I think GP might mean that time has come to focus on our emotional/spiritual evolution. IMO, saying that "this is just human nature and it won't change" in response to questions about why do we still wage wars and kill our brethren, is like saying that it is just monkeys' nature to sit on the trees and eat bananas -- yeah, at some point it was, but why won't we move on and evolve a little bit?
Hover the mouse over the "story" tag. The pop-up reads: "type tag".
I have proposed a "database FS"-like "object system" in which one uses tags instead of FS paths to organize stuff (well, certainly not a new idea, but in my version it would replace FS at the OS level). Here is my/. comment about it: http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1007863&cid=25511201
I'm pretty sure/. is using "story" tags in a similar way to my "type" tags (like "type:program" or "type:image"), which are essentially classes of objects. So the "whyiseverythingtaggedstory" tag is like a file path "~/whyeveryfileendswithadotjpg/picture.jpg".
The toilet is actually called the iToi. It has a builtin 56k modem and 1st-class shittape with rounded corners, made from a single, monolithic block of dead trees.
Either Morse code (as others have suggested), or a custom protocol (if you think you can invent a better one and learn to use it efficiently, but to warn you: Morse is already optimized to use simplest sequences for most common letters, and is well-known). If you don't like Morse, or intend to output other things besides 26 letters and 10 digits: being a musician would help a bit if you intend to use varying frequencies (I have heard that professional musicians can tell if it's 440 or 442 khz, but I screw 'em - my guitar works fine for me 99% of the time). Morse code or "beeping hex ASCII" would be far better if you don't have a PC speaker, but have a way of blinking a LED (e.g. HD LED, keyboard LED, or somehow through a serial port). Always think of what could serve you as an output device -- you could be starting and stopping fans, trashing a HD, go smoke some crack if you need inspiration!:D
While we're at it, at the first moment when toying with that box I thought of using different notes (length and frequency) instead of long series of all-equivalent beeps, but that'd be/too/ hardcore as it hadn't/usr/bin/beep on place and I didn't felt like writing a replacement with all the ioctl() and 1193180 magic. Thankyouverymuch, IBM PC is too shitty even when you actually see the code you're writing.
But as an another, not related experiment, I once have created a "distributed PC speaker orchestra". Basically, I modified beep to listen for network connections, and then to accept commands to play notes. Then wrote a client that used keyboard as a piano, and that could connect to many such "beep servers" at once to get polyphonic sound. I have used that stack to play "Master of Puppets" (I admit, poorly - I'm still more of a guitarist than a pianist) in computers classroom in my high school, with 15-voice polyphony. Too bad I've lost the source >_<
I have actually managed to use a Linux system without an attached monitor, just a keyboard. I've been writing commands blindly and using "foo && python -c 'print chr(7)'" and alike to get some feedback through PC speaker. When I got around the system, and after I felt REALLY imaginative, I proceeded to write a small tool that would translate its stdin into a series of beeps:
python -c 'sys,time=__import__("sys"),__import__("time"); time.sleep(3); beepn = lambda x: [(sys.stdout.write(chr(7)), sys.stdout.flush(), time.sleep(0.3)) for i in range(int(x))]; [(beepn(ord(ch)/16), time.sleep(1), beepn(ord(ch)%16), time.sleep(2)) for ch in raw_input()]'
Yeah, it would beep ASCII codes of each char in hex.
Polish are actually very smart, for a definition of "smart" that includes surviving in a very hostile environment. For the last two centuries our country has been almost constantly occupied by enemies (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partitions_of_Poland, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Republic_of_Poland), and I think the sole fact that our language and culture survived does mean something. Although I think the damage is irreversible - we have created a culture with an attitude towards being clever and smart - again, with a definition of "cleverness" and "smartness" that emphases tricking the enemy, where the "enemy" means occupants, communists, bosses, authorities, and the system in general (see my examples of cheating at work). I think that this is what makes our homeland such a cesspit to live in (there was that joke, what's the name of the biggest Polish city? -- Chicago. Some people say they do not know whether to laugh or cry).
Yeah, Poland. The country where many members of the parliament still hadn't passed their high school exams, where graduates of universities emigrate to the UK to wash the dishes, where some of the world's most talented programmers, mathematicians and scientists were born, and where classmates hate you for getting good grades.
> You never indicated you were Polish, and I apologise for the 'kiss my arse' reply.
No problem, really. I'll just remember to include a disclaimer next time.
