I am not knocking Python, but I have been investigating Ruby specifically because there were aspects of Python that I didn't like. I'm probably much more anal-retentive than the average developer; purity and consistency in the language design means a lot to me.
I've got a number of gripes with Ruby, but fewer than I had with Python. Among the many features I didn't like in Python were the lack of a consistent Boolean type and the lack of standard closure semantics. Instead, we get values evaluated in a Boolean context, which reminds me of all the things I didn't like about Perl. I also have been consistently given the impression that Guido is not really friendly to the functional programming community and the language will not evolve to be more supportive of the functional programming paradigm.
For context, my favorite programming languages have been Apple's NewtonScript, which was a very small language with an exceptionally clean design, and Dylan, which is not so small, but which makes Lispish programming paradigms available with a very clean Pascal-like syntax. Yep, I back the winners : )
Ruby also seems to represent a good merging of functional and object-oriented style; everything is truly an object, with no distinction between classes and types (Python is getting around to erasing this distinction as well, it seems).
Ruby has a lot of minor inconsistencies and things I don't like. I'm hoping perhaps I can get my voice heard on some of these issues. I'm not really in favor of including a lot of the Perlisms as part of the core language, but it seems like an excellent project to support.
In addition, I've been able to link Ruby into my C and C++ application code easily as a runtime support library and set up calls back and forth. That impressed me. Deploying Python this way has seemed harder, although maybe it can be done and I just haven't figured out how yet.
Well, yes; the copyright dates are 2001 and 2002. The version of Ruby designated stable is several years old as well, so I'm not sure this is a big liability; changes between the Ruby these books describe and the Ruby on your system are likely to be bug fixes, not major changes in functionality.
Seriously: did you write to them (a real letter) with a reasonable and convincing rationale for supporting an open streaming format? If so, what did they really say? (And who did you write to, and who replied?)
They are "public" radio; they do listen to listeners. (Although I'm a bit troubled that they now accept corporate backing from Microsoft; that certainly makes me concerned they will be open to pressure to conform to proprietary formats).
You're talking about "boxed" v. "unboxed" data, in Lisp and Lisp-like-languages terms. The issue here is that languages like Lisp and Scheme that use typing of objects, not of variables, do all this work for you behind the scenes. That is, entities which can be type-identified at runtime are automatically converted to primitive machine types when appropriate, for example during compilation, for languages that do this. A variable reference can hold any kind of entity at runtime.
In this regard Java tries to give the best of both worlds and winds up delivering neither. If you use primitive types, ints and whatnot, the resulting code will use machine types directly. ("Directly" meaning, in this case, via the byte code, or machine code if you're using a Java that gets compiled at some point). This is all well and good and satisifies the programmers who want to be close to the machine registers.
But because ints and whatnot are not objects, using them fails to support styles of programming where everything is an object and real genericity is possible. Hence the creation of the wrapper classes. Most Lisp-like languages don't need anything quite like this for their "boxed" data; they use instead a tagged word format, with a bit to indicate whether the word is a primitive machine type, a pointer to a more elaborate object, an array, or whatever. But in Java because of the strong compile-time typing, the user has to do all the boxing and unboxing and creation and translation from these Integer and other objects himself.
And so, in a way, the worst of both worlds, where you don't get the simplicity of untyped variables and typed values, or the simplicity of everything being an object... sacrificed for the rather muddied goal of keeping a byte-coded language close to the hardware, and limiting the complexity of the runtime.
Another reason why Java is not my favorite language.
The TRS-80 model 1 could do this too. There were some programs, probably from 80 Micro, that would play tunes on an nearby AM radio. Or you could use the radio to determine if your code had crashed. I tried to debug an assembly version of Life this way. Never did get that program working.
There were also programs that would tweak the audio out to the casette deck to play tunes (remember the system used audio casettes for recording data). I also recall someone's program that would overlay waveforms to produce several notes simultaneously - polyphony on a tiny battery-powered speaker attached to the casette port!
Those were the days to be a geek. Or something...
Re:Slightly off topic but...
on
Storage Security
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· Score: 2, Interesting
No one but me seems to use them, but I've personally seen amazing reliability with magneto-optical (MO) drives and media. In fact, I've never had one of my MO disks fail. I certainly can't say that about other media I've used:
- casettes (TRS-80 model 1 circa 1977) - floppies (actually, 8" floppy disks are very reliable, and they go down from there) - various kinds of streaming tape - Bernoulli discs of various capacity - zip discs of various capacity - hard drives of various capacity - CD-R and CD-RW of various capacity
Seriously, consider MO media such as the Fujitsu 1.3 gig discs and drives. Of course this does not address really long-term storage and the issues of lost/failing hardware and standards over decades, but I think this gives you one of the most stable physical formats available for "near-line" storage.
- Junior High and High School are going to suck. But just keep reminding yourself it will be over eventually. And college will be a lot more fun.
- By the way, you do in fact have what it takes to succeed in college. In fact, you'll have more fun if you actually pick a very competitive school. Just because most of the people in our high school aren't even going to college doesn't mean you shouldn't.
- Stick with math. I know your math teachers will be uniquely awful in all the world, but you will benefit greatly from developing some serious algebra, trig, and calculus skills. At some point, you will pretty much abandon math because of the abysmally poor teaching available to you. Don't; teach yourself.
- Getting laid by the time you're sixteen should not really be your primary goal at the present time. It won't do anything for your future to get some girl pregnant. Constant masturbation does not make you a loser at the present time. Obsessing mournfully about not getting laid, however, does.
- Start working now on skipping a grade or two, particularly your senior year in high school. Some smart people with smart parents are able to do that. Just a thought. You could save yourself a considerable amount of boredom.
- Save that twenty-page poem you wrote. Save copies of everything you write. Your thirty-five-year-old self wants to read them. It's OK that they aren't that good.
- Get some exercise. I know gym class has almost soured you on physical acivity for life, but you're going to regret not developing some exercise habits doing solo or non-competitive things that you actually like, such as biking hiking, and weightlifting.
- Lay off the high-fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated fats. One day we'll realize that putting these in just about every food item available was in fact a bad idea.
- It's really true -- none of the adults in your life do know quite what to do with you. Your parents don't know what to do with you, your teachers doen't know what to do with you, and no one is giving you much in the way of support or valuable advice for how to prepare for your future. Here are some additional miscellaneous tips:
- get more sleep. you can finish that book in a day or two.
- don't put so much effort into your part-time job. you're not getting any real benefits from working at a grocery store 35 hours a week while in high school.
- keep writing. in fact, write more.
- work on developing some actual social skills. these will prove to be far more valuable in college than the brains; sheer brains you've got covered.
- most of the biggest mistakes in your life up until the age of 35 will revolve around a lack of social maturity and self-confidence. work on that confidence thing.
- be careful: Jimmy Northrop and Edwin are both not going to be good friends; they are, in fact, both going to beat you up.
- give up the church youth groups and camps. these poor experiences with small-minded, bigoted people will sour you on spirituality and religion for the next twenty years. follow the spirituality and religious traditions that actually mean something to you.
