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Comment: Religion is stoicisim for the mentally challanged (Score 1) 238

by Qbertino (#46492755) Attached to: Religion Is Good For Your Brain

Todays Bookreligions and the way they are praticed are a watered down stoicisim for the mentally challanged and little more.
And of course a well-rounded philosophy of life will help you battle depression and and assaults on your spirits in general.

I'd bet money that stoics and zen-buddists and the like show the least likelyhood of depression, especially compared to followers of abrahamic religions.

Get Seneca, read it and be done with it. All the benefits of religion and then some without any of the downsides.

My 2 cents.

Comment: Roughly 5 hours ... (Score 1) 146

by Qbertino (#46427429) Attached to: Time sucked into Netflix or similar, weekly:

Roughly 5 hours. Between Job (part-time webdev), Coding/Fiddling with FOSS on my own time, Eveningschool (A-Level GED), Sewing (currently mending/pimping pants and sewing a pouch for my MacBook Air) and Tango Dancing there's not much time. I like to wind down during the weekdays with a movie though, even if it's late. Just watched Limitless (great one) and Contagion (dito) last week.

Last Weekend without planning to, I wound up dancing on friday, saturday and sunday. ... It get's quite adictive, especially with all the hot chicas you get to know :-))

Comment: Private Cars are just about the most stupid thing (Score 2) 187

by Qbertino (#46426781) Attached to: Is Traffic Congestion Growing Three Times As Fast As Economy?

Private Cars is just about the most stupid thing in these times. Germans spend 4.7 Billion man hours per year in traffic jams. Mind you, this is Germany, where there are better and more roads per capita, far less speed limits and people actually know how to drive. 4.7 fucking billion man hours per year. Let that sink in for a minute. And that's like 80% of the monetary income generating population wasting that sort of time (I won't say working population, for obvious reasons).

With that time wasted, we could send every person in the workincome population on a paid 3 week vacation each year and still have money to spare.

Cars are an anomally, only around today for mostly historical reasons, with no sensible reason at all. Sort of like the PC keyboard or MS Windows. Only with far more negative impact on overall quality of living and the environment.

Most populations and societies would be better of if we banned private cars alltogether and switched to e-bikes and public transport entirely. With taxis and cargo taxis for the special occasions. Would be cheaper for all, faster for all, better for the environment and we'd all be happier for it. I'd bet money on that.

If I were a billionaire I'd pay some bankrupt German cities to ban cars alltogether and then heavyly invest in them and then sit back and watch the local economy and quality of living skyrocket.

My 2 cents.

Comment: PHPs badness is its advantage. (Score 4, Interesting) 254

by Qbertino (#46406585) Attached to: The New PHP


F.I. I'm working myself into Drupal at my current employer because it's the prime go-to CMS here. It's like a live alice in wonderland trip. A strange historically grown mess, barely tamed by sanitiy and a relentless chaotic community that all by accident seem to come up with hacks that somehow solve the problem in some way. And yet there's a solid global corporation building its business all around Drupal. The surreal hacks with which the Drupal people solve their problems are mindboggling, and yet everybody seems totally OK with it. And Drupals track record of deployments is impressive.

I guess with PHP it's somehow like the C vs. Lisp argument: C is so shitty compared to Lisp that you have to get yourself together and work as a team, or you won't get anything done. Hence Lisp has this loner exisitance on the side and all the real work gets done in this ancient C thing.


As a programmer you don't feel dirty when you do bad programming in PHP, you already felt that when you picked PHP as the solution. Hence quite a bit of work gets done in PHP. That's why PHP has Drupal and Typo3 and Joomla and the Java Community has nothing of that proportions. The barrier of entry into PHP is *very* low which gives it its momentum.

My 2 cents.

Comment: Cramming 20 commands into one line ... (Score 2, Insightful) 216

by Qbertino (#46367645) Attached to: Wolfram Language Demo Impresses

Cramming 20 commands and 8 layers of brackets into one line doesn't make your programm an 'impressive 5-liner'. It, at most, makes a neat stunt by a mathematician in a proprietary programming language he invented himself. I'd be tempted to call it shitty programming.

