Contrary to some sibling comments in this tread, I'll recommend getting the type of guitar that you want to play to learn on as well. There are several kinds of guitar. The three most distinct types are classical guitar (nylon or gut strings), acoustic (steel strings) and electric guitars, which again can be divided into hollow and solid bodied types.
All these istruments are pretty different, both in physical appearance, sound and of couse also playing technique, required skills, reportoire and so on. Of course, if you are really good at one you can pick up another type more easily. However, the guitars sound and play so different that it's impossible to get good at electric guitar by only practicing classical guitar. All these types of guitars are really distinct instruments.
If you want to play electric rock, get a strat or tele of maybe even an LP. If you want to play electric jazz, get an electric hollowbody guitar. If you want to play folk-rock singer-songwriter or country types, get a steel stringed guitar. If you want to play classical guitar, get a classical guitar. I've seen countless of times people being handed cheap classical guitars when they want to play like Bob Dylan and Neil Young (etc) do. The result is almost always that the guitar goes in the closet after a few weeks and the interest dies down, which is pretty damn sad.
More expensive guitars will likely be much easier to play on and might sound better. However, I woudn't recommend spending great amounts of money on your first guitar. It is certainly possible to get great guitars for less than 1000$.
Most heavily optimizing compilers do strange things to the code. You wouldn't want to debug an -O3 program, just as you probably wouldn't want to debug with TCO turned on.
Luckily, in the lisp and scheme families (possibly also other image based PLs), it's easy to mix compiled (and optimized) and interpreted code. Whenever i run into a bug such that i need the debugger to fix it, I always replace the compiled function with an interpreted version first, making it much easier to debug. What you get in the stacktraces is the same as you read on the screen.
In most lisp implementations, this maneuver can be performed completely on line, you don't have to restart the program or recompile anything but the function under inspection itself. When the runtime signals an exception or fault, just tell lisp to interpret the suspect function. Then move up the stack to the function that called the suspect, and restart that stack frame et voilá, bob is your uncle.
While the author talks about free software in general, it seems more to me that he really means Ubuntu and Unity and perhaps common desktop applications found in that "ecosystem". What's the usability of bash? GCC? Emacs? And perhaps more importantly, for whom is the usability measured? The linux-ecosystem is mostly used by programmers. It's natural that the user interfaces tend to reflect this. One of the main reasons i have linux on my computers is exactly this, I really don't want the user interfaces of Windows or OS X.
Problems and solutions are described, but exactly _how_ to implement these solutions isn't stated very clearly, and I'd hesitate to call these suggestions "solutions" because, to be brutally honest, it's all empty talk.
Furthermore I feel like many of these solutions come at odds with the foss-culture in general. If I'm giving away my time and code for free, I really don't want a project manager or a designer to tell me what to do. I'm going to do what feels interesting, or I'm going to implement features that I need. If someone else can use my code too, then that's great. If not then that's ok too. To me it's strictly hobby basis. I don't get wages, and I don't have "customers". I'll contribute because it's fun or because I want to honor the idea that I should contribute back changes and improvements I've made to software that I got for free.
Of course, this could be very different if I were employed and paid to make software that coincidentally also was free, but I'm not. Maybe this blog post was aimed at Canonical and their employees, or the practices of big projects like GNOME. If so, then maybe he could have the decency to say so, instead of going about "solving" other peoples problems that aren't really there.
I think this is critical. A software product like Emacs would never have been produced as a consumer product for sale by a vendor. Emacs is the way it is because it was developed by and for the people who used it: coders. Not all "free" software is targeted at nor should it necessarily be usable by your mom (not a dig at your mom).
(From the article) Free software developers mostly develop software based on their own requirement and their definition of “good software”, and as a result, design software that is very complicated and “geeky”.
In many cases, this is as it should be, unless they are developing something specifically targeted at users from the "general public." However, where I do think some projects go off the rails is when they develop a UI that is either internally inconsistent, or so non-standard that even technically-minded users are frustrated by it.
