Nope, no X as root, although I su to run kpackage and actually install stuff. I'm pretty sure it's this packaging front end that's causing the problem, but it doesn't do it often enough that I've taken the time to track it down. Or it could be the result of a standard script that Mandrake runs on package installs?
In my admittedly limited experience with Helix/Ximian Gnome, it has been more stable and more configurable than KDE/KDE2. That's not a flame, just my own personal experience. I can't compare it to "vanilla" Gnome, though - when I tried Gnome, I went directly with Helixcode.
Speaking of stability, has anyone seen this situation: you're using Mandrake 6.1 through 7.2, you install packages or edit menus in either KDE or Gnome (using kpackage as the front-end in both cases) and when the package has been installed, all of the sudden your customized system menu has been replaced by the default Mandrake menu. This doesn't happen all the time, but just often enough that I have to keep backups of my menu setup. Anyone else see this?
I've always had good luck with -Ae on HP-UX, although after spending a long time trying I realized that gcc will never be compiled on my HP-UX 10.20 box. I think we don't have the full HP-UX development setup; we're definitely not using HP's cc for our real product development.
Now if only Netscape for HP-UX was stable; at least now HP-UX will probably come with one or more functional Gnome web browsers.
Of course, I'm moving to developing on Solaris instead pretty soon - although I don't think we have Gnome installed by default. Whether I install my own local copy depends on how much disk space I'll have...
Even if there were no continuing software development, distributing copies of copyrighted games would still be illegal. Which is why you can still get in trouble for distributing SNES roms, etc.
My question: doesn't it kind of put a damper on the next year of DC games if you won't be able to buy the platform after March or so? IGN had an article (just follow the links) describing how Jet Grind Radio 2 and Crazy Taxi 2 would be these huge hits for Sega this year, but I don't see anyone buying them if the platform is going away. Especially since some of those games will definitely show up on the PS2 (like Crazy Taxi is apparently going to).
If there was anything that guaranteed the PS2's success, it was this: Sega got the hell out of their way, and has basically handed them the market. I don't see how Microsoft or even Nintendo can get anything on the market fast enough to catch the disgruntled DreamCast owners who are fleeing a dead-end console.
I sound bitter mostly because I really liked the DC games I had seen and was planning to get one in a month or so. Now I guess I'll wait for Crazy Taxi for PS2, I suppose. Oh well, at least this announcement came before I plunked down my $$$, and not after:)
Transgaming appears to have some different plans as far as how they're going to be recompensed for their development efforts. Some of their code is available, some is not, and according to their web site they're going to start selling subscriptions (at $5/month) to allow people to vote on which games they try to get working first. It's a novel idea, I hope they have some success with it. The screenshots looked great!
Re:So when is /. going to get a decent design?
on
Freshmeat II
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· Score: 1
No kidding - if you make/. look like any of those sites, I'll have to hurl (once I'm done waiting for Netscape to load them, that is). One of those sites seemed to require Flash for every external link - talk about useless.
Oh wait, you weren't holding those up as cautionary examples?:)
I'm a little unawed by those studies of identical twins. Sure, it's amazing that their lives were so similar, but on the other hand there are many many more pairs of identical twins whose lives were very different. Over the whole spectrum of identical twins, I would guess that the chances of them living lives just like their twins would be close to the societal average for one person to have a life similar to any other person's life (adjusting for skin color, height, weight, and other stuff you're born with, of course).
Has there ever been a real scientific study (with a control group, etc.) that proved that the chances of leading a similar life were higher for twins than they were for two random unrelated people?
Re:what is wrong with the idea ?
on
Clever Girl Bess
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· Score: 1
Amen to that. And we should get rid of all those links that involve alcohol or women who aren't veiled either; everybody knows that God disapproves of that stuff too. Don't even get me started on all those web sites about dancing!