- those chicks you'll be lusting after at the age of 19 are actually a deeply disturbed woman who will not age well at all. her problems are far beyond your ability to help with, so don't get sucked in. you deserve to date someone who is NOT psychotic once in a while. weird is OK... psychotic is not.
Last, but not least:
- hey, you at 35 doesn't suck. you're not obsese, you're good-looking, you've had some great relationships, you've got a great family, and you've done some great work. What does this imply about you at 12? Duh... think about it...
I couldn't believe the number of replies that had accumulated before someone actually mentioned something _relevant_ about the story. So many people calling it a knock-off or rip-off of some such story... when, in fact, it is an adaptation of a highly original work by a great writer. I have no opinion on how successful the adaptation of his previous work, "From Hell," is -- I haven't seen it, and the reviews I've read have been mixed.
I'm doubly surprised by the apparent level of ignorance of modern comics/graphic novels... c'mon, haven't y'all read Watchmen? This is by the guy who created Watchmen. It was a major, very influential work in the whole area of comics for grown-ups. I suppose y'all have never heard of Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns either?
(Maybe I'm dating myself... is everyone here under 30 but me?)
Anyway, thank you, bguilliams for pointing our what anyone discussing the topic should have taken the time to find out for him/herself.
Using an unreliable battery-operated device to replace a pad and paper to store names and addresses? Nope.
Making our lives miserable and giving us the attention span of hyperactive gnats by making us always available for harassment via telemarketers, pages, e-mails, and instant messages? Nope.
Giving us carpal tunnel syndrome and tendonitis just to move a cursor around the screen or pilot Mario around? Nah.
Making it so our kids can't use a paper library or fix their own spelling errors? No way...
Making it so the documents and esigns we spend our lives writing and creating have a recoverable life span less than a tenth that of the lowest-grade _paper_ available? Not even close...
Mixing a perfect gin and tonic? Now THAT'S technology!!!
Well, the same thing happened to me and I'm here to tell you that, at least at one point in time, for at least my domain, registrars were really bad about sending out renewal notices. I don't think it is quite fair to assume that the poster was "hounded with renewal notices" and was just careless.
I lost "potts.com" (my personal domain) about 1997 when I failed to receive a renewal notice, for whatever reason.
In previous years, I had gotten notices both by paper mail and e-mail; this year, nothing came. To the best of my knowledge, InterNIC(?) still had my valid home address and e-mail address. However, the designated domain server was at a previous employer's site, and it is possible the notice went to them, and my former co-workers didn't forward it, or whatever.
Yes, I should have been personally "watching it like a hawk" and realizing that it was going to be up for renewal, but I failed to. But, please realize that registrars have not always been known for applying scrupulous care in maintaining customer domain registrations.
In any case, the next time I checked the domain it was gone. (Try it: http://www.potts.com)
Also, the new owner is not "using" it in the usual sense; there is no individual, company, or whatever by the name of Potts with a web site or service available there. DotcomEmail.com are squatters. They buy up domains and then try to sell people e-mail or web service using that domain. Their web site claims "over 1500 domains available." But they don't want to sell you the domain, they want to rent their services at that domain.
And, yes, I've contacted them to request the name back. I can't pay them for my name back, so all I can do is ask. I can't say I think much of their business model.
Incidentally, I've submitted postings asking for ideas and advice on how to recover this domain to "Ask Slashdot" twice. The posting has never been accepted. So, it is interesting to see someone else get an "Ask Slashdot" posting accepted with, essentially, the same question.
It looks like the only hope I have is that DotComEmail.com (which used to bill itself as a "pre-IPO Internet Startup") will one day go out of business and I can put potts.com to some legitimate use (perhaps advertising my consulting services).
Would they be pissed if I won it back? Does it matter? Should I care, given their business model?
Well, if I had the resources to dispute it, I would do so, but that probably won't be possible. Now whether they have a legitimate right to potts.com by the rules of the registration system: well, of course they do.
But by any other world view? I don't think so. In the dot-com domain, someone who holds a company name or trademark or service mark, or even a family name, would be a better candidate.
But, note that potts.net and potts.org are also owned by another similar service (NetIdentity). Which is why my family has had to resort to "thepottshouse.org" for our personal site.
I'm still personally a little confused about this.
When I've programmed with FSMs, I've always thought of them as graphs of states (points) and transitions (edges). An input (message pulse, word, signal, whatever) then can trigger a state change, which I've usually implemented via some kind of table. The state change is accomplished by a function; in a useful program the state transition could call an arbitrary list of functions that might involve sending other messages to other state machines, etc., or doing other "stuff" with arbitrary side effects, but as far as the state machine is concerned, you would always just move to either a different state or the same state again.
So I need a little more info to crack this: to pin down some definitions. Just how restrictive are the rules of this little universe?
- Can each soldier have a DIFFERENT state machine?
- Obviously the state machine consists of states and transitions. What I'm hearing from dmorin is that my soldier can't distinguish between different messages. In other words, when it gets a "hut!" message it always moves on to the next state. It can't distinguish between hearing the general shout "fire" and some other message like "put your gun away and go home."
- Time is passing in discrete intervals, say, seconds, but can the "tick" of some global clock also be a message? or is the only message each soldier can hear just the generic "hut!" message from the general at one end or the soldiers on either side?
- Maybe this is needlessly picky, but would "firing" count as a state? The way I usually think of state machines, "fire" would be what happened when the state machine got a message that triggered the transition between "waiting to fire" and "fired." And "speaking" (issuing a "hut!" message to the soldier on the left and right would also be a transition.
- Lastly, can the soldier "aim" (distinguish) which soldier he yells "hut!" to? Or will both the soldier on the left and right "hear" him?
I have installed it successfully and without much hassle on MacOSX and BSD, Linux, and BSD even running on an ISP's somewhat locked-down server. It is highly configurable, but the default setup is useful right out of the box.
Some features of TWiki I like:
- it's in Perl (and Perl is more likely to be available on system X than some of the newer languages)
- the source is quite readable
- it is highly readable
- the markup is extremely simple to learn
- your contents are stored in RCS files
- you can upload files (mentioned already)
- users can register to be notified about content changes by e-mail
Overall it has been a great tool. I'd like to see a few things improved, like support for creating new webs, real hierarchical namespaces for WikiWords (sub-webs), built-in preferences for enabling/disabling access to robots, simpler and better-looking default templates, and a little better support for generating a static site from the live site. But these are all pretty minor and for the most part I've been very happy with it. (And, if the itch to fix something becomes great enough, well, of course I should brush up on my Perl and contribute some fixes).
You know, some of us Slashdot readers are OLD ENOUGH TO HAVE CHILDREN that would enjoy this movie... AND DO. I appreciated the info on the film for _at_least_ that reason.
And at 35, I hope I never become too "mature" to enjoy a really good kid's film in any genre.
Both implementations look very promising, but there's always a problem. I've been aware of Eiffel for at least 9 years, but have never been able to use it for a real project, and, unfortunately, it looks like I will still not be able to.
