Yep. X (built from CVS sources) barfs and says that protocol isn't supported on this platform. And when I go look at the psm(4) manpage, there's nothing about the ThinkingMousePS/2 protocol.
What's irritating is that if I hook the mouse up to the serial port and probe it with moused -d/dev/cuaa0 -i all, the system reports it properly as a ThinkingMouse.
I've been waiting for this for years, as well. However, I just tried the ThinkingMouse protocol, and (unsurprisingly) got no love in XFree 4.0.2, on FreeBSD 4.2-stable. I tried the following:
But the pointer didn't move properly, and none of the buttons worked. The system doesn't even recoginize ThinkingMousePS/2 as a protocol, and forget trying it with moused. More X lameness.
A question for the/. masses:
I'm wondering if there's any hope for browsing the web mouseless under X?
I use Ion as a window manager, and live for the most part in Emacs, but I'm still at a loss when dealing with the web.
Navigator 4.mumble supports rudimentary keyboarding, but I can't select links in the body of a document. I built Mozilla out of an updated ports last night, and tabbing betwee links "sort of" works (their heuristic which chooses where to start is totally broken), but the browsing experience is so unpleasant that it's a move of last resort. Sadly, this is one more area where IE rules over the competition.
I've tried w3 mode, but it's not really good enough. Lynx is of course a possibility, but much of the web is visual and I don't want to give that up just because my hands hurt.
Any ideas?
TIA,
(jfb)
This is one of the most amazing misfeatures in the Windows shell imaginable -- as if using the name of the file to determine the type isn't the most backwards decision ever, they compound their crime by actually HIDING information from the user that is ESSENTIAL to operate the computer. Everytime I try using Windows as something other than a game- or ACL-launching platform, shit like this just makes me want to cry.
And they don't try and take credit for the BSD layer, dumbass. Mac OS X is so much more, and so much better, than any other Unix-based desktop, that the BSD core is hardly the most crucial thing about it.
Take, for example, the unified configuration management system. Or Quartz. Or Netinfo. Or the simple fact that I'll finally be able to run applications that don't suck (like Photoshop) next to a native windowing Emacs and CMUCL. No other Unix allows anything like the usability of Mac OS X.
You could ask him about apostolic succession. If he gets all red in the face and begins roaring on about The Whore Of Babylon, you've got yourself a genuine Looney-Tunes Holy Roller on your hands -- doubtless Protestant.
Yes. Half-Life was amazing -- I didn't even play it until last year, and was amazed at how much better everything worked compared to Unreal or any of the id games. As they say, money can't buy taste.
My vote for best video game ever would have to be Zelda on the N64. Talk about your immersive environments! I've played it through four or five times, because just/being there/ is such a pleasure.
Hey, I think Oni sucks on toast, but this is just plain wrong.
If your're on a Mac, hold down shift as the game starts to get a dialog for editing controls. On the PC, you edit a text file (EDIT A TEXT FILE!) called key_config.txt in the Oni game directory. Ok, that's/almost/ worse than not being able to config your controls.
The real problems with Oni are:
1. The save system. Save points suck the peanuts out of my shit. And the game difficulty is/totally/ out of whack, meaning that you'll spend hours trying the same stupid sequence over and over and over and over, only to die centimeters from the save point. Welcome to Oni! Here's your accordion!
2. The reliance on jumping puzzles. The only thing that would be worse would be spooky castles and lava. Oh wait: there's bio-sludge. Bio-sludge! Under tiny little catwalks! Catwalks! All this game really needs to complete it's transformation into a jumping twitch console game is... uh... save points.
3. The voice acting. It's abysmal. Maybe the stilted, middle-school dialogue gets the Anime loving sweaty palmed Japanese schoolgirl fetishist community all wet in the biscuit, but for the rest of us it's/really/ offputting.
4. The environments. Yes, they're cool, and they do look really good. But for all their "real-world" sophistication, they're still just videogame levels. For instance, you break into a government archive building. Ok so far. But what's missing? Chairs! Desks! Watercoolers! ANYTHING! There are lots of tiny offices (full of gun-toting security, of course), but apparently DMV employees in the year 2032 are forced to stand up all day long, working at clearly unergonomic wall mounted cubicles. Where's OSHA? More to the point: what's the use of having REAL ARCHITECTS design buildings that are totally empty, except for the odd crate or cringing civilian?
