That gives me an idea: make a "D:" script that echos out a big series of cryptic warnings, errors, etc. about invalid path, DLL and/or VxD warnings, a few bells, and a half-complete panic message about the file system now being corrupt with enough sleep statements between the echo's to make it all "look good". Man... seeing a tech's face (or heck, even just family company) get all sweaty for thinking he just hosed someones system might make it worth it.
It is nearly funny, except for the fact that I'll come off looking like a complete, paranoid loon for warning *my* address book of contacts to keep an eye out for this and try to warn them (and maybe, dare I say, educate) them that you can't trust anything you get by e-mail. *sigh*.
Seems like a virus is something you don't know about and/or something that performs other than advertised. This oddity actually tells you what it will do in the EULA, so assuming you click through the agreement, you get exactly everything "you want". Obviously most people won't read the details, but that's my take on why it isn't treated as a virus per se.
Clarify a bit... are you meaning install / run ximian-gnome to get the gnome2 binaries for my 7.3-based system? If not, help me out, since that is largely the assumption to which I'm replying here.
I have in fact used Ximian-Gnome and the corresponding Red Carpet over majority of the previous year. I liked the improvements over the stock versions of gnome I was running at the time, and I loved Red Carpet. It was almost perfect: the only problem that crept up has been the recent upgrade of my aging system to RH7.3. The Red Hat upgrade/installer had an issue with the "third party" applicatons installed. Granted, I did not dig too deeply into this matter to know if a clean and easy solution was present, but I've read other threads from people (here on/.) whose only complaint about ximian-gnome was upgrading their distribution. Now, wherein does the blame lie here? Red Hat installer for not being able to cope with the foo-ximian set of binaries (I've got a few other complaints about the installer, although it is a lot better than back in 5.x days), or ximian packages for not having a way to "go back"? (That sounds dangerously like an incite to flame war.) What I did to appease my system upgrade was to yank out ximian gnome (carefully and nervously by hand to resolve dependencies) a package at a time.
Also, and maybe you can point out someone/somewhere that does this, but it'd be remarkably helpful for me on dialup if a full set of ximian packages came with the installer on a CD for the cost of the CD and shipping (which should be ~$3). Otherwise the download for installation gets somewhat tedious. Otherwise, truth be told, I'm happy as-is (gnome 1.4 with nautilus stripped out) until a stock gnome2 comes with a stock RH8.1.
Anyway, I don't want to sound argumentative, and I know you're offering very valid alternatives that, things being different, I'd be all over. This thread just explores why *I* (as one person) view naut.1 poorly and yet have not tried v2. When RH8.1 comes out, rest assured, I'll give it another go; hopefully by then my system hardware won't be as many shameful generations behind as my current one is (then again, it ain't broke, so why fix it?;-)
That's what the source code is for. I compiled GNOME 2 completely from source.
[summon calmness... ohmm... ohmm...]
This reply isn't intended to be a flame or personally directed. I appreciate that source is available. That fact (i.e., the relative open-ness) is why I'm using Linux for my home machines. (And, while I don't have time to search through the source to verify everything's "above board", I trust the community as a whole does.) However, at this currently point in my life (the past year, and the next couple, likely) I need the system to "just work". Like those Apple switch ads. You've compiled for your system from source? GREAT! That we all have the option is a major boon. But personally, I don't have the time or inclination to attempt to do this. I've tried compiling bits of gnome for my system in the past; days later I gave up in complete frustration. I don't have the talent or patience to sort out cryptically worded compiler errors. (That I tried doing this anyway, in the spirit of learning -- much like the time I tried rpm --force --nodeps once -- was what caused a complete system re-install.) So, for sake of keeping it "just working", I've decided that I'll let RedHat sort out this nonsense and provide me known-working, pre-compiled rpm/binaries for things. I have a wife (gasp!) who's returned to full time school on top of near-full-time work, so I pick up the slack around the apartment to keep her from going nuts; I also have a martial arts class a couple evenings a week, and a few other things in the hopper. Therefore, lacking the extra free time, I don't want to need to deal with compilations of large, complex desktop environments (etc.) -- especially in this case that the original question I answered was"why aren't people trying Naut.2?". Well... this is why. Question asked and question answered. (IOW, why submit myself any my system to an inept compilation attempt just to try naut.2? makes no sense to me.) When RH goes to 8.1, I'll jump all over it and have gnome 2. No fuss / no muss.
