I was really hoping this article was going to discuss how Rome was somehow more open or prone to invasions due to their water networks. Instead, I was treated to the fairly unexciting conclusion of Rome traded a lot, causing its various regions to be interdependent, therefore possibly vulnerable because of additional risks inherent in relying on a trade network to supply your city with food.
The article has so little to do with ancient history it's staggering. It's the "conceptual drought modelling" equivalent of a woodworker trying to drum up attention for his range of kitchen cabinets by saying "they're the kinds of cabinet I think Justin Bieber would like".
I really dislike that patterns using * wildcard required using the letters beforehand. The game requires A* to match a row with zero or more A's, but this is absolutely incorrect, as A* will gladly match ANY string, like QQQQ.
I have no idea what you're talking about. My point is more pragmatic the regex /A/ will match the string "QQQQ" and this tool doesn't take that into account. E.g., I type this into my javascript console:
No, it doesn't. It matches the empty string at the beginning of 'QQQQ', not the Qs themselves:
/A*/.exec('QQQQ')
[""]
When computer scientists discuss what a regular express does and does not "match", they are saying that strings which are "matched" by a regex are those strings which are members of the regular language defined by the regex. QQQQ is not a string in the language defined by /A* /, so /A* / does not match QQQQ.
If we look at things your way, we would have to say that the regex /A/ matches "AQQQQ". It does not. It matches "A".
Actually this is wrong, when you use A* in vim for example you're not looking exactly for A* but for substring containing an A* since this also matches "" programs like vim will match anything.
Just because these tools use regex this way doesn't mean that's how regex really works.
It should be noted that this isn't an option if you're aleady late stage and have cirrhosis of the liver. Hep C isn't really curable past the point where they can longer administer to you the interferon it is mixed it, which requires a relatively healthy liver to handle.
Sure, I suppose I am qualified to chime in here, after all, I'm a developer for an A/B testing company (but not the one posted here-apptimize).
A/B Testing is a bit of a catch-all phrase for "testing the effectiveness of website changes." Strictly Speaking, A/B only refers to the testing specifically is testing of one change "A" against another "B". You can have multi-variate testing as well where you add in a third group "A,B, or C", or mixtures "ABC vs AB vs AC vs BC vs CONTROL"... it's up to the test design.
But basically it's a tool to help you see if the changes you make to your website will work, while the website is up running, using real users. So, for example:
* If your goal is to get more downloads, maybe you'll tset some page layouts or images and see which test group clicks the download button more
* Or, See which splash page results in the most "Sign up for Newsletter" clicks
This is great information for marketers, or really testing out any old thing you want that is trackable through browser-events.
Really though, this is just the tip of the Iceberg of what is possible... but I'll leave it at that. If you really want to know more let me know.
I find pair programming to be an excellent when you are debugging a problem and need two sets of eyes. It's also great for teaching/learning when a junior developer has banged his/her head against the problem before coming over to a more senior person for help. For research projects or deep thinking exercises, it's pretty counter-productive.
Youtube wasn't the breaking point for me, twitch.tv was. Granted, the streamers themselves do have control over this, I found it utterly annoying to see the same 1 or 2 ads played over and over in my face. Once I had ABP installed, the whole internet suddenly became faster to load too. The only annoying thing is, some websites that have those annoying ads that scroll across the webpage will now result in a dead-iframe blocking its content. Fortunately, I know how to right click, inspect element, navigate to the iframe container, and delete it, which, takes about 5 seconds.
Not just faster, but more secure as well. I couldn't tell you how many malware outbreaks I see at work because of a rogue advertisement on a popular site. Adblock keeps these from getting the best of your users. We did a pilot group with some folks who commonly use their work computers without the benefit of our corporate proxy or firewall (these are the users most at risk of advertising-based malware) by having them install Adblock. The results were pretty drastic, even if it wasn't a statistically significant sample size.
That's a huge factor. I remember watching seasons of TV shows on my local broadcaster's websites. Obviously, they were ad-supported and I was okay with this. The frustration was they'd show the same ad over and over and over again as I consumed a season-full of content.
If you gave me the kind of variety we're used to in a TV broadcast, I'd tolerate the ads. But repeated? No. That's when I start looking to hack my way around them.