The barriers now are the cost of the commercial IDE, which is pretty far out-of-line (but if that was the only barrier, it would not be enough to keep me from using it). My co-developer is a Microsoft user and is very pleased by the idea of being able to use his Visual Studio environment. So they've got at least one developer here interested that way.
The more important barrier is lack of a ready-to-roll set of tools for MacOS X. Normally I'd not be averse to becoming beta testers, but we can't bet this project on the quality of a beta.
I'll check back in another 9 years, I guess.
It's these "minor" practical matters more than anything else which means I'm still using the living hell that is C++ for my bread-and-butter work.
Saying "I've handled thousands of (whatevers) and never noticed any damage" is not a very good use of anecdotal evidence because, as many people have pointed out, sometimes you can cause latent damage.
I personally have a lot of anecdotal evidence FOR immediate damage, which leads me to be quite concerned with ESD whenever I open something up, and even when I don't (as I'll explain).
I learned ESD precautions when going through basic training to be a certified level 1 Apple repair tech, many years ago. They had a cute little video.
Since then, I've frequently NOT used precautions, and damaged a lot of devices, many times with immediate results: video cards, which suddenly have bad pixels... ROM chips, which suddenly won't boot the device... memory chips... ADB ports... etc.
In Ohio/Michigan it is very, very dry indoors (and out) during certain winter months. The humidity makes an ENORMOUS difference in the chances that you will fry a device. It gets so dry you can get a painful shock just touching your PowerBook.
A lot of Palm devices have found out the hard way that when their Palm device is connected to their PC, for desktop synchronization, and they are all charged up, and touch the Palm device first... blam. That serial port does not necessarily make a very good safe path for ESD. I've blown out some serial ports and Palm devices that way. The Newton is also susceptible.
In short, if it is not uncomfortably humid where you are, it's dry enough to want to take ESD precautions. Use that wrist strap, or at the very least, make sure you take a moment to touch a properly grounded object frequently as you work. Be especially careful if you walk away from a disassembled machine and then come BACK. Don't touch anything else until you've made certain you are properly discharged.
All right, to try and keep this from turning into an "it sucked! no, it didn't!" debate, some background.
I used (and programmed) every version of Newton device. There were several generations of Newton recognition software. The first generation was actually licensed from a Russian company called Paragraph. There was some speculation that it would perform better with Cyrillic. You could set it for cursive recognition, and could also tweak the individual character shapes it was looking for.
The algorithms were largely dictionary-based. Hence, it had a tendency to either do really well getting the words completely right, or really badly (substituting a really wacky word choice that was triggered a match). It was also possible to have the settings quite wrong for your handwriting, so that, for example, it did not know when you were breaking words (via letter spacing or pauses in your writing).
People had very mixed results with it. If you did not use cursive, it tended to be even worse. There was some idle speculation that it probably did really well with Cyrillic cursive, due to the software's origins, but I never heard any substantiation of tht rumor.
The original Newton (through OS 1.05) had many other problems, and clearly came out of the oven a bit too early. Battery life was poor. Memory was very limited. Recognition was extremely slow. One of the most noticeable was that the recognizer had a tendency to lock up and stop recognizing text; you had to hit the reset button to get it moving again. Fortunately, the early Newton stored data in flash, so even doing a reset after a severe crash, you were unlikely to lose any data. (You pretty much had to forcibly wipe the flash to do that).
Version 2.0 of the Newton software, dubbed "Newton Intelligence", came about initially with the MessagePad 130 or a ROM update to the 120. Developers were able to get the ROM from Apple and do the replacement themselves. 2.0 featured a new recognition strategy: support the cursive recognizer, and also offer a new character-by-character print recognizer. This one worked much better for me, and a lot of other users thought so too. It would also work for cursive. This is the recognizer that presumably Apple has ported. Allegedly it was based on an ATG project. One of the things that made it better was that its algorithms were more character-based than dictionary-based; it tended not to pick completely incorrect words. Instead, you'd see what you wrote with perhaps one letter wrong. You could use gestures similar to proofreading marks to edit that one letter, or even over-write the single wrong letter.
The Apple employees who described it at the Newton developer conferences spoke of it this way: when it made a mistake, instead of saying "HUH???", the user would say "huh."
When I first used a Palm, I was very disappointed that they were not able to use a recognition engine like the Newton character recognizer. It really did work much better. Yes, I learned Graffiti, but I never liked it, and to this day I don't use a Palm. I would use the Newton character recognizer on a portable Palm-sized device quite happily.
Apple doesn't get much credit for its innovations. Remember that the MessagePad 2100 could do all this, although somewhat awkwardly and perhaps just barely:
- run Pocket Quicken or other checkbook apps - do shape recognition and editing - run a spreadsheet - run a graphing calculator/solver - store text as raw "ink" (compressed vector graphics) and recognize it at a later time - provide 2 PCMCIA memory card slots - do infrared data exchange - drive a modem card - run a mini- web browser - do shape recognition - do desktop sync - record and playback voice memos - do text-to-speech (in a pretty primitive Macintalk-1.0 way). - support a keyboard - ran applications written in very cool dynamic, interpreted, byte-coded language optimized for low memory footprint, using ideas from languages like Scheme and Self, but with a simple Pascal-like syntax. (This was pre-Java).
Of course, it was also way too expensive, and Apple was not able to get the price down in time to gain market share. Flash memory was expensive. Static memory was expensive. The screen was expensive. It was expensive to assemble. If you ever took one apart, it was clear that it required a great deal of skilled labor to assemble. The screen itself was an elaborate sandwich of the recognizer, the LCD screen, and a backlight. There were wires running all over the innards. Compare that to a Palm device, which was designed for minimal chip count and minimal cost to manufacture. It was not just Apple's desire to maintain profit margins at work, although that no doubt played a part too.
I personally was very fond of using the Newton to keep notes and balance my checkbook. The character-based recognizer and StrongARM chip made it usable.
Nevertheless, when we developed software for naive new-to-the-device end users, we did everything with popups and radio buttons. Trying to get a novice user to successfully use any computer handwriting recognizer immediately is not yet feasible (and may not be for some time).
I personally am rather annoyed to see Steve's childish behavior in ignoring and marginalizing all the R&D and many smart peoples' hard work that went into the Newton. Sure, it may have been a failure as a product in the long term, but it caught people's imagination and was definitely a technological success in many ways, and its technolgies have not been equalled in another product.
The engineers who designed it don't deserve more snide behavior from Apple's self-appointed "savior." They took enough flak at the time for trying to create something so far ahead of the curve, and getting yanked around by having the Newton group spun in, spun out, and unceremoniously killed.
The marketers and project managers leading certainly deserve a healthy share of the blame for the Newton's failure; in a way, they were letting the engineers design the product and stuff it with features, which gave it a high geek value but not much chance of mass-market success and not much cost-effectiveness, but then nickel-and-diming them on things like memory. It's unclear in retrospect what outcome they really could have expected under those circumstances.