In Poland, the "polish taking over the UK" kind of jokes are simply funny (you can see them popping up on bash.org.pl from time to time -- well, if you speak polish), and I didn't know the attitude wasn't the same in other countries.
I made a reference to our stupid government, that, after all, has been chosen by us themselves (actually, it's just that the political situation in our country was so stupid, boring, daunting and shitty that nobody (but the old grandmas who actually elected Kaczynski) really cared about the elections). Seems not everyone caught on the reference.
Wow, I didn't know that there are default key bindings for this. Do you know of any quick way (other than grepping through elisp sources) to find if a command has a key bound to it?
You know what's funny? I'm polish myself, I live in Poland, I am as financially poor as the next random polish student (polish students' poorness is almost legendary here), I have been planning to work in the UK (coz there's no way you can get any real money in Poland through "hard and sincere work"), and many of my best friends live in UK now (including the girl that I really, really, really, really, really loved).
> What's that, Poland ISN'T Communist anymore?
BTW, have you actually LIVED in a communist (or post-communist) country? Wanna see how fun it is? Maybe that would give you an idea of WHY there are so many polish immigrants in the UK.
> [rant on how Polish people > English people]
You'd like to come to Poland and look and see how it's done THERE. I've been working for like, 5 zloty/hour, 6 zloty/hour (http://www.google.com/search?q=pln+gbp) and been very happy (it wasn't a full time job though, as I'm a student). My mom used to earn 15 zloty a day a few years ago and it was fine, too.
By the way, when I had that job, I've seen in practice, how true were the findings that many people in Poland waste 30-40% of time, pretending to be working. Not only are we lazy whenever we can, but we cheat. I've seen by myself how my friend cheated when working at a cash register, selling stuff cheaper to another friend of mine. I've seen another guy damage some of the stuff in the magazine, then go to the boss and tell him it must've been damaged during the transport (the stuff has been consequentially given away to the workers at the magazine). The list of similar tricks goes on and on.
When I was working with my (now ex) girlfriend, we used to lengthen every our 30 minute break into about two hours, and we excelled at doing this unnoticed by "the management" (details of what we were doing during these lengthened breaks will go unmentioned:) ). We were also so good at screwing things up, that after screwing up 90% of tasks on our list the boss just gave us another task and told us that if we'd complete it (without screwing up TOO MUCH), he'll forgive us. Of course we screwed, but he did forgive us anyway. (BTW, the odds of completing most of these tasks properly were very small anyway, because the whole supermarket we were working at was a mess in the first place -- we couldn't even find the right stuff in the magazine).
> where hardly anyone speaks their language
Only before there were half a million of us only in London. I see quotes like "(guy with a pl-en dict in one hand, in english, on a street, to a bypasser): excuse me sir... how do i find the polish embassy... (the other guy, in polish): yeah, yeah, it's down the street, I'll lead you" on bash.org.pl all the time.
And by the way: it's not anything new, surprising or rare that a friend comes back from the UK after being there for over a year and still has problems with communicating with me in simple english. Maybe I'm just fuckin' unique or what that I learned english (well, not perfectly, but still) without having anyone to talk to in it, but you'd think that after sitting for a year in an english-speaking country you'd have a little more to say in english than just "umm... can we talk in polish?" (only of he/she would not just switch to polish outright), and I'm pretty sure it has nothing to do with nostalgia.
---
I know that I sounded trollish in my OP, but I actually... Have been living in this country for 20 years (like, my whole life), and >99% of people I know are polish. I hate this fucking country, the way it works, and the way you have to live there to earn for that living, and I would love to be an ignorant, racist, lazy asshole you were accusing me of being, with three cars and watching TV all the day. Hell, I'd even love to go and work in the UK, but then my dad goes on about studying and becoming a "real" programmer with a paper and earning 6000 zloty a month (a sum that is like a dream here, but to remind you: it's 1330 GBP
I forgot to include a disclaimer in my original post: I actually AM polish.
> the incredibly talented Polish mathematicians that helped the UK crack the Enigma
Yeah, I've been passing the statue of one of these guys for past few months almost daily. It's on the Gdanska street in Bydgoszcz (and there's a second, identical one in our maths auditory, on Kazimierz Wielki's University), near the shop in which I bought my first guitar. I even have a couple of old photos of me as a kid sitting next to that guy. Funny how I never remember his name.