Speaking more generally, I'll reiterate that its wonderful we have source available, but part of what harms the community in terms of new user acceptance (do we or don't we want new users?) is the attitude of "RTFM!" and "you've got the source... go compile it yourself!" that crops up. For instance, my mom is having *countless* issues with her PC, many the result of IE / Outlook (viral) on Win'98. She's a few states away from me, so it isn't like I can drop by. Now, I'd like to tell her to run out and buy a box copy of mandrake, but things just simply are not ready for people like her. (And lest you're lead to think improperly, she has decades of computer experience; she ca$hed in on the COBOL / Y2K fiasco... in fact predicted the exact effect twenty years ahead of time like all the other code-writers forced into 2-digit year usage.) For me, I can, if i really have to, follow along with man pages, HOWTOs, grab-source-and-compile, search google, etc. to solve problems (except having time lately), but she would be completely lost at all this, and I'll not subject her to the occasional remarks of "compile from source" (where the person is trying to be genuinely helpful, but isn't realizing that they're actually causing damage).
Why do people keep ranting about how bad Nautilus 1 is but don't even try Nautilus 2?
Because RH7.3 is Gnome 1.4-based, and I don't run RH x.0 releases. Risking self-imposed corruption of a relatively clean 7.3 system to cram in the newest and best stuff isn't worth it -- to me -- to try Nautilus 2.
I tend to agree with the sentiment of another poster: it's [mainly] a freakin' file browser!, but it causes my K6-2/400 machine to thrash upon login like a M.F'er for a minimum of 30 seconds before feigning use; yet, everything else on the system comes up / runs crisp and responsively so much so that I really have no need to upgrade anything.
Re:Bonus Check?
on
LCD Round-up
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· Score: 2, Funny
What we need is an auto-reply along the lines of the famous poll option:
"I don't get a Christmas bonus check, you insensitive clod!"
Re:OK, that's it, I'm 'switching'
on
Linux 3.0
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· Score: 1
So basically, I'm a linux newbie wannabe. Where do I start?
You'd probably do best by 'starting' at the corner drug store. Consider purchasing at least one package of stay-awake pills (or a few two-liters of strong cola) and one large-ish bottle of antacid. Learning Linux is do-able (or I wouldn't be here) but is not for the casual, faint-of-heart.;-)
(And/or if the parent poster was serious, common opinion seems to favor Mandrake for true newbies. Go to your bookstore and flip through some heavy Linux books in the computer section... a $50 manual will be worth the headaches otherwise your first time in.)
I *believe* (and may be corrected if wrong) that the aphorism you refer to is about spider silk having a better *ratio* of strength to weight than steel, not that it has a better tensile strength. Since I'll wager spider silk is a lot lighter than an equivalent diameter carbon nanotube, you're question is a bit mis-worded.
The "slingshot effect" is only useful for trajectory changes. [cut] Due to conservation of energy, when you approach a planet and slingshot away from it, you end up with the same velocity on the way out as the way in.
This is correct enough, but for those who haven't taken an orbital mechanics class, I thought I'd chip in a little bit more info. The 'slingshot' effect seems to work since you (the object) is changing frames of reference into- and out of the planet being used. (The other frame being with respect to the sun.) Additionally, you have to do the approach from the 'backside' so the planet pulls you forward on your way by (assuming you want to gain speed; otherwise enter on the front-side to slow down).
Once you leave the sphere of influence of the planet itself though, and are only under the dominant effect of the sun (i.e., changed frames of reference) you have changed net velocity (speed as well as direction).
The code needs a counsler not a programmer. I'm in that boat right now, and I want out fast!
This, for once, was where I managed to use one of the company's own 'lines' against it: "Hey, I'm just an engineer, not a paid, professional code guru." (Which seemed to nicely translate, as desired, to "This is bad... deal with it as-is or give it to someone else.") I hope you find your own way out before you go bug-fscking-nuts, though... especially if you *are* the paid, professional code-guru.