6. Enemy AI is really bad. The opponents are of two kinds: the useless street thug who chases you ham-fistedly around, and O Sensei. Game balance again, of course. Oh, and they NEVER MISS when they're shooting at you. Even the goons are apparently Marine Sharpshooters.
7. No multiplayer?
8 - infinity: see 7
Admittedly, the game has some things going for it. It looks great, the combat is a blast, and the lack of blood is actually a pretty big plus. I like the fact that you're encouraged to fight hand to hand by the relative scarcity of ammo. Still, it's a sad little wet fart of a game, overall, and does not bode well for the future.
Please God (Bill?), don't let the incompetents who made this game so crappy screw up Halo.
The last time I was at my mom's house, I dug my old Bloom County books out of the basement and gave them a look. Some of it is definitely dated, and there was a dramatic dropoff in quality towards the end, but much like Doonesbury, the essential humanity of the characters always shone through.
No, you didn't. Or at least you weren't paying attention. Hatch is talking about instituting a compulsory license for on-line music that would exist alongside the copyright holder's other licensing options. The compulsory license is a long standing mechanism. How do you think that an artist gets permission to cover another's song, for instance? They can negotiate with the copyright holder, or just go ahead and do it, in which case they are subject to the terms of the compulsory license.
Hatch's idea is an interesting one; it wouldn't allow "free" music sharing, but rather would open the door for anybody to get in on distribution of copyrighted works. It would enable, as you say, people willingly to pay a reasonable price of their use of music.
Whether the record industry should continue to operate in their savagely atavistic thuggish manner is a different kettle of fish food, of course.
... what is by far the coolest thing in the whole interview:
All the built-ins to ksh93 can generate their own manual page in several formats and locales.
That's almost enough to get me to start using it. Thank you, David Korn. It'd be a pleasure if other authors took this idea and ran with it, especially on systems with the more brain-damaged documentation (you know who you are.)
You mention what I think is the best (only?) reason to buy low end Sun workstations:
They also run the same systems your big box in the basement runs...
This is right on the money. It's the whole reason they developed the Ultra 5/10, I think. It's actually a huge boon when you can run your compiles on that wussy little desktop in complete certainty that it'll work the same on the big dog. Of course, that requires a disciplined, competent IT department, which is rarer than hen's teeth, but that's a separate argument.
It's ironic, of course, that Sun implicitly encourages this sort of thing, given their very public focus on a) the "network appliance" and b) Java's WORA hype.
Face it: buying any Unix workstation these days is an exercise in futility, unless you have very specific needs. All the low end stuff from Sun, for instance, is straightup garbage (I have my deep reservations about/all/ Sun hardware these days, as well). Their budget workstations are just PCs with a super slow Ultra Sparc shoehorned in there. Any PC running a free Unix will stomp an Ultra 10 into the ground.
You don't get to the interesting stuff until your budget scales way up, of course -- when you start getting into the SGI Onyx territory, you begin to see performance numbers that no Intel box is capable of. But nobody buys those for the desktop, and regardless, it's not (usually) a function of raw processor power.
It's such a relief, after installing a port, or while struggling with some stoopid library, to type "man -k foo" and get USEFUL and RELEVANT information. This might be my number one reason not to switch to Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep. X (built from CVS sources) barfs and says that protocol isn't supported on this platform. And when I go look at the psm(4) manpage, there's nothing about the ThinkingMousePS/2 protocol.
/dev/cuaa0 -i all, the system reports it properly as a ThinkingMouse.
What's irritating is that if I hook the mouse up to the serial port and probe it with moused -d
(jfb)
I've been waiting for this for years, as well. However, I just tried the ThinkingMouse protocol, and (unsurprisingly) got no love in XFree 4.0.2, on FreeBSD 4.2-stable. I tried the following:
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "ExpertMouse"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Protocol" "ThinkingMouse"
Option "Device" "/dev/psm0"
Option "Buttons" "4"
EndSection
But the pointer didn't move properly, and none of the buttons worked. The system doesn't even recoginize ThinkingMousePS/2 as a protocol, and forget trying it with moused. More X lameness.
Anybody gotten this to work in XFree 4.x?
