xtho

The category existed long before (take a look at, e.g., win ce-based tablets/pads that were released from 2000 on). They were the first though that used an OS that is truly optimized for a capacitive touch screen (those pads had resistive screens that weren't all that useful).

It's okay to use it for templates only (and the same is true for php if you use a sane framework). If you use erb files to quickly hack together a dynamic web-page I'd be wary though.

Since this is a prominent argument may I humbly ask, why would you want to take a library with you? You can only read one book at once. The only use-case for a portable library would be writing a scientific paper at the restaurant or coffee shop. I have my doubts though that this would improve the quality of the paper.

> "<? echo "Hello World"; ?>"

That's actually a good example for why it should die (embedding code in html).

Since you seem to compare terminal vim vs gedit: How do you run gedit in a terminal?

I gvim you could have used the mouse too.

"For a few years now, people have been expecting electronic textbooks to take off in a big way: They're cheaper than traditional textbooks"

Somebody never tried to get a site license for something that is worth its money. Electronic media are much too expensive for the education market (at least for universities etc.). A "traditional textbook" you can sell once you don't have a need for it any longer. The effective cost is less than the list price. I've also made the experience that electronic media usually lacks the depth of "traditional textbooks" unless it's the textbook put on the web.

How would a rss reader for people look like? Would it be able to rate/rank items accordingly to the probability that I'm going to like it?

The main problem with rss feeds is the same as with many other media formats: people try to meet the standard volume (at least x posts per week) even if they have nothing interesting to say. Most rss feeds suffer from the same problem that also hampers novels that have to be X pages long, movies that have to be 100 minutes long, or CDs that have to have a minimum play time etc. even though the quality of the material would suggest something shorter.

How is it better than (or different from) http://github.com/tomtom/tselectfiles_vim which is vimscript only?

With truecrypt you can also create file containers, which you can easily backup as a whole by copying them to another disk. In some situations, this has certain advantages e.g. when upgrading your hard disk. It also provides a way to allow access only to certain parts by distributing your documents over several containers. I use truecrypt on my netbook and haven't had any problems with it in years and found it a convenient way to securely share files between computers with different OSes. Truecrypt is also available for linux but unfortunately there doesn't seem to be an ARM/android version available. On linux, I use encryptfs though.

I personally found it more pleasing to print web pages to pdf and copy them to the kindle via usb. But this wouldn't be exciting enough to blog about.

As somebody who doesn't blog (and never did), I wonder if there is a difference whether you want people to follow your news feed or whether you market your articles on social news sites like this one. If it is news feeds, I'd say one of the things that make people stop reading a blog is too many unrelated articles with little original content. If it is social news sites a ton of mediocre, boring articles doesn't hurt.

Are you suggesting that this could explain certain events in the past?

If the disorder is the new standard, then the underlying notion of a "normal" personality would become useless. Maybe the concept was wrong right from the beginning. It's interesting though that e.g. for Freud normality rather was something like the majority's disorder -- not the absence of neuroses/psychoses. (At least in Totem and taboo.)

Did you talk to those people when they became homeless or did you watch them after years of homelessness during which they were at best ignored by common people?

Choose something you use yourself. From the discussions on the user mailing list/forum you will soon find out what features users are missing. Or take a look at the bug tracker. Many procects have todo lists somewhere in the source tree. The usual way would be to implement a feature you miss.

Before contributing, check how the developer team reacted to patches in the past -- there are teams that tend to ignore them.

Most often developers will happily help you if you have specific questions about the code.

Start with small patches or isolated modules that don't take the core developers too long to review and adapt to their "style".

Adhere to the project's coding style.

1 isn't a matrix. Integers/floating point numbers are in many languages treated differently than other types for reasons of performance and memory management etc. Ruby isn't different in this respect (IIRC they call it immediate objects). A matrix is a "normal" object in ruby.

BTW the ruby equivalent for the above convention would be (maybe inspired by scheme?)

    a.inverse!() -> mutate a
    a.inverse() -> return the inverse

Which one is more consistent?

"In some languages, you have some objects with methods named size, some with length, etc."

In ruby you dont. It's #size and ruby is quite consistent in this respect. So it's remembering a method name vs remembering a function name (in a supposedly OO language).

I didn't comment on the article but on the statement above about applied statistics being dominated by ml and about Bayesian statistics being the future.

You can't solve all problems with machine learning and data mining. How would you apply those methods, e.g., to psychological experiments or test planing when every single test costs a considerate amount of money?

  "Academic Teaching: In academics, the courses available rarely go beyond just some Stat 101"

Not if you study statistics. The problem with learning only "applied statistics" is that people lack the mathematical foundation to understand what they are actually doing.

Well, the original 7'' eeepc probably was too small for most people. I personally understood (and welcomed) their move to 9'' models. I personally find it interesting though that they haven't since released a model that offers noticeable improvements over the 901 that was introduced 2 years ago.

You don't need to cite a study but describing contrived and hypothetical counter-examples isn't the proper way to criticize empirical research either.

How does tcl, php, and vimscript support dynamic scoping? Examples please.

IIRC common lisp supports dynamic scoping too -- it defaults to lexical scoping though.

I simply hope you were ironic since both phrases should be avoided when writing about science.

What would be the devil's term for HTML pages? Chiseled in stone?

Since more and more plugins are available as git repositories, vimball becomes less important though.

There are other similar solution for handling "bundles" (or plugins distributed as git repositories):

tpugin (on demand path manipulation): http://github.com/tomtom/vimtlib/blob/master/macros/tplugin....

scriptmanager: http://github.com/MarcWeber/vim-addon-manager

I love it when a statement begins with "Research shows ..."

An evaluation of the usual suspects would have been more interesting. I'd also suggest: start with a small language that doesn't surprise people -- like lua maybe.

Anyway, I personally learned much from my early exposure to Pascal (after having learned BASIC as first language), which was designed as a teaching language that doesn't meet any of those requirements.

I don't think it's a good idea to make this dependent on github. The README or VERSION file could contain a note about the project status/quality: "version 1.2 -- abandoned". Simply creating an empty file named ABANDONED would work too for people who don't use github.