People tell me that I'm old-fashioned too, but I don't let it get to me. I'm really fairly progressive - I mean, I let my kids listen to that jazz music, even though we all know that it's likely the first step down the Dark Path. I just watch 'em close for any sign that they might be going over the edge, like makeup on the girls or those greased haircuts on the boys.
Yup, you can't be too careful in this day and age. Why, Amos' kid from down the street used to listen to that rock-n-roll music, and I hear now he doesn't even show up for morning prayers all the time! I don't know what this sinful world is coming to, but I don't want the nefarious influences of pornography, "soul" music (soul-stealing, maybe), and the world-wide-web seducing my kids.
A couple years ago, the typical college student didn't know about Napster, either. Things can grow pretty quickly by word-of-mouth, especially when the "official" Napster starts charging. I bet people can figure it out.
Wow, way to rip that off of Scott Adams w/o attribution, there. Pretty much word-for-word out of one of his books (although I don't have it in front of me to give you the title).
Unless of course he ripped it off of you first, in which case I apologize:)
I had read somewhere that Shreck may have been a sort of PR trick for the original Nosferatu, because a last name of Shreck meant "terror" or something like that in German. This would be like seeing "Lolita Jugs" in the credits of a porn film - you would immediately assume that that wasn't their real name. So maybe there's yet another layer of indirection here - perhaps Murnau had to get someone to act the part of Shreck who was acting the part of the Count, as publicity for Nosferatu. After all, it's not like Shreck was really a vampire, regardless of his purported weirdness on the set, right? (Scully: "Because they don't exist?!")
Of course, I can't pin down where I read that now, but it's interesting to think about.
I remember hearing about a case sort of like this where the school's filter records were being requested by a father who was concerned that the filters at his kid's school weren't working correctly. There was a big dustup because theoretically you could determine a lot of personal information about all of the other students from those logs (from passwords encoded in URLs, etc.). I don't recall how it worked out, though.
I'm not sure if FOIA is the way to go, though, since most schools are operated by state or local governments. Does FOIA work on all levels of government, or just the federal level?
Well, you have to admit it's a little different: kids can choose not to watch cartoons. Pretty soon kids won't be able to choose not to be statistically analyzed by N2H2 during the school day.
I have to ask, although this isn't strictly on-topic: how do you enable filename completion with Esc-Esc in bash, rather than using Tab? Having learned to code on HP-UX, and still being forced to use it daily, I can get over most ksh-isms but I spend half an hour in the evening retraining my pinky to hit Tab for Linux, and then half an hour in the morning retraining it to hit Esc for ksh. I've tried different settings in my.bashrc, but they don't seem to be compatible with vi line-editing mode. Does anyone know a good setup that allows Esc-filename completion and vi editing mode under bash on Linux?
Hmmm, I think we are bothered by different facets of the spam problem, then. Most people that I've talked to are unhappy that they have to pay their ISPs more to receive junk email that they don't want. Sure, there's also a time cost in deleting it, but it seems like the money bugs most people, and is the issue on which most anti-spam laws and lawsuits have proceeded.
If bandwidth were free, spam would be just like getting junk snail mail. It sounds like this bugs you more than me; I just toss it in the recycling on my way to the couch. It takes me maybe 10 seconds a day to deal with junk email, so I don't consider it a great loss.
So what about the folks in Canada who were also decoding the broadcasts? Apparently it isn't illegal there.
In addition, I would say that the argument "it's illegal 'cause it's illegal and unauthorized" isn't much of an argument. If there isn't a good reason for such a law, then it is the right and the responsibility of a citizen to break such a law. In this case, since the bits are on my own property, given freely to me by DirecTV, I would assert that a law restricting my use of those bits would be a bad law, since by my use of those bits I hurt neither my neighbor, my self, my community, or DirecTV. Sure, DirecTV doesn't get as much money as they would have otherwise, but things are still exactly the same for them as if those bits had passed through me undecoded.
