DeepDuh

I could be wrong, but I think it was edited in. Otherwise scaevolus would probably have pointed it out instead of going to hunt LinkedIn.

Thanks a lot. I'm still reluctant to use LinkedIn since much of it feels like extortion to me.

Btw. I'm surprised that you've found the ü character. Not even US customs/border protection let me enter my German name in the ESTA form.

I'm in a bright[1] office with an rMBP. I'm imagining everyone with displays that give less brightness / contrast is going to have a bad time.

[1] It's a Japanese office. These people really like their cold bright neon. I think it has to with dark east asian eyes.

As a Swiss I'm curious how the name has come to be. Is the team related to ETH Zurich?

Am I the only one being put off by the CSS? I had to crank the display brightness to the max in order to read it without strain.

Edit: I agree a lot with the content though - For many complex problems, especially the kind where you can't just throw some standard software solution at it, it would be helpful to first develop a suitable DSL. From personal experience I'd say spend one third of your time budget into developing your domain specific toolset - even if your managers get nervous. If it works you will finish sooner than you expected and you have developed reusable tools and skills, if it doesn't you can still throw in a crunch and get it done. For me it has always worked though.

The problem is that today 'being able to read/write code' and 'being a programmer' is as good as synonym. It shouldn't be, that's the issue. We won't call CEOs with programming skills 'programmer's just as we don't call them 'readers' today.

How about a good old desktop mail client? I don't really understand why so many people insist on only using webmail and then complain about the lack of certain features and/or GMail lock-in.

I get this feeling about Django, but not about Flask. Its codebase is so lean I can read all the relevant parts in an hour when I want to get back into it. I don't even need docs for this thing.

However, I understand what you mean about request / response, I don't like how this is handled in most python frameworks actually, it's usually too much abstracted away.

The nicest (imperative) environment for asynchronous execution I've seen is Objective C/Cocoa for some reason. It has a way of showing you all the handles you might need, but it also makes it fairly obvious when and how these handles are called. Together with lambda support ('blocks') it's simple but effective.

I think the main difference is enterprise + closed source + well documented environments vs. opensource + not so well documented environments often originating from someone's hobby. When it comes to big middleware frameworks I prefer the first, but small lean stuff such as Flask is just fine to use IMO.

My advice is to not rely too much on the docs when you want to really know something - take a look at the source, it's all there.

> although since extensions don't have access to OS functions, it doesn't tell you if anything is playing a sound or not

and that's why this should be a browser feature and not an extension.

Only if it works reliably though. I wonder whether they can make it work with plugins.

Maybe you'd have to get a hook with some platform specific OS API that tells you when sound is playing (does this even exist though)? You could then match this to user interactions within the browser - did the user click inside my browser window when the event started? Then it's probably happening within that tab and I'm gonna show him that animation. False positives wouldn't be very harmful here, so you could let that slip.

Tl;dr: An editor with lua patterns instead of regex find/replace. Thanks, I stick with (and pay for) my ST.

Sometimes 'ahead of its time' is not such a good thing. Specifically, when the available hardware can't keep up with what the system design demands[1], e.g. a responsive smartphone touch interface created in an interpreter (as far as I can see without even having a JIT compiler) on a 500Mhz embedded CPU, without GPU acceleration[2]. It was ahead of its time alright.

[1]http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/01/02/0213204/insiders...

[2]http://forums.webosnation.com/webos-discussion-lounge/295123...

According to [1] this has already been invented. Too late then. Let's make millions anyway, just because..

[1] http://www.radiolab.org/2007/jun/07/

After owning an iPad mini I have to say that an as-light-as-possible 7'' tablet appears to be one more device that's very useful have / bring along. It allows you reading / media consumption on a device with a satisfying screen size that's as light as a medium paperback book, i.e. you can hold it for extended periods without getting tired.

Isn't it obvious? When you have your stuff stored digitally it

(a) takes care of the organizational aspects of note taking and

(b) makes notes reusable.