Just to reassure you slightly, I'm not. However, think "fuel consumption device".;-)
Otherwise, what you say is true enough... it isn't the language specification itself that causes the problems as much as the general non-CS-ness that the engineers approach code-writing with. That being what it is, a CS-guru here has a glorified 'sed' script (well, very similarly anyway) to convert f77 syntax to f90 syntax. (strip line numbers, fix continuation marks, etc.) The shock and horror of my experience was, even only changing a couple things to satisfy 'f90' warnings and errors, *by hand*, the old pre-f77-code really ran differently (and not meaning that the precision changed the last sig.fig slightly... ASCII output graphs suddenly had no data traces in them, file output format was hosed as to be useless... very very frightening. I could only somewhat sympathize with the unfortunate 'owner' of that code when I was forced to say, "Well, it'll never work, here, with f90; I understand f77 is going away, and I understand Unix is also [mostly] going away, but there is nothing I can do." (Worse still for him, no one understood the vagaries of what it did, there is/was no documentation, and what little I could untangle was so inefficiently written as to make BASIC a nice alternative.) I went home and lamented what might've otherwise been a nice, useful, maintainable code.::shudder::
Let me somewhat answer w/ what I know from the basis of Fortran '90; I haven't seen anything specific on 2000. Where I work (large aerospace industry company) all the Fortran code is still the old-school stuff (F'77... or older); there's so much of it, and it uses so many anachronisms and non-ANSI (machine and/or compiler dependent tricks / hacks / bugs / unknown evil things) code constructs that the majority of it just *cannot* even be ported to '90. (I know... I tried porting a rather small thing over to only compile with the new compiler, and all the output was way, way wrong, owing to an unknown issue that I didn't have the skill and the boss didn't have the money to chase.)
Now, F'90 didn't have true OO in it; it had just introduced "MODULE"s, and for those couple of us rebellious "young'uns" that embraced it, '90 was far and away better. I'm personally a big fan of more complete OO programming, but the bosses and supervisors here just cannot comprehend what it even is. (I've tried to explain it several times... their perspective, and perhaps refusal to learn from someone half their age, prevents their understanding at why OO is, generally, a Good Thing). Are the current Fortran languages similar? Well, in the sense that C++ is (or can be) similar to C, then yes... assuming you only code to the bits that you understand. But doing so really defeats the whole purpose of having revised the language.
For my $0.02, with where Fortran seems to be trying to head (not that I've read the referenced draft; I haven't), we might as well write and compile with C++; the vaunted speed advantage starts bleeding away with (direct or indirect) access to pointers and other things, and my experience here the past several years is that said speed difference is mainly a function of the quality of the compiler anyway. (And ours sucks big hairy ones, and I won't say which one it is.)
The biggest insurmountable hurdle here is that Fortran now-a-days is really only *used* in the scientific community, and, by and large, such community is less concerned with staying up with the new learning curve of programming practices and more concerned with getting the next thing done. (For a humorous semi-related example of this, consider our recent "port" of a well-used CFD code into Fortran '90... we changed the make file to use "f90" rather than "f77" and made sure it still compiled... huzzah! we now have a Fortran '90 program *cough*NOT*cough*...)
I read an article in Sci-Am (I believe it was; June or July-ish; the cover refers to alternative explanation to dark matter, yatta yatta) where they discussed scientific work done with respect to brain wave responses to people "hearing" the "r" and "l" sound. For "us Westerners", each sound produced two distinct lobes in a response/feedback (bleh... I'm no brain scientist) map thing, which denotes our brains ability to hear and be affected by the differences in the sound. Japanese natives, however, say their "r" with a slight tapping of the roof of the mouth (somewhat similar to Spanish, if your teacher was good enough to beat the fact into your pronunciation)... and the sound for a single "ra" sorta sounds like "rla". They studied such people, and the response/feedback map showed just a single lobe for both "r" and "l", which seems to indicate (according to the article) that their brains can't easily distinguish a difference between the sounds. (Granted, that's probably a consequence of their syllabary versus ours, and no doubt with training they can 'learn' (to hear and speak) the difference just as Westeners have from an early age.) Anyway, I found article rather interesting to have covered this.
I was looking to do the same thing. On my system, nautilus is embarrassingly un-usable. But, I couldn't find "gmc" for the life of my. I found a "gnome-commander" a couple places, but it looked like it was tagged 'beta', and the installation did not produce the old familiar "gmc" command. Can you or anyone tell me what the story is here?
JINI is a programmatic API based on Java. It, in and of itself, doesn't understand hardware. This discussion is in regards to (to put it crudely) hardware connector types/protocols. Now, putting/embedding JINI code and a micro JVM inside a physical device (as you may be remembering a write-up about) may be neat, but it is still working in a different realm since, from what I'm gathering of the discussions here, the current USB can't talk directly peripheral-to-peripheral w/out your system's processor to intermediate.