I would also argue that any law regarding decryption of freely available RF signaling is flawed, because it's always going to be possible to do such a thing in an undetectable manner. The law gives the appearance of privacy without really providing privacy, since there's no physical way to track down those who are breaking the law.
Good point, you're probably not within the law on the whole DTV issue if you signed anything. And considering the difficulty of hacking their signal completely from scratch, my claim to the bits that they're sending me will likely remain a hypothetical one.
You're right, I always get Shockwave and Galvatron confused. Shockwave was possibly the coolest gun transformer, he had this huge built-in battery pack. Galvatron always looked sort of cheap by comparison.
Man, you didn't read enough of the Transformers comic books. In order:
The ghetto-blaster guy was Shockwave. Actually eventually there were two radio-type robots, one a Decepticon and the other an Autobot, but I can't remember the Autobot's name. Yes, they always did seem to have scale problems - my favorite was when Megatron, often drawn as the largest Decepticon, would transform into a gun and hop in the cockpit of one of the aircraft to escape. How did he move when guns don't have any motive ability?
The triple-changing transformer toy was Astrotrain, although I never saw the movie so he might have been called something else. Ditto on the scale problems.
No comment on the energon cubes or the whole flight thing. Although lots of the robots were animated as if they had thrusters in their feet, even the ones that just turned into automobiles.
On their home planet, the Autobots and Decepticons were shaped like alien machines. It was only after they crash-landed on earth and their spacecraft the Ark needed to create them forms so that they could blend in with earthly life that it rebuilt them as ambulances, jet fighters, etc. Later they reestablished contact with their home planet, so you began to see non-earthly transformations again.
No comment on the trailer either, that kind of goes along with the scale factor problems from before. I guess some suspension of belief was necessary.
Oh yeah, the two humans were originally a kid who first found Bumblebee during a battle at a drive-in, and his father the mechanic who helped repair Bumblebee.
Wow, I wish my Transformers comics were still in good shape. I need to dig those out again...
The "in-between" mode was Guardian mode. That was about the best of the Transformers, but agreed very fragile. It even had metal spring-loaded landing gear with a little button to press to kick them out, although on mine after a while it didn't catch so well and it was always gear-down for Jetfire:)
The neat thing about most of the combination sets was that all the individual robots didn't have to be from the same team (although the constructicons did, IIRC). Since my brother and I never got around to collecting a whole set of any of them, we would mix-and-match them to make one giant robot. As I recall we had three of the Autobot aircraft (two small ones and a large one for the main body), one animal-shaped Decepticon, and one small Decepticon tank. This made a very wacked-out looking giant robot, but we didn't care. At least all of the legs were the right size, etc.
Ah, that's a good one. But in that case such a transformer is a theft of electricity, because it saps energy off of the power company's lines. The mere fact that they could detect it indicates that something really was stolen from them (although I'm amazed that he could draw enough from such a system that they would notice it above normal transmission losses). If it were just EM losses into the environment, I assume that their detectors wouldn't have seen anything.
In the case of DirecTV, there is no way for them to detect any energy losses from their system, because the impact of having a receiver pointed at their satellite would be just the same as if their satellite was pointed at the metal side of somebody's house, a garbage can lid, something like that. After all, if DTV could tell where the pirate receivers really were, wouldn't they just send out the lawyers to that location? DirecTV isn't out any energy, your neighbors' DTV broadcast isn't affected, nothing is any different. So I would still contend that it isn't stealing.
If you found a DVD laying in the road, then it would still be reasonable to play it via DeCSS, right? It's a disk that you own, by right of salvage.
OK, now what if Jack Valenti sent you a promo copy of a movie on a DVD as a free gift in the mail. Still OK to DeCSS it, since it's your disk now, right? We'll assume you're just watching it, of course.
OK, now imagine Jack Valenti sending you the bits from the DVD via normal analog TV signalling. It's free, you have a TV, and you watch it. Not a problem. If he didn't want you to see it, he wouldn't broadcast it, right?
