jcfields

It's been a while since I've taken the ACT or SAT, but it seems unnecessary to me to allow graphing calculators at all. I'm pretty sure you can get through any 4-year engineering program without ever using more than a good scientific calculator on an exam (and that's all you're allowed to use on the FE/PE exams), so it ought to be more than sufficient for high school algebra or trig.

I would actually take it a step further and say that graphing calculators aren't even that useful in instruction, especially now that students all have computers and can run Desmos, MatLab, or whatever. I had a TI-86 in high school, and the only class in which I found it indispensable was A.P. Statistics. Maybe I'm being narrow-minded, but I always thought those things were a bit silly and gimmicky and sort of resented that my parents had to buy me one for school.

It’s called apposition.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apposition

If the administration deserves the blame when it does something bad, it deserves the credit when it does something good.

As they say, the road to Perl is paved with good intentions.

There are several languages that people like for this sort of flexibility, but I think Python's relative rigidity has always been one of its strengths.

The two .ino files in the repository are Arduino programs for testing the sensors. So it does contain 700-800 lines of code.

That's why I learned vi initially years ago, because I was told it was the only editor that would always be available anywhere you went. I only ever use it in ssh sessions these days, but I still feel like learning how to use it has paid off many times.

I was playing with Haiku recently and was surprised that vi or vim wasn't included in its base install. Granted, Haiku (like BeOS before it) doesn't ever claim to be a Unix-like or POSIX-compliant system, but I found the CLI environment to be very Unix-like overall. I guess it's a testament to the ubiquity of vi that it never occurred to me that it wouldn't be there. (If anyone's curious, emacs is also absent but nano is there.)

Amazon suspended my parents' seller account last August or September with no explanation. All listings removed, couldn't log in, no direct customer service number that connects you with someone who knows what's going on, and kept taking the monthly fee anyway. Finally, they closed it entirely (again without explanation) a month or two ago. They're still holding their inventory in their distribution centers, probably a few thousand dollars worth. I'm sure they'll charge storage and shipping fees to send it back, so it's almost certainly not worth bothering about given how thin their margins were in the first place. Yeah, it's not a great direction we're going in here. These companies just don't have enough incentive to care.

It was also commonplace to use the UXTheme patcher to enable third-party custom window themes. I used the Watercolor theme, which was modeled after the Whistler beta builds before they (bafflingly) switched it out for Luna.

I have a soft spot for Windows 2000 because I was very impressed with it when it first came out (coming from Win9x), but there wasn't much point to using it over XP after XP came out. Windows XP is just an improved version of 2000, and it was updated for much longer. Windows 2000 doesn't even support wi-fi without third-party utilities.

CSS technically came out near the end of 1996, but I don't think it was widely used for layouts until the early 2000s when sites like A List Apart and the CSS Zen Garden were advocating against using tables for layout and separating content from presentation. A lot of web sites back then were made by mocking up a design in Photoshop and then splicing it up into a bunch of image files that you meticulously recreated in a grid using tables and spacer GIFs, so transitioning to fluid CSS layouts required rethinking the whole design approach for a lot of people. (I initially only used CSS to add hover color to my links, since that was one thing you could do in CSS that you couldn't do with plain HTML attributes.)

"View Source" was definitely the thing that got me into web development and eventually programming in general. That and reading books at Waldenbooks at the mall while my mom and sister were shopping was pretty much how I learned everything back then (since we didn't nearly the wealth of online resources we do today, and the ones we did have weren't as comprehensive as something like MDN). I remember Microsoft's web sites all used VBScript instead of JavaScript back then. I remember seeing Flash for the first time and thinking it was incredible but then being disappointed that it was a binary file format that I couldn't recreate.

Like the article author, I've oft lamented how byzantine and opaque modern web sites are to tinkerers thanks to things like CSS preprocessors (which can often lead to complex class webs like the excerpt in the article) and JavaScript minimizers (which, even if you "unminimize" it, strips meaningful symbol names and comments). Granted, there are a whole ton of new ways to learn these things, but there's something to be said for just diving in and seeing how somebody else did it.

(Edit: I should note that the CSS inspector and JavaScript debuggers in modern browsers do help bridge this gap.)

I did a couple of small projects in Python using wxWidgets recently, and I was surprised at how easy it was (as well as how consistent the results were between Windows and Mac OS).

They're x, y pairs for the top-left and bottom-right corners of the rectangle. They're coordinates in the fourth quadrant of the Cartesian plane (i.e., with the origin conceptually in the top-left corner), which is also the way coordinates are given in most windowing systems (including X). This is more obvious when using the "poly" attribute rather than "rect," where you can have an arbitrary number of x, y pairs (and the browser automatically closes the shape by drawing a line between the last coordinate and the first).

The way CSS orders border, margin, and padding values is clockwise starting from the top. But these aren't coordinates since they represent sides, not points, so I think the author is confusing things by comparing them.

I think Mac apps have settled into a pleasant place for the most part, though I'm not a fan of the look of Apple's newer apps like the App Store and News.

I'm glad that the brighter colors are more subdued now, annoying UI elements like drawers and palette windows have mostly been replaced by inspector panes, and brushed metal is long gone.

I'm glad someone else remembers this. To this day, whenever I see 0.999... = 1, I think of the Battle.net forums inexplicably flooded with threads about it for what felt like ages.

I think the difference is that the infrastructure is decoupled from the content now. Cable systems and satellite fleets were both traditionally very high barriers for new competitors to overcome. Granted, consolidated media oligopolies may get us to the same place a different way.