Nothing to see here folks, move along.

Comment: Yes, webtech is a toy. And that's why it will win. (Score 1) 82

by Qbertino (#46366163) Attached to: Github Rolls Out New Text Editor Atom

Javascript, DOM, CSS etc are a bastardised mish-mash of technologies that lack elegance and coherence; they've come about from the legacy need to display static pages in a browser. To gain functionality more and more features have been added like throwing crap against a wall in the hope something will stick. Using this spaghetti system to drive a text editor makes little sense from a technology point of view.

Web technologies today are a toy. Very true. PHP is a silly mess (Sidenote: ATM I develop PHP/HTML/CSS/JS for a living) and clientside Flash was eons ahead of everything else. That's 'was' as in 'has passed'. Adobe and Macromedia sought to that.

Devs will settle for the lowest common demoninator and will backtrack 2-3 generations of technology if it's open and free. It was the same with the PC. It was a toy. But it was open and free and you could dabble with it without a giant megacorporation sueing you into next wednesday. Now x86 rules the planet, and Amiga and GEOS Works are faint history.

That's the way things go. Nature finds the absurdest ways around obsticles, but it's true.

Comment: You got it wrong. (Score 1) 53

We spent NINETEEN BILLION DOLLARS on a chat program.

Nope. We spent 19 Billion on 450 Million active users and counting. On a programm that carries itself by asking 1 Euro per year for the service. If we play out cards right, we've just bought the soon-to-be-the-worlds-largest phone and telecommunications company at a bargain price. ... And we expect to play our cards right. Or do you think we screwed up our IPO?

Android just passed 1 billion activated devices. How long to you think it will take before the majority of humanity is communicating and doing most of its everyday work with an android based smartphone? I expect that to happen in the next decade.

Comment: For F. sake, I don't want an *elegant* e-bike ... (Score 1) 164

by Qbertino (#46344449) Attached to: Electric Bikes Get More Elegant Every Year (Video)

... I want one you can't steal. Or that is significantly unfeasable to steal. Two long integrated articulated heavy-duty locks and QR codes etched into the frame at various places once I buy one with my name and ownership certificate at the end of the URL and an alert if I reported it stolen. Plus hidden RFID Chips to do the same. And an optional hidden UMTS/GPS Module in sleep mode, powered by the batteries and integrated into the electronics so I/the authorities can track it down and/or lock down the power unit / motor / controls with a cryptocode if the need arises. And a battery and an electronics/controls unit you can remove and carry with you with zero fuss.

Oh, and it should be sturdy enough for everyday use. Have yet to see an uncustomized bike, e- or otherwise, that offers that.

Once that happens, *then* I'll seriously consider shelling out 2000 Euros for an E-Bike. Until then they are a toy for people with to much money.

My 2 cents.

Comment: Nothing is bursting. (Score 1) 280

by Qbertino (#46323425) Attached to: Who's On WhatsApp, and Why?



It's about 4,5 billion people on this planet about to be connected to the internet in the next few years, with devices that cost less than what a fourtnights worth of Starbucks costs us.

We are moving head on into a post-scarcity economy, at least in terms of digital connectivity - from there on out it's all about attention and mindshare. The purchase might bomb, yes, but it might as well just turn out to be a real bargain. And if it bombs it won't even do a blip on FBs bank account. And others won't care either. Those who have VC can buy into WhatsApp like startups for peanuts because deving, deploying and scaling has become so dirt cheap. So even if they all bomb we'll be back to business as usuall 4 weeks into that.

The world is changing, and it's changing fast. The dot-bomb era was just people getting ahead of them selves in a way that wasn't good for them. The hardware wasn't there, Databases and IDEs costed more than luxury cars, and what passes as a toy today was a cray workstation in 2001 that would set you back 30 grand. It was silly back then. It isn't now.