Now the easy part. Jack sent you the movie's bits again, but since he's none too quick on the telegraph switch any more he messed up the signal. How is it not right to decrypt the signal he sent you for free, and watch it?
Rebroadcasting it would fall under copyright law, of course, just like if you copied the DVD with DeCSS and sold it. But viewing your free DirecTV broadcast after decrypting it is just the same as viewing your free DVD after decrypting it. I don't see how you can defend one but not the other on the grounds that it's "just plaing stealing".
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Nope, no X as root, although I su to run kpackage and actually install stuff. I'm pretty sure it's this packaging front end that's causing the problem, but it doesn't do it often enough that I've taken the time to track it down. Or it could be the result of a standard script that Mandrake runs on package installs?
In my admittedly limited experience with Helix/Ximian Gnome, it has been more stable and more configurable than KDE/KDE2. That's not a flame, just my own personal experience. I can't compare it to "vanilla" Gnome, though - when I tried Gnome, I went directly with Helixcode.
Speaking of stability, has anyone seen this situation: you're using Mandrake 6.1 through 7.2, you install packages or edit menus in either KDE or Gnome (using kpackage as the front-end in both cases) and when the package has been installed, all of the sudden your customized system menu has been replaced by the default Mandrake menu. This doesn't happen all the time, but just often enough that I have to keep backups of my menu setup. Anyone else see this?
I've always had good luck with -Ae on HP-UX, although after spending a long time trying I realized that gcc will never be compiled on my HP-UX 10.20 box. I think we don't have the full HP-UX development setup; we're definitely not using HP's cc for our real product development.
Now if only Netscape for HP-UX was stable; at least now HP-UX will probably come with one or more functional Gnome web browsers.
Of course, I'm moving to developing on Solaris instead pretty soon - although I don't think we have Gnome installed by default. Whether I install my own local copy depends on how much disk space I'll have...
Even if there were no continuing software development, distributing copies of copyrighted games would still be illegal. Which is why you can still get in trouble for distributing SNES roms, etc.
My question: doesn't it kind of put a damper on the next year of DC games if you won't be able to buy the platform after March or so? IGN had an article (just follow the links) describing how Jet Grind Radio 2 and Crazy Taxi 2 would be these huge hits for Sega this year, but I don't see anyone buying them if the platform is going away. Especially since some of those games will definitely show up on the PS2 (like Crazy Taxi is apparently going to).
If there was anything that guaranteed the PS2's success, it was this: Sega got the hell out of their way, and has basically handed them the market. I don't see how Microsoft or even Nintendo can get anything on the market fast enough to catch the disgruntled DreamCast owners who are fleeing a dead-end console.
I sound bitter mostly because I really liked the DC games I had seen and was planning to get one in a month or so. Now I guess I'll wait for Crazy Taxi for PS2, I suppose. Oh well, at least this announcement came before I plunked down my $$$, and not after :)
Transgaming appears to have some different plans as far as how they're going to be recompensed for their development efforts. Some of their code is available, some is not, and according to their web site they're going to start selling subscriptions (at $5/month) to allow people to vote on which games they try to get working first. It's a novel idea, I hope they have some success with it. The screenshots looked great!
No kidding - if you make /. look like any of those sites, I'll have to hurl (once I'm done waiting for Netscape to load them, that is). One of those sites seemed to require Flash for every external link - talk about useless.
Oh wait, you weren't holding those up as cautionary examples? :)
I'm a little unawed by those studies of identical twins. Sure, it's amazing that their lives were so similar, but on the other hand there are many many more pairs of identical twins whose lives were very different. Over the whole spectrum of identical twins, I would guess that the chances of them living lives just like their twins would be close to the societal average for one person to have a life similar to any other person's life (adjusting for skin color, height, weight, and other stuff you're born with, of course).
Has there ever been a real scientific study (with a control group, etc.) that proved that the chances of leading a similar life were higher for twins than they were for two random unrelated people?
