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jpdon [dead]

Shockingly, one time a few friends and I managed to play soccer in the park without any refs at all!! Crazy right? It was like a completely different game!

/sarcasm

The low-tech argument is not valid. People play football, baseball, basketball in the park all the time. There is no love-lost due to lack of replays, shot clocks, etc.

jpdon Lego hack: Functional sniper rifle (video)

Are you suggesting that using a programming language to write a program is surprising? I feel like they may have been designed to do that...

jpdon Writing Tips from 6 All-time Great Writers

I agree, it's supposed to be a joke claiming that 'needless' is a needless word. I'm saying I do not understand the joke because I believe 'needless' is actually a necessary part of that sentence.

jpdon Writing Tips from 6 All-time Great Writers

I disagree, I find "omit all words" to make as little sense as "omit no words". Personally, I find it more likely to default to "omit some words". This, of course, does not describe the type of words we should be omitting, but rather that there exist words that we should omit. Saying "omit needless words" does describe the type, adding more information which is not there otherwise, making it a "needed" word.

jpdon Writing Tips from 6 All-time Great Writers

I've never understood that quote as I believe it removes a necessary word. "Needless" describes the type of word to delete. Without it, isn't William Zinsser suggesting we should omit random words?

jpdon The Rise of DevOps

True, but just because it starts as a personal project doesn't mean it has to stay that way. For example, z/OS's TERSE (a compression utility) was once someone's personal project, but is now shipped with the operating system. I'm sure there are many such examples. That said, these personal projects are no longer treated as such, and have gone through Test, and et cetera before being included in the system release.

jpdon Newbie Fashion Tips for Grown-up Men

Thanks for the heads up about this, just 'installed' the bookmarklet. Seems to work well.

jpdon Newbie Fashion Tips for Grown-up Men

Oddly, copy/pasting the link into the address bar and manually adding a plus to the end of the URL seems to take far more effort then just clicking on the link. If only there were a usability trick to actually see the link directly in the post somehow...

jpdon Daring Fireball: "Facebook login"

I'd imagine if your food came with instructions on how to cook them you, as a poor cook, would at least know enough to read and follow the instructions. I can't cook worth a dime normally, but I can follow directions in order to make Mac & Cheese or Ramen.

I daresay, if something I am not familiar with pops up with an error message, I would at least read it!

jpdon Daring Fireball: "Facebook login"

Answer: You can't, and no, you shouldn't try. You have to assume your users actually have the ability to get to your website before you can worry about what they do when they get there.

Sorry, but this whole thing is a whole new level of idiocy I had not previously encountered: Even my mother (whose sole computer skill is that she can get to amazon.com to buy gifts for people) would be able to determine whether or not she was at amazon after searching Google and clicking a random link.

My God! RWW isn't even BLUE for heaven's sakes.

jpdon Adobe's response to Flash Crash

Could someone plase chime in for me on this: Does Flash have a way of directly patching the current level of software like, say, Google Chrome does? Does Flash 10? It really should.

Secondly, a high-impact pervasive problem which allows a plug-in to crash the entire platform should not be marked fixed in next release.

jpdon Ask HN: If you were to learn a programming language for your first time

Personally, I'd start with assembly (not necessarily x86 though, probably MIPS or similar. The reasoning here should be obvious as it's almost as low-level as you can get, everything else in computer science is based on the axioms found at this level. For similar reasons, I think Number Systems would be an excellent place to start learning mathematics (and possibly predicate calculus in parallel).

jpdon Poll: Language Use

Not really, I suppose I'd describe it as a low-level language like C, combined with syntax which would be familiar to anyone who has used REXX. You can do things like splits in python to refer to a subset of an array, and it has a single loop macro, which is similar to ALGOL68's 'for'. Also, it has dummy sections, which are kind of like structs, except they can be associated with a specific pointer. So, rather than saying 'Employee->name' to refer to the structs name field, you just say name, and it knows which pointer it is based off of. You can tie many of these pointers together and it will follow them automatically, which is very useful, although it can get confusing.