The payoff as a student is exam prep: Now you sit at a powerful desktop computer with, say, 2x 21 inch screen estate at your disposal. You have a file explorer, a layout document editor (I use Pages and/or Keynote for this) and a good pdf viewer open (with your exported notes). Now it's a matter of copy & pasting all the information from your notes, the official class notes, literature, etc. onto your layout document which then becomes your summary.

This is of course doable by hand but it's a lot more work and it's not as easy to extend it - you can't just make room for new information on a full piece of paper (and summaries, especially the ones you can take to exams, tend to be very full).

I know, right. 'feelings' - sometimes a difficult concept to grasp after too much Fortran 90 or something similar.

Well, the thing about OSX is that it is heavily reliant on in house media codecs and drivers that I find haven't been virtualized very successfully so far. Furthermore, I find that the (paid) virtual host desktop solutions on OSX are much better in terms of performance and integration than their windows counterparts - probably because of higher demand, possibly also because of architectural reasons.

But maybe you have found a way and you can then prove me wrong: Does iWorks work in your virtual box VM? Does XCode including iOS simulator work well? Is the performance acceptable? How about the iLive suit? How about unity development? How about the clipboard - does it keep its 'PDF snippet' functionality (no rasterization of fonts, original quality images)?

See, there's tons of OSX exclusive software that's quite demanding in terms of media and hardware acceleration, simply because of the OS's highly integrated character. Unless someone can show me a solid OSX-in-a-box I doubt that it's a good experience.

About HFS: You seem to dismiss it a bit quickly. Trial versions of 'MacDrive' on Windows have always worked very solidly for me - if I were still using bootcamp I would pay for it.

However the bigger question IMO is: Do we really need native windows nowadays? If we ban windows into VMs and only use OSX + linux natively, HFS is indeed a solid option. The only thing hindering us so far from using windows VM-only was gaming and audio/video rendering software. Audio is very niche and the rest should soon be solved with increasing support for PCIe passthrough.

window management is indeed better designed on windows (since 7) which makes your parent poster's claim a bit unsubstantiated, but thinking about it a little more there is something to it: Windows applications, especially since the ribbon UI pattern has emerged, are often specifically designed such that you need them to run in fullscreen. Try using office on 950px width and you know what I mean - you simply can't get to lots of control elements comfortably without the full screen width. Mac software on the other hand has always been optimized for multiple non modal panels, still carried over in the prominent info window even in consumer apps. You can place that thing wherever you want. For power users this is very good because they can position these windows as close as possible to the content they want to edit, scroll the window behind without loosing focus (still not a standard windows feature) and do a series of operations minimizing mouse movement and clicks, since a panel of similar operations as their last one stays open. This as well as the always accessible main menu is what allows users to play around width the width of windows.

If only window management and multi screen support were as good as the one on windows - it would pretty much be a perfect classic desktop environment.

Well, the reverse is already done in ASCII art isn't it?

As someone attempting to get into systems programming - thank you! Very insightful article - maybe it would deserve a punchier headline though.

Here's the problem: I had no idea until now.

That's an interesting solution, especially since the suggested way for controlling spaces is already a touchpad thing on macs - extending the functionality for windows seems quite natural.

>Ubuntu searchable menus (HUD) coupled with execution of the command from the search results would be something I'd be interested in.

You mean like the OSX help system? Yes, feature discoverability is the main issue I have with Office ribbons. For this reason alone it's IMO not well thought through. iWorks still has the best / most consistant UI, if only its features weren't so lacking. I'd much rather have LibreOffice copy these concepts, such as the info window, table insert hotkeys and spreadsheets with multiple tables per sheet.

I agree with you. I wasn't arguing against gun control laws. Actually, Swiss gun control is very strict, plus it's also not so easy to get ammunition. Most of the guns here are the military rifles people keep after service and the ammunition for those is unavailable - well except if you really really want it. Therefore it's not quite like people have constant access to a gun for those times when they get into the mood for murdering someone. I'm certain that more regulation in the US would help in that regard.