Amen to that. And we should get rid of all those links that involve alcohol or women who aren't veiled either; everybody knows that God disapproves of that stuff too. Don't even get me started on all those web sites about dancing!
People tell me that I'm old-fashioned too, but I don't let it get to me. I'm really fairly progressive - I mean, I let my kids listen to that jazz music, even though we all know that it's likely the first step down the Dark Path. I just watch 'em close for any sign that they might be going over the edge, like makeup on the girls or those greased haircuts on the boys.
Yup, you can't be too careful in this day and age. Why, Amos' kid from down the street used to listen to that rock-n-roll music, and I hear now he doesn't even show up for morning prayers all the time! I don't know what this sinful world is coming to, but I don't want the nefarious influences of pornography, "soul" music (soul-stealing, maybe), and the world-wide-web seducing my kids.
A couple years ago, the typical college student didn't know about Napster, either. Things can grow pretty quickly by word-of-mouth, especially when the "official" Napster starts charging. I bet people can figure it out.
Wow, way to rip that off of Scott Adams w/o attribution, there. Pretty much word-for-word out of one of his books (although I don't have it in front of me to give you the title).
Unless of course he ripped it off of you first, in which case I apologize :)
I had read somewhere that Shreck may have been a sort of PR trick for the original Nosferatu, because a last name of Shreck meant "terror" or something like that in German. This would be like seeing "Lolita Jugs" in the credits of a porn film - you would immediately assume that that wasn't their real name. So maybe there's yet another layer of indirection here - perhaps Murnau had to get someone to act the part of Shreck who was acting the part of the Count, as publicity for Nosferatu. After all, it's not like Shreck was really a vampire, regardless of his purported weirdness on the set, right? (Scully: "Because they don't exist?!")
Of course, I can't pin down where I read that now, but it's interesting to think about.
LOL! Wish I had mod points, or that the moron that marked this "Flamebait" hadn't...
"consuming the red blood of wizened pizzas" - Bwaaahh hah hah hah! A true metaphor for life, indeed.
I remember hearing about a case sort of like this where the school's filter records were being requested by a father who was concerned that the filters at his kid's school weren't working correctly. There was a big dustup because theoretically you could determine a lot of personal information about all of the other students from those logs (from passwords encoded in URLs, etc.). I don't recall how it worked out, though.
I'm not sure if FOIA is the way to go, though, since most schools are operated by state or local governments. Does FOIA work on all levels of government, or just the federal level?
Well, you have to admit it's a little different: kids can choose not to watch cartoons. Pretty soon kids won't be able to choose not to be statistically analyzed by N2H2 during the school day.
Thanks, man - you rock! I agree, ksh is one of the best-thought-out command-line shells. I'll try this stuff on bash tonight, it works on ksh.
I have to ask, although this isn't strictly on-topic: how do you enable filename completion with Esc-Esc in bash, rather than using Tab? Having learned to code on HP-UX, and still being forced to use it daily, I can get over most ksh-isms but I spend half an hour in the evening retraining my pinky to hit Tab for Linux, and then half an hour in the morning retraining it to hit Esc for ksh. I've tried different settings in my .bashrc, but they don't seem to be compatible with vi line-editing mode. Does anyone know a good setup that allows Esc-filename completion and vi editing mode under bash on Linux?
Hmmm, I think we are bothered by different facets of the spam problem, then. Most people that I've talked to are unhappy that they have to pay their ISPs more to receive junk email that they don't want. Sure, there's also a time cost in deleting it, but it seems like the money bugs most people, and is the issue on which most anti-spam laws and lawsuits have proceeded.
If bandwidth were free, spam would be just like getting junk snail mail. It sounds like this bugs you more than me; I just toss it in the recycling on my way to the couch. It takes me maybe 10 seconds a day to deal with junk email, so I don't consider it a great loss.
So what about the folks in Canada who were also decoding the broadcasts? Apparently it isn't illegal there.
