Really? I must have been imagining it yesterday when I dragged a Zip disk to the trash, and instead of deleting it, it ejected it.
that offsets..what?
It offset the Macintosh bigots who say that the Mac is the only totally intuitive OS out there. It isn't intuitive, and neither are any of the others. You're just used to its inconsistencies, the way I'm used to the inconsistencies in the OSes I use on a daily basis.
The only intuitive interface is the nipple - all others are learned.
Remember the fun of typing DISKCOPY A: B: on a DOS system that only had one floppy drive? Same deal.
It would only be the "same deal" if the way you ejected a disk in DOS would be to type "del a:*.*". Face it, the Macintosh required you do something not just unituitive, but totally antithetical to your instincts that are screaming "if you do this, it will delete all your files!".
Ah yes, the OS where you inuitively drag everything to the trash when you never want it to be used again, except for removable media, where dragging it to the trash means "pop it out so I can use it later". And using the "Eject disk" menu item means "pop it out, but then nag me about it not being in the drive incessantly until I put it back in". Yeah, that's intuitive all right.
Opening up the source of Quake was the worst thing that ever happened to it. Suddenly, from a few games being unplayable because of cheating, now you can't find a server out there that doesn't have people who've compiled in their own new cheats, as well as the ones that were present in the non-open-source one. And there are cheating servers as well - ones that give an advantage to the cheaters who run them.
Team Fortress Classic is bad enough now with cheaters being all over the place, I shudder to think what would happen if all those lamers could compile stuff into their clients to give them infinite armour, infinite ammo, infinite health, extra speed, automatic aiming and a really small bounding box.
I have to wonder what motivates the cheaters, but the fact is that they are out there, they use every cheat they can find, and giving them access to the source is the worst possible thing I can imagine.
the table is made from aluminium and duct tape and then
If the table was made from a more conductive metal for magnets, or covered in some velcro-friendly fluff, fine.
Ever considered that maybe the duct tape was sticky side out?
there's never been a public copy of CDDB available to have been somehow copied by the freedb folks
Early versions of xcd or whatever it was called included, in the source tar, a copy of the cddb database, and instructions on how to email in your updates.
It's proof of nothing, they said. That's not my daughter's paper.
At that point, don't you just say "That's the only paper I got with her name on it by the deadline, so either she gets a zero for cheating or a zero for missing the assignment. I'll even let you choose which one."
Of course, you only use that in courses where there is a "no make-up assignments for missed assignments" policy.
It's worse than that - cow orkers was in common use in alt.peeves and then alt.religion.kibology and then alt.folklore.urban long before Dilbert even existed.
My *Canadian* 11 year old writes better than him. And she's the product of public schooling. I thought home schooling was all about a better quality of education? Well, either that or fundies trying to make sure their kids don't learn about evolution.
Fool! That is proper Canadian English and spelling.
Nice try, but I *am* Canadian. But then again, I never was a very good one - not polite enough. And I lived in Quebec for 5 years, which makes me instantly suspicious to anybody living west of Brampton (where, God help me, I lived for a different 5 years).
Do you count the hours I'm at work? Do you subtract from that the hours I spend reading Slashdot and The Register? How about the Half Life games? And the time spent talking to my cow orkers about non-work stuff?
Do you add back in the hours when I've woken up in the middle of the night with a brilliant idea of how to solve the latest problem? And do you count just the time awake writing it down so I don't forget it, or the time I spent mulling it over in my mind while half-asleep or watching TV? Do you add in the time I spend going over the code in my mind while driving to and from work?
Do you add or subtract the time I spend at home working on my free software project, because while it's time I *don't* spend mulling over work problems, it's also time that keeps me sharp and remembering when software development was fun.
Face it, the concept of hours worked is meaningless, and mostly used by people who mistake action for progress.
I once worked on a job with a bunch of droids from Andersen Consulting. Andersen had a corporate culture of working 24 hours a day during crunch times, and it was *always* crunch times. I bought into it on one project with them, and used to wonder if it was worth getting undressed and into bed when I stumbled back to my hotel room at 4am realizing that I had a breakfast meeting at 6:30. But the second time I worked with these guys, I was working with a guy on this problem and we were going around in circles. I recognized what we were doing, and said that I was going home at 11:30pm. I got back into work the next morning, and the Anderoid was still working on the problem, having been there all night. And it appeared that all he'd done was try the same ideas we'd already tried twice before I went home. I, on the other hand, had realized what the problem was while showering and on the drive in had formulated a solution which had worked first time.