Must say I agree. I similarly go to the theater less and less these days to see movies: for the effort, increasing prices, increasing ambient noise levels (general rude-ness and cell-phones), bad pop-corn... well, it takes a really good movie for me to want to bother, and so I become quite selective. But it isn't just the environmental issues. Maybe I'm just getting old[er] and [more] crotchety, but the overall quality of films that purport to appeal to my demographic have really gone into the crapper the past few years (rare, notable exceptions are present), and since they don't do too well in the theater, they come out in the rental stores a bit more quickly, so then there's even less reason to go spend $20+ (me and the misses) when I/we can otherwise rent it for $3, drive through $fast_food_place for $10, possibly see it many times, (plus bonus DVD footage not in the theater) and quite decidely fast-fwd through the commercials. Bleh.
I think a phone call into product activation would've been a hoot.
Product Activation: "Hello, Product Activation center. What can I do to help you today?" Crafty Hacker: "Uh, yeah. I need to re-activate my XP installation. I changed a couple things and it apparently tripped something." PA: "Okay, sure. First, what's the CD Key on your XP installation disk?" CH: "Err, its [rattles off numbers/letters]." PA: "Right. Okay. What type of system do you have it running on now,then? I need your make/model, processor speed, [etc.]" CH: "Well, I guess the system is a Microsoft XBOX. [starts ratting off rest of system specs] --" PA: "A What? It doesn't run on that. Are you sure you don't mean--" CH: "No, really... the verification hash of the system is [rattles off numbers/letters]" PA: "That seems like a valid hash, but..." (Increasingly nervous product activation employee has a panic attack as a manager tries to make sense of the ensuing chaos.)
Wouldn't casually substituting "microsoft" for "linux" in the previous thread result in a FAQ about a rant/discussion to call it GNU/microsoft? Do we really want to go that route? *shudders while pondering the ensuing flame wars*
The very fact that a newbie is still a newbie at a higher level is the problem. I'm in recovery now, but I used to play EQ a bit into the upper 30's levels. You could spot people that had pre-purchased a similarly level character by the fact that they had no idea how to play; as the overall setup of EQ favors group-play, one such person in a 6-person group is dangerous and stupid. They'll likely get the party wiped out and either (1) make a bad name for themself or if pre-purchase gets too commonplace (2) cause "legitimate players" to give up and take their subscription dollars elsewhere (which should point out why EQ's owning company didn't like people doing that).
I have [currently] three PCs at home connected in some crude network. The sum of their processor "MHz" ratings are just barely over 1GHz. My K6-2/400 box runs Linux so I can get e-mail and read slashdot. The CPU meter got boring sitting at "0" all the time. (I guess I'm saving even more system power to not draw "0%" on the screen.;) My wife's K6-2/500 box dual's between Linux (for e-mail and web) and Win'98 for Word, Money, and BG2, the last of which runs just fine for my needs. (It only started taxing down in Chapter 7, but that was fine since I was getting owned anyway;) The last box runs an ancient P-166 for Linux to basically maintain the network connection and share the modem. Aside from being lazy and/or broke (which are the main reasons preventing me from upgrading "on principle"), what *need* do *I* really have for even one box to be 1+ GHz, let alone to have two or three at 2+ GHz each? I'll answer that : I don't have any such current need; that said, the overall power of "CPU"s has exceeded my need a while ago. I'm focusing my dollars more recently on those other bits like video cards, sound cards, monitors, hub devices, more ergo mice/keyboards, etc. [shrug]
I thought I would chip in my two cents. Disclaimer: I have no strong preference between WP and Word; I've probably used both equally, but in spurts.
I actually typed and formatted my Master's thesis in MS Word, and I did not have any real great pains doing so. It was on the order of 70-some pages, had lots of figures and lots of "Equation" objects. (Now, granted MS Equation editor truly is distilled evil, but the topic is the word processor itself.;) My ability to deal with Word involves finding all the user preferences and turning them off. No auto-correct, no grammar/spellcheck squiggles showing in real-time, make sure the revealed codes are turned off (yes, there is a user pref. to show them; the grad. student lab computers always had Word revealing codes when I would use them). Then, very carefully setup the formatting for the document up per the college's strict requirements *BEFORE* typing in a single character. This went a long way to eliminating Word's default "helpful" behavior to screw my formatting over. That done, I just started banging out text and dealing with my advisers criticisms.
I admit that, yes, a true geek probably uses LaTeX for this, and I did get more than a few surprised gasps of "You... used... Word... for this?" (since it followed their question of "Looks nice... what'd you use?") But really, if you actually take time to find the user preference controls, rather than dealing with the stock defaults, it can get the job done. The version I was using, though, did have its problems dealing with the sheer quantity of material, so I will grant that as a weak point. I did have to resort to splitting the document up into a file each for my various chapters (at which point pagination became tricky, but still far from impossible).
