You think Tolkien is long-winded, try reading "Gravity's Rainbow" by Thomas Pynchon. It's taken me 3 years to read and I am still not finished. In fact this is my third attempt at it, and I finally made past 80 pages. I have sworn to myself I won't read another piece of fiction until I have finished this monster. I have vast pile of books by my bed just waiting for me to find out what the hell happens at the end and where all the characters from the beginning ever got to. Well okay he's not long-winded as much as dense. Every line can mean three things. It's littered with puns, asides, ryhmes, and weird insights on the nature of paranoia and anti-paranoia (the belief that nothing is connected to anything). There is almost no plot at all, that I can discern, but it's one of the best books I have ever started reading. Almost every page introduces more characters, so it's at stages completely bewildering and I have to keep going back and re-reading pages to work out when the perspective shifted, and how I ended up in this new characters's head. I aim to finish it before I have to move country again.
So go on Peter Jackson, make a film of that. I dare ya.
Ahh the joys of plane flight. I bought Monty Python and the Holy Grail at Heathrow and watched it thru a flight and of course was laughing out loud for much of the trip. As the film was almost over "perhaps he died while carving it..." "he wouldn't bother to carve aaarrrggghhh..." and I had tears flowing and guts aching from laughter one of the hosties tapped me on the shoulder and I turned to see there were 3 hosties and a couple of other passengers standing behind me watching over my shoulder. Sure they couldn't hear it but the whole damn plane could hear me laughing, and that film can be just as funny without sound cos most people seem to know most of it by heart anyway.
Ah the joys of portable technology.
ps: In london recently on the tube I saw more people with iPods than I saw reading Harry Potter. These things really are popular. Wish I have a 40Gb one though as 30Gb is not quite enough for my music, and a complete backup of my photos.
Western Union numbers are usually just 6 or 7 digit numbers. the recipient turns up to their nearest WU office with photo id and gets their money. it's very fast. I was holidaying in Italy and realised I had forgotten to pay a mate in australia for some work he did so i just WU'd him and send him the code as a text message via my phone. he had the money within minutes.
Somebody has obviously spent too much time thinking about porn...
Plenty have, but none have expressed their thoughts so powerfully as has Andrea Dworkin in her book Intercourse. An amazing book - I recommend it to anyone.
The poster is pointing out that Saddam et al (and I include Bush, Blair, The Queen of England and her whole filthy family et al here) are not 'evil' in the hollywood sense, as in they are not sitting there monty burns like tapping their fingertips together breathing 'eeexcellent' every time they unleash one of their many well documented horrors. No, they do what they do with a real sense that what they are doing, however misguided and wrong, is, if not for the greater good, at least for their own good.
However, according to the dictionary, "Evil" is 1. the quality of being morally bad or wrong; 2. that which causes harm or misfortune. Definition 1 gives people plenty of scope as morality is subjective. Definition 2 however makes it plain that SH is evil, OBL is evil, GWB is evil, the IRA are evil, Blair is evil, Capitalism is evil, the war on (drugs|terror) is evil etc. You and I are also evil from time to time.
Pornography, in its modern sense, while not evil per se, is an evil, exploitative industry where real and lasting harm is often perpetuated against people who, for reasons of ignorance, manipulability, or plain poverty, find themselves in the hands of some very evil men. By funding it through the purchase of pornographic material, you become evil. Much as you become evil by buying Nike shoes, or McDonalds 'burgers' and thus funding the evil that they do. You make the choice to fund these evils, and thus become evil yourself. misery loves the company.
Only a few weeks ago i handed au$50 to ozemail to reset my password etc to an account I was given in 1994 when i started building webs. needless to say the content there was mostly shit*, and the html was all buggered, so I paid my money, patched the site, emlinated all those naive mailto links I thought were so dandy at the time and nuked anything that i have never ever been emailed about specifically, or which had long ago been moved to other servers. it took a day but i feel like i have just done a long overdue spring clean.
well there are loads of bollywood films, australian, french, german, czech, italian, british, scottish, thai, viet, etc etc films that i am sure are not owned by any of the MPAA. i believe the last A is America right? and by America they usually mean the USA, not the Americas in the broader sense.
so it's easy. just boycott US films. they are mostly shit anyway - see for example 'the matrix revolutions' - utter shit.
The camera i want will have a similar or smaller form factor than my current sony cybershot, will include a GPS tranponder and record the location and orientation of my shot as well as other XIF info, will include a clock with timezone settings, will shoot video in a standard format not stupid 'muxed' mpeg, and will take a memory stick pro not the ordinary memory stick. a 10x zoom would be nice too but i get by okay with the 6x in the P9. firewire would be nice as would bluetooth. but the must haves for me are the gps and proper clock.
go on then, try it. see how far you get. i have many quite complex smart playlists and have to resort to applescripting to get the features that could be simple with the addition of some more boolean logic and bracketing.