It's not the responsibility of a language to conform to the features offered by existing editors
Maybe not in your dream world, but out here in the real world I have code to write, and it there is no editor that will skip to the end of a block in Python, but there is in every other language that I use, then I know what I'm going to choose.
If Joe Schmoe puts in 8 spaces, followed by a tab, it's not Python's fault.
Once again, the real world isn't that simple. Code gets lots and lots of different programmers working on it, over the course of years. And in every other language I use, tabs versus spaces are not an issue. So once again, I look at what has really happened in my 20 years of professional programming experience rather than what should happen in an idea world, see that it would cause major problems in Python, and decide not to choose Python for my next project.
No common text editor has a decent "go to the end of the block" function. They all have "go to the matching brace", though.
What happens when you have a line with 8 spaces followed by a line with a tab? I haven't used python, but one language I used that used whitespace indentation treated them differently, so you had lines that looked like they were indented the same, but the interpreter didn't think they were. Add in complications with people who have set their tab stops differently from you, and you might as well give up right now.
Back when the Internet was designed and run by techies, the techies would say that they needed three redundant backbones running through different cities and with no common switching points to make sure they had 100% uptime, and they leased the lines to do it. But now the Internet is in the hands of profit seeking companies, and the bean counters say "we don't have to have 100% reliability, 80% is good enough, so stop using three backbones where one will do", and suddenly you have the situation where one backhoe can cut off one part of the country from another.
You cannot just sit in your room and hack those out.
No, but you can start with US Census TIGER data, and work with dozens of other sources of free data.
I'm currently doing a program that generates databases for a free palm pilot flight planning program called CoPilot. Getting the data and writing scripts to import it is the hard part, in part because new data comes out every 28 days. The only problem I have right now is that the FAA "order form" for digital data doesn't have any feedback, so two weeks after you filled in the form and you still don't see any data, you don't know if that's because they didn't get the order, or they're just really slow processing orders, or they are waiting until the next data update cycle. So I have some older less complete data from another source for now, but I think I know where to get the latest and best data cheap.
The really sad thing is that I worked for ESRI's big competition (GeoVision) in the 1987-1992 time-frame. Back in 1991-2 I got interested in Linux, and I actually considered stealing a copy of the source code from work to try and port it to Linux (which I would have given back to the company). It wouldn't have been a big deal, since it ran on SunOS, Ultrix and AIX. The only problem at that time was the lack of a decent SQL database for Linux. Mostly our stuff ran on Oracle, but it also ran on a few others. The other major problem was that the only way I could transfer all the source code for a huge GIS application from work to my home PC was on 3.5" floppies. That would have been more painful that installing SLS 1.03 from 5.25" floppies, which I had also done.
GeoVision's product is still around, after going through a series of owners. It's still a damn good GIS. And it would probably be dead easy to port it to Linux now, since Oracle is on Linux. Heck, I think even Oracle MultiDimension, a product I worked on at Oracle, is available for Linux.
A lot of recent protests that were planned on the net were quashed by massive law enforcement action. You see, law enforcement officers read the protest web sites and newsgroups too.
I suppose it would help if the people organizing the protests knew what the hell they were talking about and protesting, instead of protesting for the sake of protesting.
Ok, now I'm confused. The NY Times article mentions solar powered aircraft *and* jet fuel, but the company web page doesn't mention solar power at all.
If slashdot had a "Cancel" function, I would cancel my previous post.
Read the article again. Which part of "solar-powered" didn't you understand?
I'm suprised the article mentions manned aircraft. The original proposal I read for "aerosats" was aircraft that would take off under remote control, get to cruising altitude then go autonomous until they needed to descend in a few weeks at which point they'd be taken over by remote control again.
What sort of arrogance is it that could lead you to believe that anybody is going to care who you are and where you were buried 500 years from now? Sure, tombstones from 500 years ago are interesting to historians, but only because of the absense of other records about how people lived. I don't know if you've noticed, but we're pretty much a record keeping and artifact building culture now, not a bunch of rural peasants whose only impact on the land is wiped out by the next rain.