What I'm saying is: I'm skeptical that this alone would bring the aggression levels in the US to European levels (not even speaking about Japan, where it's another order of magnitude below). It would certainly be a good start though and it would be relatively easy to implement. Similar to software development: One should always start optimizing by getting the low hanging fruits.

It's still interesting however, to think about why there is such a cultural difference between the US and Europe, considering our heritage is so close.

I'm working at a national Japanese research agency with several thousand researchers. The administrative overhead is probably close to 50% (as in, half the jobs here are in administration). It's only for a 3 month research project that I'm here, yet I had to fill out somewhere between 15 and 20 forms (no exaggeration) - twice actually, once scanned and sent by e-mail and once again by hand when I came here (because the scanned version wasn't 'original' enough). It's mind boggling to the extreme. I could sit down and make a simple DB application with Word / Excel export to generate all that stuff with unified interface in a day or two, which would save them literally hundreds if not thousands of man hours a year - but I don't think they really care so much about efficiency here. They really want to see the stuff all filled in by hand, there is some kind of inherent value there that I don't seem to understand.

Oh and the rules for business trips, allowances, relocation coverage and all that, don't get me started on them.

It's a good experience though, makes me all the more motivated to have my own startup soon, instead of going nuts in big organisations like these.

I understand what you mean, I think I'm wired in a similar way. However I'm skeptical whether you can spead that kind of 'love' to a wider audience without coming from the applied side of things. I believe the power to describe some daily live phenomenon in a mathematical model and then use mathematical tools to predict behavior could be a very eye opening experience for many children - and I think we could design exercises that follow such a path, even with very basic algebraic tools.

Simultaneously we could also come from the other end - describing a new world in a structured language (programming) - in order to awaken desires to learn new expressions. I remember, when I was a kid I wanted to program an 'Asteroids' clone, but I couldn't get the flying behavior quite right. I was excited when I learned about vector geometry - finally I had the tool I need to model that.

You do have a point, but I wonder what's behind that 'love in math' you're talking about. I tend to think that curiosity is the only basic character trait needed to fall in love with something as basic as math, grammar, music or physics. However, the way this kind of love is triggered doesn't necessarily correspond to how it is taught in lower classes. At least when I went to primary school in the 90ies, 'math' was really just numerical algorithms (which are IMO not at the root of what math is, it's just one sub field). What can it be applied to in our daily lives? (considering someone doesn't take a higher math education) Knowing the price total in supermarkets, that's about it.

Couldn't we include symbolic math at a much earlier age? Children enjoy the building block properties of Legos starting at age 7 I'd say. How about we give them basic problem solving tools in math at age 10? I think we need to bring the potential feeling of achievement with mathematical tools to a much lower age. That could be geometry or color theory or basic physics (calculations with distance, velocity and time as an example).

Well I didn't say it's the same kind of architecture. For the end user it serves the same purpose however.

> This was years ago, I don't know if it has improved, but it grated me greatly.

Well of course, OS X has heavily improved since the early days (I'd call 'early' everything below 10.4). The surge of developers wanting to use OS X has also increased the demand for package managers, and so they came. First fink, then macports and nowadays most use homebrew. You install them once using the standard OS X pkg installation facility and then you're good to go - the range of 'backend software' packages in brew is comparable to apt-get I'd say. For everything from linux that needs a GUI I have a VM, for everything Windows-only I have another VM. There's never even a question whether I can run something locally - once you have that it's hard to give it up again really.

That being said, the best OS X release is probably 10.6, since then I don't like the direction very much - but on macs you're basically forced to use the newest OS (XCode compatibility, hardware compatibility once you upgrade your macbook). The iOSification hasn't been a dealbreaker to me so far, it's IMO still a better all round experience than any other notebook, especially considering the service quality, which is bar none where I live. Friend of mine bought a $2.5k lenovo - the board went dead after 1 month, they picked it up and he hasn't seen it since the last six weeks, no replacement. I had a similar issue with my rMBP - got it back, fixed, after 2 days. Similar stories about Dell. HP might be better, but their hardware is crap IMO. I just can't trust any other laptop manufacturer at the moment, which makes me sad.