(genre = techno) or (genre = electronica) or (genre = dance)
and (not (artist = aphex twin) and not (artist = autechre))
and (rating > 3)
and (last played is not in the last 7 days)
or
all unrated music not in any of my other playlists.
or
(playlist = Party hits)
and (last played is not the last 7 days)
etc etc etc.
re-read my post. yes there are lots of things you can do with smart playlists, but to get any sort of genuine boolean logic in there requires scripting. you can't do that with the smart playlist interface. yet.
Yeah I gotta say iTunes' "smart playlists" are cool but could be so much cooler without you having to actually get down and script them. the other features cited in your link, the quiet-period skipper is a great idea, and party mode is also a top idea. i imagine that now iTunes is out for wintel however we'll see dramatic improvements in both the mac and wintel versions over the coming months.
Price is not a sticking point, the fact I have that functionaity through iTunes on our macs is the sticking poiunt. But for others yes as I said it looks like a cool solution.
is it auto configuring like iTunes is (via rendesvous) or do you have to set anything up to get it all to work? ie can i just wander onto your LAN and immediately have my music available to anyone else on the lan? I can't imagine it would be too hard to integrate rendesvous into PC software.
shame one must buy it. iTunes has all this functionality for free. thing is these days we rarely play music off the server, but end up streaming it to the server from either of our laptops:-) But yeah for centralised serving MC9 looks pretty good.
two consecutive paragraphs actually. the music sharing via rendesvous is what i referred to as 'nothing to confuse a non-techy person' (ie my gf). in the next paragraph i go on to explain that additionally there is some serious nerdy stuff also going on under the hood. and yes, it does just work, cos i set it up, but my very non-techy gf never needs know about it. unless her hard disk shits itself or she deletes an essay by mistake - then all she need know is that her stuff is 'magically' on the g3, or even more magically on my friends mac in holland.
it's called Workgroup Manager. also use SSHAgent to handle the SSH key stuff transparently. and of course the terminal:-) the backup scripts were written by a mate of mine and there are a bunch of us that use them to do regular remote backups to his machine in holland. i use commandline for cvs as it's the easiest way. have tried all the guis and they just suck ass.
Clearly Apple is not for you then. But I imagine at some stage you will want to upgrade your machines. If you were buying a new laptop for example, is there a reason why you would not choose Apple hardware? Curious.
Reading all this just made me think for a sec. what is it about my macs that I reallly like. Well today's winning answer is this. It's not startup times (< 1 second on my laptops), it's not ram (1Gb on my tibook) it's not the overall speed etc etc it's this:
In our house we have 3 laptops, I have a tibook, my girlfriend a 12"G4 and sometime ago I retired the g3 laptop to inhouse server status. It is connected to the stereo and since it is pre-firewire is connected to a great big external drive via USB. we both have itunes running. my gf likes music i'd never allow on my laptop and i have music she will never want. she's in the back room writing an essay but using rendesvous has access to all the music on my mac, all the music on the stereo and her own music. she's no nerd, and the music sharing abilities of itunes are simply transparent. right now, just taking a look, she's playing music off my laptop but is out my my earshot. I am listening to music off the home stereo that is also coming off my laptop. there is nothing to configure, nothing to confuse a non-techy person, it all just works.
meanwhile every night at around 3am some shell scripts run thanks to cron that use ssh and rsync to backup mine and my gf's work to the g3, into our own account spaces on the stereo. when our local backups are done the stereo in turn backs up changes to a mate's server in holland. his server? an even older g3 laptop than mine. i have admin rights and the osx server admin tools are simply awesome. he's running a cvs server which i use with a bunch of our mates to share code. ican admin that from here with a lovely gui. yeah i know you can so all that nerdy stuff on *nix or windows, or at least I assume you can on windows, but the convenience of having it all look and feel consistant is just gold to me.
later this year i'll buy a new 15" powerbook and the tibook will hit the hi-fi rack. it's running mysql and tomcat and so forth so will become both a music server, dvd burning station and staging server for my clients.
and what's more it all synchs with my new cell phone and my ipod. lordy lordy i love my macs.
Hibernate is much more than just serialisation and persistance of data objects. Is there a C equiv with a rich query language that lets me avoid any use of SQL?
