Yeah, it does, I checked it against bc a while back. It's pretty impressive, actually.
...but my favorite 'pi' program would have to be the Obfuscated C Contest entry that had a function that looked like a circle, and it said "To get a better approximation for Pi, write a bigger program." And it ran that function to mostly calculate Pi. I won't spoil the rest of it for you.:) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Oh man, that is incredibly stupid. Either he has no idea what he's getting himself into, or he's even stupider than he's letting on.:)
I suppose it's his right to decide who he wants to distribute to, and even if someone got the source code with that disclaimer on it, and considered themselves bound by it, they could still (a) Not Ask, and (b) Distribute the "GPL"ed work to someone else.
It doesn't look like that person would be bound by the original (bogus) agreement, but Slade would still be obligated to give them the source, and that person could give the original party the source.
...and the constitution is a lousy example, considering those "laws" aren't absolutes, but rather manipulated by legal precedent. (is it okay to yell "W1ND0WZ RULEZ" in a crowded Linux forum?;) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Eventually I'll have to learn Perl. But I might wait for release 6.6.666, so that it runs on Windows properly.;)
Seriously, though, I think this is news, because Perl hasn't changed version numbers in a while. I guess this'll be cooler when it's a stable version, but...
Remember, Linux, Apache and Perl are always news here, because Slashdot runs on all three. And if Slashdot ever tackles that "slow under load" problem, that'll really be news!:) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
All this does is make me more impatient. *And* I'll have to decide between this and an Athlon. Aww man!
(If Tom's Hardwre manages to get a multiprocessor Crusoe system up and running, I might be stupid enough to try it too, for better price / performance. Otherwise, I guess we'll just have to build that Beowulf cluster instead, eh, guys?;) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Sometimes a long article is needed to properly get a point across, yes. But verboseness is often not what is needed. (Or, rather, eschew unnecessary verbosity:)
Katz often finds a controversial or nonsensical perspective, with lots of extra "Buzzwords From The HellMouth: A Katzian Diatribe". This article is more like what I would call interesting. But, each to their own. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I don't know, I searched on Ask Jeeves, and turned up this list of recipies too:
bar cookies butter spritz gingerbread men girl scout cookies shortbread snickerdoodles turtle brownies vegan chocolate cookies springerle cookies
Children don't need to be going to bars, spritzing butter, messing around with "gingerbread men" or girl scouts (commonly called "making brownies"), snickering at shortbread, assaulting turtles, watching Springer, or coating Vegans in chocolate! Oh, the nerve of them!
Some people just don't get it.:) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Something is very wrong, this is longer than your average Katz article. However, it looks like jamie has something important to say. Surfing software blocks content unexpectedly, not necessarily based on if it's 'pr0n' or not.
However, I say: is this so bad? I don't like censorship, but if I did, blocking "Babe: Pig in the City" would be a good start. Most kids don't know about porn when they're that young, but we could save them from many other societal ills. If only we had blocked Barney, Pokemon, Nintendo, etc., etc., they would realize that the only purpose for those computers is for their schoolwork. That's it.
And we could have more filters for adults, too, and block their pr0n, their Slashdot, their "Yahoo Pager", and make them work for a living, instead!
Then we could have a constitutional convention, and push for a perfect Communism, and have the government genetically engineer people to only want to do what the government wants them to do, so it wouldn't be so inhumane. And we'd work all day and all night, and we'd collapse occasionally, but we'd be happy and efficient, like ants are... --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
God, why did they have to write that page in FrontPage? It hurts to look at! And it uses basic HTML that any knowledgable 8-year-old would shun. And the images are worse... and...
I mean, come on, my web pages are crappy, but they just don't compare to the horror that is "Gentus Linux".
It's the HTML equivalent of "It R00Lz? D00D? GENTUS L1NUKZ 0WNZ U???" In fact, why don't they have an option like that built into FrontPage, so that newbies don't write pages like that? Oh, because they would. Gotcha. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Precisely. That's just like if Dell preconfigured their Windows boxes with special drivers for their hardware, and called it "Dell Windows"....which isn't far from the truth.