I hope they are judged harshly for this incident. If they are blasting cannon balls through peoples houses and cars they have no control of what they are doing. Sending balls of cast iron through habitated areas cannot be dismissed as an "unfortunate incident". In my country (Norway) you'd immediately get arrested and charged if you fired a live cannon outside a big millitary shooting range. I certainly hope that their celebrity status won't impede justice in this case.
In my country (Norway) you'd immediately get arrested and charged if you fired a live cannon outside a big millitary shooting range.
They did fire this in a "big military shooting range". The problem is that it didn't stay confined to the range.
Actually I'd say the range is at least partly responsible for this. They shouldn't have allowed a cannon to be fired that had the energy to go beyond the confines of the range.
They are at a firing range, it says right in the article "Camp Parks Military Firing Reservation". Apparently the cannonball hit one or two hills before entering the town. They weren't even firing in the direction of the town.
Apparently not big enough then. This was a lucky case. Wern't and apparently couldn't have undone any bodily harm that was caused.
If they indeed were several kilometers from anyone else, then they have miscalculated the ballistic trajectores so gravely that it's completely mindboggling to think of how these guys were allowed to play with explosives in the first place.
While I do like some of the MB Episodes, I'm not a fan of blowing up things with oversized explosions in general. Please note that explosives are dangerous. Leave it to professional use. Playing with fire will eventually get you burnt.
Accidents do happen, no one is infallible, but one should really go to the utmost of efforts when it comes to blowing stuff up or launching heavy projectiles into the air at great speed. At least if accidents happen because explosives were used for something useful, say, construction, then one could at least think that the damage or bodily harm was for a greater good, even though that is by all means a meagre comfort. However, when these sort of things happen for the entertainment (and the profits of the show, mind you!) of others, then something is really really wrong.
They weren't lucky, they were unlucky. This never happens. This is a military firing range. Do you know how many requirements had to be fulfilled for the range to be built? and the regulations they have to follow for safety? "miscalculated the ballistic trajectories" They didn't miscalculate, the cannonball struck the hill, as planned. They didn't plan for it to basically bounce off in a different direction. The trajectory is not the issue. "Leave it to professional use" They are professionals with many years of experience, and they were surrounded by more professionals. "go to the utmost of efforts" If building a firing range in the middle of the desert and firing toward a hill, away from the direction of any towns, isn't enough then what is?
The standard approach is to place the cannon such that no trajectory with the energy of the projectile can hit anything important. That's why huge ranges like the Canadian Forces Base Suffield exist [2,690 km2 (1,040 sq mi)]. The the only dangerous variable is the energy you put in, and not the direction you point the gun, unlucky bounces, etc.
They are obviously not professional enough. Either the MB team, or the range supervisors, or anyone else in that chain.
If your range is situated so close to populated areas that you can fire a projectile from a makeshift cannon out of the bounds of the range, then get a bigger range. Or a smaller gun. I have no idea how big their range is. However, it was apparently not big enough.
I don't know if the ball hit the hill or the sky or a bird on the way or anything else that might have happened. I weren't there. I also obviously understand that they didn't plan for the ball to go though those houses. However intentions does not change facts. Neither do regulations nor safety procedures, nor requirements.
If you cause an accident then you havent gone to the utmost of efforts in preventing it. The utmost of efforts might also include not doing it at all.
Nobody is professional enough to screw up 0% of the time. It is not possible to plan for everything, ever.
> The utmost of efforts might also include not doing it at all.
So, I should never drive again lest I have a car accident? I understand that you're saying that the reward for this is zero so they shouldn't take any risks at all. But you're extrapolating the risk from a sample size of one and exaggerating it.
I'm sure you wouldn't blame someone for driving to the movies, even if that caused a car accident. And one could just as easily said that they should've stayed home because the drive was unnecessary and cars are, in fact, dangerous.
>They weren't lucky, they were unlucky.
exactly right ! these are too careful, and would normally have officials from local emergency services and experts in hand when they do this. they may be financially responsible for the damage, which might be adequately covered by their insurance, but hopefully no criminal charges...
What indicates the cannonball struck the hill at all?
The article only mentions it went 'over' the foothills. It presumably could have bounced off, but that doesn't seem to be corroborated.