That of course doesn't outweight the fact that after every maths lecture, I see 90% of my pals with a giant WTF on their faces, and another fact, that less than 40% of CS students get promoted to the second year (and 50% of those who do, are more lucky and/or stubborn than talented or smart). Of course there IS that 5 or 10% that is actually talented (e.g. I know a girl who can calculate integrals in her mind), but such people are really rare.
But on average... We chose mr Kaczynski as our president, really great choice ~~~~
Maybe except "Honor, Respect, and Loyalty" - I actually think that our "mission" is simply to learn to love each other, but otherwise you just summed up my whole philosophy in a couple of statements.
Yes, there is. / changes less frequently so there is no point in running updatedb more often than once a week. There's no point in updatedb indexing/home because the index will be quickly out of date, and I would need to run updatedb more frequently (and waste time re-indexing/, which probably hadn't changed at all). So I simply have two indexes: one for / and one for my $HOME. It actually took me more time to write this post than to come up with that solution and implement it (one line in.bashrc, one quick command whenever I think the index is out of date).
> I've seen people look for a background job with ps, and then kill > it using the PID. In most shells you can just do kill %, e.g. kill %1
Because there is no single word about it in the bash man page (at least not in my version). Even the "help kill" talks about some "jobspec" - without any mention how to specify that job! Damnit. I still don't know where and how did I learned about % - it's as counterintuitive as it can get, and forget you'd find any help in man pages or what.
I actually run updatedb as nobody (who has no access to/home). There isn't much change under / anyway. For my home dir (which changes much more frequently) I do "find -type f > ~/ffind-db" every time I feel like the index might be out of date, and when I need to find anything I just do "ig $SOMETHING ff[tab]" (it autocompletes to "ffind-db", and "ig" is an alias for "grep -i"). Pretty handy.
I've been piping various stuff into/dev/dsp - the linux kernel image sounds pretty interesting (literally). Also, there is often significant difference between data of the same type -/bin/tar sounds much different from/bin/grep!:)
Slashdot Mirror
I think GP might mean that time has come to focus on our emotional/spiritual evolution. IMO, saying that "this is just human nature and it won't change" in response to questions about why do we still wage wars and kill our brethren, is like saying that it is just monkeys' nature to sit on the trees and eat bananas -- yeah, at some point it was, but why won't we move on and evolve a little bit?
Hover the mouse over the "story" tag. The pop-up reads: "type tag".
/. comment about it: http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1007863&cid=25511201
/. is using "story" tags in a similar way to my "type" tags (like "type:program" or "type:image"), which are essentially classes of objects. So the "whyiseverythingtaggedstory" tag is like a file path "~/whyeveryfileendswithadotjpg/picture.jpg".
I have proposed a "database FS"-like "object system" in which one uses tags instead of FS paths to organize stuff (well, certainly not a new idea, but in my version it would replace FS at the OS level). Here is my
I'm pretty sure
The toilet is actually called the iToi. It has a builtin 56k modem and 1st-class shittape with rounded corners, made from a single, monolithic block of dead trees.
Please Stop :(
Explicit boolean types were not a part of Python until some version (I don't remember which).
http://xkcd.com/224/
No, the year of the Solaris Laptop...
Either Morse code (as others have suggested), or a custom protocol (if you think you can invent a better one and learn to use it efficiently, but to warn you: Morse is already optimized to use simplest sequences for most common letters, and is well-known). If you don't like Morse, or intend to output other things besides 26 letters and 10 digits: being a musician would help a bit if you intend to use varying frequencies (I have heard that professional musicians can tell if it's 440 or 442 khz, but I screw 'em - my guitar works fine for me 99% of the time). Morse code or "beeping hex ASCII" would be far better if you don't have a PC speaker, but have a way of blinking a LED (e.g. HD LED, keyboard LED, or somehow through a serial port). Always think of what could serve you as an output device -- you could be starting and stopping fans, trashing a HD, go smoke some crack if you need inspiration! :D
/too/ hardcore as it hadn't /usr/bin/beep on place and I didn't felt like writing a replacement with all the ioctl() and 1193180 magic. Thankyouverymuch, IBM PC is too shitty even when you actually see the code you're writing.