So they screwed up and called it a distribution, so what? I *like* having my preconfigured computer work correctly, even if they call the OS "Charlene". (wait... that'd be pretty cool, actually...:) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Re:(OT) Ha! Another Trianglian!
on
Muppets Sold
·
· Score: 1
Dude, we're all over the place.
The Triangle: we just wish Cary wasn't there.:) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
What I meant to say was, do you think that an obfuscated C++ contest would be more fun than the traditional one?
'Cause you can still do all the ridiculous things that C lets you do, but now you can also overload operators (like ++, yeah!) to do stupid things (like take the square root if it's on the left, and take the cosine otherwise, yeah!)
And then you can make a couple of classes, and merge them together, and have fun function naming clashes, that's pretty cool too. Or pass 'this' around, or use templates for no reason at all... (and attempt to pass them to the C library Quicksort function!)
I mean, really, C++ has so much more potential here. It's a valuable addition to the set of programming languages that promote obfuscated programming and maintenance code. It's years ahead of BASIC and Perl, IMO. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Post a reply anonymously, or normally if you really want to apologize.
(If you followed my link and knew what Flash was, you should have marked it as 'Funny'. Really, guys, it was some funny stuff.) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I wonder if this business model will ever succeed.
There's an amusing and lengthy flash intro at FreeComputer.com, but no actual content yet, besides an e-mail address. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
At least until a Linux version comes out, or if you want to do some cross-platform development work:
The installer worked under Wine, and the compiler works too. When it calls the linker, it stalls on me, but I'll try invoking it separately.
The header files are a little bit different, but I could figure out most of it. Looks like the Windows way to do it is to steal whatever headers you need for compatibility and stick them in whatever file you're working on. I couldn't find gettimeofday, and timeval was defined in a couple of places (like winsock.h).
Of course, you could always use VMWare. And Borland also released their old C and Pascal compilers and IDEs a while back, if you need that. (I might try out the C compiler in this case.:) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
The compressed file size might be 1.5-2 times the size still, but the raw file size would not be, and neither would the bandwidth.
(decompress file, write three images to memory == bandwidth) Unfortunately, bandwidth is an overloaded word these days.:) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
That sure beats mirrors, but I guess you'd still have to get a "3-D!" digital camera with two lenses, and whatnot, just to take pictures. And movies would be fun, but take up at least 2-3 times the bandwidth.
Oh well. One small step for LCD's, one giant leap for Virtual Reality! --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
3) We don't have enough letters in front of "RAM" yet, no! I want SCFLEADDRAM!!! (that's Super-Cali-Fragi-Listic-Expi-Ali-Docious-Dynamic-R andom-Access-Memory, for those who aren't in the know.)
4) AMD rulez! Oh man, I want a Crusoe. My K6/300 is just sucking lately. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
GUIs make things prettier, and occasionally easier to use. But there should be a way to get what you want to do done with the existing GUI tools, and not have to make or buy a completely new one, as is often the case.
And there are many tasks where a CLI / text environment is easier *and* more efficient. I can select a portion of a document and stick it into another application with everything preserved with my favorite text editor. Or I can just use text files and filters. Nothing could be simpler.
CLIs are suitable for automating any repetitive task, *especially* interactive tasks. Nothing could possibly be more repetitive than a GUI, and there are powerful tools that can optimize interactive tasks. (expect, GIMP's script-fu... whole languages made for that job. I'm learning Scheme now, and it's interesting.)
Some simple things are simple in GUIs, but sometimes the metaphor is just plain broken, or there logically aren't enough options. Too many icons for different choices get hard to manage.
And I'd kill for a GUI environment that made "difficult things possible". Especially anything like the example I posted. (you'd have to build a "binary offset per line" function into your GUI text editor, and give it the power to do something a bit more powerful than global search and replace. And then add that to your other applications. Maybe an environment that shares GUI object thingies would work better for this...)
Everything I needed to know about CLIs originally came from a MS-DOS 3.3 manual. Back when the manual came with the OS and the computer, and it contained vital and detailed information. Ah yes, those were the days... --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I, for one, am happy I learned my "unnecessarily arcane, arbitrary computer commands".
And I'll tell you a few other things.
* At times they can be necessary, but if you don't know them, then they can't help you.