I keep 3 turtles in a big tank. They are low-maintenance, won't shed hair all over, only need fed a few times a week, and given a good tank heater, clean water, some nooks and crannies to hide in, and an overhead light or sunlight and rocks to bask on, pretty much take care of themselves. I've even kept a heated indoor tank for nights and a sun-heated outdoor tank on my balcony for days (in the summer months only, for days when it will get up over 90; they love to bask in the sun).
The only problem with the outdoor tank is you have to make sure they can't wander off and get lost (they will climb over the edge of the tank and go for a stroll).
You can feed them canned "senior" dog food, making sure they get enough calcium, and supplement with just about any kind of chopped-up fresh fruits and vegetables, dried shrimp, mealworms, crickets, even brown rice, beans, leftover people-food salad... they are omnivores. They have different tastes. Giblet loves broccoli. Bubba hates bananas. Etc.
The possible downsides:
They don't have the most exciting life-style.
They aren't cuddly... in fact, they would prefer you didn't handle them. Although they will learn to take food from your fingers (watch the fingers; big ones can draw blood).
They are very messy eaters. You need a separate tub or tank to feed them in. If you feed them in their regular tank it will get clogged with rotting food. The books warn against feeding them in the sink but I have a big stainless steel sink with a garbage disposal, and that's where they get fed. Just clean it afterwards.
They can live a LONG time if you take care of them... like maybe 50 years! (Are you ready for a long-term commitment?)
They can bite HARD when they get to be bigger. I've got some scars on my hands.
Some of the breeds can be harder to deal with, especially if they need hibernation. Red-eared sliders, box turtles, and musk turtles are easy to take care of, though.
But they are an unusal pet, kids love to watch them in the tank, and they are mildly entertaining.
I have to agree that the movie is at least visually impressive and interesting, if not "gripping" in the sense of an edge-of-your-seat thriller. I have a special fondness for long films; whereas a short film can act like a short story, following a change in one character, a long film can follow multiple characters over real spans of time, and be about time itself. Examples of long films that I think are great, that could not do what they do in short versions:
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Wings of Desire (original)
Maybe it is partly a matter of being older, spending most of my formative years before MTV, and not watching much TV at all as a child, developing my attention span on books. People who can't get anything out of long movies because they don't have the attention span; well, I think they are missing out on something, like being unable to appreciate painting.
That said, my attention span for ballet is apparently zero. I've never made it though more than an hour of a dance performance without snoring loudly.
YES, potential readers, please be aware that although I quite enjoyed the book, it does follow along in the tradition of grotesque horror, with reanimated corpses, brain-sucking, lurking horrors, slaughterhouses, mutilation, torture, trips through sewers, vividly described mutated aliens.
(Of course, if you're a slashdot reader, this will probably increase rather than decrease your interest in the book... but I would not recommend it for, say, my mother...)
Interesting possibilities for using one as an audio recording workstation, in a rack with a FireWire audio interface like the MOTU 828. In that case maximum convenience would dictate one FireWire port in front, and one in back.
Yes, as a cross-platform Linux geek so far I am very disappointed at the quality of the PowerPC distributions. Mandrake 8.2b2 just informed me that the sound driver failed to start up right on a stock iMac DV. Not too cool.
So, YDL 2.2 is still MIA: I've got a cable modem and attempted download from all the mirrors to my RH 7.1 PC @ home. Bad results all weekend. There are SRPMs only, and the download failed each time; unlike downloading a big ISO file, I can't get Konqueror to pick up where it left off.
Managed to download YDL 2.1 and install it; it is reasonably good, although there are a lot of errata against this build and I also have not been able to download the directory full of update RPMs, get yup to work, etc. Dual boot with MacOS is not working, apparently since I installed YDL before installing MacOS. Unsure how to get dual boot up and running; simplest might be just to reinstall. Video performance is terrible when dragging windows; this is probably an unaccelerated X driver. The default fonts for Konqueror are almost unreadable; web pages show terrible aliasing.
Also managed to download and burn Mandrake 8.2b2: the installer is very nice, but would not recognize the second CD, although it was named as requested and mounts and appears fine on my PCs and Mac. This leads to missing RPM errors down the line. The installer is nice. It also looks like it supports network install, which is a big plus for me. The bootloader installer identified MacOS 9 and gives me a nice dual boot scenario. However, after configuring the default account and booting, I get a blank blue screen. Not crashed, but not a very good default install.
Attempted to find a reasonable build of Suse for PowerPC that I could download and install on the iMac... gave up (you are in a maze of twisty little broken mirrored directories, all different).
I did a little shopping to see if any of my local shops (CompUSA, Borders, Best Buy, etc.) here in Ann Arbor carried any recent Mac-compatible Linux install packages. None.
So far, the verdict is... (drum roll)... they ALL kind of suck! They don't meet the standard of quality set by the Red Hat installers.
Of course, RED HAT doesn't make it easy to get free ISOs any more, and they only provide security updates via their up-to-date mechanism on their subscription basis for paying customers now. I'm not sure what will happen if I attempt to update my (paid-for) 7.1 to 7.2, but I have a feeling I won't be able to continue to get free security updates.
So far... not impressed with Linux in the Brave New World. Familiarity may not be a good enough reason for me to stick with attempting to get it going on my Mac.
For my part, through long trial and error I have come to understand how to configure Linux servers and make them work. I am a MacOS user since 1984 and have been using MacOSX. I would like to be able to get apache running and configured, viewcvs up and running and configured, cervisia up and running, etc.
The configuration tools, build scripts, install scripts, etc. for Linux are mature and fairly easy to use. RPM is easy to use and generally reliable. I know how to configure the internet daemons, understand what I need to know about the boot process, etc. I got the desired viewcvs stuff working on my Linux box at home in only a short time and would like to get it configured at work.
By comparison, I have not had good luck getting all this stuff up and running on OSX. I am not familiar with BSD at all (it is full of gratuitous differences. The ports to OSX are not mature and the tools are not yet very robust.
Unfortunately, YDL has not been very useful for me. I bought a full package of version 2.0 a year or so ago, including a 3-button mouse and a t-shirt, but never did install it on my TiBook. I can't download 2.2, so I'm trying the 2.0 installs on an iMac at the office. So far the process has been a disaster. "yup" does not work, the installer siezes up on me every time I try to use it, I get endless package dependency errors, forcibly installing (with --nodepends) packages locks up the system, X was not properly installed, etc. etc. etc.
I might give Mandrake or Suse a shot. I'd like to have Linux on a Mac here at work and I am most familiar with the Red Hat distro. I will try to build some fresh install CDs at home and try again tomorrow but so far YDL is not cutting it. I _could_ screw around endlessly trying to build things from source but things ought to be easier than this by now.
Slashdot Mirror
Ruby is actually ten years old, as ten seconds looking at http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/ would have told you.
I am not knocking Python, but I have been investigating Ruby specifically because there were aspects of Python that I didn't like. I'm probably much more anal-retentive than the average developer; purity and consistency in the language design means a lot to me.
