monkeyfacebag

Apple stock is down on the news. Although I'm personally underwhelmed by this announcement, I'll bet analysts are more worried about the lower priced iPad cutting into margins than they are Apple's ability to ship them.

This is a great response. I did not watch the keynote, though as a Nexus 7 owner, I keenly feel the dearth of apps. Music creation apps, in particular, are absent from Android because of poor support for low latency audio in the SDK. Most of the time, however, I use the Nexus 7 to browse the web, in which case, I imagine it performs roughly as well as the iPad mini, except with the higher information density.

>The iPad's screen is a much higher quality IPS display than the N7.

I'm curious how you know this. I understood the Nexus 7 screen to also use IPS. What makes the one in the new iPad better?

>Of course, I'm going to expect all of this in a tablet with a $70 higher price point.

My Nexus 7 was $199. Yes, it has less storage space than the mini, but the difference between getting an Android tablet and and iPad is actually $130, not $70.

I don't know a lot about iPads, but that price is about $50 more than I would have naively guessed. Spec for spec, the Nexus 7 (disclosure: I own this) seems to offer more for less (yes, the screen is smaller, but the information quantity & density is actually greater). Sure, there is the value of Apple's ecosystem, but I imagine Android will catch up on this sooner or later.

If Chrome OS had a package manager hooked into Debian's (or anyone's) repos, I'd be all over this. I do almost all of my non-programming work in the browser, but I can't leave the batteries included world of Linux behind just yet.

> It was responsive and impressive and, well, weird. Keys fired well, but other aspects, like the track pad or pressing keyboard combinations, felt odd.

Due to (supposed) focus on productivity, Surface has piqued my interest, but there's no way I'm going to order one without putting my hands on the touch keyboard first. Microsoft has not done a good job showing me how it works or convincing me that it is better than the on-screen keyboard I'm currently using (compare to Apple's iPhone keynote, etc.).

> But after I got my first iPad, the original, I found that I could type at nearly the same speed

Speed is certainly one issue, but the ergonomics of typing for an extended period favor separate screen and keyboard components. I too use a table for typing and while I'm pretty quick at it, I can't find a comfortable position that lets me do this for more than half an hour at a time. For this reason alone, the inclusion of a keyboard has certainly made me take notice of Microsoft's offering.

Of course now that MS is tying Metro style apps to their proprietary app store in the next version of Windows, the distinction between appliance and platform is starting to blur.

> Both iOS and Android prevent users from installing and accessing other app stores.

This is not true for Android. Some OEMs might ship a version of Android that is tied to a single app store (e.g., Kindle Fire), but I'm quite certain that vanilla Android can install any old .apk from any source.

I'm not a marketing guy, so I have no idea what I'm talking about here, but shouldn't a call to action include an action? Something like (again, not a marketing guy): get yours today! If the iPhone 5 banner is considered a call to action by marketing people, the term doesn't seem that useful.

The "risk" as described here seems to account for only single incidences of bicycle theft. Seems like the more professional the bike thief, the larger the inventory of stolen bikes, thus the greater the penalty for being caught. Given that the value of stolen bikes on the market is relatively low, this might explain why there is no bike thief kingpin: at a certain point the risk exceeds the reward.

As an aside: I am surprised that the risk to kidnappers is considered higher than the risk to bank robbers. Can anyone explain this?

I second this. I switched from Arch to Debian unstable so I could have machines targeting unstable, testing and stable all from the same distro.

I do miss Arch-style init though.

> but how one might implement them matters just as much if not more IMO

This is a false choice. Learning monads through Haskell, you get the forest and the trees! That said, I get that there are legitimate differences of opinion and what worked for me will not necessarily work for others. I feel like some understanding of types (or categories, etc.) is necessary to fully grok monads. Both this article and your linked paper offer some basic explanation of the concept. Tutorials that are essentially implementations of bind are, in fact, missing the forest for the trees.

I appreciate these attempts to give non-Haskellers a chance to learn Monads but, personally, I never really grokked them until I got into Haskell. In Haskell, Monads are defined in terms of types, thus languages without type systems like Haskell's make the concept both more difficult to understand and less (immediately) useful. Having been through many of these tutorials myself, I think the best way to get into Monads (as well as many other useful constructs like Functors, Monoids and Monad Transformers) is to roll up your sleeves and learn Haskell (Learn You A Haskell is a great and relatively quick read). As a bonus, you'll also learn one of the most elegant programming languages around.

This comment isn't intended as a knock against the article. I think there's a lot of merit in using monadic constructs in languages that aren't Haskell, I just think Haskell's type system makes understanding the concept easier.

That's fair. I was conflating two things in my initial post: legibility and suitability. Legibility was atrocious; I did not get the same insight from the vis that you did because I couldn't read it. Suitability is, of course, debatable. I find star plots have a fair bit of noise (e.g., line slope) that detracts from the message of the vis. Parallel coordinates are slightly better in this regard, but still require a "discerning eye." However, looking at it again, I agree that a table would be insufficient.

Off topic, but that star plot was impossible to read. Straight up parallel coordinates would have been an improvement (maybe), but I can't help feeling like, with only 25 data points, a summary table would have been even better. I love visualizations as much as the next guy, but only when they are aids to understanding, not, you know, detriments to it.

