sjs

No wonder that MS mouse felt so strange. I couldn't use the thing and instead bought a trackpad.

What about Ruby and Perl and their ability to shell out as easily as you do in a shell? (with backticks)

You have a real language available with (arguably) fewer weird things and warts to be aware of or remember, better string manipulations and lots of other advantages, but if you really just want to send something through `awk` or `bc` you can do that just as easily as you do in bash and capture the result in a Ruby or Perl variable.

Seems like a win-win situation. (Unless you have an exceptional circumstance with requirements about running anything but shell scripts or something like that.)

Six of one, half a dozen of the other.

http://news.php.net/php.internals/57655

I use TextMate day to day. If I'm not on OS X I use Emacs for making software, and sometimes I use Emacs on OS X. It's great for JavaScript.

Though vim is no longer my main editor I still use it every day. Right tool for the job and all that.

Pretty nice to have sliders to quickly and easily dial things just so though.

    setopt correct              # try to correct spelling...
    setopt no_correctall        # ...only for commands, not filenames

https://github.com/samsonjs/config/blob/master/zsh/zshrc#L11...

[...]

    alias cp='nocorrect cp'            # don't correct spelling for 'cp'
    alias mkdir='nocorrect mkdir'      # don't correct spelling for 'mkdir'
    alias mv='nocorrect mv'            # don't correct spelling for 'mv'

https://github.com/samsonjs/config/blob/master/zsh/zshrc#L20...

> especially the average Mac user to secure their machine’s audio input in the first place.

The average user of any machine doesn't need to worry about this. Much ado about nothing.

Not in my experience. Invariably terrible.

His clients are the ones accepting payments though, so they need Canadian merchant accounts. Beanstream accepts Canadian merchants. We just started the sign up process with them last week, from Victoria BC.

We're going with Beanstream + Chargify. You might want to take a look at this: http://expletiveinserted.com/2011/10/02/stripes-new-online-p...

I'm sure some people will find this useful, but it seems to be the way I already use email. I don't have to deal with a lot of email so maybe this has more use for those who do.

If it's in my inbox it needs my attention. If not it's archived or deleted. To enter review mode I go to my inbox.

> The iPhone 4S was 6 months late.

How do you figure? Apple announced it for October and released it in October. If you make the assumption that they wanted to release it in June or July, it's at most 3 or 4 months "late".

> If you stretch this chart back another 6 months you'll see a considerable sag in iPhone sales as the 4S waiting game began.

I'm pretty sure that iPhone 4 sales didn't slow down prior to the 4S's release. Not much anyway. Do you have anything to back up that claim?

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/09/iphone-4-tops-charts/

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/09/09/iphone_4_sales...

> Android, due to it's constant upgrade stream, doesn't suffer from this cycle. Let's take a look at some yearly charts before we call this race...

I agree. Let's go further. Why does it always have to be a race? If you look at the big picture instead of the versus battle portrayed by the media then Android and iOS are together leading the industry. And next in line is Windows Phone which consistently gets great reviews.

It's not all rainbows and unicorns. iOS suffers somewhat from being so locked down, but there are advantages to that as well. Android benefits from the immense range of devices that run it, but that also contributes to devices not getting upgrades. Windows Phone is not growing as quickly as many agree that it should based on its merit.

But overall everyone is doing well and customers are happy. Nobody is losing except some of the old dogs like Blackberry.

Costs about $700 for that privilege.

Not my first GUI code. I've done lots of web development in the past 15 years. Front and back. I've written an OS X app, several iOS apps including some universal ones, a few Android apps, a few webOS apps, and one Windows Phone 7 app. In a previous life I made games and utilities with Visual Basic and played around with Gtk+ in C (but quickly ran away).

A couple of months ago I was looking at Flex. It's a complete nightmare to try and play around with. I downloaded the SDK and tried to make some kind of hello world thing but just trying to make a module with a single function and then call that function was not straightforward at all. I didn't even want a module but I have to have one. Fine. How do I make one? The docs don't even cover this sort of thing. There is basically no tutorial or documentation I could find that told me how to do this. I gave up.

Oh, and that was after I had to add manifest types everywhere like I was writing Java, without a free IDE to complete that junk for me. All the docs I found assumed you have the Flex IDE or Flash Builder whatever it is. Which costs over $500. Apparently it's still 1995 at Adobe Inc.

And people say Haskell is hard to use. I had no trouble getting started with Haskell. `ghci<return>` and away you go.