Reality is catching up. Fast.

Bottom line:
I wouldn't hold my breath for any bubble of sorts bursting any time soon.

My 2 cents.

Comment: Interesting way to see how CEOs think. (Score 1) 144

by Qbertino (#46321863) Attached to: WhatsApp Founder Used Unchangable Airline Ticket To Pressure Facebook

CEOs are rich because they pinch on things that seem strangely unreasonable to the layman. I bet one CEO pressing another to an appointment because he otherwise has wasted his Miles was actually a solid appeal to Zuckerbergs politeness and courtesy and Zuckerberg felt compelled to follow suit - and rightly so.

Zuckerberg, Jobs and other rich people have strange money saving habits they carry on well into being insanely rich. I'll still be mending my own trowsers should I ever land a lucky punch, f.i. Zuckerberg lives in a house reminiscent of that of a simple honest working craftsman here in Germany and he's married to a modest, refreshingly unspectacular asian woman, probably because the western / u.s ladies were to strenious for him.

Truth is, these people don't give a shit how many bazillions they have on the bank. They want to build cool stuff and make a dent in the universe, and they would be doing the *exact* *same* *thing* if they just would barely get by, because they like what they do. I know wealthy multi-Ph.Ds who still ask for the rest of their dinner to be wrapped up so they can take it home. That may be strange, but it's comforting. They haven't forgotten where they come from.

That's why these people have my respect. I don't like FB to much, I don't like Apples golden cage lock, etc. pp. But who am I to complain? Nobody is stopping me from sitting my ass down and building the next big thing in IT. But my respect they have nonetheless.

As fas as I'm concerned that WhatsApp guy deserves every billion he can squeeze out of the deal. If he still doesn't waste his miles, that makes him more respectable in my book.

My 2 cents.

Comment: Xonotic, Prof. Layton, The Bards Tale, ... (Score 1) 669

by Qbertino (#46284285) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: What Games Are You Playing?

Mac & Linux:
Xonotic (excellent FOSS FPS Multiplayer), Wesnoth, Warzone 2100 (neat FOSS 3D RTS)

Nintendo DSi:
Prof. Layton (the Time Machine Story (can't remember the exact title)
Advance Wars 'something' (DSi Edition of AW)
Zelda Spirit Tracks ... etc.

PSP 1:
GTA Chinatown (hilarious and fun)
Ratchet & Clank
God of War (the PSP titles)
Wipeout ... etc.

Android Tablet (HTC Flyer
The Bards Tale

I've been playing very rarely though in the last 10 years, so all of those games I've been playing for a few years now. F.i. I've been at that specific title of Prof. Layton for roughly 2,5 years now. I'm something like 2 or 3 titles behind in the Layton series now. In GTA Chinatown PSP im at the 5th mission or so. ... The Bards tale for 3 Euros on Android illustrates to me where gaming is headed. Rough times for the console makers ahead, portable and stationary, that's my take on the situation.

Comment: Re:How about no tution at all? (Score 1) 597

by Qbertino (#46246081) Attached to: Financing College With a Tax On All Graduates

Yes, but you have limits on who can attend, right?

Yes, you have to have basic brain functions. And your A-Levels. Which you can get "post-schoolum" in public GED 'evening school' programms which can take 2-3 years. Also basically for free, btw. Though you only get student support (basic monthly sustenance + some extra as an interest-free (!!) loan from the government) up to the age of 30 or so. A little later in some cases (if you've raised children in the mean time for instance you get up to 9 years added to the agebarrier).

There also are NC barriers for popular fields, so f.i. to become an MD you have to have a good or very good average, depending on the college you want to attend, but it's doable for anybody who put's his mind to it. The important part is that you don't need any money whatsoever to go to college , beyond the most trivial amounts of fees, the cost of living and such.

And it pays off for everybody.
Those who make it and get the paying jobs pay taxes, those who aren't there yet allways have a real chance.
Contrary to the situation in the U.S. where that isn't the case, no matter what they tell you.
