I seem to remember (which means, I don't have a reliable source...) that last time there was a dispute between the EU and the US about trade tariffs, the EU went and put a relatively large (around 50%) tax on a whole list of implausible-seeming products. The only connection between them is that they were each important to the economy of a swing state in the (then-upcoming) US election; the EU was trying to put pressure on the incumbents to accede to their demands or be voted out by their own citizens. (I ran into this problem when trying to import some embedded microprocessors from the US to the UK; it was necessary to decide whether they were handheld computers without a calculator function (very low import duty rate), or handheld computers with a calculator function (much higher import duty rate). In the end, I think they qualified as non-calculators.)
On some embedded systems, it's entirely plausible for an int to be one 32-bit byte. That's a common scheme on DSPs that can't address anything smaller than one 32-bit word.
Technically speaking, a decibel's a unit of ratio (on a logarithmic scale) rather than anything else. (When used to describe sound, you get dBa, which is volume relative to a standard value of sound intensity (0 dB)). So 1 kB would be a ratio of 10^1000 to 1, which would probably be enough to destroy the Earth if measured relative to the standard unit of sound intensity.
In case you didn't know (and probably you don't, or you'd likely have mentioned it), there are actually two Advance Wars sequels on the DS: Advance Wars: Dual Strike (which came earlier), and Advance Wars: Days of Ruin (which came later). Strangely, Dual Strike has almost perfect touchscreen controls (except for the bottom row of the map, where the menu pops up in the wrong place), but it was somehow messed up for Dark Conflict, where I go back to using the D-pad. (Dark Conflict is considerably better in terms of gameplay, though, and even has some semblance of a plot if you're into that sort of thing.)
You can normally tell when stores have tried to resell a returned game cartridge (say, for the DS) as new, because they nearly always forget to wipe the saves on them. Of course, you don't discover that until you get home, when it's too late. On the other hand, I'm the sort of person who'd be happy to buy a good-condition returned game anyway, but there aren't any because they're all being sold as new...
Part of the reason is because Windows is backwards-compatible to Windows 3.1 and 95, which were build without reasonable security models. Since then, Windows' security model has improved a lot; but it still needs to be compatible with old programs, which tended to be written quite badly back then. (I'd say older versions of Windows encouraged sloppy coding because it was just so easy, unlike the UNIX variants around at the time which would generally complain if you tried to do things that broke security too badly). Windows also used to be more homogenous than UNIX systems (even nowadays, you can see Linux manpages talking about the difference between BSD-style and X/Open-style, such as this one which summarises the mess). As a result, old Windows programs tended to work even if written badly because they only had one sort of system to run on, which let them get away with dubious things, whereas old UNIX programs tended to need to be written well to work at all. (Classic Mac OS can be pretty-much disregarded here, because nobody uses it nowadays and Mac OS X is based on UNIX.)
Since then, all the operating systems involved have become more modern. In UNIX land, people were used to porting programs anyway, to get them to run on new variants, so when newcomers like Linux turned up (and later Mac OS X, which is less different from traditional UNIX than Linux is with respect to how traditional UNIX applications behave, although it's a lot more different with respect to newly-written applications designed to run on it specifically), it was generally the responsibility of people to modify applications to get them running on Linux in particular, or whatever. As a result, Linux can do its job quite well without needing to tolerate badly-written insecure legacy applications. On the other hand, Windows would lose one of its major selling points (its compatibility), if it did that. So Windows is written to be very good at running legacy badly-written applications; as a side-effect, though, this means that it's rather good at running badly-written applications, even new ones.
The end conclusion is that if you want to write well, you can do it on any platform; but lazy programmers who want to write badly will have fewer issues doing so on Windows.
(There's another force at play, too; the cultures of obtaining software in Windows and Linux are rather different, and as a result, well-written Linux software tends to become much easier to find than badly-written Linux software. I imagine there's lots of bad software out there for both Windows and Linux despite the above effects, but you'll find bad Windows software preinstalled on a newly bought computer alongside the OS itself (people debate the merits of various OSes, but everyone I know hates "shovelware"), and on driver disks with hardware you buy. This doesn't happen so much with Linux, because there's no, or not as much, money in it; people on Linux are so used to (legally) getting software for free, that they're unlikely to pay unless people are offering something of good quality.)
Pretty much every nontechnical user I know just calls it DOCX, after the file extension Word 2007 uses by default. And they hate it; to them, it just doesn't work (i.e. they can't load it on their Word 2003 systems) and they don't know why.
F# is more like a.NET-ised version of one of the ML languages (such as OCaml), just like C# is a.NET-ised version of Java. (I know OCaml and Java and can read F# and C# without real problems; the syntax is marginally different, but the only really major difference is in the libraries.)