Is there a back story available? I'd be interested in knowing what compelled a developer to abandon Firefox, but this post is nothing more than a rant, lacking both explanation and evidence.

To be fair, I don't think the integrated device model is worse than the beige box model per se. Tablets and smartphones afford us completely new ways to interact with computers (and each other). Recent ones, such as the Nexus 7, are reasonably priced to boot. There are some perhaps unavoidable consequences of replacing whole devices rather than individual components (environmental, to say the least), but in the abstract I think it's hard to say whether one model is necessarily worse than the other.

No doubt it has been replaced by device obsolescence, where the screen, camera, wireless radio, etc. are bundled together and improvements in any one component compels the purchase of a whole new unit.

As far as I know, this has been changed in Python 3. See: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3815359/while-1-vs-for-wh...

It may be the case that at any given point, the idiomatic way is not the fastest. However, if idioms are widely adopted, the language implementers have good reason to optimize them. I'm not saying that's what happened in this case, but I think it's reasonable claim to make in general.

> That may be a byproduct if the language implementers then make the social mores they admire the ones that perform the best

I understand the definition of the word idiom. I'm saying that the quoted scenario is, in fact, not just hypothetical, but likely. Thus, following idiomatic style can help one avoid performance issues.

I always interpret "idiomatic" as "avoiding performance issues". In Python, for example, using the join method on strings is not only idiomatic, it's performant. Even if a particular idiom has no effect on performance, the worst that happens is I write idiomatic code. Not only that, but idiomatic coding allows me to write performant code without having to understand why it performs well. I don't know Ruby, so I can't comment on each vs for loops, but in general there's a practical, performance-based advantage to idiomatic coding.

> There is nothing distinguishing Android from a conventional general-purpose computing OS

Except the expectations of the consumer, which was, you know, the whole point of my post. The touch interface has literally nothing to do with it.

To be totally clear, I agree that Android doesn't carry the same caveats as iOS and Windows RT, but in the eyes of the consumer, Windows and Android mean very different things.

I'd attribute it to the software. iOS and Android are clearly meant to coexist with and not supplant a more traditional OS. To me, the dangerous precedent is that this new ARM computer comes loaded with "Windows", a label which connotes a more traditional OS, yet it can only run apps from MS's app store and cannot be booted into Linux. Yes, this is a slippery slope argument given that MS also provides the x86 version which can do all of those things, but I think the distinction will be lost on the general public.

> our workflows are so refined at this point

Whose workflows and at what point? Do we think the children born today will be satisfied with GNOME 2 (or GNOME 3 for that matter)? I agree that we're playing fast and loose with the definition of "reinvention" here (and that GNOME 3 is clearly not a reinvention of anything--to be fair, he started it!), but I think there's room for better than incremental improvements in all facets of computing, including the desktop.

I get where you're coming from, but I'm curious how you can evaluate a desktop environment from release notes. To me, GNOME 3 is a clear demonstration of the difference between features and design. Rather than adding new features, it focuses on making them fast and easy to use. I'm not saying GNOME 3 is perfect or for good for everyone, but I don't think it can be evaluated by its feature list.

For the record, I do think GNOME 3 is "substantially better" than previous versions, but I also understand that this is in no way an objective measure and it's perfectly reasonable for us not to hold the same opinion here.

> Every new PC sold with Windows 8 will be locked up tight with Microsoft's UEFI ... secure boot on

Not that I don't agree that there's a potentially dangerous precedent here, but this is omitting a key detail. For x86 computers, MS's certification requires that users can disable secure boot. Of course, this is not true for ARM computers, hence the dangerous precedent.

> The desktop really doesn't need reinventing.

I'm surprised people think this. Do you think we're going to still be using the Windows 95 model in 10 years?

Sure, the relative importance of the desktop will diminish as other forms of input become viable, but we're not there yet. I still do 95% of my work in a desktop environment with multiple windows and everything, just like I did 10 years ago. The difference is that the desktop environments I have access to now are better than the ones I had then. I hope that trend continues.

GNOME 3 is a really great, well integrated (if not particularly innovative) desktop environment. Unfortunately, it broke existing workflows, which led to a great deal of criticism on its release. Had GNOME 3 had been a new, unrelated product rather than the next version of GNOME, there would be, if not more excitement about it, at least less criticism.

Making radical changes to an incumbent system is difficult and often thankless, even when the new version is, if not objectively better than the previous, very good. Apple encountered this with the transition to OS X. Anyone who remembers the "Classic" environment can attest to how poorly this transition was perceived by many Mac fans. Microsoft has a real problem on its hands trying to convince users that Windows 8 is better than Windows 7.

Ultimately, GNOME 3 feels like a much better designed environment than the previous version. For those that tried an early release and gave up on it, I'd encourage you to go back and try it again.

OK, I want to hear you out, but I have major problems with this evidence. First, in what way are the mayor of Boston and the Jim Henson company emissaries from the gay community? Second, this article references things that happened after Dan Cathy's remarks. You indicated that there were incidents prior to (indeed causing) those remarks to be made. I'm aware of all the stuff going on now, but you led me to believe there was some history I was unaware of. Can you explain?

Can you be more specific about what the gay community has done to this person that forced him to stand up for his views in public? I am genuinely ignorant here and would like some information.