morty16

what I took from that is that inertia is more significant than total energy.

if you've got a tank of gas you can go a long way slowly, a short way quickly.

a flywheel takes a lot of effort to spin up or spin down. once it's going at a certain speed it tends to stay there.

so if you tend to get home, eat burritos, and watch netflix, you'll keep doing that.

The original JS borrowed heavily from Scheme (lisp1 + everything evaluatable) and Self (prototype model of inheritance) and then was covered with a bunch of Java-like nonsense, which (IMO) just made things more complex.

There's been a nice functional language buried in JS all this time. It's still buried in there someplace.

From early on in the article

> asyncio.get_event_loop() returns the thread bound event loop, it does not return the currently running event loop.

How can these be different objects? In order to ask for the thread-bound event loop, you must be in the thread, right? When/why would you expect anything else?

fyi, I don't have any background with asyncio/twisted.

Amen.

Further, C helps you think like a particular evolutionary path of computer, and the language and architecture developed mostly in parallel. It's like saying that giraffes have long necks because they need them to reach the tall branches.

I'm just going to leave this here...

http://sqitch.org/

My understanding is that English is a natural second language for the Dutch and is taught extensively in schools (i.e. learned by everyone). Also, they are close enough to the U.K. to receive broadcast television, etc. so they also have that level of immersion.

Every Dutch person I've met has had a terrific command of the language, much better than average native speakers. I suspect that at least some of this is due to the fact that as second-language students they actually take time to learn the rules of grammar, etc. Most native speakers pick it up "on the street", so the Dutch (that I've met) tend to sound more formal and educated, especially when there's no discernible accent.

The allies (the RAF) had fairly specialized bombs in WWII to blow dams. They would fly in from upstream and drop a bomb shaped like a barrel (picture a barrel of oil) from very low altitude. The bomb would skip along the surface as it lost momentum and then sink close to the dam wall. At a certain pressure it would blow and take advantage of the hydrostatic shock to break up the wall.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Chastise

"do the right thing" for a corp. is to maximize profits, full stop.

Labour laws exist to keep unfettered capitalism in check.

I think the GPS receiver comes "for free" with the phone hardware (the DSP/antenna package).

So, I doubt it, just because it wouldn't add much and would cost significantly more (both in components and battery life).

With this kind of device, you're only online when in wifi, so location-aware services are limited too. i.e. what would you do with the GPS info? Maybe photo tagging?

I read that as a short story in the Nebula anthology, and then again when "Story of your life and others" came out.

That was more than a decade ago, and I still think about it more often than most sci-fi stories I've read.

There's a recent release by O'Reilly called "Choosing a Javascript Framework" (http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9781939902085.do) that you might want to look at.

It covers the same frameworks (Angular, Backbone, Ember) and also mentions Polymer and React.

~20$ for the early access version.

This is for the education market, IMO.

Gartner also had an active hand in killing Smalltalk in the enterprise.

CTOs would pay Gartner millions of dollars to have them confirm their bias to go 100% Java/Windows/IBM.

Not that ParcPlace did themselves any favors.

PyCharm also has plugin support, because it's a shared framework (much like Eclipse).

I'm running PyCharm (3.1 pro) and I currently have plugins for .sh, .pl, .md, and more. Some plugins require download (iirc, I had to go through a wizard to get the plugin for markdown)

It's low risk trying PyCharm. The community edition is fairly full-featured, and is free.

>Deprecation with threat of removal of robust long-standing threading APIs with rewrite required.

What's he referring to here?

When are they going to start hunting them to extinction for delicious, scientific reasons?

yes, but I get reminded every day how it is not SmallTalk.

e.g. the primitive vs. object distinction, the lack of closures (gcd is a poor replacement) and the way they allow a rethink of control flow, the neat things you can do because the stack is an object (restart exceptions with values! coroutines!)

I'm fine with the compromise, I just wish it was different.

I had hopes that MacRuby would turn into a supported systems programming language, but it's not to be.

I went from SmallTalk to Java/C/C++ in the mid-nineties. Obj-C is both a relief and a constant source of frustration.

> There's a fantastic WWDC 2012 session that covers how the iPhoto UI is put together in more detail).

Do you happen to know the session name or number?

I was a very mediocre and uninspired student in primary school, often getting Cs and Ds. My parents enrolled me in a small Montessori school for grade 6 and my whole attitude changed. I was back in public school for junior high, but I was getting A/A+ across the board. Looking back (nearly 30 years), it was the most significant year of my education.

It's not that it enabled me to do well in conventional school (I suppose I would have qualified as gifted if I wasn't so extremely lazy), it's that it gave me an enthusiasm for learning and a realization of the broad horizons that were open to me.

You're forgetting your history. Apple bought NeXT in early 97, the iMac came out in early 98, OS 9 came out in late 99 and OS X didn't ship in beta until 2000.

Obviously Apple was working on Pink/Copland all through the 90's, then Rhapsody/OS X since early 97. They didn't ship OS X for _3 whole years_, all the while losing market and mindshare to Wintel.

RIM stating that they aren't abandoning the current form of BB OS is to me equivalent to Apple shipping bug fixes for OS 8 (i.e. OS 9) and Carbon support in OS X (blue box), except in RIM's case they are declaring software/service support for BB OS because they understand that smartphone buyers are on a 3 year cycle imposed by the carriers.

I'm not trying to defend RIM's failure to execute, but it's a difficult, multi-year process to ship a new platform without nuking the company. In my mind their biggest failure is that they should have bought QNX in 2007, not 2010.

>but RIM seems to be afraid to throw away the old.

They aren't going to say that they're abandoning the current platform, they'd Osborne themselves if they did. That doesn't mean that the company isn't throwing all of it's efforts into next year's phone.

Apple sold a lot of bondi blue iMacs before OS X was ready, they wouldn't have survived to ship OSX if they hadn't.

It's because you don't have to pay per-message, and there's groups.

i.e. cheap and fast.

>If they become a label they have to start giving advances to artists

Why?

Logic now costs $200 and a MacBook. I daresay that most musicians pay far more for their instruments than they have to for a production studio.

The idea that you have to invest $$$ to produce an album (hire Timbaland as a producer, spend megabucks on marketing and A&R) is more a byproduct of the blockbuster music market than a logical necessity. If you want to produce a blockbuster, spend blockbuster money, but don't assume that this is the only path to success (success defined as being able to make a living as a musician).