I've got a number of gripes with Ruby, but fewer than I had with Python. Among the many features I didn't like in Python were the lack of a consistent Boolean type and the lack of standard closure semantics. Instead, we get values evaluated in a Boolean context, which reminds me of all the things I didn't like about Perl. I also have been consistently given the impression that Guido is not really friendly to the functional programming community and the language will not evolve to be more supportive of the functional programming paradigm.
For context, my favorite programming languages have been Apple's NewtonScript, which was a very small language with an exceptionally clean design, and Dylan, which is not so small, but which makes Lispish programming paradigms available with a very clean Pascal-like syntax. Yep, I back the winners : )
Ruby also seems to represent a good merging of functional and object-oriented style; everything is truly an object, with no distinction between classes and types (Python is getting around to erasing this distinction as well, it seems).
Ruby has a lot of minor inconsistencies and things I don't like. I'm hoping perhaps I can get my voice heard on some of these issues. I'm not really in favor of including a lot of the Perlisms as part of the core language, but it seems like an excellent project to support.
In addition, I've been able to link Ruby into my C and C++ application code easily as a runtime support library and set up calls back and forth. That impressed me. Deploying Python this way has seemed harder, although maybe it can be done and I just haven't figured out how yet.
Well, yes; the copyright dates are 2001 and 2002. The version of Ruby designated stable is several years old as well, so I'm not sure this is a big liability; changes between the Ruby these books describe and the Ruby on your system are likely to be bug fixes, not major changes in functionality.
Paul
Did NPR really tell you to "fuck off?"
Seriously: did you write to them (a real letter) with a reasonable and convincing rationale for supporting an open streaming format? If so, what did they really say? (And who did you write to, and who replied?)
They are "public" radio; they do listen to listeners. (Although I'm a bit troubled that they now accept corporate backing from Microsoft; that certainly makes me concerned they will be open to pressure to conform to proprietary formats).
You're talking about "boxed" v. "unboxed" data, in Lisp and Lisp-like-languages terms. The issue here is that languages like Lisp and Scheme that use typing of objects, not of variables, do all this work for you behind the scenes. That is, entities which can be type-identified at runtime are automatically converted to primitive machine types when appropriate, for example during compilation, for languages that do this. A variable reference can hold any kind of entity at runtime.
In this regard Java tries to give the best of both worlds and winds up delivering neither. If you use primitive types, ints and whatnot, the resulting code will use machine types directly. ("Directly" meaning, in this case, via the byte code, or machine code if you're using a Java that gets compiled at some point). This is all well and good and satisifies the programmers who want to be close to the machine registers.
But because ints and whatnot are not objects, using them fails to support styles of programming where everything is an object and real genericity is possible. Hence the creation of the wrapper classes. Most Lisp-like languages don't need anything quite like this for their "boxed" data; they use instead a tagged word format, with a bit to indicate whether the word is a primitive machine type, a pointer to a more elaborate object, an array, or whatever. But in Java because of the strong compile-time typing, the user has to do all the boxing and unboxing and creation and translation from these Integer and other objects himself.
And so, in a way, the worst of both worlds, where you don't get the simplicity of untyped variables and typed values, or the simplicity of everything being an object... sacrificed for the rather muddied goal of keeping a byte-coded language close to the hardware, and limiting the complexity of the runtime.
Another reason why Java is not my favorite language.
Paul
The TRS-80 model 1 could do this too. There were some programs, probably from 80 Micro, that would play tunes on an nearby AM radio. Or you could use the radio to determine if your code had crashed. I tried to debug an assembly version of Life this way. Never did get that program working.
There were also programs that would tweak the audio out to the casette deck to play tunes (remember the system used audio casettes for recording data). I also recall someone's program that would overlay waveforms to produce several notes simultaneously - polyphony on a tiny battery-powered speaker attached to the casette port!
Those were the days to be a geek. Or something...
No one but me seems to use them, but I've personally seen amazing reliability with magneto-optical (MO) drives and media. In fact, I've never had one of my MO disks fail. I certainly can't say that about other media I've used:
- casettes (TRS-80 model 1 circa 1977)
- floppies (actually, 8" floppy disks are very reliable, and they go down from there)
- various kinds of streaming tape
- Bernoulli discs of various capacity
- zip discs of various capacity
- hard drives of various capacity
- CD-R and CD-RW of various capacity
Seriously, consider MO media such as the Fujitsu 1.3 gig discs and drives. Of course this does not address really long-term storage and the issues of lost/failing hardware and standards over decades, but I think this gives you one of the most stable physical formats available for "near-line" storage.
- Junior High and High School are going to suck. But just keep reminding yourself it will be over eventually. And college will be a lot more fun.
- By the way, you do in fact have what it takes to succeed in college. In fact, you'll have more fun if you actually pick a very competitive school. Just because most of the people in our high school aren't even going to college doesn't mean you shouldn't.
- Stick with math. I know your math teachers will be uniquely awful in all the world, but you will benefit greatly from developing some serious algebra, trig, and calculus skills. At some point, you will pretty much abandon math because of the abysmally poor teaching available to you. Don't; teach yourself.
- Getting laid by the time you're sixteen should not really be your primary goal at the present time. It won't do anything for your future to get some girl pregnant. Constant masturbation does not make you a loser at the present time. Obsessing mournfully about not getting laid, however, does.
- Start working now on skipping a grade or two, particularly your senior year in high school. Some smart people with smart parents are able to do that. Just a thought. You could save yourself a considerable amount of boredom.
- Save that twenty-page poem you wrote. Save copies of everything you write. Your thirty-five-year-old self wants to read them. It's OK that they aren't that good.
- Get some exercise. I know gym class has almost soured you on physical acivity for life, but you're going to regret not developing some exercise habits doing solo or non-competitive things that you actually like, such as biking hiking, and weightlifting.
- Lay off the high-fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated fats. One day we'll realize that putting these in just about every food item available was in fact a bad idea.
- It's really true -- none of the adults in your life do know quite what to do with you. Your parents don't know what to do with you, your teachers doen't know what to do with you, and no one is giving you much in the way of support or valuable advice for how to prepare for your future. Here are some additional miscellaneous tips:
- get more sleep. you can finish that book in a day or two.
- don't put so much effort into your part-time job. you're not getting any real benefits from working at a grocery store 35 hours a week while in high school.
- keep writing. in fact, write more.
- work on developing some actual social skills. these will prove to be far more valuable in college than the brains; sheer brains you've got covered.
- most of the biggest mistakes in your life up until the age of 35 will revolve around a lack of social maturity and self-confidence. work on that confidence thing.
- be careful: Jimmy Northrop and Edwin are both not going to be good friends; they are, in fact, both going to beat you up.
- give up the church youth groups and camps. these poor experiences with small-minded, bigoted people will sour you on spirituality and religion for the next twenty years. follow the spirituality and religious traditions that actually mean something to you.
- those chicks you'll be lusting after at the age of 19 are actually a deeply disturbed woman who will not age well at all. her problems are far beyond your ability to help with, so don't get sucked in. you deserve to date someone who is NOT psychotic once in a while. weird is OK... psychotic is not.