Agreed, same thing happened to me with an Inspiron 6400 running Linux (specifically Ubuntu). I'm pretty sure it's a hardware problem in that case, not a software problem.
Part of the issue with Li-ion batteries is that in order to avoid losing maximum capacity, they're best stored at 40% charge and in a refrigerator. This is not a typical storage condition for a laptop battery. (It wouldn't at all surprise me if it was the storage condition that the manufacturers announced their life based on, though.)
This is my major problem with the Ribbon. Yes, after a while it makes things easier to find; my issue isn't with that. It's with the number of clicks it takes to do something. It used to be that all the commands you used frequently were in the toolbars (one click each); and everything was in the menus, in case you wanted to do something unusual (and maybe you had to hunt around for it a bit; that didn't happen that often, though). Now, there's only one way to find things: via the Ribbon. But you have to select the tab you want first; and even if it's obvious which tab you need, if that tab isn't selected right now, that's two clicks. So in short, the Ribbon's faster for people who aren't used to the UI (because they take less time finding things). But if you're used to the old UI, and also used to the new UI, the new one's slower (because it requires more clicks, and they aren't in particularly faster-to-click locations).
Microsoft probably have more accurate figures than anyone else for how many PCs exist, and how many of them run Windows. Given that Mac OS X is unlikely to be run on PCs (at least not legally, and mostly not at all), and other OSes are even smaller than Linux is, you can conclude that most of the difference run a Linux-based OS; and therefore, Microsoft probably have more accurate figures of the installbase of Linux than anyone else at the moment.
Ouch, I hate the IE tab behaviour. (Luckily, it's not too much of a problem, due to the other repliers explaining how to change it.) I prefer to surf as a queue rather than as a stack (otherwise some tabs would never get read at all), and opening tabs at an end is an easy way to organise that. The IE way seems to promote things like getting stuck in TVTropes...
Just use xmonad, it works like a charm. (It's a rather nice window manager, but is considerably worse than vi/emacs in terms of starting it up without a manual and having absolutely no clue what to do. People who want to borrow your computer generally give up at a completely blank screen where nothing they press seems to do anything.)
Actually, the issue with Firefox isn't leaks, it's just large usage generally. Memory leaks are when a program allocates memory but doesn't use it, then keeps allocating more and more to use instead (eventually running your system out of memory); Firefox is actually using most or all of the memory it requests, leading to a different sort of problem (being utterly bloated, rather than leaking your computer to death).
Some moderators also do it to reward the poster (or cancel out a mod-down, as the grandparent says). Modding someone funny doesn't increase their karma; modding them interesting, informative, insightful or underrated does.
Even more fun, holding down all four at once doesn't work with many laptops. Probably the easiest way to do it is to hold alt, hold fn, press sysrq, release sysrq, release fn, press k, release alt. It took me about 10 minutes of experimentation to find that specific sequence...
This is possibly the only Slashdot story where lots of people have decided to link to XKCD, but picked lots of different ones. XKCDs 191 244 384 404 523 563 have all been linked to in this story, which is an unusual amount of variety.
I've used it before when an application running inside X that I was developing started causing massive thrashing (due to a mistake I made). The computer was rather unresponsive to everything; and control-alt-backspace at least kills the process the next time the thrashing kernel starts paying attention to the keyboard, rather than having to go over to one of the other terminals, log in, find out what process it was, and kill it, with a very badly unresponsive computer.
You don't. You hold down alt and sysrq, but the other keys are pressed in sequence (and rather slowly). (Some laptop keyboards with sysrq requiring fn require you to let go of sysrq while you press the other keys, in which case you hold down alt but alternate between sysrq and the other characters.)
Incidentally, for the grandparent: you probably want to write the whole sequence of 6 commands, R E I S U B, rather than just S U B. The R sets the keyboard to raw mode, sometimes allowing you to control-alt-f1 into a terminal and fix the crash without rebooting. E tells all the processes which are still running properly to terminate (many of them will save crash recovery or autosave data if you do that, so you can more easily get back to where you were); I kills all the processes that didn't shut down when you pressed E. This means that when you use S to synchronise the disks, it actually saves what you want to save, and nothing tries to queue up more data to save afterwards. Then U remounts filesystems readonly (or unmounts them; it comes to much the same thing), and B reboots the system instantly (the REISU do the rest of the shutdown process between them).
A good mnemonic for this is that REISUB is "busier" spelt backwards. (Raising Elephants Is So Utterly Boring is another common mnemonic.)
Sometimes I end up doing REISUO instead; unlike REISUB which is a manual reboot, RESIUO is a manual shutdown. It all rather depends on whether you want the system to stay down or come back up.
Although I've never used an old-fashioned typewriter, I have a old book teaching people how to use an old-fashioned typewriter. With the example keyboard layout it gives, the numbers start at 2; it recommends using l to type 1 and O to type 0 (as well as other fun combinations involving backspace to get a whole range of other symbols).
