Domain: ptaff.ca
Stories and comments across the archive that link to ptaff.ca.
Comments · 27
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Re:Data transfer between snails
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Re:So?
ARGH! You had to mention windchill! One of the biggest misconceptions invented by so called tv meteorologists - aka: weather reporters, who being at least 50% reporter by definition must overhype any news to improve the ratings.
No matter how fast the wind may or may not be blowing on Pluto, the temperature will be the same!
The "Windchill" being reported in weather broadcasts is some quasi made up number that claims to represent how you'd feel outside. Out in the blowing wind. After a shower. Naked.
Sheesh.... more information is available here.
Sorry for the rant - I've either had too much coffee, or not enough - its too early in the morning to tell. -
Addictions
Some short classical games can keep depth throughout the years. Here I'm thinking about chess, go, and especially bridge. Though these games were available before computers, their computerized ports make it easy to find online partners for an half-hour session, any time of day.
Though I played bridge for several years now, I still feel like a newbie and will feel that way even when I'm retired - and that's the appeal. I can't imagine myself still playing Bard's Tale or Ultima IV several times a month; these long games lose their appeal after a while.
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Re:Impact of Firefox
Seems you weren't around in the late nineties when we had to support 2 different codebases when writing Javascript/Jscript. It was more trouble because in those days the 2 models were mostly incompatible.
Now as Safari/MSIE/FF are DOM-based, its a lot easier - sure there are quirks, but it only means "Build it so it works in FF, then tweak for others" instead of "do a 'if (MSIE)' first and then rewrite everything in the 'else' for NN4".
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Is Java the right language for a RDBMS?
The product page boasts their RDBMS is written in pure Java.
Databases engines must mainly do hardcore work on large sets of data (index, sort, merge, uniq, manipulate dates...); using Java for data crunching, is that really a neat idea?
Aside from the needed feature set, speed is I think the most important factor when picking up a RDBMS. I guess this is one of the major reasons for the quick adoption of SQLite and the popularity of MySQL vs. PostgreSQL.
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Career Path?Career path?
$ which career
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which: no career in (/usr/local/bin:/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin:/usr/ X11R6/bin) -
Re:Lazy IE Only Scripted Webpages...
Biting the troll.
You got it right: interpretation. Like if I told you "John says to Paul that he is fat". Who is fat? MSIE says it's John, Firefox says it's Paul, Opera says it's both, Safari says neither.
The last thing you want from any language is random behavior. That's what you get from tag soup. You get no point from saying that the average person writing HTML has no clue so browsers must cope with that; it's because early browsers allowed tag soup that we're caught with it now. If malformed HTML were not possible then, people would've learned the proper syntax, like they do in each and every other programming language.
We are now in a position where we can (and must) break the circle, using XHTML served as application/xhtml+xml, which will fail (just like a C compiler would fail on a missing semicolon) on bad-formedness. This will allow for a flawless integration of new XML modules (MathML, SVG, XForms, RDF, ...), simpler parsers and make the web evolve.
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Re:Should I bother?
Another soul who confuses free as in speech and free as in beer.
More than 80% of the software written never goes on the store racks; it's custom-made for a particular purpose for a specific customer. The customer wants software that works and he pays you to write it. Now, whatever licence you distribute your works with don't matter: you get paid anyway. It'll be free software if you grant the 4 freedoms to your customer, no matter what, you get paid anyway.
You wrote some code, and you got paid, get it?
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Re:Cygwin RULES
Konsole is nice, with tab's, I just with there was a tabbed RXVT then life would be truly sweet. (No tabbed putty yet, come on!)
No point in having tabbed terminal emulators when you use GNU Screen. Just a couple of keybindings to learn (^A c to create a new "tab", ^A 0 or ^A 1 and so on to see the Nth tab). Would work in PuTTY too, and all terms I can think of.
I personally hate all these Konsoles, gnome-terminal and others that take forever to load - if I wanted bells and whistles, I wouldn't use the comandline, wouldn't I?
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Single sign-on to what ?Why not single-sign-on to OpenLdap ?
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Three times more?
Using the Segway a candidate can reach three times the people compared to simply walking.
For this to make sense, the transport time between visits must be incredibly high compared to the time speeched at-the-front-door. As an example, for a 4 minute speech, you'd need a 14 minute transport time reduced by a factor of seven to see 3 times more people in the same timelapse.
Are candidates aware that they don't have to visit their voters list alphabetically?
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Docbook
Another XML-based format is DocBook, which originally was SGML based but now has a XML DTD too. From this format you can output to ps, pdf, rtf and plenty of other formats.
