One of the great annoyances of cmd.exe is that it's ANSI only. Type 'dir' on a directory with different language filenames in it and you get a sea of questionmarks, and you have to use ugly 'chcp' commands to see different filenames... and forget about entering them at the keyboard.
The console is Unicode.. it's deliberately downgrading itself just to be annoying. Makes multilingual stuff on NT really hard.
Not a lot of what-if in coding really... it's very determininstic (I've seen people who use what-if to operate and program computers... it's really annoying - I usually end up grabbing the keyboard off them and finishing the damned thing for them.. too many people out there who can't see the bleedin' obvious when it's starting them in the face).
Coding is more like painting or sculpting - you have the finished product in your minds eye, and you have to do the bit in the middle to go from A (your main() function or whatever) to B (your finished product) in as short a time as possible. Bonus points if the result is especially elegant.
OTOH I hate roleplay.. was chucked out of the one that I was invited to as a student after 10 minutes because I refused to do silly voices & talk in the first person as if I was the character.
I'd honour a guy stood in front of the photocopier with a baseball bat, but it doesn't mean that the copyright owners are allowing me to copy stuff because there isn't one there.
Re:It'll tell us something about greenhouse gases
on
ESA Venus Mission Delayed
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
It's a bit more complex than that... More pollution -> blocks sunlight slightly, lowers average temperature -> changes path of air currents slightly -> africa loses rainy season -> drought.
If it was happening uniformly it wouldn't have any effect... however industrialised countries are pumping a lot of crap into the atmosphere, so they're experiencing dimming more than non-industrialised countries.
This was also apparently a cause of the hot summers they've had in france that have killed several people (although they're french, so probably don't count).
I was a little unconvinced by the argument this was mainly caused by aircraft though - yes, their trails probably do make a small difference to the surface temperature, but they're talking about a couple of degrees drop due to it... which would take a *lot* of aircraft.
I'd love an 'embedded' pgsql.. something that could be automatically setup as part of an installation and run in the background with little or no user intervention.
Currently we use sqlite for this, but it's only OK for small installations (well it's flipping excellent for small installations...) - it doesn't scale properly as you get more active, as you can only have one active write at a time.
Last time I look at firebird it had a lot of issues, although that was about 6 months ago and it might have changed.
The Postgress Win32 installer needs work though - last time I looked it wrote things into system32. Next time I get a look I'll have to see if I can submit patches to fix that.
We pay taxes to our national government... OK, they pay for drug research for their own populace (most large countries already do this - there's little commercial incentive for curing a disease when you can make millions merely treating it, so government funding subsidizes it).
National governments are, by and large, greedy, self centred, b*stards. They want to treat their own population and screw everyone else... hence the use of patents even for drugs that are largely government funded.. so the citizens of other countries can't get their hands on it.
The answer? No idea... you'd probably never get enough governments to pay into a world drug research programme (massive increase funding to the WHO for example to pay for it) as they'd be arguing about their share for years and probably at the end of it the US would refuse to sign for some reason...
Marketing is *every* reason to want more than one. Why do you think people upgrade cars, change fashions every couple of months, go to a chainstore and pay 3x as much for hardware than you and I pay, and, yes, think they need multiple mp3 players. Marketing. It's certainly not because someone would actually *need* more than one.
The ipod is a good mp3 player, but it isn't a *great* mp3 player... it's just well marketed. No I don't mean the adverts, I mean things like making the term 'ipod' generic as if there were no other mp3 players around, and managing to make the things fashionable amongst teenagers.
The ipod video will sell millions... doing exactly what other video player has been doing for years (often cheaper too). Precisely because it's well marketed.
Hell, Windows Vista will make new headlines on its release (paid for by microsoft, no doubt) and will so well marketed that everyone will believe they need it even if their current OS is working fine.
You don't need adverts for that. Well placed 'news' stories, rumours... people are smart enough to filter out the crap when it's an 'advert', so marketing people use more underhand techniques. (ever heard someone on slashdot saying OSX is 'intuitive' and 'easy'? No OS is 'easy' by defintion (certainly not OSX which is more than a little counterintuitive in places).. it's a little bit of underhand marketing that seems to have taken off in the slashdot geek crowd, even if it never reached the masses).
eg. I picked up a Motorola V3 (from the supermarket of all places) for £180. I'm on a minimal PAYG tariff nowadays (I keep the sim and just transfer it around phones), and typically pay £10/mo in phone calls (£120 for a round figure).
To get that 'free' on the network would have meant paying £30/month for a year... £360, with no upgrade possible for 12 months an no cancellation possible for the same period.
Multiply that profit by a couple of million and the carriers really aren't losing money at all.
Going full circle.. remember dejanews? It did usenet -> web, and did it well. Everyone used it.
Then a bunch of marketing execs got together and said "Everyone's looking at our site! I know... let's rename it to a 'portal', fill it with advertising and all sorts of extra features. Oh, and get rid of those boring news pages."
They went bust. Very fast (within 6 months IIRC).
google bought up the remains and now do what dejanews did originally... and they're very successful at it.
