lanaer
It (and its brother, rel="prev") are meant to inform the browser (which then hopefully informs the user, but that never took off) of what the next or previous page is (in contexts where that makes sense). Maybe it's the next page of an article (evil!), or the next blog post in line. Whatever.
Anyway, this has been around for a while, even mentioned in this post from 2008: http://diveintomark.org/archives/2008/06/21/minimalism
So it's more accurate to say that Firefox likes to prefetch pages, and will use <link rel="next"> tags to guide it. If you're going to be pre-fetching pages anyway, that seems a reasonable enough way to decide what to fetch, but I agree that I'd prefer pre-fetching to be off.
Anyway:
Reasons 1-5 aren't about the many languages used in China (if French & Spanish are different languages, then I consider Mandarin & Cantonese to be different languages). These difficulties are due to the lack of a concise phonetic alphabet (like the roman alphabet used in English, French, Spanish…, or the hiragana alphabet used in Japanese). If the Chineses languages all used a common (small!) phonetic alphabet of some sort, many of those difficulties would dissolve (and there is no particular reason why that could not be done, technically, except that it throws out a huge part of their culture). Even if only Mandarin existed, those first 5 difficulties would remain.
Edit: OK, so using a phonetic alphabet would mean that each language would be written differently... except that this is already true, essentially. You can actually write in Cantonese in a way that a Mandarin speaker could not understand (using the same characters), and there are those who do this. I think he says this in there (I read this a long time ago), that the Mandarin writing system is just that; Mandarin. The whole country knows how to read it (without necessarily knowing how to pronounce it), so it's more about the non-Mandarin-speaking Chinese people having 2 languages that they use: their own for speaking, and Mandarin for writing. Using a purely phonetic alphabet may make this bi-lingual usage more difficult... or not. The existing writing system is already pretty painful, whether you're a native or not (though natives have more time to get used to it before they're expected to be able to use it, I suppose).
Reason 6: this isn't like reading Shakespeare (Modern English, though an earlier version of it), as far as I understand. It seems more like trying to read The Canterbury Tales (Middle English) or Beowulf (Old English, more like German than English, really). You're completely correct about it not being relevant to practical usage of any of the Chinese languages, though.
In any case, Steam isn't running with any elevated privileges on my own system (I already had access enabled for assistive devices, which Steam only seems to need to actually launch its games), so I have no complaint on a security standpoint.
My only complaint with Steam so far is that it hardcodes the directory it stores the games. I want to put them elsewhere.
It also doesn't need admin access to view all running processes, any user on a unix system can do so.
That being said… I'm pretty sure Steam never actually asked me for an admin password (and I run in a non-privileged account), so I'm not quite sure what this guy is talking about.
The point here is that in order to write a tiny bit of data, SSDs have to write to a larger portion of the drive (usually).
So reducing the # of tiny writes should lengthen the lifetime of the drive. It's theory, but the theory is sound enough to me to optimize for it if there's little or no downside to the optimizations.
Edit: though, as noted elsewhere, these drives will generally last more than long enough, so the effort is probably unnecessary.
Granted, I have my vim configured to look almost like TextMate in just this way, so maybe he's just ripping off textmate… somehow I doubt it.
In any case, the software on the phone never sees any javascript code, only the proxy does.
When I hover over the link you gave (or click it and see it in the address bar), it looks like http://www.youtube.xn--combad-site-hx3f.com/something_else (which lets off plenty of flags for me).
Ninjas do the job, and nobody knows until it’s too late.
I'm not seeing desirable qualities here for coders.
Changing my text encoding to latin-1 fixed the display.
I'm on Chrome, amusingly enough, on OS X 10.6.
Personally, I'll probably use H.264. Why? Because I find it preferable than flash, and if I want my web video to be viewable without flash to most of my visitors, H.264 seems like the only practical solution (and possibly encoding in Theora as well).