Last, but not least:
- hey, you at 35 doesn't suck. you're not obsese, you're good-looking, you've had some great relationships, you've got a great family, and you've done some great work. What does this imply about you at 12? Duh... think about it...
Thank you!
I couldn't believe the number of replies that had accumulated before someone actually mentioned something _relevant_ about the story. So many people calling it a knock-off or rip-off of some such story... when, in fact, it is an adaptation of a highly original work by a great writer. I have no opinion on how successful the adaptation of his previous work, "From Hell," is -- I haven't seen it, and the reviews I've read have been mixed.
I'm doubly surprised by the apparent level of ignorance of modern comics/graphic novels... c'mon, haven't y'all read Watchmen? This is by the guy who created Watchmen. It was a major, very influential work in the whole area of comics for grown-ups. I suppose y'all have never heard of Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns either?
(Maybe I'm dating myself... is everyone here under 30 but me?)
Anyway, thank you, bguilliams for pointing our what anyone discussing the topic should have taken the time to find out for him/herself.
Using an unreliable battery-operated device to replace a pad and paper to store names and addresses? Nope.
Making our lives miserable and giving us the attention span of hyperactive gnats by making us always available for harassment via telemarketers, pages, e-mails, and instant messages? Nope.
Giving us carpal tunnel syndrome and tendonitis just to move a cursor around the screen or pilot Mario around? Nah.
Making it so our kids can't use a paper library or fix their own spelling errors? No way...
Making it so the documents and esigns we spend our lives writing and creating have a recoverable life span less than a tenth that of the lowest-grade _paper_ available? Not even close...
Mixing a perfect gin and tonic? Now THAT'S technology!!!
Well, the same thing happened to me and I'm here to tell you that, at least at one point in time, for at least my domain, registrars were really bad about sending out renewal notices. I don't think it is quite fair to assume that the poster was "hounded with renewal notices" and was just careless.
I lost "potts.com" (my personal domain) about 1997 when I failed to receive a renewal notice, for whatever reason.
In previous years, I had gotten notices both by paper mail and e-mail; this year, nothing came. To the best of my knowledge, InterNIC(?) still had my valid home address and e-mail address. However, the designated domain server was at a previous employer's site, and it is possible the notice went to them, and my former co-workers didn't forward it, or whatever.
Yes, I should have been personally "watching it like a hawk" and realizing that it was going to be up for renewal, but I failed to. But, please realize that registrars have not always been known for applying scrupulous care in maintaining customer domain registrations.
In any case, the next time I checked the domain it was gone. (Try it: http://www.potts.com)
Also, the new owner is not "using" it in the usual sense; there is no individual, company, or whatever by the name of Potts with a web site or service available there. DotcomEmail.com are squatters. They buy up domains and then try to sell people e-mail or web service using that domain. Their web site claims "over 1500 domains available." But they don't want to sell you the domain, they want to rent their services at that domain.
And, yes, I've contacted them to request the name back. I can't pay them for my name back, so all I can do is ask. I can't say I think much of their business model.
Incidentally, I've submitted postings asking for ideas and advice on how to recover this domain to "Ask Slashdot" twice. The posting has never been accepted. So, it is interesting to see someone else get an "Ask Slashdot" posting accepted with, essentially, the same question.
It looks like the only hope I have is that DotComEmail.com (which used to bill itself as a "pre-IPO Internet Startup") will one day go out of business and I can put potts.com to some legitimate use (perhaps advertising my consulting services).
Would they be pissed if I won it back? Does it matter? Should I care, given their business model?
Well, if I had the resources to dispute it, I would do so, but that probably won't be possible. Now whether they have a legitimate right to potts.com by the rules of the registration system: well, of course they do.
But by any other world view? I don't think so. In the dot-com domain, someone who holds a company name or trademark or service mark, or even a family name, would be a better candidate.
But, note that potts.net and potts.org are also owned by another similar service (NetIdentity). Which is why my family has had to resort to "thepottshouse.org" for our personal site.
I'm still personally a little confused about this.
When I've programmed with FSMs, I've always thought of them as graphs of states (points) and transitions (edges). An input (message pulse, word, signal, whatever) then can trigger a state change, which I've usually implemented via some kind of table. The state change is accomplished by a function; in a useful program the state transition could call an arbitrary list of functions that might involve sending other messages to other state machines, etc., or doing other "stuff" with arbitrary side effects, but as far as the state machine is concerned, you would always just move to either a different state or the same state again.
So I need a little more info to crack this: to pin down some definitions. Just how restrictive are the rules of this little universe?
- Can each soldier have a DIFFERENT state machine?
- Obviously the state machine consists of states and transitions. What I'm hearing from dmorin is that my soldier can't distinguish between different messages. In other words, when it gets a "hut!" message it always moves on to the next state. It can't distinguish between hearing the general shout "fire" and some other message like "put your gun away and go home."
- Time is passing in discrete intervals, say, seconds, but can the "tick" of some global clock also be a message? or is the only message each soldier can hear just the generic "hut!" message from the general at one end or the soldiers on either side?
- Maybe this is needlessly picky, but would "firing" count as a state? The way I usually think of state machines, "fire" would be what happened when the state machine got a message that triggered the transition between "waiting to fire" and "fired." And "speaking" (issuing a "hut!" message to the soldier on the left and right would also be a transition.
- Lastly, can the soldier "aim" (distinguish) which soldier he yells "hut!" to? Or will both the soldier on the left and right "hear" him?
Paul
I agree and recommend TWiki (www.twiki.org)
I have installed it successfully and without much hassle on MacOSX and BSD, Linux, and BSD even running on an ISP's somewhat locked-down server. It is highly configurable, but the default setup is useful right out of the box.
Some features of TWiki I like:
- it's in Perl (and Perl is more likely to be available on system X than some of the newer languages)
- the source is quite readable
- it is highly readable
- the markup is extremely simple to learn
- your contents are stored in RCS files
- you can upload files (mentioned already)
- users can register to be notified about content changes by e-mail
Overall it has been a great tool. I'd like to see a few things improved, like support for creating new webs, real hierarchical namespaces for WikiWords (sub-webs), built-in preferences for enabling/disabling access to robots, simpler and better-looking default templates, and a little better support for generating a static site from the live site. But these are all pretty minor and for the most part I've been very happy with it. (And, if the itch to fix something becomes great enough, well, of course I should brush up on my Perl and contribute some fixes).
Paul R. Potts
Well, being allowed to compile it and able to compile it are too different things.
I've running Jaguar (MacOS X 10.2) with the version of the developer tools (freshly installed compiler, etc.) that they recommend.
I can't get it to build. Endless header file-referencing problems.
They explicitly do NOT provide technical help getting it to build, too.
My suspicion is just that the instructions are incorrect or incomplete and there are some dependencies out-of-order.
Anyone gotten it to build?
You know, some of us Slashdot readers are OLD ENOUGH TO HAVE CHILDREN that would enjoy this movie... AND DO. I appreciated the info on the film for _at_least_ that reason.