Vodaphone charge £10 per megabyte. And belatedly told me that my 100mb allowance didn't apply. And I left my machine on and Windows Update had kicked in...
The final bill was more than the laptop cost.
OTOH in the UK only a complete idiot would pay for a landline call - multiple companies offer unlimited free UK calling, mostly without any monthly fee either.
Even without the noise the bass response on the ipod varies from poor to completely crappy (with $60 headphones, which sound absolutely awesome when played via a decent sounds source).
I'm told they've made up for some of the problems in the Shuffle/Mini but I'm not about to spend the money to find out - the Photo I have was damned expensive (predates when Apple got a clue and started selling the ipod at resonable prices in the UK.. this one cost £550 which is about $800).
Has anyone actually ever bought a DVD for the PSP? If so, *why* for heaven's sake?
Many of them more expensive than standard DVDs (at least in the UK), and you have to watch them on a crappy small screen with a tinny speaker... not exactly the greatest experience in the world.
Not at all... SecurID works for example by a challenge/response system typed in on the keyboard. Last I heard linux supported keyboards out of the box:)
Client certificates are just too hard to manage for most people.
Breasts are not indecent. Kissing (even gay kissing - we broadcast that on childrens TV here..) isn't indecent. Even a bit of groping isn't indecent... all of these things you're going to see *anyway* if you leave your church and look outside for a bit.
Hot monkey sex with multple partners.. that might be described as indecent.
I remember when Linux Journal did a python article. They highlighted it on the front page with a guy from Monty Python sat playing the piano, naked (you couldn't see anything but his back... this stuff was produced in the 70's).
The next issue the letters page was full of outraged americans screaming about 'pornography'. Funniest letters page I ever read...
Then there was the 'oh my god we say a 1/100th/second view of Janet Jackson's tits! The world is ending!!' episode, which had most of the *world* rolling on the floor laughing...
Slashdot Mirror
Is it Unicode yet?
One of the great annoyances of cmd.exe is that it's ANSI only. Type 'dir' on a directory with different language filenames in it and you get a sea of questionmarks, and you have to use ugly 'chcp' commands to see different filenames... and forget about entering them at the keyboard.
The console is Unicode.. it's deliberately downgrading itself just to be annoying. Makes multilingual stuff on NT really hard.
Not a lot of what-if in coding really... it's very determininstic (I've seen people who use what-if to operate and program computers... it's really annoying - I usually end up grabbing the keyboard off them and finishing the damned thing for them.. too many people out there who can't see the bleedin' obvious when it's starting them in the face).
Coding is more like painting or sculpting - you have the finished product in your minds eye, and you have to do the bit in the middle to go from A (your main() function or whatever) to B (your finished product) in as short a time as possible. Bonus points if the result is especially elegant.
OTOH I hate roleplay.. was chucked out of the one that I was invited to as a student after 10 minutes because I refused to do silly voices & talk in the first person as if I was the character.
I'd honour a guy stood in front of the photocopier with a baseball bat, but it doesn't mean that the copyright owners are allowing me to copy stuff because there isn't one there.
copyright is not opt-in.
Copying an entire book is not in any sense fair use... you already broke the law if you did that.
You might be able to argue it for articles but a whole article is still dodgy - a few sentences is OK.
I heard there was a small seattle based software company that was taking it and making products out of it... wonder what became of them?
Damn that's fast.
It can take 3-4 minutes on my AMD64 laptop.
It's a bit more complex than that... More pollution -> blocks sunlight slightly, lowers average temperature -> changes path of air currents slightly -> africa loses rainy season -> drought.
If it was happening uniformly it wouldn't have any effect... however industrialised countries are pumping a lot of crap into the atmosphere, so they're experiencing dimming more than non-industrialised countries.
This was also apparently a cause of the hot summers they've had in france that have killed several people (although they're french, so probably don't count).
I was a little unconvinced by the argument this was mainly caused by aircraft though - yes, their trails probably do make a small difference to the surface temperature, but they're talking about a couple of degrees drop due to it... which would take a *lot* of aircraft.
I'd love an 'embedded' pgsql.. something that could be automatically setup as part of an installation and run in the background with little or no user intervention.
Currently we use sqlite for this, but it's only OK for small installations (well it's flipping excellent for small installations...) - it doesn't scale properly as you get more active, as you can only have one active write at a time.
Last time I look at firebird it had a lot of issues, although that was about 6 months ago and it might have changed.
The Postgress Win32 installer needs work though - last time I looked it wrote things into system32. Next time I get a look I'll have to see if I can submit patches to fix that.
The problem becomes 'who pays'?
We pay taxes to our national government... OK, they pay for drug research for their own populace (most large countries already do this - there's little commercial incentive for curing a disease when you can make millions merely treating it, so government funding subsidizes it).
National governments are, by and large, greedy, self centred, b*stards. They want to treat their own population and screw everyone else... hence the use of patents even for drugs that are largely government funded.. so the citizens of other countries can't get their hands on it.
The answer? No idea... you'd probably never get enough governments to pay into a world drug research programme (massive increase funding to the WHO for example to pay for it) as they'd be arguing about their share for years and probably at the end of it the US would refuse to sign for some reason...