It's not a standard, and browser vendors & others can continue to offer alternatives, one of which may supplant H.264, as PNG replaced GIF. Or maybe Theora will turn out to infringe on patents that H.264 legally relies on, and H.264 will stay around for a while.
Whatever the case may be, this is only the first generation of video-capable browsers. It wouldn't surprise me at all to see future generations be much more flexible in terms of codec support.
Unless the economy manages to crash again in that time, and worse. Then, though, you'd probably be in a crappy situation even if you left now.
More than likely, at this point, your house will be worth more (though probably not a lot more) than it does now, and (since you've been meeting your payments) your debt will have shrunk, too.
Problem with GUI is that you need a new tool for each such task; we don’t yet have a generalized way of handling such things.
This is fundamentally incorrect. See the millions of Photoshop, Visual Studio, Notepad++, GEdit, Eclipse, Microsoft Office, Autodesk, Blender, Visio, Labview, Mathematica, Quickbooks, SAP, Oracle and other users of proprietary application-specific software. Do those users consider themselves to be experts? Do the accountants working at your company consider themselves to be experts? Do you really believe they would be more productive if they had to work in a terminal all day?
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Um, isn’t that particular quote you have there about keyboards vs. mice, rather than command-line vs. GUI? (Next paragraph he talks a bit about one advantage of command-line, but it is a different point than this one).
Expert photoshop users rely quite heavily on the keyboard (keyboard shortcuts specifically), for many operations. The mouse is also used heavily, of course. The keyboard just can’t select portions of an image very effectively, or help you point at a pixel you want different, etc. Whenever I see a Photoshop expert do something to the image, though, they’ve used the keyboard, where beginner users (like me) just use the mouse.
For most of the others, I expect expert X users are similar to expert Photoshop users. Then there are the rest, which are very text-oriented and therefore mostly keyboard-driven by default.
On to the actual GUI-vs-command-line argument.
You say “The way this works in interactive GUI applications is that they provide input forms and status indications to communicate with the user.” His argument was that this is less straightforward than just typing the arguments next to the command. I do not think you have refuted his point.
The simple fact is that both interfaces have their places. I do a lot of work in both, and I think it will pretty much always be that way (for me).
I do not think text-oriented command interfaces will go away while we still read & write, though hopefully they will indeed become friendlier with graphical interfaces.
I do not find this to be the case. But then, there are various keyboard commands, both in Vim and on the command line, that I do not really have to call to mind before using. I just type them when needed.
It’s really weird how that works, actually, how with many things (I’ve noticed this with GUI interfaces, too) the mind will learn it to the point where you don’t need the conscious part of you to be aware of it anymore.
So I think this is really about what we’re most used to, what our mind has adapted to. I feel very clumsy if I’m editing in something other than Vim, because that’s what I’ve adapted to.
For a time, I had gotten used to typing correct apostrophes and quotes ( ‘ ” “ ), such that I could no longer automatically type a ' or ". I had to think about those primes if those were what I wanted, although the quotes are certainly harder to type.
So what am I saying here? I guess I’m saying that we can’t rely on our own experience too heavily — whichever interface we find we have to think more to use may be far more natural for another, and all of that may be entirely irrelevant from an objective standpoint.
Also Safari 4.
Edit: Now that I've read further down the page, apparently I really should try it in Firefox, or thoroughly clear my Safari cache.
Seriously? People still say this? This hasn’t been true since Apple standardized on the Mighty Mouse (horrible mouse that it was). That was a long time ago (in internet time, anyway), and now the Mighty Mouse is dead.
Cite? I was under the impression that it was about as dangerous as others.
“Browse eBooks, magazines and newspapers on AT&T's 3G Wireless Network or on Wi-Fi. And every Barnes & Noble has free Wi-Fi, so you can connect at lightning fast speeds.”
Sounds like B&N is just marketing their Wi-Fi hotspots as a convenience, but it doesn’t need to be their hotspots; any Wi-Fi connection should do.