My wife didn't get an engagement ring. We went from "Will you marry me?" to "I do" within a few weeks. Don't ever let anyone tell you that unplanned pregnancies aren't good for anything.
The CEO's concern, according to the article (you did read it, right?) was that the loans might never be repaid, since the board had previously voted to make the loans "non-recourse" -- in other words, the board members had passed a resolution essentially saying that they didn't have to repay the loans at all. That's why he asked them to pay up. It might have been more tactful to ask them to reverse the "non-recourse" decision, but there would have been nothing to stop them from doing it again at some future board meeting, so perhaps it would have been best for them to just pay the loans back immediately and put the whole issue behind them.
I don't agree at all. I have a Philips DVD player (model 950A) which I bought around a year and a half ago (just after Christmas 2000). It has performed flawlessly ever since and has never failed to play any DVD I've put in it. My only minor unhappiness with it is that it's not progressive-scanning, but I knew that when I bought it. (At the time, I had an old 20" TV with only coax and antenna inputs, with which I figured progressive scan wouldn't matter much. I've since replaced that TV with a 36" Sony WEGA XBR, on which I think progressive scan would be quite helpful.)
In general, Cygwin/XFree86 works very well. However, just recently I've been developing a Win32 product that needs to interoperate with Microsoft NetMeeting 3, and I find that whenever NetMeeting is running, the XFree86 window is a blank white rectangle, and refuses to repaint itself any other way until the NetMeeting process terminates. I haven't investigated this, but I suspect NetMeeting sends out some broadcast window message that XFree86 finds confusing. I really ought to bring up Microsoft's Spy++ tool to see what messages the XFree86 window receives when NetMeeting starts up, but I haven't done so yet.
Another oddity is that ever since I followed these directions to set up sshd on Win32, my window manager (fluxbox) won't start from the startxwin.sh script -- it just prints "Pure virtual function called" and exits. However, I can start the wm manually, and all is well from then on. I haven't taken the time to debug this either; it could be related to having sshd running (why?) or to some change made by Erdely's fix-perms.sh script. Or perhaps the changes Erdely recommends for/etc/passwd and/etc/group?
Btw, I use the same window manager on Cygwin/XFree86 that I do on Linux/XFree86 -- fluxbox 0.1.9, which is a nice extension of blackbox 0.61.1 with a number of nice features such as user-customization of the title bar button positioning (essential, as blackbox insists on putting the Close button right next to the Maximize button, which is stupid) and tabbed windows (which ought to be an WM feature, not an app feature).
One thing I notice in all the metacity screen shots I've seen is that the title bar buttons are badly arranged (a problem it shares with many other WMs). Putting the close button right next to the maximize button (or any other non-destructive button) is just dumb, even if it is fashionable nowadays (MacOS X and Windows since Win95 have the same problem, though older versions of MacOS and Windows did not). Can this be changed without modifying the source and recompiling?
I recently got tired of sawfish too, so I switched to fluxbox, which is a new fork of blackbox with some nice features. One of its new features is that the user can change the button order! So I have the close button on one side and the minimize and maximize buttons on the other side, as they should be.
Pronounce it like "Ing", but minimize the leading vowel as much as you can. It's a common Chinese name. Sometimes it gets spelled "Ing" or "Eng" or "Ang", but "Ng" is closest to the actual pronunciation, unless you're a real idiot and try to pronounce it as "Nig".
I have kids. I don't have a problem with CD/DVD scratches. This is because we keep them away from digital media until they're old enough to handle them (say, age 4 or 5), and then we teach them how to take care of the discs.
Fingerprints aren't much of an issue for CDs, and even with DVDs, you just carefully wipe them off.
As usual, IANAL, but I think your clients are completely out to lunch unless they made some really significant contributions to your product and had a contract with you that stipulated that should have such rights. I agree completely with your view: they're getting your services for free, tailored to their needs, and that's more than enough.
If they actually contributed code to your software, or designed hardware components, then they may reasonably regret giving it to you for nothing, but if they gave you stuff with an understanding that it would be used in your product, without making it quite clear (preferably by contract) that they expected to be part-owners of the resulting product, then I don't see how they could possibly have an argument that could hold up in court.
Another question: is this a copyright or patent issue? For copyright, the implementation is all that matters, so if they didn't give you actual code or circuit diagrams that are present in your final product, then they have no basis to claim ownership. If patents are at issue, then it could be a little murkier.
You must not manage your kids very well. My eldest daughter (now 6) managed to crack a few jewel cases when she was younger (particularly during her crawling phase as a baby, when she became fascinated with pulling all the CDs off the shelves she could reach), but she never actually damaged a CD itself. And she's been using CD-ROMs (the JumpStart series from Knowledge Adventure) since she was 2 -- she puts the CDs in by herself, and takes them out and puts them away. She also has a CD player in her room (a small boom box) and several music CDs.
I think the crucial thing is that when she was too young to be allowed to get at the CDs, we did our best to keep her away from them and teach her not to touch them, and as soon as she was old enough to have a legitimate reason to access them, we showed her how to hold them, not to mess around with them, and so on.