If the US invaded Taiwan, then China would get involved (since it considers it its territory). It would become a *very* big mess very fast.
If China invaded Taiwan, then the opposite would (probably) happen.
Nobody else has even the opportunity to do so.
I don't think anyone is convinced Velociraptors are harmless.
Everyone knows Trolls are. Just let the post on slashdot and they'll be busy for hours.
Marketing is *every* reason to want more than one. Why do you think people upgrade cars, change fashions every couple of months, go to a chainstore and pay 3x as much for hardware than you and I pay, and, yes, think they need multiple mp3 players. Marketing. It's certainly not because someone would actually *need* more than one.
The ipod is a good mp3 player, but it isn't a *great* mp3 player... it's just well marketed. No I don't mean the adverts, I mean things like making the term 'ipod' generic as if there were no other mp3 players around, and managing to make the things fashionable amongst teenagers.
The ipod video will sell millions... doing exactly what other video player has been doing for years (often cheaper too). Precisely because it's well marketed.
Hell, Windows Vista will make new headlines on its release (paid for by microsoft, no doubt) and will so well marketed that everyone will believe they need it even if their current OS is working fine.
You don't need adverts for that. Well placed 'news' stories, rumours... people are smart enough to filter out the crap when it's an 'advert', so marketing people use more underhand techniques. (ever heard someone on slashdot saying OSX is 'intuitive' and 'easy'? No OS is 'easy' by defintion (certainly not OSX which is more than a little counterintuitive in places).. it's a little bit of underhand marketing that seems to have taken off in the slashdot geek crowd, even if it never reached the masses).
Not really...
eg. I picked up a Motorola V3 (from the supermarket of all places) for £180. I'm on a minimal PAYG tariff nowadays (I keep the sim and just transfer it around phones), and typically pay £10/mo in phone calls (£120 for a round figure).
To get that 'free' on the network would have meant paying £30/month for a year... £360, with no upgrade possible for 12 months an no cancellation possible for the same period.
Multiply that profit by a couple of million and the carriers really aren't losing money at all.
Going full circle.. remember dejanews? It did usenet -> web, and did it well. Everyone used it.
Then a bunch of marketing execs got together and said "Everyone's looking at our site! I know... let's rename it to a 'portal', fill it with advertising and all sorts of extra features. Oh, and get rid of those boring news pages."
They went bust. Very fast (within 6 months IIRC).
google bought up the remains and now do what dejanews did originally... and they're very successful at it.
Try GPRS while travelling in europe.
Vodaphone charge £10 per megabyte. And belatedly told me that my 100mb allowance didn't apply. And I left my machine on and Windows Update had kicked in...
The final bill was more than the laptop cost.
OTOH in the UK only a complete idiot would pay for a landline call - multiple companies offer unlimited free UK calling, mostly without any monthly fee either.
UK to US? You can get that free - the carriage costs are so low they don't bother charging you any more.
eg. voipbuster it), sipdiscount, and others.
Both of the above are IAX compatible so you can plug asterisk into them and automatically route US calls over them.
Even without the noise the bass response on the ipod varies from poor to completely crappy (with $60 headphones, which sound absolutely awesome when played via a decent sounds source).
I'm told they've made up for some of the problems in the Shuffle/Mini but I'm not about to spend the money to find out - the Photo I have was damned expensive (predates when Apple got a clue and started selling the ipod at resonable prices in the UK.. this one cost £550 which is about $800).
Has anyone actually ever bought a DVD for the PSP? If so, *why* for heaven's sake?
Many of them more expensive than standard DVDs (at least in the UK), and you have to watch them on a crappy small screen with a tinny speaker... not exactly the greatest experience in the world.
Not at all... SecurID works for example by a challenge/response system typed in on the keyboard. Last I heard linux supported keyboards out of the box :)
Client certificates are just too hard to manage for most people.
Who do you think wrote all those lovely 'bug-free' drivers in Windows?
AJAX *is* javascript. It's just another name for it...
It's useful on some sites, but the majority should avoid things like that as it just causes incomaptibilities (especially with IE!).
If the DB is simple, sqlite blows away mysql... mysql has started to bloat and slow down as it gets older.
any material which is indecent.
Define 'indecent'.
Breasts are not indecent. Kissing (even gay kissing - we broadcast that on childrens TV here..) isn't indecent. Even a bit of groping isn't indecent... all of these things you're going to see *anyway* if you leave your church and look outside for a bit.
Hot monkey sex with multple partners.. that might be described as indecent.
Especially if one of them is Steve Ballmer.
I remember when Linux Journal did a python article. They highlighted it on the front page with a guy from Monty Python sat playing the piano, naked (you couldn't see anything but his back... this stuff was produced in the 70's).
The next issue the letters page was full of outraged americans screaming about 'pornography'. Funniest letters page I ever read...
Then there was the 'oh my god we say a 1/100th/second view of Janet Jackson's tits! The world is ending!!' episode, which had most of the *world* rolling on the floor laughing...