Slashdot Mirror
That gives me an idea: make a "D:" script that echos out a big series of cryptic warnings, errors, etc. about invalid path, DLL and/or VxD warnings, a few bells, and a half-complete panic message about the file system now being corrupt with enough sleep statements between the echo's to make it all "look good". Man... seeing a tech's face (or heck, even just family company) get all sweaty for thinking he just hosed someones system might make it worth it.
It is nearly funny, except for the fact that I'll come off looking like a complete, paranoid loon for warning *my* address book of contacts to keep an eye out for this and try to warn them (and maybe, dare I say, educate) them that you can't trust anything you get by e-mail. *sigh*.
Seems like a virus is something you don't know about and/or something that performs other than advertised. This oddity actually tells you what it will do in the EULA, so assuming you click through the agreement, you get exactly everything "you want". Obviously most people won't read the details, but that's my take on why it isn't treated as a virus per se.
Clarify a bit... are you meaning install / run ximian-gnome to get the gnome2 binaries for my 7.3-based system? If not, help me out, since that is largely the assumption to which I'm replying here.
/.) whose only complaint about ximian-gnome was upgrading their distribution. Now, wherein does the blame lie here? Red Hat installer for not being able to cope with the foo-ximian set of binaries (I've got a few other complaints about the installer, although it is a lot better than back in 5.x days), or ximian packages for not having a way to "go back"? (That sounds dangerously like an incite to flame war.) What I did to appease my system upgrade was to yank out ximian gnome (carefully and nervously by hand to resolve dependencies) a package at a time.
;-)
I have in fact used Ximian-Gnome and the corresponding Red Carpet over majority of the previous year. I liked the improvements over the stock versions of gnome I was running at the time, and I loved Red Carpet. It was almost perfect: the only problem that crept up has been the recent upgrade of my aging system to RH7.3. The Red Hat upgrade/installer had an issue with the "third party" applicatons installed. Granted, I did not dig too deeply into this matter to know if a clean and easy solution was present, but I've read other threads from people (here on
Also, and maybe you can point out someone/somewhere that does this, but it'd be remarkably helpful for me on dialup if a full set of ximian packages came with the installer on a CD for the cost of the CD and shipping (which should be ~$3). Otherwise the download for installation gets somewhat tedious. Otherwise, truth be told, I'm happy as-is (gnome 1.4 with nautilus stripped out) until a stock gnome2 comes with a stock RH8.1.
Anyway, I don't want to sound argumentative, and I know you're offering very valid alternatives that, things being different, I'd be all over. This thread just explores why *I* (as one person) view naut.1 poorly and yet have not tried v2. When RH8.1 comes out, rest assured, I'll give it another go; hopefully by then my system hardware won't be as many shameful generations behind as my current one is (then again, it ain't broke, so why fix it?
That's what the source code is for. I compiled GNOME 2 completely from source.
[summon calmness... ohmm... ohmm...]
This reply isn't intended to be a flame or personally directed. I appreciate that source is available. That fact (i.e., the relative open-ness) is why I'm using Linux for my home machines. (And, while I don't have time to search through the source to verify everything's "above board", I trust the community as a whole does.) However, at this currently point in my life (the past year, and the next couple, likely) I need the system to "just work". Like those Apple switch ads. You've compiled for your system from source? GREAT! That we all have the option is a major boon. But personally, I don't have the time or inclination to attempt to do this. I've tried compiling bits of gnome for my system in the past; days later I gave up in complete frustration. I don't have the talent or patience to sort out cryptically worded compiler errors. (That I tried doing this anyway, in the spirit of learning -- much like the time I tried rpm --force --nodeps once -- was what caused a complete system re-install.) So, for sake of keeping it "just working", I've decided that I'll let RedHat sort out this nonsense and provide me known-working, pre-compiled rpm/binaries for things. I have a wife (gasp!) who's returned to full time school on top of near-full-time work, so I pick up the slack around the apartment to keep her from going nuts; I also have a martial arts class a couple evenings a week, and a few other things in the hopper. Therefore, lacking the extra free time, I don't want to need to deal with compilations of large, complex desktop environments (etc.) -- especially in this case that the original question I answered was"why aren't people trying Naut.2?". Well... this is why. Question asked and question answered. (IOW, why submit myself any my system to an inept compilation attempt just to try naut.2? makes no sense to me.) When RH goes to 8.1, I'll jump all over it and have gnome 2. No fuss / no muss.