There are tons of grave yards that have been dug up and the tombstones placed on a wall somewhere because the land was needed for something else. And the pressure on land is only growing. I wouldn't give current grave yards a snowball's chance in hell of surviving out the next century without being paved over.
Do yourself and future generations a favour. Get cremated, have your ashes scattered somewhere that meant something to you, and build your legacy by having good children rather than a long-lived gravestone.
Get an ordinary digital camera that takes pictures onto removable media, such as CF or memory sticks. Get a couple of these media. Every once in a while have your support people drive up and hand you one CF/stick while you hand them back the one you've just filled up with pictures. Let them worry about uploading the pictures to the web.
This solution means that you no longer have size/weight/power restraints on the computer and communications equipment doing the uploading to the net, which should make things cheaper and easier.
If you've got the budget for it, you might prefer two cameras to swap back and forth rather than trying to fiddle with CF cards while riding at high speed.
From the article:
Another factor driving the deal was that the perceived need for VeriSign to split into two businesses -- one to manage the master list of Web addresses, another to sell addresses -- had faded of late, as competitors no longer feared the registry gave the company an unfair sales
advantage.
The only reason Notwork Sellutions hasn't managed to use their ownership of the registry to gain an unfair sales advantage is that their customer service and business practices are so abominable that nobody in the know would have anything to do with them as long as there is an alternative. If they were ever to get their act together and start acting like customer service organization rather than a monopoly, they could easily use their ownership of the registry to their advantage. First of all, they don't need to pay any registry access fee to themselves like their competitors do, so they could undercut their competition.
I've had two mice fail with cable problems in the last 6 months. As well as two sets of headphones. I'll tell you why - Cockatiels! They are the biggest chewers in the world. All pieces of paper around my computer desk have shredded edges. One time the cord was chewed so badly that the PS/2 port evidently shorted out - other PS/2 mice don't work in that port any more, so I had to start using a USB mouse.
Slashdot Mirror
and that Apple fixed it years ago
Really? I must have been imagining it yesterday when I dragged a Zip disk to the trash, and instead of deleting it, it ejected it.
that offsets..what?
It offset the Macintosh bigots who say that the Mac is the only totally intuitive OS out there. It isn't intuitive, and neither are any of the others. You're just used to its inconsistencies, the way I'm used to the inconsistencies in the OSes I use on a daily basis.
The only intuitive interface is the nipple - all others are learned.
Remember the fun of typing DISKCOPY A: B: on a DOS system that only had one floppy drive? Same deal.
It would only be the "same deal" if the way you ejected a disk in DOS would be to type "del a:*.*". Face it, the Macintosh required you do something not just unituitive, but totally antithetical to your instincts that are screaming "if you do this, it will delete all your files!".
If you want intuitive check out Mac OS.
Ah yes, the OS where you inuitively drag everything to the trash when you never want it to be used again, except for removable media, where dragging it to the trash means "pop it out so I can use it later". And using the "Eject disk" menu item means "pop it out, but then nag me about it not being in the drive incessantly until I put it back in". Yeah, that's intuitive all right.
Opening up the source of Quake was the worst thing that ever happened to it. Suddenly, from a few games being unplayable because of cheating, now you can't find a server out there that doesn't have people who've compiled in their own new cheats, as well as the ones that were present in the non-open-source one. And there are cheating servers as well - ones that give an advantage to the cheaters who run them.
Team Fortress Classic is bad enough now with cheaters being all over the place, I shudder to think what would happen if all those lamers could compile stuff into their clients to give them infinite armour, infinite ammo, infinite health, extra speed, automatic aiming and a really small bounding box.
I have to wonder what motivates the cheaters, but the fact is that they are out there, they use every cheat they can find, and giving them access to the source is the worst possible thing I can imagine.
the table is made from aluminium and duct tape
and then
If the table was made from a more conductive metal for magnets, or covered in some velcro-friendly fluff, fine.
Ever considered that maybe the duct tape was sticky side out?
With Kevin Sorbo, you say?