* Arcane is a matter of perspective, like "User-friendly". If you LEARN them, they aren't so arcane anymore.
* Arbitrary is unjustified here. Many of the commands share common syntaxes or conventions, and again, if you LEARN them, they don't seem so arbitrary. Rather, their consistent interface is helpful.
You never know when you might need it. I used this the other day, because I didn't want to write it in C. And it helped me test out an approach to a problem. I wouldn't want to do that in Excel or Access or whatever Windows program purports to replace this functionality. (Perl?:) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I agree, which is why my fvwm2 setup is blue, and the background is black.
However, some people like eyecandy. And that's why slashdot posts this stuff, people download it, and make web pages which make me dizzy. Aww man... --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Sure, the Linux community is great and all, but remember that we're also part of a larger Free Software community. (and we also have commercial interests on Linux as well)
First, I'd say that the Linux Community has always been a supporter of the FSF, but not always the other way around. (spare me your GNU/Linux!) Also, the core BSD people have always been very gracious, unlike some of their (rabid FreeBSD) users (to balance out our rabid Linux-on-x86 users:).
Where am I going with this? Well, I guess I just don't want to hear more "Linux-is-good Rah-rah-rah" stuff as much as I want to hear "The cooperation in the Free Software and Hacker communities is astounding, and many wonderful projects and environments have come from this, such as Linux."
We should continue to support the development and implementation of new and cool ideas, and not let ourselves get too stuck on one platform or OS. Our portability is our strength. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, it does, I checked it against bc a while back. It's pretty impressive, actually.
:)
...but my favorite 'pi' program would have to be the Obfuscated C Contest entry that had a function that looked like a circle, and it said "To get a better approximation for Pi, write a bigger program." And it ran that function to mostly calculate Pi. I won't spoil the rest of it for you.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Oh man, that is incredibly stupid. Either he has no idea what he's getting himself into, or he's even stupider than he's letting on. :)
;)
I suppose it's his right to decide who he wants to distribute to, and even if someone got the source code with that disclaimer on it, and considered themselves bound by it, they could still (a) Not Ask, and (b) Distribute the "GPL"ed work to someone else.
It doesn't look like that person would be bound by the original (bogus) agreement, but Slade would still be obligated to give them the source, and that person could give the original party the source.
...and the constitution is a lousy example, considering those "laws" aren't absolutes, but rather manipulated by legal precedent. (is it okay to yell "W1ND0WZ RULEZ" in a crowded Linux forum?
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Eventually I'll have to learn Perl. But I might wait for release 6.6.666, so that it runs on Windows properly. ;)
:)
Seriously, though, I think this is news, because Perl hasn't changed version numbers in a while. I guess this'll be cooler when it's a stable version, but...
Remember, Linux, Apache and Perl are always news here, because Slashdot runs on all three. And if Slashdot ever tackles that "slow under load" problem, that'll really be news!
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
When do we get to play with these?
;)
All this does is make me more impatient. *And* I'll have to decide between this and an Athlon. Aww man!
(If Tom's Hardwre manages to get a multiprocessor Crusoe system up and running, I might be stupid enough to try it too, for better price / performance. Otherwise, I guess we'll just have to build that Beowulf cluster instead, eh, guys?
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Yeah, but what would they call it?
"The Director's Cut of South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut!"
(You couldn't get any stupider if you tried to make a recursive acronym. Really...)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Again, you catch my references.
(and I was just paraphrasing...)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Sometimes a long article is needed to properly get a point across, yes. But verboseness is often not what is needed. (Or, rather, eschew unnecessary verbosity :)
Katz often finds a controversial or nonsensical perspective, with lots of extra "Buzzwords From The HellMouth: A Katzian Diatribe". This article is more like what I would call interesting. But, each to their own.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I don't know, I searched on Ask Jeeves, and turned up this list of recipies too:
:)
bar cookies
butter spritz
gingerbread men
girl scout cookies
shortbread
snickerdoodles
turtle brownies
vegan chocolate cookies
springerle cookies
Children don't need to be going to bars, spritzing butter, messing around with "gingerbread men" or girl scouts (commonly called "making brownies"), snickering at shortbread, assaulting turtles, watching Springer, or coating Vegans in chocolate! Oh, the nerve of them!
