I help maintain the phones/computers for several non-technical and/or elderly family members.
Their computers are a mess. No matter what pro-active measures I take, every time I get involved, they have a bunch of nonsense installed doing who-knows-what. Random apps, most of which are running all the time, slogging down the system. The younger folks have different game-stores, or other similar things, all running in the background. The computers are slower than mud.
Their phones are all fine. They may download crap, but I know it is almost impossible for it to mess things up outside of that individual app.
I'm not saying this to completely defend Apple - I honestly don't know which side of the App Store/sideloading debate I fall on. I'm just pointing out that there are huge benefits, particularly for the general population of non-techincal users, to Apple remaining as a gatekeeper (albeit obviously a quite imperfect one).
You’re being disingenuous here. Of course malware slips through the review process, but it definitely catches more than it misses. Additionally, it serves as a deterrent to malware authors to seek softer attack surfaces.
Having more stores won't open up anything. A user will still have to install them. And I'm sure they would implement their own process. Fdroid for example, compiles everything going through there
I think the best option really is for side-loading to be possible, but just not easy. this is how it work on Amazon Fire TV sticks. you have to go into settings, flick a switch buried a few layers deep, then download an unobvious app from the store, after which you can download whatever app you like from the internet, but only within that app. everyone wins. at least until Amazon decide this is losing them money, anyway
Yeah! Whenever I visit my parents their Android phones are always full of adware and toolbars, their background is a gambling ad, and their bluetooth speaker insults the cat!
Except that's not what happens. My mom gets spammy magazine article notifications which I offered to help her get rid of, but she actually wants them for some reason.
Why should I buy something else because other people can’t handle computers without training wheels?
The befuddled kind grandmothers of the world can just not install/sideload alt stores.
The most common way the elderly get scammed is over voice telephone conversations. Would you suggest we disable the ability to speak over the phone to “protect” them as well?
In short, we think 1 keypress = 1 symbol printed on the screen. That explicitness brings peace. But, we also think that ligatures are optional and many people like them (read about all the pros and cons in the link above).
You are not alone. While I can imagine a feasible use for some very commonly used glyph combinations being made a ligature, I just really prefer the one glyph per key press presentation (kerning them well OTOH is always greatly appreciated). Unicode in text editors still bugs me in that way, in the back of my mind I know that pretty non-ASCII character is taking up more than a byte, and it's... distracting.
Watching a movie or listening to music stored on your NAS. Turning your "smart" light off and on. Using your remote (since even those are cloud connected now).
You know, everyday stuff, for which modern IoT equivalents somehow need internet connectivity to work.
But the app is required for configuration, not for actually using your wifi, right? Perhaps I'm wrong.. The overlap for needing to configure your network and the internet connection being down is probably very small, although not non-existant.
These are just issues that someone unfamiliar with a field would face. None of them are problems for those of us in the field.
First, the expectation thing. He's using a special case, E(X), and complaining that the more general case doesn't follow the general case. It's like saying "Well the plural of mouse is mice but the plural of house isn't hice!". The general definition of expectation (for a discrete probability) is
E(f(x)) = sum f(x_i)* p(x_i)
If you start with this general definition, both E(X) and E(X^2) are perfectly natural. The author's error of starting with the special case in no way implies an issue with notation.
And how is the fact that Wikipedia is inconsistent between E(X) and E[X] in any way mathematical notation's fault? If you read a novel that starts using ' for quotes and switches to ", that's an issue with the novel (assuming its not stylistic) and not an issue with the typography in general.
> These are just issues that someone unfamiliar with a field would face. None of them are problems for those of us in the field.
True, but it raises a "barrier to entry" (on purpose, or by mistake) because it is almost impossible to enter the field without a supervisor/colleges that provide the "semi-supervision" needed to learn the notation.
I can understand how those in the field think that's a good thing, but for the rest of humanity it probably isn't... Look e.g. what has happened in academic operating system research: innovation has moved from Berkeley and Bell Labs to the Linux kernel mailing list. Are academic OS researchers better off because of it? Probably not. Is the world better off? You bet!