(jfb)
Hot damn. Works like a charm, builds out of /usr/ports/www/linux-opera without a hitch.
Thanks.
(jfb)
A question for the /. masses:
I'm wondering if there's any hope for browsing the web mouseless under X?
I use Ion as a window manager, and live for the most part in Emacs, but I'm still at a loss when dealing with the web.
Navigator 4.mumble supports rudimentary keyboarding, but I can't select links in the body of a document. I built Mozilla out of an updated ports last night, and tabbing betwee links "sort of" works (their heuristic which chooses where to start is totally broken), but the browsing experience is so unpleasant that it's a move of last resort. Sadly, this is one more area where IE rules over the competition.
I've tried w3 mode, but it's not really good enough. Lynx is of course a possibility, but much of the web is visual and I don't want to give that up just because my hands hurt.
Any ideas?
TIA,
(jfb)
This is one of the most amazing misfeatures in the Windows shell imaginable -- as if using the name of the file to determine the type isn't the most backwards decision ever, they compound their crime by actually HIDING information from the user that is ESSENTIAL to operate the computer. Everytime I try using Windows as something other than a game- or ACL-launching platform, shit like this just makes me want to cry.
No real content, just an amazed head shaking.
(jfb)
You expected a solid, well written, technically savvy programming essay from Eric "I know python!" Raymond? Well, I never.
(jfb)
And they don't try and take credit for the BSD layer, dumbass. Mac OS X is so much more, and so much better, than any other Unix-based desktop, that the BSD core is hardly the most crucial thing about it.
Take, for example, the unified configuration management system. Or Quartz. Or Netinfo. Or the simple fact that I'll finally be able to run applications that don't suck (like Photoshop) next to a native windowing Emacs and CMUCL. No other Unix allows anything like the usability of Mac OS X.
(jfb)
Maybe some spooky castles? Robot-demons? Lava?
God, games suck.
(jfb)
You could ask him about apostolic succession. If he gets all red in the face and begins roaring on about The Whore Of Babylon, you've got yourself a genuine Looney-Tunes Holy Roller on your hands -- doubtless Protestant.
(jfb)
You're going to have to throw some of these back -- you're over the limit.
(jfb)
Pretty good troll. You should have put in something about, say, a VA box beating an SP/2 as well.
(jfb)
I really hope that you're right. I loved the Marathon and Myth series more than any person ought, and I really like the idea of Halo.
But oh good God almighty it better not suck eggs like Oni.
(jfb)
Yes. Half-Life was amazing -- I didn't even play it until last year, and was amazed at how much better everything worked compared to Unreal or any of the id games. As they say, money can't buy taste.
/being there/ is such a pleasure.
My vote for best video game ever would have to be Zelda on the N64. Talk about your immersive environments! I've played it through four or five times, because just
(jfb)
Hey, I think Oni sucks on toast, but this is just plain wrong.
/almost/ worse than not being able to config your controls.
/totally/ out of whack, meaning that you'll spend hours trying the same stupid sequence over and over and over and over, only to die centimeters from the save point. Welcome to Oni! Here's your accordion!
... uh ... save points.
/really/ offputting.
If your're on a Mac, hold down shift as the game starts to get a dialog for editing controls. On the PC, you edit a text file (EDIT A TEXT FILE!) called key_config.txt in the Oni game directory. Ok, that's
The real problems with Oni are:
1. The save system. Save points suck the peanuts out of my shit. And the game difficulty is
2. The reliance on jumping puzzles. The only thing that would be worse would be spooky castles and lava. Oh wait: there's bio-sludge. Bio-sludge! Under tiny little catwalks! Catwalks! All this game really needs to complete it's transformation into a jumping twitch console game is
3. The voice acting. It's abysmal. Maybe the stilted, middle-school dialogue gets the Anime loving sweaty palmed Japanese schoolgirl fetishist community all wet in the biscuit, but for the rest of us it's
4. The environments. Yes, they're cool, and they do look really good. But for all their "real-world" sophistication, they're still just videogame levels. For instance, you break into a government archive building. Ok so far. But what's missing? Chairs! Desks! Watercoolers! ANYTHING! There are lots of tiny offices (full of gun-toting security, of course), but apparently DMV employees in the year 2032 are forced to stand up all day long, working at clearly unergonomic wall mounted cubicles. Where's OSHA? More to the point: what's the use of having REAL ARCHITECTS design buildings that are totally empty, except for the odd crate or cringing civilian?
