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>
> Now, if the real reason for using Twitter is to follow stuff that's
> happening in real life, then yes, I guess to me the system would be
> completely useless. I can't think of anything that happens in real life
> that I would actually give a damn about...
Yeah, I fogrot that you live in a bubble completely isolated from the
outside world, but even then, one day maybe you'll be caught in an event
(massive car pile up on the highway after two picometers of snow, bus
blown up by Mozambican terrorists, or something like that)
For example, our province's new premier was almost assassinated last
night while giving her victory speech. There were lots of people in
that theater who wanted to know what the heck was going on. Following
the police's and tv stations' Twitter feed was all they had. Likewise,
the tv stations were following the twitter feeds of the people in the
theater to get as many details as they could.
--
/*Francois Labreque*/#local a=x+y;#local b=x+a;#local c=a+b;#macro P(F//
/* flabreque */L)polygon{5,F,F+z,L+z,L,F pigment{rgb 9}}#end union
/* @ */{P(0,a)P(a,b)P(b,c)P(2*a,2*b)P(2*b,b+c)P(b+c,<2,3>)
/* gmail.com */}camera{orthographic location<6,1.25,-6>look_at a }
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> On 05/09/2012 11:06 AM, scott wrote:
>> You answered your own question, app is short for application, it's come
>> to be associated with small cheap applications that you download for
>> mobile devices though.
>
> Sure, I get where the name comes from. I don't get what the point is.
>
followed by:
>> Or if you're used to using a laptop, an iPad is going to be smaller
>> and lighter (and boot up much quicker).
>
> On the other hand, you can't run any software on it. You can just browse
> the Internet.
>
Reread those two snippets together a few times. It will eventually sink in.
"Apps" are the software that you run on iThings.
For example, the Wolfram Alpha app that you mentioned earlier. There
are also word processors, spreadsheets, presentation packages, etc...
with varying degrees of compatibility with Ms-Office. Picture
manipulation apps. Movie-making apps, inventory management tools,
games, etc...
Who said the only thing you could do on a tablet was surf the net?
--
/*Francois Labreque*/#local a=x+y;#local b=x+a;#local c=a+b;#macro P(F//
/* flabreque */L)polygon{5,F,F+z,L+z,L,F pigment{rgb 9}}#end union
/* @ */{P(0,a)P(a,b)P(b,c)P(2*a,2*b)P(2*b,b+c)P(b+c,<2,3>)
/* gmail.com */}camera{orthographic location<6,1.25,-6>look_at a }
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>> Now, if the real reason for using Twitter is to follow stuff that's
>> happening in real life, then yes, I guess to me the system would be
>> completely useless. I can't think of anything that happens in real life
>> that I would actually give a damn about...
>
> Yeah, I fogrot that you live in a bubble completely isolated from the
> outside world
It's more that politics and commerce do not interest me.
> For example, our province's new premier was almost assassinated last
> night while giving her victory speech. There were lots of people in that
> theater who wanted to know what the heck was going on. Following the
> police's and tv stations' Twitter feed was all they had. Likewise, the
> tv stations were following the twitter feeds of the people in the
> theater to get as many details as they could.
Damn. And here I was thinking that's what people watch the news and read
newspapers for...
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>> I moved on from C64 BASIC to C64 assembler - or rather, machine code. I
>> couldn't afford an actual assembler program. So I used to do it old
>> skool - you know, with pencil and paper and a giant opcode table.
>
> Ouch. Good job the instructions were only 8 bit then...
Oh, it's not /that/ bad. The 6502 only has a few dozen instructions,
each with a handful of addressing modes. Sure, that makes hundreds of
possible opcodes, but you hardly ever use most of them.
I did attempt to /write/ an assembler. Or at least, a BASIC program with
the entire opcode list contained in DATA statements. But long before I
finished the data entry part, the program was already taking /way/ too
long to do a linear search for the right opcode. If only I knew back
them about hash tables and binary search trees. ;-)
>> All the time I was using BASIC, I kept reading scattered references to
>> these "more powerful" languages like COBOL, FORTRAN, Pascal and C.
>
> Oh I never heard of anything like that until there was a short series of
> articles in my Acorn magazine about programming in C. But then the C
> compiler was useless on the Acorn, it required more RAM than 99.9% of
> Acorns had at that time so you needed to use it with some buggy virtual
> memory program that was very slow.
I'm guessing you're talking about a slightly different time frame.
Alternatively, maybe you just read different literature than I did.
(I still have a kids' science book which proudly proclaims that the most
powerful computer ever to exist is the Cray II. It broke the 1 gigaFLOPS
barrier. Aaaand then my current GPU produces about 480 gigaFLOPS, so....)
