Edootjuh's comments

Edootjuh | 8 years ago | on: Who the Hell Uses Onion Juice?

I've heard 'piquant' (from French) being used for spicy in the red pepper sense. It sounds pretentious but maybe it'll be more mainstream some day.

Edootjuh | 13 years ago | on: Why F#

Forgive my ignorance, but what is wrong with static class members?

Edootjuh | 13 years ago | on: Why Are College Textbooks So Absurdly Expensive?

I recently followed a Computer Networking course, and the teachers actually went though pains to ensure those with older editions could follow the assigned exercises.

From what I could tell, the differences between the 6th, 5th and 4th editions were not discernible in the text, only the exercises had changed positions and had subtle variations in the numbers and wordings. That was my first experience with the textbook industry. The book, Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach by Kurose and Ross was very good, but the obvious abuse of their monopoly by forcing students to buy the newer editions gave me my first look into how the textbook industry operates.

Still, I have great respect for my University (Utrecht University in the Netherlands) for (until now) either using syllabi that can be freely downloaded or cheaply bought for a hardcopy or accommodating students with older editions of textbooks.

EDIT: Oh, and I recently found this link: http://www.textbooknova.com/.

It's probably not legal, but free textbooks!

Edootjuh | 13 years ago | on: The cost of ODF and OOXML

That seems like a bad idea. TeX doesn't allow separation between markup and presentation very well. Something like DocBook[1] with a presentation engine like XSLT might be better, if it wasn't for the verbosity of the XML source.

[1] http://www.docbook.org/whatis

Edootjuh | 13 years ago | on: The cost of ODF and OOXML

This might be obvious, but PDF isn't usually reflowable (and if it is, it's not very easy to do so), which makes for a painful reading experience on a smallish widescreen monitor, and isn't editable easily.

I usually just decide between plain-text, HTML, Google Docs and LaTeX/PDF, going up the ladder as the complexity of the document requires, or if it needs to be editable.

I hate it when I'm e-mailed a Word document that could easily have been plain text, in which case it would be searchable and more easily found when looking through e-mails manually.

Edootjuh | 14 years ago | on: React is a PHP port of NodeJs non-blocking I/O platform

Let me make sure I understand...

Is this meant to be run on a web hosting service that supports PHP in the 'traditional' way or do you need permission to run this as a daemon?

If it's the former, I can definitely see its benefits, but if it's the latter I can only imagine the target audience being people who refuse to program in anything but PHP and people who are by some bizarre policy required to use PHP but are allowed to run their own HTTP server.

Edootjuh | 14 years ago | on: VLC has been downloaded over a billion times

While it does require some terminal skills, as far as playing or streaming any media file and skipping left and right a bit (the largest part of my contact with a media player) or shuffling through a music library goes, I find it far easier to work with.

I feel that people too often confuse a user-friendly interface with an intuitive or noob-friendly one. But I guess seeing as most programs' user base's large majority are non-technical people that's fair.

page 1