And at 35, I hope I never become too "mature" to enjoy a really good kid's film in any genre.
Both implementations look very promising, but there's always a problem. I've been aware of Eiffel for at least 9 years, but have never been able to use it for a real project, and, unfortunately, it looks like I will still not be able to.
The barriers now are the cost of the commercial IDE, which is pretty far out-of-line (but if that was the only barrier, it would not be enough to keep me from using it). My co-developer is a Microsoft user and is very pleased by the idea of being able to use his Visual Studio environment. So they've got at least one developer here interested that way.
The more important barrier is lack of a ready-to-roll set of tools for MacOS X. Normally I'd not be averse to becoming beta testers, but we can't bet this project on the quality of a beta.
I'll check back in another 9 years, I guess.
It's these "minor" practical matters more than anything else which means I'm still using the living hell that is C++ for my bread-and-butter work.
Paul R. Potts
Saying "I've handled thousands of (whatevers) and never noticed any damage" is not a very good use of anecdotal evidence because, as many people have pointed out, sometimes you can cause latent damage.
I personally have a lot of anecdotal evidence FOR immediate damage, which leads me to be quite concerned with ESD whenever I open something up, and even when I don't (as I'll explain).
I learned ESD precautions when going through basic training to be a certified level 1 Apple repair tech, many years ago. They had a cute little video.
Since then, I've frequently NOT used precautions, and damaged a lot of devices, many times with immediate results: video cards, which suddenly have bad pixels... ROM chips, which suddenly won't boot the device... memory chips... ADB ports... etc.
In Ohio/Michigan it is very, very dry indoors (and out) during certain winter months. The humidity makes an ENORMOUS difference in the chances that you will fry a device. It gets so dry you can get a painful shock just touching your PowerBook.
A lot of Palm devices have found out the hard way that when their Palm device is connected to their PC, for desktop synchronization, and they are all charged up, and touch the Palm device first... blam. That serial port does not necessarily make a very good safe path for ESD. I've blown out some serial ports and Palm devices that way. The Newton is also susceptible.
In short, if it is not uncomfortably humid where you are, it's dry enough to want to take ESD precautions. Use that wrist strap, or at the very least, make sure you take a moment to touch a properly grounded object frequently as you work. Be especially careful if you walk away from a disassembled machine and then come BACK. Don't touch anything else until you've made certain you are properly discharged.
Paul R. Potts
All right, to try and keep this from turning into an "it sucked! no, it didn't!" debate, some background.
I used (and programmed) every version of Newton device. There were several generations of Newton recognition software. The first generation was actually licensed from a Russian company called Paragraph. There was some speculation that it would perform better with Cyrillic. You could set it for cursive recognition, and could also tweak the individual character shapes it was looking for.
The algorithms were largely dictionary-based. Hence, it had a tendency to either do really well getting the words completely right, or really badly (substituting a really wacky word choice that was triggered a match). It was also possible to have the settings quite wrong for your handwriting, so that, for example, it did not know when you were breaking words (via letter spacing or pauses in your writing).
People had very mixed results with it. If you did not use cursive, it tended to be even worse. There was some idle speculation that it probably did really well with Cyrillic cursive, due to the software's origins, but I never heard any substantiation of tht rumor.
The original Newton (through OS 1.05) had many other problems, and clearly came out of the oven a bit too early. Battery life was poor. Memory was very limited. Recognition was extremely slow. One of the most noticeable was that the recognizer had a tendency to lock up and stop recognizing text; you had to hit the reset button to get it moving again. Fortunately, the early Newton stored data in flash, so even doing a reset after a severe crash, you were unlikely to lose any data. (You pretty much had to forcibly wipe the flash to do that).
Version 2.0 of the Newton software, dubbed "Newton Intelligence", came about initially with the MessagePad 130 or a ROM update to the 120. Developers were able to get the ROM from Apple and do the replacement themselves. 2.0 featured a new recognition strategy: support the cursive recognizer, and also offer a new character-by-character print recognizer. This one worked much better for me, and a lot of other users thought so too. It would also work for cursive. This is the recognizer that presumably Apple has ported. Allegedly it was based on an ATG project. One of the things that made it better was that its algorithms were more character-based than dictionary-based; it tended not to pick completely incorrect words. Instead, you'd see what you wrote with perhaps one letter wrong. You could use gestures similar to proofreading marks to edit that one letter, or even over-write the single wrong letter.
The Apple employees who described it at the Newton developer conferences spoke of it this way: when it made a mistake, instead of saying "HUH???", the user would say "huh."
When I first used a Palm, I was very disappointed that they were not able to use a recognition engine like the Newton character recognizer. It really did work much better. Yes, I learned Graffiti, but I never liked it, and to this day I don't use a Palm. I would use the Newton character recognizer on a portable Palm-sized device quite happily.
Apple doesn't get much credit for its innovations. Remember that the MessagePad 2100 could do all this, although somewhat awkwardly and perhaps just barely:
- run Pocket Quicken or other checkbook apps
- do shape recognition and editing
- run a spreadsheet
- run a graphing calculator/solver
- store text as raw "ink" (compressed vector graphics) and recognize it at a later time
- provide 2 PCMCIA memory card slots
- do infrared data exchange
- drive a modem card
- run a mini- web browser
- do shape recognition
- do desktop sync
- record and playback voice memos
- do text-to-speech (in a pretty primitive Macintalk-1.0 way).
- support a keyboard
- ran applications written in very cool dynamic, interpreted, byte-coded language optimized for low memory footprint, using ideas from languages like Scheme and Self, but with a simple Pascal-like syntax. (This was pre-Java).
Of course, it was also way too expensive, and Apple was not able to get the price down in time to gain market share. Flash memory was expensive. Static memory was expensive. The screen was expensive. It was expensive to assemble. If you ever took one apart, it was clear that it required a great deal of skilled labor to assemble. The screen itself was an elaborate sandwich of the recognizer, the LCD screen, and a backlight. There were wires running all over the innards. Compare that to a Palm device, which was designed for minimal chip count and minimal cost to manufacture. It was not just Apple's desire to maintain profit margins at work, although that no doubt played a part too.
I personally was very fond of using the Newton to keep notes and balance my checkbook. The character-based recognizer and StrongARM chip made it usable.
Nevertheless, when we developed software for naive new-to-the-device end users, we did everything with popups and radio buttons. Trying to get a novice user to successfully use any computer handwriting recognizer immediately is not yet feasible (and may not be for some time).
I personally am rather annoyed to see Steve's childish behavior in ignoring and marginalizing all the R&D and many smart peoples' hard work that went into the Newton. Sure, it may have been a failure as a product in the long term, but it caught people's imagination and was definitely a technological success in many ways, and its technolgies have not been equalled in another product.
The engineers who designed it don't deserve more snide behavior from Apple's self-appointed "savior." They took enough flak at the time for trying to create something so far ahead of the curve, and getting yanked around by having the Newton group spun in, spun out, and unceremoniously killed.