>> But I
>> couldn't imagine what "more powerful" would actually look like. Then I
>> read about Pascal, and it was instantly obvious what a massive, massive
>> increase in power if offered. I had to wait years to actually try it out
>> though. Heh.
>
> I spent several years hacking around with C++ and Glide (the API for
> 3Dfx cards), then DirectX. But I got really frustrated in that to do
> anything useful (ie windows, graphics, sound, network/database stuff)
> you needed to find libraries and because I'm not a professional
> programmer I always had problems getting them to work, or the
> documentation sucked.
>
> I briefly used MS's managed C++ for a bit, but quickly moved onto C# and
> have been using that now for the last few years. It suits my needs
> perfectly, and even if I don't do any coding for several months I can
> get back into it pretty much instantly.
I did Pascal for years. We "learned" Pascal at college. And C. (I still
remember reading an introductory C book and thinking "eew, yuck!")
Between college and uni I learned Java (and object-oriented
programming.) At uni we did Smalltalk [which I've never heard of before
or since], and then Java. At Graham's suggestion, I learned Eiffel. And
since then, I've learned PostScript, Tcl, I've at least looked at Lisp
and Prolog, and then of course I learned Haskell and never looked back.
[I wonder exactly when I learned Haskell... I honestly can't remember.
One day I found a TeX document I wrote about Haskell, and it was dated 5
years ago, and I was like OMG! Really?? I still thought I'd only been
using it a few weeks...]
>> Sure, I get where the name comes from. I don't get what the point is.
>
> Surely you get the point in general, you mean you don't get the point of
> why installing an application on a phone or tablet might be useful?
I don't get why you would install an app which just displays the
contents of a specific web page. I mean, isn't that what a web browser
already does??
Then again, mobile isn't the only platform with "apps". You get spades
of them on Facebook. I keep getting notifications that this app or that
app wants to access my stuff. (Obviously, I click the "go **** yourself"
button.)
>> How would I know?
>
> You must have seen other people with phones, or at least heard of what a
> blackberry is? Or seen adverts from Samsapple about their products?
I know that other people /have/ phones. I wouldn't know what their
actual capabilities are though. I don't often interact with other humans
in person.
Come to think of it, I did have to set up a Blackberry once. It had the
most horrid controls. A track ball that you click by pressing on it (in
other words, as soon as you try to click a button, the cursor moves
away). The keys were so tiny even my skinny fingers couldn't operate
them. And trying to type in a 20-letter string of gibberish when it
keeps trying to correct the spelling just isn't fun... It never did work
in the end.
>> (You will note, of course, that I am *always* sitting in front of a
>> real, live computer. Why would I need a *phone* to access the Internet?)
>
> Lots of people do other things though away from a computer, and having a
> phone allows you to read email within 1 second or look up something on
> google within 10 seconds without having to walk away and boot up a PC
> (if there is even one nearby).
Sure. I'm saying this would not be useful /to me/. Not everyone is like
me though.
>> I can see how a bigger screen would be beneficial. (I
>> can't even imagine how the **** you would look at a web page on a screen
>> that's less than an inch across...)
>
> My phone's 800x480 I think (and about 4 inches across), and I spent many
> years staring at a 640x480 screen, so it does nicely :-)
It's like you can get those portable DVD players, which invariably have
a 4-inch screen. Somehow, watching a picture that's so tiny you can
barely make out the actors' faces just doesn't seem as enjoyable as
watching it on a huge 40-inch display... But maybe that's just me. After
all, they sell these stupid things for many hundreds of pounds, so
*somebody* must be buying them...
> Also most web
> pages recognise you're on a mobile device and give a different layout to
> the desktop version.
That sounds /highly/ unlikely...
> People have thought about this.
OK, that sounds almost completely impossible! :-P
>> On the other hand, you can't run any software on it. You can just browse
>> the Internet.
>
> Err no, you can install software, in fact I suspect that is where they
> make a lot of money from. On my Android phone I even downloaded the
> development stuff (for free) and made a simple program in Java, it took
> an afternoon or something to get setup (and I don't even know Java!) and
> works very easily - you have it hooked up via USB, and when you hit
> "run" in the IDE within 2 seconds it's compiled and running on your phone.
It's not minimal CPU power, no input devices other than a touch screen,
and a fairly small display. What useful software could you possibly run?
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On 05/09/2012 02:57 PM, Francois Labreque wrote:
> "Apps" are the software that you run on iThings.
>
> For example, the Wolfram Alpha app that you mentioned earlier.
...the Wolfram Alpha app I mentioned as an example of utter pointlessness?
