I'm pretty sure this is the computer that my mom had hooked up to an old TV set back in the early 90s. She used it all the time to communicate with me by e-mail, printing out each message she received. I always knew a message was from her because the text was wrapped at something like 25 columns in width. It worked great! It was like a fancy typewriter.
Then I upgraded her to an IBM PC with Windows, and she stopped using the computer altogether! She just never made the jump to a windowed system with a mouse.
> She just never made the jump to a windowed system with a mouse.
That's funny, my parents were the same. They started using computers with punch cards, then moved to teletypes, terminals and finally DOS-based PCs. Never made the jump to Windows, which they thought was "too complicated."
Yes, I have had a similar experience. I eventually gave up on finding a competent cross-border tax accountant and just learned it all myself. I would rather make my own mistakes than pay someone quite a bit of money to make even more mistakes. It took a lot of reading and research, and I needed to make my finances as simple as possible, but so far so good in the past 15 years.
I am also very grateful to James Gosling. I was working with C++ at Taligent (an Apple, IBM, and HP joint venture) in the fall of 1995 when I first downloaded Java to give it a try. I literally jumped up and down with joy after writing my first "Hello, World" program. It was such a breath of fresh air compared to the Taligent CommonPoint application framework we were building.
I took the severance package when Taligent imploded, dropped everything I was doing at the time, and have been working with Java and its related software ever since.
I think it's incredible with hindsight how Java countered many of the mid 90s C++ problems, especially by avoiding multiple inheritance.
It remains a shame that it didn't launch with generics though, and I still think operator overloading would have been good. Had it done so I think a lot more people would have stuck around for when the performance improved with HotSpot.
That's actually pretty fast. It took 10 years for Java[1] and 5 years for JavaFX[2] to fix some trivial but rather severe text rendering bugs. Most of that time was getting enough courage to fix them myself. :-)
Reporting text rendering bugs is frustratingly difficult!
I think this study is related to two books I read this summer: Burn, by Herman Pontzer, presents his "constrained energy expenditure hypothesis," and Exercised, by Daniel E. Lieberman, discusses his "costly repair hypothesis."
Together, they try to explain why exercise can force your body to stop using its energy to destroy itself (inflammation, autoimmune diseases) and instead use its energy to restore itself (releasing antioxidants, repairing damage).
One formula for getting a publisher interested in your book is claiming new data that intuitively makes sense. Consultants will list things that many people believe that contradict established science or wisdom, and then there is a search for data that can be gathered into a counter-argument to find a book topic that a publisher will put marketing dollars into.
Pontzer contends “[exercise] just won’t do much for your weight" because "we naturally compensate for exercise by reducing non-exercise activity expenditure (NEAT) and resting metabolic rate (RMR)". That excercisers exercise less when they're not specifically exercising.
Ward says Pontzer underestimates exercise's role, misinterprets energy compensation and overemphasis anecdotal evidence, and cherry-picks data by choosing studies that primarily show minimal changes in Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE) and weight loss with increased physical activity.
Ward points to a broader range of studies that demonstrate significant increases in TDEE and weight loss in individuals who engage in moderate to high levels of exercise, arguing that this evidence indicates exercise can be a substantial factor in energy expenditure and weight management.
Ward specifically points out
Pontzer told me “the distinction between confounders and mediators is largely conceptual” and “They would be treated the same in stats analysis such as the one used”, but any statistician would argue the differences are defined and vitally important. Confounders interfere with the causal pathway we’re interested in; mediators are part of the causal pathway we’re interested in. Hence, when statistically adjusting and removing the effect of different variables, we do this for confounders, not mediators – thus removing the interference.
I enjoyed reading both books, but especially Herman Pontzer's stories in Burn about his time with the Hadza people in Africa. The study is based in part on his research (Pontzer, 2018, Pontzer et al., 2021). His hypothesis does seem to be controversial and counter-intuitive.
Thank you for the link to the nutritionist's article. I'll read it with interest.
The last time I looked at Ubuntu as a daily driver, a few years back, I remember reading the threads about snap and its forced updates. The sheer arrogance of the snap team in their hardline refusal to acknowledge that this would be useful to users was staggering, and for me, ample reason to write Ubuntu off.
Glad that they finally came around. I'm sure many people are happy with this.
Maybe they were trying to take a page from Microsoft's business model; take control away from users only to sell it back as an "enterprise edition" brand store.
Yeah I mention this towards the end of my rant (in the article) but it's a) not available yet and b) not clear whether it'll actually notify you when there are updates to be made. I'm guessing it expects you to unhold at some point to get "refreshes".
I'm fine with that. Nothing drives me more mad than to be in the middle of an interview taking notes and then suddenly land in an endless loop of being forced to restart my browser. It's not like some of us don't have work to do while we're in the browser and the utter disrespect by the designers of this crap to the detriment of their users is baffling. This is one thing where commercial software has something of an edge over FOSS: you can't even threaten to withhold your $ if they misbehave. Power to the user.
It's the 'font-family: Georgia,Times,serif;' that ends up being Nimbus Roman as a substitute for Times (on my Ubuntu system, at least), and that font looks just terrible in white on a black background. I remove Times, or the entire font-family rule, and it looks great (DejuVu Serif or DejaVu Sans).
I spent years using NetBeans, then Eclipse, then IntelliJ IDEA and Android Studio, and now back to NetBeans. The features that made me return were having full C and C++ support (at the time, now less supported) and super-easy remote debugging. Those features let me write, build, and debug a Java application that interfaced with a Linux kernel device driver on an ARM Kobo Touch e-reader. Neither Eclipse nor IntelliJ IDEA could do that so easily.
And as mentioned in another comment, the direct support for the Apache Maven POM can make life easier, without the messy import required by the others.
With the new Flat Look-and-Feel with dark mode and the generally much better font rendering in Java, it finally looks great, too. There was a decade-long ugly period, though, which was one of the reasons I was desperately seeking alternatives.
I used NetBeans for C++ dev as well. But I had to stop several/many versions ago. They hard-coded a bunch of C++ version stuff, and it stopped getting updated. So when C++ was updated, beyond that, I stopped using NetBeans.
I think it's a great option, mostly because it can run anywhere the JDK runs. I'm building and testing the JavaFX 18 early-access builds for Linux on six Debian architectures (amd64, arm64, armhf, i386, ppc64el, s390x). I should have the JavaFX 17 general-availability release built this week on all six, too. See:
Then I upgraded her to an IBM PC with Windows, and she stopped using the computer altogether! She just never made the jump to a windowed system with a mouse.