Yup. There's even a scene in one of the episodes where the geek who keeps the ship running all the time says "He's like some sort of greek god".
I'm waiting for them to meet The Mule.
(Spot the reference?)
there's never been a public copy of CDDB available to have been somehow copied by the freedb folks
Early versions of xcd or whatever it was called included, in the source tar, a copy of the cddb database, and instructions on how to email in your updates.
It's proof of nothing, they said. That's not my daughter's paper.
At that point, don't you just say "That's the only paper I got with her name on it by the deadline, so either she gets a zero for cheating or a zero for missing the assignment. I'll even let you choose which one."
Of course, you only use that in courses where there is a "no make-up assignments for missed assignments" policy.
Maybe I'm out of date, but in the early days of the Sun4, we were told it was "Scalable Processor Architecture RISC Computer".
It's worse than that - cow orkers was in common use in alt.peeves and then alt.religion.kibology and then alt.folklore.urban long before Dilbert even existed.
My *Canadian* 11 year old writes better than him. And she's the product of public schooling. I thought home schooling was all about a better quality of education? Well, either that or fundies trying to make sure their kids don't learn about evolution.
Fool! That is proper Canadian English and spelling.
Nice try, but I *am* Canadian. But then again, I never was a very good one - not polite enough. And I lived in Quebec for 5 years, which makes me instantly suspicious to anybody living west of Brampton (where, God help me, I lived for a different 5 years).
Do you count the hours I'm at work? Do you subtract from that the hours I spend reading Slashdot and The Register? How about the Half Life games? And the time spent talking to my cow orkers about non-work stuff?
Do you add back in the hours when I've woken up in the middle of the night with a brilliant idea of how to solve the latest problem? And do you count just the time awake writing it down so I don't forget it, or the time I spent mulling it over in my mind while half-asleep or watching TV? Do you add in the time I spend going over the code in my mind while driving to and from work?
Do you add or subtract the time I spend at home working on my free software project, because while it's time I *don't* spend mulling over work problems, it's also time that keeps me sharp and remembering when software development was fun.
Face it, the concept of hours worked is meaningless, and mostly used by people who mistake action for progress.
I once worked on a job with a bunch of droids from Andersen Consulting. Andersen had a corporate culture of working 24 hours a day during crunch times, and it was *always* crunch times. I bought into it on one project with them, and used to wonder if it was worth getting undressed and into bed when I stumbled back to my hotel room at 4am realizing that I had a breakfast meeting at 6:30. But the second time I worked with these guys, I was working with a guy on this problem and we were going around in circles. I recognized what we were doing, and said that I was going home at 11:30pm. I got back into work the next morning, and the Anderoid was still working on the problem, having been there all night. And it appeared that all he'd done was try the same ideas we'd already tried twice before I went home. I, on the other hand, had realized what the problem was while showering and on the drive in had formulated a solution which had worked first time.
It's not the responsibility of a language to conform to the features offered by existing editors
Maybe not in your dream world, but out here in the real world I have code to write, and it there is no editor that will skip to the end of a block in Python, but there is in every other language that I use, then I know what I'm going to choose.
If Joe Schmoe puts in 8 spaces, followed by a tab, it's not Python's fault.
Once again, the real world isn't that simple. Code gets lots and lots of different programmers working on it, over the course of years. And in every other language I use, tabs versus spaces are not an issue. So once again, I look at what has really happened in my 20 years of professional programming experience rather than what should happen in an idea world, see that it would cause major problems in Python, and decide not to choose Python for my next project.
Back when the Internet was designed and run by techies, the techies would say that they needed three redundant backbones running through different cities and with no common switching points to make sure they had 100% uptime, and they leased the lines to do it. But now the Internet is in the hands of profit seeking companies, and the bean counters say "we don't have to have 100% reliability, 80% is good enough, so stop using three backbones where one will do", and suddenly you have the situation where one backhoe can cut off one part of the country from another.
You cannot just sit in your room and hack those out.
No, but you can start with US Census TIGER data, and work with dozens of other sources of free data.