The marketers and project managers leading certainly deserve a healthy share of the blame for the Newton's failure; in a way, they were letting the engineers design the product and stuff it with features, which gave it a high geek value but not much chance of mass-market success and not much cost-effectiveness, but then nickel-and-diming them on things like memory. It's unclear in retrospect what outcome they really could have expected under those circumstances.
Paul R. Potts
I keep 3 turtles in a big tank. They are low-maintenance, won't shed hair all over, only need fed a few times a week, and given a good tank heater, clean water, some nooks and crannies to hide in, and an overhead light or sunlight and rocks to bask on, pretty much take care of themselves. I've even kept a heated indoor tank for nights and a sun-heated outdoor tank on my balcony for days (in the summer months only, for days when it will get up over 90; they love to bask in the sun).
The only problem with the outdoor tank is you have to make sure they can't wander off and get lost (they will climb over the edge of the tank and go for a stroll).
You can feed them canned "senior" dog food, making sure they get enough calcium, and supplement with just about any kind of chopped-up fresh fruits and vegetables, dried shrimp, mealworms, crickets, even brown rice, beans, leftover people-food salad... they are omnivores. They have different tastes. Giblet loves broccoli. Bubba hates bananas. Etc.
The possible downsides:
They don't have the most exciting life-style.
They aren't cuddly... in fact, they would prefer you didn't handle them. Although they will learn to take food from your fingers (watch the fingers; big ones can draw blood).
They are very messy eaters. You need a separate tub or tank to feed them in. If you feed them in their regular tank it will get clogged with rotting food. The books warn against feeding them in the sink but I have a big stainless steel sink with a garbage disposal, and that's where they get fed. Just clean it afterwards.
They can live a LONG time if you take care of them... like maybe 50 years! (Are you ready for a long-term commitment?)
They can bite HARD when they get to be bigger. I've got some scars on my hands.
Some of the breeds can be harder to deal with, especially if they need hibernation. Red-eared sliders, box turtles, and musk turtles are easy to take care of, though.
But they are an unusal pet, kids love to watch them in the tank, and they are mildly entertaining.
I have to agree that the movie is at least visually impressive and interesting, if not "gripping" in the sense of an edge-of-your-seat thriller. I have a special fondness for long films; whereas a short film can act like a short story, following a change in one character, a long film can follow multiple characters over real spans of time, and be about time itself. Examples of long films that I think are great, that could not do what they do in short versions:
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Wings of Desire (original)
Maybe it is partly a matter of being older, spending most of my formative years before MTV, and not watching much TV at all as a child, developing my attention span on books. People who can't get anything out of long movies because they don't have the attention span; well, I think they are missing out on something, like being unable to appreciate painting.
That said, my attention span for ballet is apparently zero. I've never made it though more than an hour of a dance performance without snoring loudly.
YES, potential readers, please be aware that although I quite enjoyed the book, it does follow along in the tradition of grotesque horror, with reanimated corpses, brain-sucking, lurking horrors, slaughterhouses, mutilation, torture, trips through sewers, vividly described mutated aliens.
(Of course, if you're a slashdot reader, this will probably increase rather than decrease your interest in the book... but I would not recommend it for, say, my mother...)
Interesting possibilities for using one as an audio recording workstation, in a rack with a FireWire audio interface like the MOTU 828. In that case maximum convenience would dictate one FireWire port in front, and one in back.
Yes, as a cross-platform Linux geek so far I am very disappointed at the quality of the PowerPC distributions. Mandrake 8.2b2 just informed me that the sound driver failed to start up right on a stock iMac DV. Not too cool.
So, YDL 2.2 is still MIA: I've got a cable modem and attempted download from all the mirrors to my RH 7.1 PC @ home. Bad results all weekend. There are SRPMs only, and the download failed each time; unlike downloading a big ISO file, I can't get Konqueror to pick up where it left off.
Managed to download YDL 2.1 and install it; it is reasonably good, although there are a lot of errata against this build and I also have not been able to download the directory full of update RPMs, get yup to work, etc. Dual boot with MacOS is not working, apparently since I installed YDL before installing MacOS. Unsure how to get dual boot up and running; simplest might be just to reinstall. Video performance is terrible when dragging windows; this is probably an unaccelerated X driver. The default fonts for Konqueror are almost unreadable; web pages show terrible aliasing.
Also managed to download and burn Mandrake 8.2b2: the installer is very nice, but would not recognize the second CD, although it was named as requested and mounts and appears fine on my PCs and Mac. This leads to missing RPM errors down the line. The installer is nice. It also looks like it supports network install, which is a big plus for me. The bootloader installer identified MacOS 9 and gives me a nice dual boot scenario. However, after configuring the default account and booting, I get a blank blue screen. Not crashed, but not a very good default install.
Attempted to find a reasonable build of Suse for PowerPC that I could download and install on the iMac... gave up (you are in a maze of twisty little broken mirrored directories, all different).
I did a little shopping to see if any of my local shops (CompUSA, Borders, Best Buy, etc.) here in Ann Arbor carried any recent Mac-compatible Linux install packages. None.
So far, the verdict is... (drum roll)... they ALL kind of suck! They don't meet the standard of quality set by the Red Hat installers.
Of course, RED HAT doesn't make it easy to get free ISOs any more, and they only provide security updates via their up-to-date mechanism on their subscription basis for paying customers now. I'm not sure what will happen if I attempt to update my (paid-for) 7.1 to 7.2, but I have a feeling I won't be able to continue to get free security updates.
So far... not impressed with Linux in the Brave New World. Familiarity may not be a good enough reason for me to stick with attempting to get it going on my Mac.
For my part, through long trial and error I have come to understand how to configure Linux servers and make them work. I am a MacOS user since 1984 and have been using MacOSX. I would like to be able to get apache running and configured, viewcvs up and running and configured, cervisia up and running, etc.
The configuration tools, build scripts, install scripts, etc. for Linux are mature and fairly easy to use. RPM is easy to use and generally reliable. I know how to configure the internet daemons, understand what I need to know about the boot process, etc. I got the desired viewcvs stuff working on my Linux box at home in only a short time and would like to get it configured at work.
By comparison, I have not had good luck getting all this stuff up and running on OSX. I am not familiar with BSD at all (it is full of gratuitous differences. The ports to OSX are not mature and the tools are not yet very robust.
Unfortunately, YDL has not been very useful for me. I bought a full package of version 2.0 a year or so ago, including a 3-button mouse and a t-shirt, but never did install it on my TiBook. I can't download 2.2, so I'm trying the 2.0 installs on an iMac at the office. So far the process has been a disaster. "yup" does not work, the installer siezes up on me every time I try to use it, I get endless package dependency errors, forcibly installing (with --nodepends) packages locks up the system, X was not properly installed, etc. etc. etc.
I might give Mandrake or Suse a shot. I'd like to have Linux on a Mac here at work and I am most familiar with the Red Hat distro. I will try to build some fresh install CDs at home and try again tomorrow but so far YDL is not cutting it. I _could_ screw around endlessly trying to build things from source but things ought to be easier than this by now.