(I'd like to think that it wasn't my fault. Maybe I'm not as capable as I think I am, but I have written compilers and interpreters in C, Haskell, and Lisp. I have written an x86 assembler in Ruby that emits real x86 machine code as Mach-O binaries. I can write hello world in at least 10 languages. I feel like I have the capacity to understand this stuff. Hello world with an existing compiler should be a piece of cake, not an exercise in frustration.)

edit: Ok, I searched for "flex hello world" and did find something that looks like what I want. I deleted Flex and can't try to run it now though. Still don't like all the complexity but it does look like what I said I couldn't find: http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/html/help.html?content=02_G...

> Well there is an option for Fx keys as Fx keys instead of shortcuts in Preferences.app

If you've plugged an Apple keyboard into a Windows box you know that they don't just send the standard function key codes. I don't think that the PC version's function keys would just work as volume and iTunes keys on a Mac. And even if they did you would have to remember where they are, and how they are different from your MacBook keyboard. Apple routinely shuffles things around. Is F4 a Dashboard key or a LaunchPad key?

> But this keyboard, even if it supposedly designed for the mac, won't get my money

Ok.

> Basically, they took the PC version, didn't change the molds (expansive!!) and just printed some mac-like labels on the key.

I'm certain they would have to send different key codes in order to be truly compatible, as they claim to be.

> A cheap hack, not worth $133.

If someone wants Das Keyboard and also wants the function keys and such to work correctly then maybe it is worth $133 to them. It's not to me, but I can see how it is to some. Even if all they did was change the caps and key codes that could be very valuable to some people. If I were a fan of Das Keyboard I would probably shell out for one.

Even the keys for volume, iTunes, brightness, and Mission Control?

The way this article is written and the way they use the word "fanboy" highlights their bias much more than anyone else's. They have the makings of an interesting article, but instead of writing an interesting story or adding any insight they decided to make it a versus thing. Yay, just what the web needs. :/

> We would have paid good money to watch Sherlock Holmes or Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. But it simply was not an option. So we went with a TV show that was free and then went to bed.

Free? Surely Fred has paid for his cable subscription. And paid dearly if he has any HD channels. And then there are the loud, terrible, annoying commercials.

It costs at least $50/month to get anything half decent on cable TV here in BC. More if you want HD stuff. Many folks I know spend about $100/month on cable.

Do they have a home button? I'm sure the answer varies but in general you need the hardware and software to agree on some things. That is my point. Even if the software is flexible such as Android 4 that will display the buttons if necessary, or use hardware buttons if they are available.

AFAIK Android was basically unusable on iOS hardware, using the sleep/wake button in an odd way and other things that do not work well.

People have hacked iPads and iPhones to run Android. And nobody actually uses it because there is no hardware back button, etc.

When hardware and software are a cohesive unit it's hard to run something generic on the hardware, or run the software on some other hardware. That is not the case for Windows, Linux, and Android, which is why people feel differently about that ecosystem.

SemiAccurate loves drama. Take everything you read on that site with a grain of salt. (Especially if it has to do with Nvidia. Charlie hates Nvidia.)

Funny anecdote, but does "hot swap" necessarily mean "yank out without warning"? My understanding is that you might need to tell the kernel that you are going to yank out a component before doing so. Similarly after adding in a component you might have to poke the kernel and say "hey, new stuff here" before you can use it.

> As for rude: you just demonstrated it. If you think you're giving away 70% of "your money" you don't get it. You're getting a 40% commission of THEIR MONEY.

Absolutely not. Both parties need each other. It collectively belongs to both of them.

> Your money has been made of the backs of creators, and to turn around and call those indie label executives shitheads doesn't endear you to anyone no matter how many concerts you go to.

I didn't see him call anyone a shithead. And you could just as easily say that the labels make money on the backs of artists. If you want to be rude and dismissive of others.

Nope. Especially not in Canada.

Poor wording on my part. What I meant is that they too had to build a user base from nothing.

Reddit didn't appear out of the ether as one of those sites. They built a user base like everyone else.

That depends on the language support for the editor in question. Emacs can check C and related languages on the fly with flymake. Emacs can also check JavaScript on the fly with js2-mode. Editors such as BBEdit and TextMate cannot do that as far as I know. I'm not sure about the others that I mentioned.

The sky is the limit with programmable editors like Emacs and vim. Like general purpose hardware and OSs, neither can do anything that the other cannot do. Emacs does have an edge but in practice people have been able to make vim do just about anything.

I like vim, use it daily for editing configs and such, and used to use gvim as my main text editor. Its ubiquity or usefulness is not disputed by anyone. I don't think that modes are stupid (though I don't prefer modes myself).

However, when developing locally on a relatively modern machine it does not feel any faster at performing basic tasks than other text editors. vim being optimized to run over 300 baud connections is not an advantage in what many consider normal, daily use.

Eclipse is a dog. If you compare vim to other text editors such as BBEdit, TextMate, Emacs, Gedit, Sublime Text 2, e, etc. then your argument falls flat on its face.

No problem. Glad that you found it useful!