That said, it does have high-level-assembler features, like being able to directly declare and modify registers. Pl/X also features a way to directly insert assembly code using a GENERATE macro, in which you have to specifically declare which registers/variables are either modified or referenced.

All-in-all, it's not a bad language; I prefer it to C.

jpdon Poll: Language Use

As far as I know, the only place PL/X is still used is inside z/OS, though I could be wrong.

jpdon Poll: Language Use

Other: PL/X, System Z Assembly

jpdon Zap Reader - Download to your brain as fast as you can handle

What makes this better than the previously released www.spreeder.com?

jpdon Report says IBM is switching from Microsoft Office to Lotus Symphony

Lotus Symphony is even slower than Lotus Notes on my machine (Lenovo T61) and neither of them startup in less than 10 seconds. That's a deal breaker right there. But at least it LOOKS (superficially) better than Lotus Word Pro which they preinstalled on my machine. I still use that though because Lotus Word Pro takes about 2 seconds to start up. Way better.

jpdon New Hitchhiker's Guide book "not very funny"

I have read Eoin's Artemis Fowl trilogy and found it quite good -- but it's not anywhere near the same writing style used in Hitchhiker's Guide. If they wanted the same Hitchhiker feel they probably should have gone with Terry Pratchett (though I doubt he'd accept, he seems to quite enjoy his own Discworld universe). I'm sure it will be good, just different from what people expect from the series.

jpdon Review my startup: Revizr. You haven't seen this before.

Great, now all you need to do is integrate it in a service like fanstory.com or fanfiction.net. Users could then point out all the writing mistakes perspective authors make as they read, beautifully and elegantly. Beta-readers would love it.

jpdon Prototype Nokia phone recharges without wires

No, the Pre has a landing pad which you put it on. (i.e. it's "specifically designed with a transmitter and receiver in mind"). This phone will not require a landing pad, and will recharge ANYWHERE you happen to be (as long as radio waves penetrate the area).

jpdon User gets fed up with bug; cracks program to fix it himself.

Can someone explain how one might do something like this? I get that you can use some sort of disassembler to read the code, but how did he insert his check without upsetting the machine code's memory offsets?

jpdon Bing’s Reign As #2 Search Engine Lasted One Day

My apologies, when you said "write a followup when better data proves it wrong," I thought you were suggesting that it was now good data.

jpdon Bing’s Reign As #2 Search Engine Lasted One Day

Uhm... where better data is the exact same source as they used before?

jpdon I want to help you write better...

My sentence needs the period moved to the left a bit.

Not if you're English.

jpdon Bing Is Live

yeah, noone has ever made "release early, update often" work on the web...

jpdon How to beat Page's Law? Pretend you're coding for a Vic-20

Yes, software is getting more bloated, but it's also getting more powerful. The VIC-20 couldn't do any number of graphics related things our current range of hardware does on a regular basis. Take all your best engineers, and try to make it play a HD movie at an acceptable frame-rate. It's not going to happen.

jpdon [dead]

I also heard said anecdote, along with the fact that it didn't actually effect Chevy Nova sales; it sold admirably.

jpdon Wikipedia bans Church of Scientology

That's Jabberwocky, not Hunting of the Snark.

jpdon Plastic Logic: Like Kindle, but Thin like iPhone.

Plastic Logic: Like Kindle, but Thin like Kindle 2.

jpdon How Perl 6 just sells itself (excerpt from IRC)

While UTF-8 is a good default encoding, it seems odd to tie standard functions into things which cannot be presumed. Without having the ability to specify encoding, you will have one function for UTF-8 and a different one (roll your own?) for every other encoding out there.

Uhm... read the both these lines, not just one of them like you did before:

  <jnthn> chars($string) # characters
  <jnthn> bytes($string) # how many bytes