Unfamiliar is a weasel word. It's a No-True-Scottsman. And I don't mean, that it is entirely wrong, I am saying you are unjustly putting a limit to whom you deem worthy for the field. There is no need for imprecision other than speed breaking things while you go.
> "Well the plural of mouse is mice but the plural of house isn't hice!"
Are irregular word forms necessary or essential? Probably, but I doubt you could explain why. Hence you are not qualified to ridicule anyone. It's a perfectly valid complaint, IMHO, but probably only loosely related to the math example, which I can't be bothered to follow at the moment.
I have taken ten years of math in school and then calculus, discrete math, linear algebra. That's all useless if I want to follow math in a simple research paper because they're using notation common in THAT field and it has nothing to do with the notation in another math field.
And it's all V hat superscript pi subscript h. It's not like code, where I get descriptive variable names. And you thought pi meant pi? No, it means policy in THIS context.
Reading a "simple" research paper requires a different approach compared to reading a newspaper or a blog. I hope the following explanation helps.
The notation actually helps to keep things simple. I think of it as a kind of metalinguistic programming [1] where a notation is introduced which then makes the important parts easier to understand.
I am not mathematically inclined but I have to read papers containing maths quite a lot of the time. I tend to read them 3 times.
The first time, I tend to skip the equations altogether and just get a feeling for the paper - what is it about, is it useful for me to read?
The second time I have a pen and a highlighter where I actually label the mathematical symbols with arrows and words (using the textual descriptions). I also highlight important sentences. I think of this stage as trying to make the paper as clear as possible for later reading.
In the third stage I am trying to understand the paper as a whole - something it seems you try to do on the first read, I am familiar with the frustration because this is what I used to do.
I quite enjoy reading papers now and I have more respect for the notation.
> The second time I have a pen and a highlighter where I actually label the mathematical symbols with arrows and words (using the textual descriptions).
Gee, it's almost as if we should be writing the words out instead of writing one letter variable names.
Funny how programmers found this to be good practice and mathematicians still write with a notation that's purposefully unreadable.
I've taken years of English Studies in school, then German, Greek, Russian. That's all useless if I want to read a French book, because they are using a language common in THAT country, and it has nothing to do with the language in another country.
That's not a direct equivalent, but it is close; somewhat equivalent but distinct notations arise in Math and Physics because authors weren't working together (much like natural languages). But otherwise it is "turtles all the way down" - it can only be "simple" or "needlessly complicated" if you assume something about the reader's knowledge.
All of
integrate(f(x)dx,dx)
sum f(x_i) for i=1..n
f(x_1) + f(x_2) + .... + f(x_3)
Are essentially equivalent to a mathematician, often with a preference for the first, whereas someone unfamiliar may claim that only the 3rd is clear and the others are unreadable. A friend of mine was in a classroom where the lecturer started with the first form, when to the 2nd and 3rd over class objections, and finally switching to something like "our function result at the first data point, added to our function result at the second data point, ....". This was an OR class for students pursuing an MBA.
This sounds so much like something the greybeards used to say in the 80s: "If it was hard to write, it should be hard to understand"
Basically, it's not the fault of our systems; it's the user's fault. Once he learns the arcane incantations, he'll understand why our way is the better way.
Computer UX has finally progressed beyond this arrogance. Why not math?
The reason is that difficulty of mathematics lies not in notation - it is in ideas and techniques. There is no doubt that a good modern UX complete with graphics, animation, and audio would facilitate understanding of the ideas, but, just as in programming, the need for textual notation cannot be overcome. Category Theory is an interesting example: while a lot of reasoning in it is done by "diagram chasing", if you look at a book on this theory, you will find more textual proofs and formulas than diagrams. Even more strikingly, same is true for topology, differential geometry etc.
Years of studying what, though? Calculus, most of linear algebra, discrete math are all calculation based. Math papers are proof based. If you spend years studying proof based math (analysis, algebra, topology, and so on) then you'll be familiar enough with proof based math to understand it.
It's like saying "why isn't spending years studying spelling not sufficient to understand Ulysses?"