:D
While we're at it, at the first moment when toying with that box I thought of using different notes (length and frequency) instead of long series of all-equivalent beeps, but that'd be
But as an another, not related experiment, I once have created a "distributed PC speaker orchestra". Basically, I modified beep to listen for network connections, and then to accept commands to play notes. Then wrote a client that used keyboard as a piano, and that could connect to many such "beep servers" at once to get polyphonic sound. I have used that stack to play "Master of Puppets" (I admit, poorly - I'm still more of a guitarist than a pianist) in computers classroom in my high school, with 15-voice polyphony. Too bad I've lost the source >_<
And no, I'm not strange
I have actually managed to use a Linux system without an attached monitor, just a keyboard. I've been writing commands blindly and using "foo && python -c 'print chr(7)'" and alike to get some feedback through PC speaker. When I got around the system, and after I felt REALLY imaginative, I proceeded to write a small tool that would translate its stdin into a series of beeps:
:)
python -c 'sys,time=__import__("sys"),__import__("time"); time.sleep(3); beepn = lambda x: [(sys.stdout.write(chr(7)), sys.stdout.flush(), time.sleep(0.3)) for i in range(int(x))]; [(beepn(ord(ch)/16), time.sleep(1), beepn(ord(ch)%16), time.sleep(2)) for ch in raw_input()]'
Yeah, it would beep ASCII codes of each char in hex.
It was fun
> "Polish == dumb" thing annoys me.
Polish are actually very smart, for a definition of "smart" that includes surviving in a very hostile environment. For the last two centuries our country has been almost constantly occupied by enemies (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partitions_of_Poland, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Republic_of_Poland), and I think the sole fact that our language and culture survived does mean something. Although I think the damage is irreversible - we have created a culture with an attitude towards being clever and smart - again, with a definition of "cleverness" and "smartness" that emphases tricking the enemy, where the "enemy" means occupants, communists, bosses, authorities, and the system in general (see my examples of cheating at work). I think that this is what makes our homeland such a cesspit to live in (there was that joke, what's the name of the biggest Polish city? -- Chicago. Some people say they do not know whether to laugh or cry).
Yeah, Poland. The country where many members of the parliament still hadn't passed their high school exams, where graduates of universities emigrate to the UK to wash the dishes, where some of the world's most talented programmers, mathematicians and scientists were born, and where classmates hate you for getting good grades.
> You never indicated you were Polish, and I apologise for the 'kiss my arse' reply.
No problem, really. I'll just remember to include a disclaimer next time.
> My apologies
No problem.
> I thought you were some bitter UK racist
In Poland, the "polish taking over the UK" kind of jokes are simply funny (you can see them popping up on bash.org.pl from time to time -- well, if you speak polish), and I didn't know the attitude wasn't the same in other countries.
I made a reference to our stupid government, that, after all, has been chosen by us themselves (actually, it's just that the political situation in our country was so stupid, boring, daunting and shitty that nobody (but the old grandmas who actually elected Kaczynski) really cared about the elections). Seems not everyone caught on the reference.
What does it do? Haven't seen MS Windows for years...
Wow, I didn't know that there are default key bindings for this. Do you know of any quick way (other than grepping through elisp sources) to find if a command has a key bound to it?
OK, sure
<aims a gun at greenhuey's head>
You know, it certainly doesn't bother me that I don't have the source code for this gun.
You know what's funny? I'm polish myself, I live in Poland, I am as financially poor as the next random polish student (polish students' poorness is almost legendary here), I have been planning to work in the UK (coz there's no way you can get any real money in Poland through "hard and sincere work"), and many of my best friends live in UK now (including the girl that I really, really, really, really, really loved).
> What's that, Poland ISN'T Communist anymore?
BTW, have you actually LIVED in a communist (or post-communist) country? Wanna see how fun it is? Maybe that would give you an idea of WHY there are so many polish immigrants in the UK.
> [rant on how Polish people > English people]
You'd like to come to Poland and look and see how it's done THERE. I've been working for like, 5 zloty/hour, 6 zloty/hour (http://www.google.com/search?q=pln+gbp) and been very happy (it wasn't a full time job though, as I'm a student). My mom used to earn 15 zloty a day a few years ago and it was fine, too.
By the way, when I had that job, I've seen in practice, how true were the findings that many people in Poland waste 30-40% of time, pretending to be working. Not only are we lazy whenever we can, but we cheat. I've seen by myself how my friend cheated when working at a cash register, selling stuff cheaper to another friend of mine. I've seen another guy damage some of the stuff in the magazine, then go to the boss and tell him it must've been damaged during the transport (the stuff has been consequentially given away to the workers at the magazine). The list of similar tricks goes on and on.