Some people just don't get it.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Something is very wrong, this is longer than your average Katz article. However, it looks like jamie has something important to say. Surfing software blocks content unexpectedly, not necessarily based on if it's 'pr0n' or not.
However, I say: is this so bad? I don't like censorship, but if I did, blocking "Babe: Pig in the City" would be a good start. Most kids don't know about porn when they're that young, but we could save them from many other societal ills. If only we had blocked Barney, Pokemon, Nintendo, etc., etc., they would realize that the only purpose for those computers is for their schoolwork. That's it.
And we could have more filters for adults, too, and block their pr0n, their Slashdot, their "Yahoo Pager", and make them work for a living, instead!
Then we could have a constitutional convention, and push for a perfect Communism, and have the government genetically engineer people to only want to do what the government wants them to do, so it wouldn't be so inhumane. And we'd work all day and all night, and we'd collapse occasionally, but we'd be happy and efficient, like ants are...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
God, why did they have to write that page in FrontPage? It hurts to look at! And it uses basic HTML that any knowledgable 8-year-old would shun. And the images are worse... and...
I mean, come on, my web pages are crappy, but they just don't compare to the horror that is "Gentus Linux".
It's the HTML equivalent of "It R00Lz? D00D? GENTUS L1NUKZ 0WNZ U???"
In fact, why don't they have an option like that built into FrontPage, so that newbies don't write pages like that?
Oh, because they would. Gotcha.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Precisely. That's just like if Dell preconfigured their Windows boxes with special drivers for their hardware, and called it "Dell Windows". ...which isn't far from the truth.
:)
So they screwed up and called it a distribution, so what? I *like* having my preconfigured computer work correctly, even if they call the OS "Charlene". (wait... that'd be pretty cool, actually...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Dude, we're all over the place.
:)
The Triangle: we just wish Cary wasn't there.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Why? Oh God, why? Oh, the pain, the pain!
Oh. Um. Sorry. Just kidding.
What I meant to say was, do you think that an obfuscated C++ contest would be more fun than the traditional one?
'Cause you can still do all the ridiculous things that C lets you do, but now you can also overload operators (like ++, yeah!) to do stupid things (like take the square root if it's on the left, and take the cosine otherwise, yeah!)
And then you can make a couple of classes, and merge them together, and have fun function naming clashes, that's pretty cool too. Or pass 'this' around, or use templates for no reason at all... (and attempt to pass them to the C library Quicksort function!)
I mean, really, C++ has so much more potential here. It's a valuable addition to the set of programming languages that promote obfuscated programming and maintenance code. It's years ahead of BASIC and Perl, IMO.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Yo, how was this a 'Troll'?
No, really, Mr. Moderator, I want to know.
Post a reply anonymously, or normally if you really want to apologize.
(If you followed my link and knew what Flash was, you should have marked it as 'Funny'. Really, guys, it was some funny stuff.)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I wonder if this business model will ever succeed.
There's an amusing and lengthy flash intro at FreeComputer.com, but no actual content yet, besides an e-mail address.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
At least until a Linux version comes out, or if you want to do some cross-platform development work:
:)
The installer worked under Wine, and the compiler works too. When it calls the linker, it stalls on me, but I'll try invoking it separately.
The header files are a little bit different, but I could figure out most of it. Looks like the Windows way to do it is to steal whatever headers you need for compatibility and stick them in whatever file you're working on. I couldn't find gettimeofday, and timeval was defined in a couple of places (like winsock.h).
Of course, you could always use VMWare. And Borland also released their old C and Pascal compilers and IDEs a while back, if you need that. (I might try out the C compiler in this case.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Moderate this back up, or post, you coward!
*I* sure didn't know what Bluetooth was, and I appreciate any information.
Also, Dr. Dobbs journal is very cool, it sounds like this is some pretty new stuff.
Don't punish people for being INFORMATIVE.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
You'd be working with two or three cameras.
:)
The compressed file size might be 1.5-2 times the size still, but the raw file size would not be, and neither would the bandwidth.