This conflicts badly with Ubuntu's decision to make Alt-Sysrq+K the default way to kill X (as opposed to control-alt-backspace which is too easy to press by mistake), too.
Slashdot Mirror
I seem to remember (which means, I don't have a reliable source...) that last time there was a dispute between the EU and the US about trade tariffs, the EU went and put a relatively large (around 50%) tax on a whole list of implausible-seeming products. The only connection between them is that they were each important to the economy of a swing state in the (then-upcoming) US election; the EU was trying to put pressure on the incumbents to accede to their demands or be voted out by their own citizens. (I ran into this problem when trying to import some embedded microprocessors from the US to the UK; it was necessary to decide whether they were handheld computers without a calculator function (very low import duty rate), or handheld computers with a calculator function (much higher import duty rate). In the end, I think they qualified as non-calculators.)
On some embedded systems, it's entirely plausible for an int to be one 32-bit byte. That's a common scheme on DSPs that can't address anything smaller than one 32-bit word.
Technically speaking, a decibel's a unit of ratio (on a logarithmic scale) rather than anything else. (When used to describe sound, you get dBa, which is volume relative to a standard value of sound intensity (0 dB)). So 1 kB would be a ratio of 10^1000 to 1, which would probably be enough to destroy the Earth if measured relative to the standard unit of sound intensity.
In case you didn't know (and probably you don't, or you'd likely have mentioned it), there are actually two Advance Wars sequels on the DS: Advance Wars: Dual Strike (which came earlier), and Advance Wars: Days of Ruin (which came later). Strangely, Dual Strike has almost perfect touchscreen controls (except for the bottom row of the map, where the menu pops up in the wrong place), but it was somehow messed up for Dark Conflict, where I go back to using the D-pad. (Dark Conflict is considerably better in terms of gameplay, though, and even has some semblance of a plot if you're into that sort of thing.)
You can normally tell when stores have tried to resell a returned game cartridge (say, for the DS) as new, because they nearly always forget to wipe the saves on them. Of course, you don't discover that until you get home, when it's too late. On the other hand, I'm the sort of person who'd be happy to buy a good-condition returned game anyway, but there aren't any because they're all being sold as new...
But does the fact that this was settled, rather than taken to a final judgement, mean that it doesn't set a binding precedent?
Since then, all the operating systems involved have become more modern. In UNIX land, people were used to porting programs anyway, to get them to run on new variants, so when newcomers like Linux turned up (and later Mac OS X, which is less different from traditional UNIX than Linux is with respect to how traditional UNIX applications behave, although it's a lot more different with respect to newly-written applications designed to run on it specifically), it was generally the responsibility of people to modify applications to get them running on Linux in particular, or whatever. As a result, Linux can do its job quite well without needing to tolerate badly-written insecure legacy applications. On the other hand, Windows would lose one of its major selling points (its compatibility), if it did that. So Windows is written to be very good at running legacy badly-written applications; as a side-effect, though, this means that it's rather good at running badly-written applications, even new ones.
The end conclusion is that if you want to write well, you can do it on any platform; but lazy programmers who want to write badly will have fewer issues doing so on Windows.
(There's another force at play, too; the cultures of obtaining software in Windows and Linux are rather different, and as a result, well-written Linux software tends to become much easier to find than badly-written Linux software. I imagine there's lots of bad software out there for both Windows and Linux despite the above effects, but you'll find bad Windows software preinstalled on a newly bought computer alongside the OS itself (people debate the merits of various OSes, but everyone I know hates "shovelware"), and on driver disks with hardware you buy. This doesn't happen so much with Linux, because there's no, or not as much, money in it; people on Linux are so used to (legally) getting software for free, that they're unlikely to pay unless people are offering something of good quality.)
Pretty much every nontechnical user I know just calls it DOCX, after the file extension Word 2007 uses by default. And they hate it; to them, it just doesn't work (i.e. they can't load it on their Word 2003 systems) and they don't know why.
That wasn't just anyone, it was CmdrTaco. And it was Valentines day. And she did marry him...
F# is more like a .NET-ised version of one of the ML languages (such as OCaml), just like C# is a .NET-ised version of Java. (I know OCaml and Java and can read F# and C# without real problems; the syntax is marginally different, but the only really major difference is in the libraries.)
Agreed, same thing happened to me with an Inspiron 6400 running Linux (specifically Ubuntu). I'm pretty sure it's a hardware problem in that case, not a software problem.
Part of the issue with Li-ion batteries is that in order to avoid losing maximum capacity, they're best stored at 40% charge and in a refrigerator. This is not a typical storage condition for a laptop battery. (It wouldn't at all surprise me if it was the storage condition that the manufacturers announced their life based on, though.)