Of course, we'll see if this same strategy works with her little sister, who is now learning to crawl...
"i" in vi is a command that switches modes. It is perfectly obvious that you're in a different mode, because the program now behaves differently in response to your actions. If you hit "i" in command mode, you switch to insert mode; if you hit "i" in insert mode, an "i" appears in your document. These are obviously different modes.
Now, by the same token, an "i" entered in Emacs will do something slightly different depending on what kind of buffer you're viewing in the current window. So Emacs is not completely modeless either (very few programs are, if they have any significant user interactivity). However, in Emacs, it is always obvious what mode you're in, because the mode line shows you; and Emacs is less modal than vi, because basic editing activities like entering text, deleting text, and cursor navigation can all take place in the same mode, which is not true in vi.
The problem with the original vi, which has a lot to do with its awful reputation among UI designers, was that it gave no visual indication whatsoever what the current mode was. So if you stepped away from your terminal for a bit, and when you came back, you couldn't remember whether you'd left the program in command mode or insert mode, there was no way to know what would happen if you pressed a key! The safe thing to do, IIRC (I haven't used vi in over ten years), was to hit ESC, which in insert mode would switch to command mode, and in command mode would do nothing -- so you had a reliable way to get to a known state, regardless of the current state.
Newer vi clones, such as vim, use the bottom line of the window to display the current mode. This is a simple but very important improvement, and increases vi's usability markedly.
No, you need not press ESC to simulate META if your system is sensibly configured (and in most EMACS environments, the default is sensible). The ALT key on a standard "IBM Enhanced" style keyboard usually maps to META.
It has a built in watercooling system, to save people into overclocking the trouble of building their own. Unfortunately, it only works with Athlon, Duron, and Pentium IIIs. The P4 socket isn't compatible with it.
Overclockers are generally performance freaks, so why the hell would one be buying a P4?
99.8% accuracy is fine for a proof-of-concept demo, but as always, the devil is in the details. This won't be a useful technology until it can do a hell of a lot better than that. I certainly wouldn't trust my PC if it made mistakes on.2% of its calculations. Who knows, it might take several years to develop a really usable version of this, or it might never get into the market at all if, say, other technologies can beat it to market or have better cost/performance ratios.
People have been using ext3 in production for some time, without difficulty, so your expectation is heading for serious disappointment.
I remember reading somewhere a while back that Linus and other kernel developers were disinclined to ever put XFS in the kernel because it was a huge amount of code and pretty ugly.
When I first started using Debian, I installed Potato. All the software was badly out of date, so I moved to Woody. A lot of the software was still out of date. So I moved to Sid. Everything worked. I'm happy.
Yes, from time to time something bad happens (the broken PAM package of last February of March being the worst incident -- it broke login!), but those usually get fixed up within a day. The more lengthy problems are usually caused by a package being reorganized or renamed such that everything dependent on it has to be rebuilt. This is currently occurring with the Python packages. So I have all the core Python packages marked "hold" until everything I need that's dependent on them is updated. It's a minor annoyance, but no big deal really.
So by and large, I'm very happy with Sid and I think its breakage problems are severely overrated, mostly by people who are afraid of living on the edge.
Interesting to realize that Unix has been in use for more than half the lifetime of the commercial computer industry. Unix is 30 ("born" 1971); commercial computing goes back only another <=20 years, to the early '50s.
This is sort of cool, as it shows how flexible and open-ended the basic Unix concept was, that it has managed to evolve and remain useful all this time.
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Okay, so Larry had an off-by-one error...
"Santa Cruz Operation" sounds doesn't sound to me at all like military jet manufacturing -- more like cocaine smuggling.
My wife didn't get an engagement ring. We went from "Will you marry me?" to "I do" within a few weeks. Don't ever let anyone tell you that unplanned pregnancies aren't good for anything.
The CEO's concern, according to the article (you did read it, right?) was that the loans might never be repaid, since the board had previously voted to make the loans "non-recourse" -- in other words, the board members had passed a resolution essentially saying that they didn't have to repay the loans at all. That's why he asked them to pay up. It might have been more tactful to ask them to reverse the "non-recourse" decision, but there would have been nothing to stop them from doing it again at some future board meeting, so perhaps it would have been best for them to just pay the loans back immediately and put the whole issue behind them.
I don't agree at all. I have a Philips DVD player (model 950A) which I bought around a year and a half ago (just after Christmas 2000). It has performed flawlessly ever since and has never failed to play any DVD I've put in it. My only minor unhappiness with it is that it's not progressive-scanning, but I knew that when I bought it. (At the time, I had an old 20" TV with only coax and antenna inputs, with which I figured progressive scan wouldn't matter much. I've since replaced that TV with a 36" Sony WEGA XBR, on which I think progressive scan would be quite helpful.)
That should have been these directions for setting up sshd.