When I was working with my (now ex) girlfriend, we used to lengthen every our 30 minute break into about two hours, and we excelled at doing this unnoticed by "the management" (details of what we were doing during these lengthened breaks will go unmentioned
> where hardly anyone speaks their language
Only before there were half a million of us only in London. I see quotes like "(guy with a pl-en dict in one hand, in english, on a street, to a bypasser): excuse me sir... how do i find the polish embassy... (the other guy, in polish): yeah, yeah, it's down the street, I'll lead you" on bash.org.pl all the time.
And by the way: it's not anything new, surprising or rare that a friend comes back from the UK after being there for over a year and still has problems with communicating with me in simple english. Maybe I'm just fuckin' unique or what that I learned english (well, not perfectly, but still) without having anyone to talk to in it, but you'd think that after sitting for a year in an english-speaking country you'd have a little more to say in english than just "umm... can we talk in polish?" (only of he/she would not just switch to polish outright), and I'm pretty sure it has nothing to do with nostalgia.
---
I know that I sounded trollish in my OP, but I actually... Have been living in this country for 20 years (like, my whole life), and >99% of people I know are polish. I hate this fucking country, the way it works, and the way you have to live there to earn for that living, and I would love to be an ignorant, racist, lazy asshole you were accusing me of being, with three cars and watching TV all the day. Hell, I'd even love to go and work in the UK, but then my dad goes on about studying and becoming a "real" programmer with a paper and earning 6000 zloty a month (a sum that is like a dream here, but to remind you: it's 1330 GBP
I forgot to include a disclaimer in my original post: I actually AM polish.
> the incredibly talented Polish mathematicians that helped the UK crack the Enigma
Yeah, I've been passing the statue of one of these guys for past few months almost daily. It's on the Gdanska street in Bydgoszcz (and there's a second, identical one in our maths auditory, on Kazimierz Wielki's University), near the shop in which I bought my first guitar. I even have a couple of old photos of me as a kid sitting next to that guy. Funny how I never remember his name.
That of course doesn't outweight the fact that after every maths lecture, I see 90% of my pals with a giant WTF on their faces, and another fact, that less than 40% of CS students get promoted to the second year (and 50% of those who do, are more lucky and/or stubborn than talented or smart). Of course there IS that 5 or 10% that is actually talented (e.g. I know a girl who can calculate integrals in her mind), but such people are really rare.
But on average... We chose mr Kaczynski as our president, really great choice ~~~~
If TCP/IP had been proprietary, there would be no Internet at all.
(or there would be, but it wouldn't use TCP/IP.)
There are more and more polish in the UK, so...
> may or may not be as stupid as this lot
abandon your hope.
I'd mod you +1, agree wholeheartedly
Maybe except "Honor, Respect, and Loyalty" - I actually think that our "mission" is simply to learn to love each other, but otherwise you just summed up my whole philosophy in a couple of statements.
Yes, there is. / changes less frequently so there is no point in running updatedb more often than once a week. There's no point in updatedb indexing /home because the index will be quickly out of date, and I would need to run updatedb more frequently (and waste time re-indexing /, which probably hadn't changed at all). So I simply have two indexes: one for / and one for my $HOME. It actually took me more time to write this post than to come up with that solution and implement it (one line in .bashrc, one quick command whenever I think the index is out of date).
Talk about using a right-sized wheel.
Aside from not having to wait for fsck to complete, what exactly do I gain? I lose all unsaved work anyway.
> I've seen people look for a background job with ps, and then kill
> it using the PID. In most shells you can just do kill %, e.g. kill %1
Because there is no single word about it in the bash man page (at least not in my version). Even the "help kill" talks about some "jobspec" - without any mention how to specify that job! Damnit. I still don't know where and how did I learned about % - it's as counterintuitive as it can get, and forget you'd find any help in man pages or what.
I actually run updatedb as nobody (who has no access to /home). There isn't much change under / anyway. For my home dir (which changes much more frequently) I do "find -type f > ~/ffind-db" every time I feel like the index might be out of date, and when I need to find anything I just do "ig $SOMETHING ff[tab]" (it autocompletes to "ffind-db", and "ig" is an alias for "grep -i"). Pretty handy.
I've been piping various stuff into /dev/dsp - the linux kernel image sounds pretty interesting (literally). Also, there is often significant difference between data of the same type - /bin/tar sounds much different from /bin/grep! :)
666. Cthulhu.