We spend years learning "spelling", because the mathematical equivalent (arithmetic, up through calculus, linear algebra, differential equations, discrete math, etc) is incredibly valuable on its own—and that that value doesn't really require familiarity with the proof-based foundations underpinning it. Learning real analysis is valuable if you're going to be a mathematician, but as an engineer it won't help you get more out of calculus (at least, not compared to the cost of learning it).
I believe you have adopted your opinion of what should go into the first set of brackets of yours.
An engineer is expected to allot too much time to math to turn out unfamiliar with it. I think we should spend less effort on practicing cleaning fish and more on learning to forage for fish.
> I believe you have adopted your opinion of what should go into the first set of brackets of yours.
I'm not really sure what you mean by that.
Certainly I'm not of the opinion that proof-based math is useless; I studied math in grad school, and stayed as far away from anything applied as I could. But I don't think it offers much value to engineers or scientists. Let mathematicians establish the foundations, and let scientists and engineers build on top of that. They're different skill sets, with different goals.
"These are just issues that someone unfamiliar with a field would face. None of them are problems for those of us in the field."
How is this argument different from defending code with bad variable naming by stating that it doesn't cause issues to anyone familiar with the code base?
In the other words, E(...) has a hidden lambda there, and the fully consistent usage would be E(X -> X^2) (instead of E(X^2)) and so on. The covariance thing would be E((X,Y) -> X*Y) with an implied domain being a Cartesian product of that of X and Y. Of course we humans can easily infer the domains, and writing explicit domains every time is not efficient.
Well, formally a random variable is already a function which assigns values to elements of the probability space (outcomes). The expected value is just another name for an integral over this space. When the probability space is discrete, "the integral over a probability space" is just another name for a weighted sum. The domain is always the same: it's the probability space.
The real bad notation (which is employed here, actually) is f² meaning (x ↦ f(x)²) while at the same time f⁻¹ means the inverse function of f instead of (x ↦ f(x)⁻¹).
Can someone explain the benefits of using tmux or screen or something similar over opening multiple terminals in a tiling WM?
The two arguments I could see are resource usage (not an issue on modern machines) or detach/attach (which is a huge benefit when working remotely, but I don't see any gain locally). But other than those, I don't see any benefits to having a second tiling system sitting on top of my current tiling system.
Xmonad user here.
Sessions are wonderful. I can run one just for xmonad as a job (I like to hack that config quite often ). Another just for my VPN script (which puts out I/O stats every few minutes).
And per project, I'll have a few. Say I have one where I have one shell for compilation, one for version control, and two for testing. Give each one a prefix for the project, and I've got all that separated out. E.g.: Two projects: foo and bar: foo-compile, foo-git, foo-test-a, foo-test-b, bar-compile, bar-git, etc..
Now, I have clean shell histories (and scroll buffers) for each. I can ssh into each one as I want, and reuse my terminal windows. This latter bit helps keep my already-complex-enough window setup manageable.
1. You might not have a tiling window manager in the first place (there are no decent ones on OS X that don't require manual operation to my memory).
2. You work on a remote machine and prefer to have your window layout remembered there, so it can instantly be restored no matter what computer you're physically working on, whether or not it happens to have or even support your favorite tiling window manager.
3. It's simply easier for me to do everything within one terminal window full-screened on a 27 inch monitor. It's less context switching.
I completely agree with 1 and 2 - my question was related to a local machine with a tiling WM.
For 3, can you elaborate? How is it less context switching? You're doing the same set of operations in both settings - switching, moving and resizing terminal windows (whether real or virtual).
I've got a Macbook 7,1 with Ubuntu 12.04 running Xmonad, and its by far the smoothest linux experience I've ever had. I ran it under Gnome Unity for a bit and that was fine too. I've never had the mouse issues you refer to. The trackpad works just as well as it did until OS X.
The way people typically do this is by VCing their configurations in a "dotfiles" repository. New machine? Pull your dotfiles, and create the symlinks in your homedir.
I currently do this with my entire .emacs.d directory, but it sounds like Derbasti only pulls his .emacs, and then has code to check for installed packages and get any that are missing.
Then everytime you installed a package it would get written into the list and everytime you moved your init it would all happen automatically.
That would be cool. And not hard to do either. You could just keep a customization variable of the "base packages" or something and have it saved by the standard custom stuff.