I'm currently doing a program that generates databases for a free palm pilot flight planning program called CoPilot. Getting the data and writing scripts to import it is the hard part, in part because new data comes out every 28 days. The only problem I have right now is that the FAA "order form" for digital data doesn't have any feedback, so two weeks after you filled in the form and you still don't see any data, you don't know if that's because they didn't get the order, or they're just really slow processing orders, or they are waiting until the next data update cycle. So I have some older less complete data from another source for now, but I think I know where to get the latest and best data cheap.
The really sad thing is that I worked for ESRI's big competition (GeoVision) in the 1987-1992 time-frame. Back in 1991-2 I got interested in Linux, and I actually considered stealing a copy of the source code from work to try and port it to Linux (which I would have given back to the company). It wouldn't have been a big deal, since it ran on SunOS, Ultrix and AIX. The only problem at that time was the lack of a decent SQL database for Linux. Mostly our stuff ran on Oracle, but it also ran on a few others. The other major problem was that the only way I could transfer all the source code for a huge GIS application from work to my home PC was on 3.5" floppies. That would have been more painful that installing SLS 1.03 from 5.25" floppies, which I had also done.
GeoVision's product is still around, after going through a series of owners. It's still a damn good GIS. And it would probably be dead easy to port it to Linux now, since Oracle is on Linux. Heck, I think even Oracle MultiDimension, a product I worked on at Oracle, is available for Linux.
A lot of recent protests that were planned on the net were quashed by massive law enforcement action. You see, law enforcement officers read the protest web sites and newsgroups too.
I suppose it would help if the people organizing the protests knew what the hell they were talking about and protesting, instead of protesting for the sake of protesting.
Ok, now I'm confused. The NY Times article mentions solar powered aircraft *and* jet fuel, but the company web page doesn't mention solar power at all.
If slashdot had a "Cancel" function, I would cancel my previous post.
Read the article again. Which part of "solar-powered" didn't you understand?
I'm suprised the article mentions manned aircraft. The original proposal I read for "aerosats" was aircraft that would take off under remote control, get to cruising altitude then go autonomous until they needed to descend in a few weeks at which point they'd be taken over by remote control again.
What sort of arrogance is it that could lead you to believe that anybody is going to care who you are and where you were buried 500 years from now? Sure, tombstones from 500 years ago are interesting to historians, but only because of the absense of other records about how people lived. I don't know if you've noticed, but we're pretty much a record keeping and artifact building culture now, not a bunch of rural peasants whose only impact on the land is wiped out by the next rain.
There are tons of grave yards that have been dug up and the tombstones placed on a wall somewhere because the land was needed for something else. And the pressure on land is only growing. I wouldn't give current grave yards a snowball's chance in hell of surviving out the next century without being paved over.
Do yourself and future generations a favour. Get cremated, have your ashes scattered somewhere that meant something to you, and build your legacy by having good children rather than a long-lived gravestone.
Get an ordinary digital camera that takes pictures onto removable media, such as CF or memory sticks. Get a couple of these media. Every once in a while have your support people drive up and hand you one CF/stick while you hand them back the one you've just filled up with pictures. Let them worry about uploading the pictures to the web.
This solution means that you no longer have size/weight/power restraints on the computer and communications equipment doing the uploading to the net, which should make things cheaper and easier.
If you've got the budget for it, you might prefer two cameras to swap back and forth rather than trying to fiddle with CF cards while riding at high speed.
From the article:
Another factor driving the deal was that the perceived need for VeriSign to split into two businesses -- one to manage the master list of Web addresses, another to sell addresses -- had faded of late, as competitors no longer feared the registry gave the company an unfair sales
advantage.
The only reason Notwork Sellutions hasn't managed to use their ownership of the registry to gain an unfair sales advantage is that their customer service and business practices are so abominable that nobody in the know would have anything to do with them as long as there is an alternative. If they were ever to get their act together and start acting like customer service organization rather than a monopoly, they could easily use their ownership of the registry to their advantage. First of all, they don't need to pay any registry access fee to themselves like their competitors do, so they could undercut their competition.
I've had two mice fail with cable problems in the last 6 months. As well as two sets of headphones. I'll tell you why - Cockatiels! They are the biggest chewers in the world. All pieces of paper around my computer desk have shredded edges. One time the cord was chewed so badly that the PS/2 port evidently shorted out - other PS/2 mice don't work in that port any more, so I had to start using a USB mouse.