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Comment: TWEETS ARE FOR TWITS (Score 1) 166

by lxrslh (#43158251) Attached to: Live Tweeting the Symphony?
Tweeter mostly appeals to those losers who have been raised up by over-indulgent boomers and taught that their every thought and action was valuable and meaningful and MUST be shared with the world at large. I hate when TV shows think its cool/trendy to post tweets of viewers in real time, 99.5% of which are moronic and distract from the viewing experience for everyone else. However, I grant that it can be useful to broadcast breaking news of importance to citizens, not including tweets from entertainers and politicians.

Comment: Re:Common knowledge (Score 1) 670

by lxrslh (#36452960) Attached to: C++ the Clear Winner In Google's Language Performance Tests
Not being an "expert" in any of these languages, I actually RTFA and discovered the following on Page 9: "Jeremy Manson brought the performance of Java on par with the original C++ version. This version is kept in the java_pro directory. Note that Jeremy deliberately refused to optimize the code further, many of the C++ optimizations would apply to the Java version as well." Sounds to me like Java can be as fast as C++. YMMV....

Comment: Smartphones Work Pretty Well (Score 1) 143

by lxrslh (#31413032) Attached to: The Evolution of Reading In the Digital Age
I have been reading ebooks for ten years, since acquiring my first Palm Pilot. I've evolved my devices to a Toshiba Pocket PC PDA, then a Samsung (Palm) smartphone, and now a Palm Treo Pro (WM). My sources are RSS feeds, Gutenberg classics, free ebooks, and occasionally books downloaded from usenet. About 90% of my reading is electronic, excepting technical books and new fiction I borrow from the library. The small screen sizes have never bothered me nor have I suffered any eyestrain in my 60+year old eyes, which have actually improved with age. I have enjoyed many happy hours reading in lines, in airports, on trains, backpacking, etc. while others fretted or were bored. The only thing I have lost is viewing images and maps, sometimes of value in travel books or some fiction, or reading electronically at a beach, for which I have a supply of paperback "beach" books. However, I can curl up on a sofa or bed and read quite comfortably, without a lamp, or when someone else is driving. Although I do it a lot, I don't "really like" reading online using my 6 lb. 15" notebook and have considered moving to a netbook. But today's smartphones give me nearly everything I need in single device that fits in my shirt pocket, including music, and even limited TV and a basic GPS. However, physical size and professional layout is necessary for most technical books, such as Tufte's, with maps, diagrams, images, etc. So I suspect I will always need some device with the resolution of paper or a bigger screen, until such time as direct eyeball projection devices are perfected and comfortable.

Comment: Chickens are smarter than people (Score 1) 184

by lxrslh (#27450987) Attached to: Baby Chicks Have Innate Mathematical Skills
From "The Chicken Vanishes" by Calvin Trillin The New Yorker, February 8, 1999 ....On my walks from my house in Greenwich Village to Chinatown, I have truly had the custom of taking out-of-town visitors to a Mott Street amusement arcade, otherwise known for video games, where the out-of-towners get to try their hand at playing tictacktoe against a chicken. My wife waits on the sidewalk. She has a low tolerance for video games, and she somehow acquired the impression that requiring a chicken to play ticktacktoe is cruel. ("Cruel!" I say to her. "I've never seen the chicken lose. What's cruel?") The chicken is in a glass cage that is outfitted with the sort of backlit letters common to pinball machines - so that, at the appropriate time, "Your Turn" or "Bird's Turn" lights up. When it's your turn, you push a button on the outside of the cage to light up your "X" in one box or another; when it's the bird's turn, the bird goes behind an opaque piece of glass marked "Thinkin' Booth" and pecks once to produce an "O" in a box you were sort of hoping it wouldn't notice. If you win, you get a bag of fortune cookies. I furnish the entry fee - fifty cents. I am, after all, the host. When I tell the chicken story, I always point out that nearly all the people I take down there have precisely the same response to the the prospect of playing ticktacktoe with a chicken. After looking the situation over, they say, "The chicken gets go go first!" "But she's a chicken," I say. "You're a human being. Surely there should be some advantage in that." Some of my guest, I always report with some embarrassment, don't stop there. Some of them say, "The chicken plays every day. I haven't played in years."

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