Another oddity is that ever since I followed these directions to set up sshd on Win32, my window manager (fluxbox) won't start from the startxwin.sh script -- it just prints "Pure virtual function called" and exits. However, I can start the wm manually, and all is well from then on. I haven't taken the time to debug this either; it could be related to having sshd running (why?) or to some change made by Erdely's fix-perms.sh script. Or perhaps the changes Erdely recommends for /etc/passwd and /etc/group?
Btw, I use the same window manager on Cygwin/XFree86 that I do on Linux/XFree86 -- fluxbox 0.1.9, which is a nice extension of blackbox 0.61.1 with a number of nice features such as user-customization of the title bar button positioning (essential, as blackbox insists on putting the Close button right next to the Maximize button, which is stupid) and tabbed windows (which ought to be an WM feature, not an app feature).
The LA station is KIIS.
I recently got tired of sawfish too, so I switched to fluxbox, which is a new fork of blackbox with some nice features. One of its new features is that the user can change the button order! So I have the close button on one side and the minimize and maximize buttons on the other side, as they should be.
Pronounce it like "Ing", but minimize the leading vowel as much as you can. It's a common Chinese name. Sometimes it gets spelled "Ing" or "Eng" or "Ang", but "Ng" is closest to the actual pronunciation, unless you're a real idiot and try to pronounce it as "Nig".
Fingerprints aren't much of an issue for CDs, and even with DVDs, you just carefully wipe them off.
If they actually contributed code to your software, or designed hardware components, then they may reasonably regret giving it to you for nothing, but if they gave you stuff with an understanding that it would be used in your product, without making it quite clear (preferably by contract) that they expected to be part-owners of the resulting product, then I don't see how they could possibly have an argument that could hold up in court.
Another question: is this a copyright or patent issue? For copyright, the implementation is all that matters, so if they didn't give you actual code or circuit diagrams that are present in your final product, then they have no basis to claim ownership. If patents are at issue, then it could be a little murkier.
I think the crucial thing is that when she was too young to be allowed to get at the CDs, we did our best to keep her away from them and teach her not to touch them, and as soon as she was old enough to have a legitimate reason to access them, we showed her how to hold them, not to mess around with them, and so on.
Of course, we'll see if this same strategy works with her little sister, who is now learning to crawl...
...my DSL provider, PacBell Internet, actually wants to sell you a NAT router when you sign up for basic home DSL service.
Make light go backwards? Yeah, I've got one of those mounted on the wall in my bathroom.
Now, by the same token, an "i" entered in Emacs will do something slightly different depending on what kind of buffer you're viewing in the current window. So Emacs is not completely modeless either (very few programs are, if they have any significant user interactivity). However, in Emacs, it is always obvious what mode you're in, because the mode line shows you; and Emacs is less modal than vi, because basic editing activities like entering text, deleting text, and cursor navigation can all take place in the same mode, which is not true in vi.
The problem with the original vi, which has a lot to do with its awful reputation among UI designers, was that it gave no visual indication whatsoever what the current mode was. So if you stepped away from your terminal for a bit, and when you came back, you couldn't remember whether you'd left the program in command mode or insert mode, there was no way to know what would happen if you pressed a key! The safe thing to do, IIRC (I haven't used vi in over ten years), was to hit ESC, which in insert mode would switch to command mode, and in command mode would do nothing -- so you had a reliable way to get to a known state, regardless of the current state.
Newer vi clones, such as vim, use the bottom line of the window to display the current mode. This is a simple but very important improvement, and increases vi's usability markedly.
No, you need not press ESC to simulate META if your system is sensibly configured (and in most EMACS environments, the default is sensible). The ALT key on a standard "IBM Enhanced" style keyboard usually maps to META.
99.8% accuracy is fine for a proof-of-concept demo, but as always, the devil is in the details. This won't be a useful technology until it can do a hell of a lot better than that. I certainly wouldn't trust my PC if it made mistakes on .2% of its calculations. Who knows, it might take several years to develop a really usable version of this, or it might never get into the market at all if, say, other technologies can beat it to market or have better cost/performance ratios.
I remember reading somewhere a while back that Linus and other kernel developers were disinclined to ever put XFS in the kernel because it was a huge amount of code and pretty ugly.
Yes, from time to time something bad happens (the broken PAM package of last February of March being the worst incident -- it broke login!), but those usually get fixed up within a day. The more lengthy problems are usually caused by a package being reorganized or renamed such that everything dependent on it has to be rebuilt. This is currently occurring with the Python packages. So I have all the core Python packages marked "hold" until everything I need that's dependent on them is updated. It's a minor annoyance, but no big deal really.
So by and large, I'm very happy with Sid and I think its breakage problems are severely overrated, mostly by people who are afraid of living on the edge.
Interesting to realize that Unix has been in use for more than half the lifetime of the commercial computer industry. Unix is 30 ("born" 1971); commercial computing goes back only another <=20 years, to the early '50s. This is sort of cool, as it shows how flexible and open-ended the basic Unix concept was, that it has managed to evolve and remain useful all this time.