This is my major problem with the Ribbon. Yes, after a while it makes things easier to find; my issue isn't with that. It's with the number of clicks it takes to do something. It used to be that all the commands you used frequently were in the toolbars (one click each); and everything was in the menus, in case you wanted to do something unusual (and maybe you had to hunt around for it a bit; that didn't happen that often, though). Now, there's only one way to find things: via the Ribbon. But you have to select the tab you want first; and even if it's obvious which tab you need, if that tab isn't selected right now, that's two clicks. So in short, the Ribbon's faster for people who aren't used to the UI (because they take less time finding things). But if you're used to the old UI, and also used to the new UI, the new one's slower (because it requires more clicks, and they aren't in particularly faster-to-click locations).
Microsoft probably have more accurate figures than anyone else for how many PCs exist, and how many of them run Windows. Given that Mac OS X is unlikely to be run on PCs (at least not legally, and mostly not at all), and other OSes are even smaller than Linux is, you can conclude that most of the difference run a Linux-based OS; and therefore, Microsoft probably have more accurate figures of the installbase of Linux than anyone else at the moment.
Ouch, I hate the IE tab behaviour. (Luckily, it's not too much of a problem, due to the other repliers explaining how to change it.) I prefer to surf as a queue rather than as a stack (otherwise some tabs would never get read at all), and opening tabs at an end is an easy way to organise that. The IE way seems to promote things like getting stuck in TVTropes...
Just use xmonad, it works like a charm. (It's a rather nice window manager, but is considerably worse than vi/emacs in terms of starting it up without a manual and having absolutely no clue what to do. People who want to borrow your computer generally give up at a completely blank screen where nothing they press seems to do anything.)
Actually, the issue with Firefox isn't leaks, it's just large usage generally. Memory leaks are when a program allocates memory but doesn't use it, then keeps allocating more and more to use instead (eventually running your system out of memory); Firefox is actually using most or all of the memory it requests, leading to a different sort of problem (being utterly bloated, rather than leaking your computer to death).
Some moderators also do it to reward the poster (or cancel out a mod-down, as the grandparent says). Modding someone funny doesn't increase their karma; modding them interesting, informative, insightful or underrated does.
Even more fun, holding down all four at once doesn't work with many laptops. Probably the easiest way to do it is to hold alt, hold fn, press sysrq, release sysrq, release fn, press k, release alt. It took me about 10 minutes of experimentation to find that specific sequence...
This is possibly the only Slashdot story where lots of people have decided to link to XKCD, but picked lots of different ones. XKCDs 191 244 384 404 523 563 have all been linked to in this story, which is an unusual amount of variety.
I've used it before when an application running inside X that I was developing started causing massive thrashing (due to a mistake I made). The computer was rather unresponsive to everything; and control-alt-backspace at least kills the process the next time the thrashing kernel starts paying attention to the keyboard, rather than having to go over to one of the other terminals, log in, find out what process it was, and kill it, with a very badly unresponsive computer.
You don't. You hold down alt and sysrq, but the other keys are pressed in sequence (and rather slowly). (Some laptop keyboards with sysrq requiring fn require you to let go of sysrq while you press the other keys, in which case you hold down alt but alternate between sysrq and the other characters.)
Incidentally, for the grandparent: you probably want to write the whole sequence of 6 commands, R E I S U B, rather than just S U B. The R sets the keyboard to raw mode, sometimes allowing you to control-alt-f1 into a terminal and fix the crash without rebooting. E tells all the processes which are still running properly to terminate (many of them will save crash recovery or autosave data if you do that, so you can more easily get back to where you were); I kills all the processes that didn't shut down when you pressed E. This means that when you use S to synchronise the disks, it actually saves what you want to save, and nothing tries to queue up more data to save afterwards. Then U remounts filesystems readonly (or unmounts them; it comes to much the same thing), and B reboots the system instantly (the REISU do the rest of the shutdown process between them).
A good mnemonic for this is that REISUB is "busier" spelt backwards. (Raising Elephants Is So Utterly Boring is another common mnemonic.)
Sometimes I end up doing REISUO instead; unlike REISUB which is a manual reboot, RESIUO is a manual shutdown. It all rather depends on whether you want the system to stay down or come back up.
Although I've never used an old-fashioned typewriter, I have a old book teaching people how to use an old-fashioned typewriter. With the example keyboard layout it gives, the numbers start at 2; it recommends using l to type 1 and O to type 0 (as well as other fun combinations involving backspace to get a whole range of other symbols).
This conflicts badly with Ubuntu's decision to make Alt-Sysrq+K the default way to kill X (as opposed to control-alt-backspace which is too easy to press by mistake), too.
On GNOME, it takes a screenshot and pops up a dialog box asking you where to save it (or you can send it to the clipboard if you prefer).