chilie

I help maintain the phones/computers for several non-technical and/or elderly family members.

Their computers are a mess. No matter what pro-active measures I take, every time I get involved, they have a bunch of nonsense installed doing who-knows-what. Random apps, most of which are running all the time, slogging down the system. The younger folks have different game-stores, or other similar things, all running in the background. The computers are slower than mud.

Their phones are all fine. They may download crap, but I know it is almost impossible for it to mess things up outside of that individual app.

I'm not saying this to completely defend Apple - I honestly don't know which side of the App Store/sideloading debate I fall on. I'm just pointing out that there are huge benefits, particularly for the general population of non-techincal users, to Apple remaining as a gatekeeper (albeit obviously a quite imperfect one).

Am I alone in disliking ligatures? I want a font that displays the characters I type in exactly the form I type them. I really don't see the appeal.

I'm not big into IoT yet - what sort of devices would it be necessary for the network to remain functional if there was no internet connection?

Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but what would most users need to be able to use the network for if the internet is down?

The only use case I can think of is transferring files around? Do you think that's so common amongst most users?

These are just issues that someone unfamiliar with a field would face. None of them are problems for those of us in the field.

First, the expectation thing. He's using a special case, E(X), and complaining that the more general case doesn't follow the general case. It's like saying "Well the plural of mouse is mice but the plural of house isn't hice!". The general definition of expectation (for a discrete probability) is

E(f(x)) = sum f(x_i)* p(x_i)

If you start with this general definition, both E(X) and E(X^2) are perfectly natural. The author's error of starting with the special case in no way implies an issue with notation.

And how is the fact that Wikipedia is inconsistent between E(X) and E[X] in any way mathematical notation's fault? If you read a novel that starts using ' for quotes and switches to ", that's an issue with the novel (assuming its not stylistic) and not an issue with the typography in general.

I completely agree with 1 and 2 - my question was related to a local machine with a tiling WM.

For 3, can you elaborate? How is it less context switching? You're doing the same set of operations in both settings - switching, moving and resizing terminal windows (whether real or virtual).

Can someone explain the benefits of using tmux or screen or something similar over opening multiple terminals in a tiling WM?

The two arguments I could see are resource usage (not an issue on modern machines) or detach/attach (which is a huge benefit when working remotely, but I don't see any gain locally). But other than those, I don't see any benefits to having a second tiling system sitting on top of my current tiling system.

(For reference, I use i3.)

I've got a Macbook 7,1 with Ubuntu 12.04 running Xmonad, and its by far the smoothest linux experience I've ever had. I ran it under Gnome Unity for a bit and that was fine too. I've never had the mouse issues you refer to. The trackpad works just as well as it did until OS X.

I currently do this with my entire .emacs.d directory, but it sounds like Derbasti only pulls his .emacs, and then has code to check for installed packages and get any that are missing.

Would you mind sharing your .emacs so we can see how you have that set up?