(decompress file, write three images to memory == bandwidth) Unfortunately, bandwidth is an overloaded word these days.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
If that works, I want it now! :)
That sure beats mirrors, but I guess you'd still have to get a "3-D!" digital camera with two lenses, and whatnot, just to take pictures. And movies would be fun, but take up at least 2-3 times the bandwidth.
Oh well. One small step for LCD's, one giant leap for Virtual Reality!
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
1) To Intel: "Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Nyah nyah!"
R andom-Access-Memory, for those who aren't in the know.)
2) Let's hear it for DDR-SDRAM!
3) We don't have enough letters in front of "RAM" yet, no! I want SCFLEADDRAM!!!
(that's Super-Cali-Fragi-Listic-Expi-Ali-Docious-Dynamic-
4) AMD rulez! Oh man, I want a Crusoe. My K6/300 is just sucking lately.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Conspiracy theory time: hey, Rob, did you post that to defray the inevitable attack on the story posting?
...because the Microsoft guys have a lot of money, and they all own a lot of stuff. It's an investment. Like Transmeta.
Let me know when Microsoft owns 50% of something I care about. Then I'll start to worry!
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
GUIs make things prettier, and occasionally easier to use. But there should be a way to get what you want to do done with the existing GUI tools, and not have to make or buy a completely new one, as is often the case.
And there are many tasks where a CLI / text environment is easier *and* more efficient. I can select a portion of a document and stick it into another application with everything preserved with my favorite text editor. Or I can just use text files and filters. Nothing could be simpler.
CLIs are suitable for automating any repetitive task, *especially* interactive tasks. Nothing could possibly be more repetitive than a GUI, and there are powerful tools that can optimize interactive tasks. (expect, GIMP's script-fu... whole languages made for that job. I'm learning Scheme now, and it's interesting.)
Some simple things are simple in GUIs, but sometimes the metaphor is just plain broken, or there logically aren't enough options. Too many icons for different choices get hard to manage.
And I'd kill for a GUI environment that made "difficult things possible". Especially anything like the example I posted. (you'd have to build a "binary offset per line" function into your GUI text editor, and give it the power to do something a bit more powerful than global search and replace. And then add that to your other applications. Maybe an environment that shares GUI object thingies would work better for this...)
Everything I needed to know about CLIs originally came from a MS-DOS 3.3 manual. Back when the manual came with the OS and the computer, and it contained vital and detailed information. Ah yes, those were the days...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
A pox on both your houses.
:)
I, for one, am happy I learned my "unnecessarily arcane, arbitrary computer commands".
And I'll tell you a few other things.
* At times they can be necessary, but if you don't know them, then they can't help you.
* Arcane is a matter of perspective, like "User-friendly". If you LEARN them, they aren't so arcane anymore.
* Arbitrary is unjustified here. Many of the commands share common syntaxes or conventions, and again, if you LEARN them, they don't seem so arbitrary. Rather, their consistent interface is helpful.
So remember:
grep '' -b $x | tr : '\t' | uniq -f 1 -w 3 | expand | cut -c 1-10
You never know when you might need it. I used this the other day, because I didn't want to write it in C. And it helped me test out an approach to a problem. I wouldn't want to do that in Excel or Access or whatever Windows program purports to replace this functionality. (Perl?
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I agree, which is why my fvwm2 setup is blue, and the background is black.
However, some people like eyecandy. And that's why slashdot posts this stuff, people download it, and make web pages which make me dizzy. Aww man...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Sure, the Linux community is great and all, but remember that we're also part of a larger Free Software community. (and we also have commercial interests on Linux as well)
:).
First, I'd say that the Linux Community has always been a supporter of the FSF, but not always the other way around. (spare me your GNU/Linux!) Also, the core BSD people have always been very gracious, unlike some of their (rabid FreeBSD) users (to balance out our rabid Linux-on-x86 users
Where am I going with this? Well, I guess I just don't want to hear more "Linux-is-good Rah-rah-rah" stuff as much as I want to hear "The cooperation in the Free Software and Hacker communities is astounding, and many wonderful projects and environments have come from this, such as Linux."
We should continue to support the development and implementation of new and cool ideas, and not let ourselves get too stuck on one platform or OS. Our portability is our strength.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.