Posts by captain veg 690 posts • joined 12 Jun 2009
You'd be surprised. It's not necessarily the size of a demograph that matters to advertisers. Depends on what they're advertising. For toothpaste, sure, the more the merrier. If you're selling something more niche like, I dunno, a smart phone with a physical keyboard, say, you can't afford to waste impressions on pimply youths and housewives.
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I'll see your anecdote.
My retired father has an uncanny ability to destroy any version of Windows, using unusual techniques like messing around with things he completely doesn't understand in the device manager, or the more common method of strangling the system in cruft until it becomes unusable.
A few years ago I built him a NUC and put Mint on it. Windows is there in a VM if needed. It isn't. Apart from inadvertently moving the start menu to an unexpected position I've not had to field a single support call. It just works.
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JavaScript strings were (and are) Unicode with the meaning that had at the time it was created, more or less what we call UTF-16 now. Numeric values are 64-bit floats, except for when subject to bitwise operations when they are temporarily converted to unsigned 32-bit integers. Other types include undefined, null, boolean, Object and regular expressions. Date and Array are built-in derivatives of Object, as are boxed Boolean, Number and String.
TypeScript brings (optional) compile-time type checking, which JavaScript doesn't have because it is not compiled. It still relies on prototypical inheritance.
Almost all criticism of JavaScript is born of ignorance as to what it actually is, not helped by the fact that the language syntax goes out of its way to pretend that it is something else. That's a valid criticism, by the way.
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JavaScript's undefined needs a bit of respect because an identifier that has been declared but not initialised has a value of undefined, but an identifier that has never been declared and so can't really be said to exist at all also resolves to undefined. It helps to remember that variables are actually properties of an object -- either the global object or a function' local context. Also comparing a value to undefined is not necessarily reliable because undefined is, outside of strict mode, not a keyword, and may be assigned a completely different value! Use the void operator to be sure.
JSHint is genuinely useful, unlike the ridiculously prescriptive JSLint upon which it was based. It would have alerted you pronto about the undeclared identifier.
The d3 library is undoubtedly clever, but I agree that it goes out of its way to demonstrate JavaScript's functional bona fides, sometimes at the expense of clarity.
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> I literally wasted hours on an error until I realized that I had mistyped `foo` so that it was null.
There's your problem right there. You don't understand the language. Your foo is not null, it's undefined.
To be fair, hardly anyone really understands JavaScript, and the superficially Java-like syntax is deeply unhelpful. There are very few decent texts on the subject, so people end up learning frameworks instead of the language and they end up with difficult to debug inpenetrable bloat that runs at a crawl. When you need to introduce a build phase to deploying code written in a dynamic interpreted language then something has gone very badly wrong.
For pure JavaScript, I find the debuggers built in to modern browers to be a joy to use. And JSHint plugged in to my IDE catches the typos long before deployment.
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I switched to LineageOS a couple of years ago when our BOFHs tweaked Exchange in some diabolical way that the email app on my N9 didn't understand. Have to say that I was shocked at how user-hostile it is. My first ever smartphone (also my first ever mobile phone of any kind) was far and away the easiest to use. A Handspring Treo, it ran PalmOS.
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Most peculiar. Installing applications is way easier on most Linux distros* than on any version of Windows. Are you sure that you're not trying to install Windows programs on Linux?
On Debian and Ubuntu, use Synaptic Package Manager. On SuSE it's YaST. On WIndows 7 it's, er, find the publisher's web site, download some binary executable that might or might not try to install malware, you can't really know in advance, and hope that DLL hell isn't about to break out.
No idea about your GRUB problem. I've never had the slightest issue installing OS updates on any Linux. OS upgrades (to a newer version) are a different matter, but I find the 'buntus handle that with aplomb too.
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* Of course, that's for apps that are in the repositories. Which is, for most people's purposes, all of them.
Not really.
Hard with React/Angular/jQuery/framework-du-jour to make performant applications. Oh yes.
Sheesh, just learn the DOM. Wrap it up in your own cruft-free library. You too can be one of those "really experienced developers", or something.
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"While it's not realistic to expect a vendor to maintain major updates and produce patches indefinitely for older software versions"
Really? So will they indemnify me against exploitation of their defective product, that they know to be defective and also know how to fix? Or even just refund the purchase price, it being clearly not of merchantable quality? It's not like they've been giving this crap away over the years.
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Complete coincidence.
Both that and the Intel thing mentioned by Dave look promising, but there's a way to go before wither would fit into a phone chassis that people would want to use or buy. They're both too thick to fit a battery in the same enclosure. My dream evisages something much closer to a bare circuit board with a thin edge connector, more like a DIMM.
Thanks to both for the heads up though.
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Wouldn't it be great to have a standardised mechanical form factor and electrical interface for a credit-card sized compute module? Kind of like a supersized SIM card, but with a SoC, RAM and flash storage on board. You could plug it in to a touch screen that has cellular hardware to use it as a phone, or a larger version of same (possibly without the cell radios) to use as a tablet, or a docking station to make it a desktop PC. Hell, if it were really standard, why wouldn't all flat screens have the necessary interface? And then you wouldn't need to carry the docking kit with you; it would be ubiquitous. Best of all, there would be competition. You might have x86 modules up against ARM, your choice of operating system, mix and match the compute-power you need with the external form factor that fits your lifestyle.
It'll never catch on.
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Why is this rubbish still repeated?
The "old EEC" was a political union, not merely an economic union. The most casual skimming of the 1957 Rome treaty sets out almost all of what we now recognise as the EU. It is an insulting myth that voters in 1975 were somehow fooled into signing up to something different.
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JavaScript does not need frameworks to make it easier to code. It already is easy.
JavaScript is not awful to code in once you understand that any syntactical similarity to Java is entirely irrelevant.
I admit that it took me a while to understand this, which is why I wrote up a summary of what I learned in the hope of saving others a lot of bother.
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OK, it's a long time ago, but...
I had Tom Tom maps on my Handspring Treo (PalmOS) and mostly loved it.
One day it gave me a route that took in the rue d'Alsace next to the Gare de l'Est in Paris. Fortunately I was on a bicycle, because that road incorporates a flight of stairs.
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There's plenty that doesn't add up here.
Doesn't matter how the people voted in the referendum. Doesn't matter what the opinion of the backbench bastards. What matters to the Conservative party is big finance and the NFU. One needs the single market, the other needs cheap labour and agricultural subsidies.
This should be fun.
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No they didn't. They "integrated" it with the operating system, going way beyond "free" bundling by making it impossible to uninstall. This was judged to be an abuse of their monopoly position in the desktop operating system market, and rightly so. Neither Apple nor Googls has (yet) such an O/S monopoly to abuse. Now, if Chrome became a de facto monopoly browser, and Google used that to illegally manipulate some other market (online purchases, say), I would expect the competition authorites to take an interest.
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> That would be a very dangerous precedent to set.
What, asserting the primacy of Parliament? I think you will find that this principle is entirely unaffected by precedent.
> That certainly entitles the vote to be regarded as valid.
The vote is valid. However, completely unlike a general election, it is not binding. I really don't understand what part of the word "advisory" is causing so many people difficulty.
Countries that make a habit of putting constitutional matters to referendum invariably include some requirement for supermajority (as did Britain for the 1979 Scottish devolution vote). Of course, it would have been rather silly setting out the conditions for "winning" a consultation exercise.
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