I have never written any C or C++, as I went straight from BASIC and APL (woohoo APL, those little upside down triangles!) in high school to Pascal to ADA to Modula2 at University. I dropped out of uni when they said I had to learn fortran and cobol, and to be honest my knowledge of SQL is pretty damn limited (hooray for Hibernate). But i reallly got hooked on 68000 assembler, having been a 6502 geek for years, and I loved the raw thrill of coding in languages like RDL and then using 4D to do web-fronted CMS on my mac (pre PowerPC btw). And in 1996 I was shown Java. I went to JavaOne. I've been a Java coder ever since. (And Jini reallly is cool, no question about it).
So tell me, is there an equivalent for JUnit in C? Is there a package like Hibernate? Is there introspection and reflection and casting and interfaces? As a Java programmer I can concentrate more on the design of my code, and working out what not to write. That's why I like it. Cos yes, I am a lazy programmer. If I wanted to work hard I'd still be coding in assembly language.
You are of course right that it is not about deterring computer crime, and partly right when you say it's about politicians being able to say they are tough on such crimes. But IMHO what it is really about is multi-fold. Firstly it is about keeping a slave labour pool of willingnerds who can have their sentances magically communted for 'good service' in the name of national security or whatever - kind of 'la femme nikita' style. The US abolished literal slavery, much to the detriment of its economy, and instead ratcheted up the imprisonment rate. prisoners, now get to shrink wrap microsoft products, sew posh underwear, etc etc - it's far cray from the old image of making licence plates as prison labour. now they even have imprisoned tele-marketers. But in this day and age the US needs more nerds, and needs them cheap. what better way than making more things nerds do carry prison time. and lots of it. Why a hacker, she's almost "worse than hitler" now-a-days. but their skills can be usefully harnessed. who knows if they behave they'll get time off for good service.
secondly it is about instilling terror in some hapless nerd when she's busted, forcing her to incriminate her friends - soviet style. soon, like terrorism, you'll only need be suspected of 'computer crimes' and it's off to some labour camp somewhere for you, your friends and any members of your family not prepared to publicly denounce you on fox news.
Slashdot Mirror
Th@s cs txt msgs rk.
So go on Peter Jackson, make a film of that. I dare ya.
Ah the joys of portable technology.
ps: In london recently on the tube I saw more people with iPods than I saw reading Harry Potter. These things really are popular. Wish I have a 40Gb one though as 30Gb is not quite enough for my music, and a complete backup of my photos.
Western Union numbers are usually just 6 or 7 digit numbers. the recipient turns up to their nearest WU office with photo id and gets their money. it's very fast. I was holidaying in Italy and realised I had forgotten to pay a mate in australia for some work he did so i just WU'd him and send him the code as a text message via my phone. he had the money within minutes.
funny, but many mornings I get up, make coffee and bring my girlfriend her coffee and 'the papers', ie her laptop, in bed.
Plenty have, but none have expressed their thoughts so powerfully as has Andrea Dworkin in her book Intercourse. An amazing book - I recommend it to anyone.
However, according to the dictionary, "Evil" is 1. the quality of being morally bad or wrong; 2. that which causes harm or misfortune. Definition 1 gives people plenty of scope as morality is subjective. Definition 2 however makes it plain that SH is evil, OBL is evil, GWB is evil, the IRA are evil, Blair is evil, Capitalism is evil, the war on (drugs|terror) is evil etc. You and I are also evil from time to time.
Pornography, in its modern sense, while not evil per se, is an evil, exploitative industry where real and lasting harm is often perpetuated against people who, for reasons of ignorance, manipulability, or plain poverty, find themselves in the hands of some very evil men. By funding it through the purchase of pornographic material, you become evil. Much as you become evil by buying Nike shoes, or McDonalds 'burgers' and thus funding the evil that they do. You make the choice to fund these evils, and thus become evil yourself. misery loves the company.
my (euro)0.017 (love that sliding dollar)
*as per sturgeon's law - 90% of anything is crud.
so it's easy. just boycott US films. they are mostly shit anyway - see for example 'the matrix revolutions' - utter shit.
the n;y real difference is that it's millions of windows using kids feeding it, not with their 'bio-energy' but with their money.
The camera i want will have a similar or smaller form factor than my current sony cybershot, will include a GPS tranponder and record the location and orientation of my shot as well as other XIF info, will include a clock with timezone settings, will shoot video in a standard format not stupid 'muxed' mpeg, and will take a memory stick pro not the ordinary memory stick. a 10x zoom would be nice too but i get by okay with the 6x in the P9. firewire would be nice as would bluetooth. but the must haves for me are the gps and proper clock.
go on then, try it. see how far you get. i have many quite complex smart playlists and have to resort to applescripting to get the features that could be simple with the addition of some more boolean logic and bracketing.