In addition, I would say that the argument "it's illegal 'cause it's illegal and unauthorized" isn't much of an argument. If there isn't a good reason for such a law, then it is the right and the responsibility of a citizen to break such a law. In this case, since the bits are on my own property, given freely to me by DirecTV, I would assert that a law restricting my use of those bits would be a bad law, since by my use of those bits I hurt neither my neighbor, my self, my community, or DirecTV. Sure, DirecTV doesn't get as much money as they would have otherwise, but things are still exactly the same for them as if those bits had passed through me undecoded.
I would also argue that any law regarding decryption of freely available RF signaling is flawed, because it's always going to be possible to do such a thing in an undetectable manner. The law gives the appearance of privacy without really providing privacy, since there's no physical way to track down those who are breaking the law.
Good point, you're probably not within the law on the whole DTV issue if you signed anything. And considering the difficulty of hacking their signal completely from scratch, my claim to the bits that they're sending me will likely remain a hypothetical one.
You're right, I always get Shockwave and Galvatron confused. Shockwave was possibly the coolest gun transformer, he had this huge built-in battery pack. Galvatron always looked sort of cheap by comparison.
Man, you didn't read enough of the Transformers comic books. In order:
Oh yeah, the two humans were originally a kid who first found Bumblebee during a battle at a drive-in, and his father the mechanic who helped repair Bumblebee.
Wow, I wish my Transformers comics were still in good shape. I need to dig those out again...
The "in-between" mode was Guardian mode. That was about the best of the Transformers, but agreed very fragile. It even had metal spring-loaded landing gear with a little button to press to kick them out, although on mine after a while it didn't catch so well and it was always gear-down for Jetfire :)
The neat thing about most of the combination sets was that all the individual robots didn't have to be from the same team (although the constructicons did, IIRC). Since my brother and I never got around to collecting a whole set of any of them, we would mix-and-match them to make one giant robot. As I recall we had three of the Autobot aircraft (two small ones and a large one for the main body), one animal-shaped Decepticon, and one small Decepticon tank. This made a very wacked-out looking giant robot, but we didn't care. At least all of the legs were the right size, etc.
Ah, that's a good one. But in that case such a transformer is a theft of electricity, because it saps energy off of the power company's lines. The mere fact that they could detect it indicates that something really was stolen from them (although I'm amazed that he could draw enough from such a system that they would notice it above normal transmission losses). If it were just EM losses into the environment, I assume that their detectors wouldn't have seen anything.
In the case of DirecTV, there is no way for them to detect any energy losses from their system, because the impact of having a receiver pointed at their satellite would be just the same as if their satellite was pointed at the metal side of somebody's house, a garbage can lid, something like that. After all, if DTV could tell where the pirate receivers really were, wouldn't they just send out the lawyers to that location? DirecTV isn't out any energy, your neighbors' DTV broadcast isn't affected, nothing is any different. So I would still contend that it isn't stealing.
If you found a DVD laying in the road, then it would still be reasonable to play it via DeCSS, right? It's a disk that you own, by right of salvage.
OK, now what if Jack Valenti sent you a promo copy of a movie on a DVD as a free gift in the mail. Still OK to DeCSS it, since it's your disk now, right? We'll assume you're just watching it, of course.
OK, now imagine Jack Valenti sending you the bits from the DVD via normal analog TV signalling. It's free, you have a TV, and you watch it. Not a problem. If he didn't want you to see it, he wouldn't broadcast it, right?
Now the easy part. Jack sent you the movie's bits again, but since he's none too quick on the telegraph switch any more he messed up the signal. How is it not right to decrypt the signal he sent you for free, and watch it?
Rebroadcasting it would fall under copyright law, of course, just like if you copied the DVD with DeCSS and sold it. But viewing your free DirecTV broadcast after decrypting it is just the same as viewing your free DVD after decrypting it. I don't see how you can defend one but not the other on the grounds that it's "just plaing stealing".