At the end of the day, whatever precautions were in place were clearly not sufficient. You don't shoot cannonballs into residential neighborhoods and go "oops".
Exactly. I'm a little appalled at the rampant speculation, the apologetics in Mythbuster's favor, and the blind raging and blaming against them. We need to know the actual facts of what went wrong before we can make any determination of:
a - who was at fault
b - what actions are reasonable to ensure this never happens again
c - what repercussions might be appropriate
For all any of you know, there was a bad mix of powder. Or a mislabeled measuring cup. Or a rusty screw that broke loose at the exact wrong moment and allowed an unexpected pivot in the cannon. Those are nonsense reasons of course - we simply don't know yet what actually went wrong at the firing range.
Re: the apologetics in Mythbuster's favor, keep in mind, these guys are pretty damned rigorous when it comes to safety. Fire and EMS on site, clearing their experiments with local authorities, etc. Having them take the piss with something of this magnitude seems highly unlikely.
It was a freaking accident, dude. Accidents happen. Nobody likes it, and nobody is making excuses for them. But sometimes you have to acknowledge that you can't control everything. From the sounds of things they took what should have been the necessary precautions, including doing the test at a military firing range.
I'm not saying they shouldn't be held accountable for the outcome of their actions or anything. Of course they should. And they should be expected to learn something from this incident that will prevent something like this from happening again. But there's absolutely no point in crucifying them over this.
_I certainly hope that their celebrity status won't impede justice in this case._
"Justice" in this case would be paying for the damage they caused. I'd be highly surprised if that doesn't happen. I mean, surely they have insurance to cover things like this???
Please note how the "other" category consists of nearly half of the downloads. I would say that this adds a lot of uncertainity in this dataset. Without knowing the distribution of the OS-es that shows up in "other" this data is pretty much meaningless.
That's just how CLI apps work, there is nothing elitist about it. Its "cd" and "ls -la" and "cat", not "change-directory," "list-directory long-format everything" and so on. The learning curve might be steep, but it's well worth it, especially for those of us who "live" in a shell.
In the particular case of pacman, I really like the design of the arguments, in particular the top level ones. -S is for syncing, -R is for removing, and -Q is for querying and so on. Nice!
Yes, but why rename install to syncing and search to query? Why not just call it install and make it -i for install and -s for search which is still search. I think that is what the OP is trying to say.
Searching isn't the same as querying. -Q is for operations dealing on the _local_ repository. -S synchronizes your local repository with the remote repository. In a way installing could very well be -Si (-S --install), but installing is the default action in -S mode instead. Pacman is maybe somewhat idiosyncratic, but I find it very useful and simple once you get the basics.
Oh, i used it. Found it delightful, actually I am yet to encounter a very bad package management system. They are all really good since I started using linux.
Your graphs make it very hard to compare the performance of the different collectors. What about putting all of them in the same plot, making that logarithmic, and include cumulative time (on a separate linear axis)?
That would be splendid. I'd even pay more if i can get room for my legs, but much more importantly have the opportunity to actually lean back in the seat and not break my neck... In otherword have a neckrest that's not designed for 150cm tall people.
All these istruments are pretty different, both in physical appearance, sound and of couse also playing technique, required skills, reportoire and so on. Of course, if you are really good at one you can pick up another type more easily. However, the guitars sound and play so different that it's impossible to get good at electric guitar by only practicing classical guitar. All these types of guitars are really distinct instruments.
If you want to play electric rock, get a strat or tele of maybe even an LP. If you want to play electric jazz, get an electric hollowbody guitar. If you want to play folk-rock singer-songwriter or country types, get a steel stringed guitar. If you want to play classical guitar, get a classical guitar. I've seen countless of times people being handed cheap classical guitars when they want to play like Bob Dylan and Neil Young (etc) do. The result is almost always that the guitar goes in the closet after a few weeks and the interest dies down, which is pretty damn sad.
More expensive guitars will likely be much easier to play on and might sound better. However, I woudn't recommend spending great amounts of money on your first guitar. It is certainly possible to get great guitars for less than 1000$.