You could also hack one of the docbook XSL stylesheets (using XSLT? would be pretty!) to make it parse your own format.
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Standards based...
...rich internet applications platform (standards-based, zero-install, all-singing / all-dancing)
Last time I checked, Flash was not a web standard in the true sense, was still a proprietary technolgy and you couldn't redistribute the player (so it can't be bundled by your favorite distribution).
Pretending that this product is standards-based is like saying MSOffice is standards-based because it can import/export XML.
Are we to expect a future release supporting SVG - as the backend seems to be modeled around XML/ECMAScript? That'd be most impressive - and web engine friendly, at last.
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TheDraw
For those who created real ASCII art back in the days of the BBS, there exists a GPL clone of TheDraw to bring back memories (and maybe dust your 5.25" floppies) called DuhDraw. Those were the good old times, as anybody remembering ANSI music will tell.
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Re:False Positives
From the original paper in the British Medical Journal, the experiment was to show 7 petri dishes to each of the 6 dogs, one of the dishes containing 'cancered' urine, and repeating this 9 times. So dogs flagged the wrong dish 32 times out of 54, making both a false positive and a false negative every time. I'm no stat wiz, but I feel the "41% success rate" is a bit misleading.
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Every time!
Did you ever work on such a project as a programmer yourself?
At my workplace, typical work is customizing already free-as-both-beer-and-speech existing programs (skins, terminology, add a function here and there). So, take GPL, give GPL.If so, how did the development differ from a free(dom)/free(beer) Open Source application?
Somebody gets paid!
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All stories?
As with all sections on Slashdot, there will be stories available within that section that don't get posted to the main page
For real /. geeks, would it be possible to turn on a flag to get everything on the home page? Every time I metamoderate I wonder "How come this story doesn't ring a bell?". Now I understand why.
Clicking on each and every section to watch for missing stories is a bit lame, no?
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Re:Looks like a nice business
... then write in your CV that you're a perl developer.
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Finally, all is clear!
Finally I understand why they have run out of color names for makeup! Calculator Beige, Misty brown, Mirror, Dead Duck, Greedy Pumpkin and all variations.
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Re:Sorry, your product is banned here.What would be the point of having a swiss knife without a knife ?
Until what we all know, we could bring that kind of knife on a plane. A swiss knife is very useful in all sort of situations, especially when you are travelling and just taking a piece of bread and some paté instead of eating a burger
;-)Stick to Tux, get your own TuxSticker !
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How can a pill?
They believe this has the potential to lead to a pill to turn similar genes on in humans
Always wondering, in genetic marketing speeches, how they can pretend that a pill or any process can change genetic code in an already grown being. To change a gene in my body, they'd have to reprogram billions of cells, one by one. Even cancer, which is a mutated DNA, can't propagate fast enough to replace all my cells (and god knows cancer cells reproduces quickly) in a few years. Maybe they have truck-stop stale egg-salad sandwiches on their mind?
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The obvious
a great program for slowing the spread/proliferation of virii and reducing the impact of DoS attacks, it's all being shelved due to Windows incompatibilities.
So, they are starting their own GNU/Linux distribution?
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By the side door
A great libre project that could be worth the try (even more so if you're into old games) is DOSBox which does a great job simulating a 1990-era DOS machine, using SDL. As it's emulating the CPU, you'll be able to summon it on your reverse-endian architecture. All you need now is a good telnet client.
Overhead for a telnet session, you could object, but as an added bonus you'll be able to reminisce all those 2 and 4 and 16-color days.
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Happy hacking keyboard ?Personaly, I'm using the happy hacking keyboard, which is maybe not "specially designed for" linux, but works very well. And there is an "diamond" key that makes the menu pop-up, which is fine for the windows-like-button fans.
Stick to Tux, buy a tuxsticker !
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Stop reinventing the wheel
For so many years, Microsoft has brought useless fileformats to complete with those that already exist. Stop trying to innovate and start supporting the open standards. Did we really need BMP? How come PNG is so lamely supported? How about pushing Ogg Vorbis/Theora with your media player?
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Gkrellm
A slick tool is Gkrellm, which has real-time graphical status for memory/temperatures/net/disk. Can be run in "server mode" (so no need for X on the monitored server). Lots of plugins are also available, from SNMP to ping tools. The project is well alive. Don't know if it floats your boat, though, as you're mentioning huge networks.
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Fake 3-D?
You could draw a cube and see three of its face; would "feel" 3-D to most people, but without the limitations of paper. I gimped a little sketch that explains the idea.