I feel HTML5 today's "Web 2.0" of a few years ago. It's an overblown term that doesn't really capture what it is. CSS3 is cool. Canvas is cool. More native video is cool, I guess. The other new html elements are... ok... but quite frankily I'm fine with <div>s and changing them to <sections> seems annoying more so than helpful. HTML5 doesn't seem to bring anything radically new; most of what it allows could be done before, just with more workarounds and quirks. It's being hyped up as some next great thing, and not really a radical new development, it's much more incremental really.
And plenty of people are still using IE8 and Windows XP, and will for the next few years, so I don't think it's really more critical to learn HTML5 than over HTML4. Actually, it's hardly even possible to learn one without the other.
You should emphasize the "overblown term" part of that. Non-engineering-types who say HTML5 aren't literally talking about the W3C's HTML5 spec in isolation. What they mean is "frontend web technology". Non-engineers lump Backbone.js and HTML5 in the same bucket.
<section> tags have nothing to do with a normal person's understanding of HTML5. :)
Yes, to me HTML5 means more expensive testing, less browser support, and more effort on graceful degradation. I use HTML5 every day, and there is a good business case for e.g. HTML5 video so you have iOS support. But it's funny to see business people so enthusiastic about a cutting-edge tech; usually it's the programmers.
I think there is more to it than a buzzword though, the HTML5 way of doing web ie, paving the cow paths is radically different to the methodologies of XHTML, such that the range of technologies to be born/adopted out of that paradigm shift could be thought of as HTML5 era technologies.
"HTML5 doesn't seem to bring anything radically new" The canvas tag is radically new. Also, webgl isnt part of the HTML5 spec but its going to revolutionize browser gaming.
As an American who eats out a lot, I have to admit I loved going to Iceland where tipping is not expected whatsoever. Tipping feels like prostitution; when cash is exchanged it's hard to believe you're getting authentic service.
Money is being exchanged for service whether its bundled into the price charged for food and drink, tacked on as an explicit service fee, or paid separately as a tip.
If paying for service feels equivalent to prostitution to you, well, if you want to avoid "prostitution", you're going to need to forgo a lot of common economic activity.
I didn't express myself well enough, but your comment helped coax the idea from my heart to my brain:
I have no problems with explicit fees, nothing about that feels wrong to me. They are black and white. I want food, I pay for it. The non-negotiable, you pay the price on the menu aspect means both parties know fully-well in advance and can agree to what's being exchanged.
It's the ambiguous / "implicit" fees that cause me anguish. The waitress, in knowing that after the meal I'll be forced to make a judgment call, evaluating their service allows the possibility that every interaction leading up until I've paid them has been constructed to manipulate me. And outside an egregious there's little I can do to prove/disprove that. Whereas if its spelled out that upon entering the restaurant you will "pay XX rate for the service to do YY for you" you have the peace of mind that all parties involved know exactly what's going on. And anything they do above and beyond that is authentically who they are. If they tell me a joke, I know it's because they wanted to, not because they thought it might coax more money out of me.
Wait, what? You mean service from my car mechanic, gardener, pool guy, garbage collector, repairman, contractor, hairdresser, sports trainer, etc. - all "unauthentic" because I pay money for it? Or it is only when serving food that paying for it somehow becomes "unauthentic"? It is extremely weird notion that paying for service is somehow not expected. Why do you think all these people do it - out of deep and passionate love for you?
A gardener cuts my lawn for money they are not payed to be nice.
If they are nice then I assume it's because they are nice, not because they are doing it for money, since there's no direct obvious correlation. (Especially if they don't own the business.)
Prostitutes are payed to be nice, that is their service so the nice bit is "unauthentic". Just as the gardener might not be cutting my lawn for love, it's probably just money, but the friendly conversation probably is real.
Once you start tipping the niceness is much more out there as possibly faked.
There is an obvious correlation - if I employ someone and he's not nice to me, I'll fire him (or stop ordering his services) and hire somebody who is. Why should I suffer for my own money? Of course, there could be cases where I have no choice - like when I'm dealing with some sort of government monopoly like telecom or water company - but even there people are usually nice and there are ways to deal with it if they are not.
>>> Once you start tipping the niceness is much more out there as possibly faked.
What you mean by "faked"? I don't want each of these people to become by best friends forever or have deep emotional relationship with me. I don't date them or plan to spend a romantic vacation with them. I want them to be polite, courteous and helpful. How can it be "fake"? How you distinguish "fake" please from "sincere" please and what that even means?
