On Thursday, 13 June 2013 at 18:00:26 UTC, Peter Alexander wrote:
> 35 years later and we now have the device he described, but the absurdity isn't imaginary.

The ipad amazes me. Not only is it brutally slow, but it crashes... a lot (the ipad 1 anyway, i've never seen the newer ones). Yet Apple has a reputation for quality. Maybe it is because their crashes just reset the device rather than giving an error message so people don't know whom to blame! idk.

Another slow, unstable device? The playstation 3. The games themselves run ok, but turning it on and switching apps on that home screen is just atrocious.

On Thu, 13 Jun 2013 13:33:26 -0400, Walter Bright <newshound2@digitalmars.com> wrote:

> On 6/13/2013 6:58 AM, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
>> Home ownership is much simpler than playing with stocks,
>
> I have to strongly disagree about that. Buying/selling a stock is a mouse click. Tax accounting is a one liner. Buying/selling a house is a major amount of work. Heck, even once you have a deal, you have a stack of 30 or more papers you gotta sign. Dealing with the taxes on it is a major amount of record keeping - especially if you make any capital improvements.

I meant much simpler to predict/easier to come out ahead.  Sheesh, so much literalism here :)

-Steve

On Thursday, June 13, 2013 10:36:11 Ali Çehreli wrote:
> On 06/13/2013 06:22 AM, Don wrote:
> > Guys, this wasn't even part of the talk. The point I made in the talk
> 
> > is:
> Judging from most of the posts on this thread, your talk was about solar panels. :p

LOL. Yeah. That and the housing market. The actual talk has had very little discussion here. :(

- Jonathan M Davis

On Thursday, 13 June 2013 at 18:27:11 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> The actual talk has had very little discussion here. :(

In my defense, Andrei did say to try to drive discussion on the social channels, so I posted my more on-topic comments to Reddit.

On 6/13/2013 11:00 AM, Peter Alexander wrote:
>  From a cold boot, the terminal I use, iTerm, can take upwards of 10 seconds to
> start up before I can start entering commands.

The perennial problem with JITs.

On 6/13/2013 2:22 AM, Peter Alexander wrote:
> The syntax highlighting has actually bogged down vim for me in the past. I had a
> file with a large array in it (hundreds of lines), and scrolling over those
> lines caused vim to stutter at about 1fps.

Back in the Bad Old DOS days, I had trouble with that with my text editor. The solution was to implement cooperative multitasking, where the computation of the display was disconnected from the command processing. The display computation would regularly check to see if it was obsolete, and start over if it was. Command handling always preempted. It worked like a champ, making the editor nice and crisp.

On 6/13/2013 3:48 AM, Regan Heath wrote:
> What are the basic features you would require of a development environment,

People tell me that intellisense is the #1 feature.

On 6/13/2013 11:25 AM, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
> I meant much simpler to predict/easier to come out ahead.  Sheesh, so much
> literalism here :)

I'm going to disagree with that one, too!

Consider an S&P 500 index stock, like SPY. It's:

1. trivial to buy and sell - a couple clicks
2. liquid - sell and get your money within minutes
3. trivial to borrow against - just write a check - no papers to sign
4. globally internationalized
5. fairly inflation proof
6. long term gains are fairly reliable
7. you can space out incremental sales in order to avoid a one-time boost into a high tax bracket
8. you instantly know exactly what it's worth

A house:

1. hard to buy and sell
2. selling can easily be a year long process to get your money
3. hard to borrow against - need appraisals, approvals, piles of paperwork
4. it's literally nailed to one spot. location location location - bet wrong on that, and the economy will easily pass you by
5. reasonably inflation proof
6. long term gains again depend on location, location, location
7. no income averaging on a big gain
8. you never know what it's worth until you have a signed deed of sale, in fact, its value can vary tremendously (+-30%) depending on who happens to be looking for a house like yours. Zillows has only a vague connection to reality, and is only really useful if you have a cookie cutter house in a cookie cutter subdivision.

Yes, I own my home. But it blows as an easy, predictable investment.


You're not going to get a big score investing in SPY. But if you have a regular schedule of investing in it, over the long term, it's very very likely you'll be just fine.

On Thursday, June 13, 2013 20:29:34 Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> On Thursday, 13 June 2013 at 18:27:11 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> > The actual talk has had very little discussion here. :(
> 
> In my defense, Andrei did say to try to drive discussion on the social channels, so I posted my more on-topic comments to Reddit.

Well, the fact that other discussions popped up isn't necessarily a problem. It's just a pity that there's been so little discussion about the talk itself. There wasn't a ton of talk in reddit either, but there was definitely quite a bit more there than here. I feel particularly sorry for Stefan Rohe's talk though. The _only_ comment that it got on reddit was Walter's post for the abstract. It's gotten more discussion here though.

- Jonathan M Davis

On Thursday, 13 June 2013 at 18:49:14 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 6/13/2013 3:48 AM, Regan Heath wrote:
>> What are the basic features you would require of a development environment,
>
> People tell me that intellisense is the #1 feature.

The debugger is the #1 feature I'd miss from my day job if I didn't use Visual Studio. Feature wise, I'm sure gdb has most if not all VS has, but in VS everything is just there in front of you, easily usable (you don't need to consult the manual, or remember archaic commands). Using gdb vs. Visual Studio feels like trying to do web browsing via the command line.

Intellisense is a definite must, and proper intellisense, i.e. actually shows me what members a variable has, and not just some crappy lookup in the current file for potential members. Needs to work with templates, macros etc. as well.

"Go to definition" and "Find all references" are must haves as well. Again, they need to work properly, not just some half-assed grep script that throws up lots of false positives. Again, needs to work with templates, macros, etc.

Basically, if the intellisense doesn't use a complete parser and semantic analyser then it probably isn't up to scratch.