- (genre = techno) or (genre = electronica) or (genre = dance)
- and (not (artist = aphex twin) and not (artist = autechre))
- and (rating > 3)
- and (last played is not in the last 7 days)
or- all unrated music not in any of my other playlists.
or- (playlist = Party hits)
- and (last played is not the last 7 days)
etc etc etc.re-read my post. yes there are lots of things you can do with smart playlists, but to get any sort of genuine boolean logic in there requires scripting. you can't do that with the smart playlist interface. yet.
Yeah I gotta say iTunes' "smart playlists" are cool but could be so much cooler without you having to actually get down and script them. the other features cited in your link, the quiet-period skipper is a great idea, and party mode is also a top idea. i imagine that now iTunes is out for wintel however we'll see dramatic improvements in both the mac and wintel versions over the coming months.
is it auto configuring like iTunes is (via rendesvous) or do you have to set anything up to get it all to work? ie can i just wander onto your LAN and immediately have my music available to anyone else on the lan? I can't imagine it would be too hard to integrate rendesvous into PC software.
shame one must buy it. iTunes has all this functionality for free. thing is these days we rarely play music off the server, but end up streaming it to the server from either of our laptops :-) But yeah for centralised serving MC9 looks pretty good.
two consecutive paragraphs actually. the music sharing via rendesvous is what i referred to as 'nothing to confuse a non-techy person' (ie my gf). in the next paragraph i go on to explain that additionally there is some serious nerdy stuff also going on under the hood. and yes, it does just work, cos i set it up, but my very non-techy gf never needs know about it. unless her hard disk shits itself or she deletes an essay by mistake - then all she need know is that her stuff is 'magically' on the g3, or even more magically on my friends mac in holland.
it's called Workgroup Manager. also use SSHAgent to handle the SSH key stuff transparently. and of course the terminal :-) the backup scripts were written by a mate of mine and there are a bunch of us that use them to do regular remote backups to his machine in holland. i use commandline for cvs as it's the easiest way. have tried all the guis and they just suck ass.
Clearly Apple is not for you then. But I imagine at some stage you will want to upgrade your machines. If you were buying a new laptop for example, is there a reason why you would not choose Apple hardware? Curious.
In our house we have 3 laptops, I have a tibook, my girlfriend a 12"G4 and sometime ago I retired the g3 laptop to inhouse server status. It is connected to the stereo and since it is pre-firewire is connected to a great big external drive via USB. we both have itunes running. my gf likes music i'd never allow on my laptop and i have music she will never want. she's in the back room writing an essay but using rendesvous has access to all the music on my mac, all the music on the stereo and her own music. she's no nerd, and the music sharing abilities of itunes are simply transparent. right now, just taking a look, she's playing music off my laptop but is out my my earshot. I am listening to music off the home stereo that is also coming off my laptop. there is nothing to configure, nothing to confuse a non-techy person, it all just works.
meanwhile every night at around 3am some shell scripts run thanks to cron that use ssh and rsync to backup mine and my gf's work to the g3, into our own account spaces on the stereo. when our local backups are done the stereo in turn backs up changes to a mate's server in holland. his server? an even older g3 laptop than mine. i have admin rights and the osx server admin tools are simply awesome. he's running a cvs server which i use with a bunch of our mates to share code. ican admin that from here with a lovely gui. yeah i know you can so all that nerdy stuff on *nix or windows, or at least I assume you can on windows, but the convenience of having it all look and feel consistant is just gold to me.
later this year i'll buy a new 15" powerbook and the tibook will hit the hi-fi rack. it's running mysql and tomcat and so forth so will become both a music server, dvd burning station and staging server for my clients.
and what's more it all synchs with my new cell phone and my ipod. lordy lordy i love my macs.
I am curious. What would get you to switch to apple? And what are you using now?
I'll take your word on "make check".
Hibernate is much more than just serialisation and persistance of data objects. Is there a C equiv with a rich query language that lets me avoid any use of SQL?
How does C provide interfaces?
dave
So tell me, is there an equivalent for JUnit in C? Is there a package like Hibernate? Is there introspection and reflection and casting and interfaces? As a Java programmer I can concentrate more on the design of my code, and working out what not to write. That's why I like it. Cos yes, I am a lazy programmer. If I wanted to work hard I'd still be coding in assembly language.
took 2 seconds of googling to find that link.
secondly it is about instilling terror in some hapless nerd when she's busted, forcing her to incriminate her friends - soviet style. soon, like terrorism, you'll only need be suspected of 'computer crimes' and it's off to some labour camp somewhere for you, your friends and any members of your family not prepared to publicly denounce you on fox news.