> There are
> also word processors, spreadsheets, presentation packages, etc...
How can you operate a word processor or a spreadsheet without a keyboard?
> Who said the only thing you could do on a tablet was surf the net?
I didn't say tablet, I said iPad.
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> I don't get why you would install an app which just displays the
> contents of a specific web page. I mean, isn't that what a web browser
> already does??
Some apps are like that (essentially just shortcuts to web pages,
perhaps with auto login and remembering certain settings etc.) which
isn't a problem, so long as they are free. Other apps do more useful
stuff though that isn't possible through a web page.
> It's like you can get those portable DVD players, which invariably have
> a 4-inch screen. Somehow, watching a picture that's so tiny you can
> barely make out the actors' faces just doesn't seem as enjoyable as
> watching it on a huge 40-inch display...
Hold your phone closer to your eyes then, Nokia have a full-HD
(1920x1080) phone in the pipeline/announced, so quality should be fine
for making out actors faces :-)
>> Also most web
>> pages recognise you're on a mobile device and give a different layout to
>> the desktop version.
>
> That sounds /highly/ unlikely...
But true, and some even prompt you to ask if you want to download their
mobile app (eg if you visit facebook).
> It's not minimal CPU power, no input devices other than a touch screen,
> and a fairly small display. What useful software could you possibly run?
Depends what you're interested in. Browse the google play store for ideas.
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On 5-9-2012 9:10, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:
>>> Whatever. He seemed to think there's nothing wrong with my heart. (He
>>> also told me that "your blood prezzure is egzelent".)
>>
>> If he can see that from you ECG he should be practising alternative
>> medicine.
>
> Heh, no. He took my blood pressure (and had a listen to my heart) long
> before he ordered the ECG.
>
> It still troubles me that here in the 21st century, the only way to
> actually measure a person's blood pressure is [still] to crush their arm
> until no blood reaches it, and measure how much force it takes to do
> that. o_O
nope. There are things like finger blood pressure meters (finapres and
similar). NOn invasive and continuous and therefore used e.g in the OR.
Other methods may use catheters to measure pressure at different points
in the cardiovascular system.
But the method you describe is the more easy and cheap one.
Now you are unemployed I suggest you do your research before making any
sweeping statement. ;)
--
Women are the canaries of science. When they are underrepresented
it is a strong indication that non-scientific factors play a role
and the concentration of incorruptible scientists is also too low
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Orchid Win7 v1 <voi### [at] dev null> wrote:
> On 05/09/2012 11:06 AM, scott wrote:
> > If you use a phone a lot to read email and browse the internet then
> > you'd probably appreciate the larger screen.
>
> It's still news to me that you /can/ use a phone to read email or browse
> the net, but OK. I can see how a bigger screen would be beneficial. (I
> can't even imagine how the **** you would look at a web page on a screen
> that's less than an inch across...)
hello, caveman. Our minimum smartphone screen sizes are now 4"
> On the other hand, you can't run any software on it. You can just browse
> the Internet.
ooga-booga
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On 05/09/2012 4:40 PM, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:
> I didn't say tablet, I said iPad.
What is an iPad if it is not a tablet?
And you use an on screen keyboard.
--
Regards
Stephen
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On 05/09/2012 05:05 PM, scott wrote:
>> I don't get why you would install an app which just displays the
>> contents of a specific web page. I mean, isn't that what a web browser
>> already does??
>
> Some apps are like that (essentially just shortcuts to web pages,
> perhaps with auto login and remembering certain settings etc.) which
> isn't a problem, so long as they are free.
Which is why the high price of the WA app is so anomalous.
> Other apps do more useful
> stuff though that isn't possible through a web page.
OK, but... like what?
>> It's like you can get those portable DVD players, which invariably have
>> a 4-inch screen. Somehow, watching a picture that's so tiny you can
>> barely make out the actors' faces just doesn't seem as enjoyable as
>> watching it on a huge 40-inch display...
>
> Hold your phone closer to your eyes then, Nokia have a full-HD
> (1920x1080) phone in the pipeline/announced, so quality should be fine
> for making out actors faces :-)
Full HD, on a screen only an inch across. How pointless...
(You realise that the human eye can only focus on objects a certain
distance away from your face, right? Never mind if you want to see it
with both eyes simultaneously.)
>>> Also most web
>>> pages recognise you're on a mobile device and give a different layout to
>>> the desktop version.
>>
>> That sounds /highly/ unlikely...
>
> But true, and some even prompt you to ask if you want to download their
> mobile app (eg if you visit facebook).
Oh, I know Facebook is /constantly/ trying to shove stuff like that in
my face...
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