid, I wouldn't have to know where I actually want to put it? (this latter bit is from pyDev plugin, which afaik is the same for Aptana as Eclipse)

>> Delphi IDE, which had horrible syntax highlighting but was otherwise alright

>In it's hay day, I considered Delphi to be the epitome of IDEs. I never did have syntax highlighting problems with it. I never liked Object Pascal syntax, but the compiler, library and IDE were great.

Yes it was an amazingly awesome IDE, but sucked horribly for its primary function which is coding. It was like trying to paint a picasso with photoshop

>> and Aptana, which is the closest I've gotten to my beloved Kate in an IDE. However, Aptana only has a "comment" shortcut for languages with the // commenting syntax, has unintuitive indentation support, tries too hard to help me out with code completion (often resulting in errors), and exibits quite subpar syntax highlighting when compared to Kate.

>I only used Aptana in passing. Code completion was always pretty bad with most open source IDEs (I checked Aptana and Kdevelop with each release for many years to see if they got any better in this. I finally gave up on it) and I consider any IDE that does not do it well to be half baked. Eclipse does it exceptionally well for Java. CDT and PyDev (especially PyDev Extensions) do an adequate job.

I use the PyDev extension in Aptana and ... well maybe I'm just not one of those people that actually want code completion and automatic formatting. Please just let me type at my 120wpm without worrying when something will be done automatically and when it won't and also just please, keep the same indentation level. Don't jump around like a drunk moose.

>> The most argument for IDE's I've heard was integrated svn support, I prefer the cli client, and that thingy that displays all functions and whatnot in a class, well Kate can do that for many languages as well.

>The CVS/SVN support in Eclipse never limited me.

Maybe it's just an Aptana fluke, but why can't I provide a message file when commiting? I'm used to writing up everything I do in a file so I wouldn't forget when I do a commit. Aptana forces me to copy paste said file into the "helpful" little boxy.

>Eclipse has plugins to highlight any language as well. But if syntax highlighting is all that is available for your language (without any special understanding of the language by the IDE), I wouldn't bother with Eclipse. SciTE/Kate/anything-else do just fine and are lighter to boot.

When you code in six or more languages every day (including markup ones), it's essential not to have to think about which syntax highlighting plugin or whatever to install. I just want it to be perfect for everything right out of the box. God forbid I needed a different IDE for every language.

Actually the greatest argument against IDE's I can muster is this: When I was once talking to an uber advanced Java guru guy and asked him a simple question of "So how do I add a library to my code?", his answer was that he didn't know. If it isn't done automatically for him, he simply can't finish said simple task. As a developer I prefer to know what my code is doing and why. I don't want hidden magic, I don't want automatic [practially] anything since it inadvertently breeds bloat and obscure bugs.

Comment Re:Poll has a bit of ambiguity (Score 1) 303

by Swizec (#29161553) Attached to: While Coding, How Often Do You Refer To Language Docs?
Well for example, what's with the having to refresh the file view to see something was added? What's with not simply having a list of open files on the side (tabs soon get too small and useless or simply obscured) ordered by when you opened htem and colour coded as to when they were last edited. Why would I always be interested in the tree structure of my project?

Then again, what's this "project" business. Why is it I have to have a project per se, how does this simplify what I'm doing? Sure, different sessions for different sets of open documents, but why projects?

The IDE's I've used most are KDevelop, which is based on Kate but bloats it too much. Delphi IDE, which had horrible syntax highlighting but was otherwise alright, Turbo Pascal, which was actually quite enjoyable for that one language, Eclipse, but for very little time because it was just confusing me with all the options, and Aptana, which is the closest I've gotten to my beloved Kate in an IDE. However, Aptana only has a "comment" shortcut for languages with the // commenting syntax, has unintuitive indentation support, tries too hard to help me out with code completion (often resulting in errors), and exibits quite subpar syntax highlighting when compared to Kate.

The most argument for IDE's I've heard was integrated svn support, I prefer the cli client, and that thingy that displays all functions and whatnot in a class, well Kate can do that for many languages as well. Plus the best thing about Kate is that I can open remote files via practically any protocol (even ssh) transparently, it just doesn't care where the file is as long as it can be accessed by kio_slaves.

Comment Re:Why don't they hire men? (Score 2, Insightful) 126

by Swizec (#29143971) Attached to: Robots Make the Coins Go 'Round, Down Under
I'm one of those people who hates seeing mums with their strollers everywhere as well. But for a different reason, they remind me how I still haven't gone odne a vassectomy and am sexually active ... it's very frustrating this prospect of losing one's whole future to something as silly as two halves of a genome accidentally making a new infinitely replicating (cancerous?) cell.

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