6. Enemy AI is really bad. The opponents are of two kinds: the useless street thug who chases you ham-fistedly around, and O Sensei. Game balance again, of course. Oh, and they NEVER MISS when they're shooting at you. Even the goons are apparently Marine Sharpshooters.
7. No multiplayer?
8 - infinity: see 7
Admittedly, the game has some things going for it. It looks great, the combat is a blast, and the lack of blood is actually a pretty big plus. I like the fact that you're encouraged to fight hand to hand by the relative scarcity of ammo. Still, it's a sad little wet fart of a game, overall, and does not bode well for the future.
Please God (Bill?), don't let the incompetents who made this game so crappy screw up Halo.
(jfb)
Well, I set you up for that one.
The last time I was at my mom's house, I dug my old Bloom County books out of the basement and gave them a look. Some of it is definitely dated, and there was a dramatic dropoff in quality towards the end, but much like Doonesbury, the essential humanity of the characters always shone through.
Good stuff.
"Yes, it was poor little PETAs turn yesterday."
(jfb)
But what about nun beating?
(jfb)
OK, I just read the article.
No, you didn't. Or at least you weren't paying attention. Hatch is talking about instituting a compulsory license for on-line music that would exist alongside the copyright holder's other licensing options. The compulsory license is a long standing mechanism. How do you think that an artist gets permission to cover another's song, for instance? They can negotiate with the copyright holder, or just go ahead and do it, in which case they are subject to the terms of the compulsory license.
Hatch's idea is an interesting one; it wouldn't allow "free" music sharing, but rather would open the door for anybody to get in on distribution of copyrighted works. It would enable, as you say, people willingly to pay a reasonable price of their use of music.
Whether the record industry should continue to operate in their savagely atavistic thuggish manner is a different kettle of fish food, of course.
(jfb)
Totally irrelevant aside, but Postscript fonts could most certainly be considered programs.
(jfb)
Because FireWire is a radically superior technology, with a huge selection of devices available now?
(jfb)
> Yep, fvwm is probably the fastest and smallest
/usr/local/bin/lwm
Oh yeah?
gamera:~% ls -l `which lwm`
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 31015 Feb 3 11:30
Can't beat that with a stick. It's a great wm, too, very reminiscent of twm. You can get it here.
(jfb)
... what is by far the coolest thing in the whole interview:
All the built-ins to ksh93 can generate their own manual page in several formats and locales.
That's almost enough to get me to start using it. Thank you, David Korn. It'd be a pleasure if other authors took this idea and ran with it, especially on systems with the more brain-damaged documentation (you know who you are.)
(jfb)
You mention what I think is the best (only?) reason to buy low end Sun workstations:
...
They also run the same systems your big box in the basement runs
This is right on the money. It's the whole reason they developed the Ultra 5/10, I think. It's actually a huge boon when you can run your compiles on that wussy little desktop in complete certainty that it'll work the same on the big dog. Of course, that requires a disciplined, competent IT department, which is rarer than hen's teeth, but that's a separate argument.
It's ironic, of course, that Sun implicitly encourages this sort of thing, given their very public focus on a) the "network appliance" and b) Java's WORA hype.
(jfb)
A Spark? What's that?
/all/ Sun hardware these days, as well). Their budget workstations are just PCs with a super slow Ultra Sparc shoehorned in there. Any PC running a free Unix will stomp an Ultra 10 into the ground.
Face it: buying any Unix workstation these days is an exercise in futility, unless you have very specific needs. All the low end stuff from Sun, for instance, is straightup garbage (I have my deep reservations about
You don't get to the interesting stuff until your budget scales way up, of course -- when you start getting into the SGI Onyx territory, you begin to see performance numbers that no Intel box is capable of. But nobody buys those for the desktop, and regardless, it's not (usually) a function of raw processor power.
(jfb)
How soon IS now?
(jfb)
THIS IS SO TRUE.
...
It's such a relief, after installing a port, or while struggling with some stoopid library, to type "man -k foo" and get USEFUL and RELEVANT information. This might be my number one reason not to switch to Linux.
XFS, on the other hand
(jfb)