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Comment Fine him into the ground, but don't ... (Score 2, Insightful) 520

Fine him into the ground, but don't get him fired. The PUSA bragged about sexual assault (grabbin' PUSSY) and got elected. Colbert joked about something and gets fired? Give me a break. I agree his remarks might have been homo-offensive or even homophobic, but that's protected under free speech laws. Hate speech attacks individuals or orientations; homophobic speech is merely offensive. I'm a staunch advocate of free speech and I defend both Trump's "locker room talk" and Colbert's "homophobic remarks" because they are not meant to provoke, but rather to entertain. I find both incidents morally objectionable, but not to the point of obscenity or hate against a class. tl;dr this shit doesn't matter: fix hunger, refugee crises, nuclear threats, global warming before you shit your pants over sex jokes while the whole system fails.

Comment Nice to see (Score 4, Insightful) 103

I live in Colorado where Sys76 is based. The original post may read like an ad, and my comment may sound like a shill, but check my post history. I'm not shill, I'm a real life Sys76 customer. Sys76 is committed to Linux on well-designed desktop/laptop systems. They have a legit business that focuses on systems designed for HPC and deep learning. I don't think they're super focused on mainstream consumer audience right now. From what I've seen they're really on the prosumer/commercial side of things -- looking to cash in on the deep learning craze, and put capable hardware and OS stack in the hands of interested people who want form-factors that fit into daily life. I'm impressed with their last-gen offerings, and I really look forward to what they'll be doing next.
tl;dr: real company, real product. Keep an eye on this.

Comment Performing well in school... (Score 5, Informative) 256

by poor_boi (#43687669) Attached to: Spoiler Alert: Smart Kids Become Successful Adults
I've always felt that performing well in school is less a measure of intelligence and more a measure of one's ability to follow rules, complete assigned tasks, get along with teachers and classmates, and behave in socially acceptable ways. It even seems like highly intelligent people often perform worse-than-average in school because high intelligence often comes along with lower-than-average social skills (or a disinterest in adhering to social norms).

Comment subject (Score 2) 302

by poor_boi (#43538895) Attached to: Stop Standardizing HTML
He basically wants to drop tag names and just have tags create generic dom nodes which get sculpted by CSS and JS.

<html6style>
.myCoolTag { act-like-html: br }
.heyThisIsFun { act-like-html: p }
.canWeDropTheHtmlStandardNow { act-like-html: i }
</html6style>
<html>
This is the first line.
<html class="myCoolTag">
This comes after a newline
<html class="heyThisIsFun">
This comes after a paragraph break.
<html class="canWeDropTheHtmlStandardNow">And this is italicized.</html>
</html>

That's too verbose for him though, so he wants to be able to write this:

<html6style>
.myCoolTag { act-like-html: br }
.heyThisIsFun { act-like-html: p }
.canWeDropTheHtmlStandardNow { act-like-html: i }
</html6style>
<html>
This is the first line.
<myCoolTag>
This comes after a newline
<heyThisIsFun>
This comes after a paragraph break.
<canWeDropTheHtmlStandardNow>And this is italicized.</canWeDropTheHtmlStandardNow>
</html>

You'll notice that all this does is push the HTML spec into the CSS spec. I don't see much of an advantage to that. And it makes it impossible to get even a basic understanding of HTML document structure without constantly referring back to the CSS.

He also wants all new features that would previously have been implemented by adding tags to the HTML specification to be implemented by way of shims (polyfills). But who standardizes the behavior of shimmed constructs? Well, nobody. People just pick the shims they like. And because the shims are JS + CSS, the W3C is in charge of making sure the browsers execute them properly. Kind of like how today the W3C is in charge of making sure browsers execute HTML properly.

I think this guy might be happy if we got rid of every tag except <canvas> and all reusable components (e.g. <button>) came from third party vendors. E.g. <include src="http://html6.google.com/button.polyfill">. Oh boy I can't wait.

Comment Unit Tests are now your Compiler (Score 1) 575

One of the things you really miss with JavaScript is a compiler. Something to check your entire program for obvious errors. That's where unit tests come in. If you have Significant unit test coverage, you can run your unit tests instead of running your compiler. Unit tests nearly double in value (IMO) when used with a dynamic language that has no compiler.

Comment Re:Options and Advice (Score 1) 107

by poor_boi (#37909660) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Learning Dart Development?

Some of the most useful programming books I've owned were from Wrox, especially on C++. Their extra effort to address programming in practice can be very helpful to someone who needs to get stuff done. (If I needed a regurgitation of the spec, I'd just read the spec.)

I rarely avoid books based on their publisher. Instead I look for books that are reviewed favorably by many people. And I look for reviews that tend to indicate that the book is the style and level that I'm looking for. Of course there are other criteria like date of publish, etc. Sometimes I don't even realize the publisher of a book until after I'm done with the book. :)

Basically I think pre-filtering based on publisher isn't a very useful way to locate the best book for a given scenario. Hypothetically if I found a Wrox book and an O'Reilly book that were seemingly very equal, I'd choose O'Reilly. But such a situation rarely happens -- I almost always have some other substantive reason to choose one book over another.

Comment Re:But ... (Score 3, Insightful) 354

by poor_boi (#36772830) Attached to: Apple Patents Portrait-Landscape Flipping
Filing a patent requires a lot of expensive lawyer time; a company like Apple typically will not file one that it cannot defend.

It's not true. Tech companies spam the USPTO with patent applications, taking the shotgun approach of hoping something, anything will stick. It is not terribly expensive to file patents, especially when compared with the amount of money that Apple can throw around.

Comment Mountain Names, Server Names (Score 1) 722

by poor_boi (#36538744) Attached to: I Name My Servers After:
I have worked at 3 software companies in Colorado, and all 3 companies named their servers after mountains: fourteeners first, then thirteeners. With VM technology making server instances so cheap these days, I wouldn't be surprised if I started seeing the names of some tall foothills showing up in the directory.

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