Speaking more generally, I'll reiterate that its wonderful we have source available, but part of what harms the community in terms of new user acceptance (do we or don't we want new users?) is the attitude of "RTFM!" and "you've got the source... go compile it yourself!" that crops up. For instance, my mom is having *countless* issues with her PC, many the result of IE / Outlook (viral) on Win'98. She's a few states away from me, so it isn't like I can drop by. Now, I'd like to tell her to run out and buy a box copy of mandrake, but things just simply are not ready for people like her. (And lest you're lead to think improperly, she has decades of computer experience; she ca$hed in on the COBOL / Y2K fiasco... in fact predicted the exact effect twenty years ahead of time like all the other code-writers forced into 2-digit year usage.) For me, I can, if i really have to, follow along with man pages, HOWTOs, grab-source-and-compile, search google, etc. to solve problems (except having time lately), but she would be completely lost at all this, and I'll not subject her to the occasional remarks of "compile from source" (where the person is trying to be genuinely helpful, but isn't realizing that they're actually causing damage).
Why do people keep ranting about how bad Nautilus 1 is but don't even try Nautilus 2?
Because RH7.3 is Gnome 1.4-based, and I don't run RH x.0 releases. Risking self-imposed corruption of a relatively clean 7.3 system to cram in the newest and best stuff isn't worth it -- to me -- to try Nautilus 2.
I tend to agree with the sentiment of another poster: it's [mainly] a freakin' file browser!, but it causes my K6-2/400 machine to thrash upon login like a M.F'er for a minimum of 30 seconds before feigning use; yet, everything else on the system comes up / runs crisp and responsively so much so that I really have no need to upgrade anything.
What we need is an auto-reply along the lines of the famous poll option:
"I don't get a Christmas bonus check, you insensitive clod!"
So basically, I'm a linux newbie wannabe. Where do I start?
;-)
You'd probably do best by 'starting' at the corner drug store. Consider purchasing at least one package of stay-awake pills (or a few two-liters of strong cola) and one large-ish bottle of antacid. Learning Linux is do-able (or I wouldn't be here) but is not for the casual, faint-of-heart.
(And/or if the parent poster was serious, common opinion seems to favor Mandrake for true newbies. Go to your bookstore and flip through some heavy Linux books in the computer section... a $50 manual will be worth the headaches otherwise your first time in.)
Next.
Finnish.
It tricks users into switching to a Finnish language set? Neat-o...
I *believe* (and may be corrected if wrong) that the aphorism you refer to is about spider silk having a better *ratio* of strength to weight than steel, not that it has a better tensile strength. Since I'll wager spider silk is a lot lighter than an equivalent diameter carbon nanotube, you're question is a bit mis-worded.
Just a minor clarification on the parent...
The "slingshot effect" is only useful for trajectory changes. [cut] Due to conservation of energy, when you approach a planet and slingshot away from it, you end up with the same velocity on the way out as the way in.
This is correct enough, but for those who haven't taken an orbital mechanics class, I thought I'd chip in a little bit more info. The 'slingshot' effect seems to work since you (the object) is changing frames of reference into- and out of the planet being used. (The other frame being with respect to the sun.) Additionally, you have to do the approach from the 'backside' so the planet pulls you forward on your way by (assuming you want to gain speed; otherwise enter on the front-side to slow down).
Once you leave the sphere of influence of the planet itself though, and are only under the dominant effect of the sun (i.e., changed frames of reference) you have changed net velocity (speed as well as direction).
The code needs a counsler not a programmer. I'm in that boat right now, and I want out fast!
This, for once, was where I managed to use one of the company's own 'lines' against it: "Hey, I'm just an engineer, not a paid, professional code guru." (Which seemed to nicely translate, as desired, to "This is bad... deal with it as-is or give it to someone else.") I hope you find your own way out before you go bug-fscking-nuts, though... especially if you *are* the paid, professional code-guru.
Just to reassure you slightly, I'm not. However, think "fuel consumption device". ;-)
::shudder::
Otherwise, what you say is true enough... it isn't the language specification itself that causes the problems as much as the general non-CS-ness that the engineers approach code-writing with. That being what it is, a CS-guru here has a glorified 'sed' script (well, very similarly anyway) to convert f77 syntax to f90 syntax. (strip line numbers, fix continuation marks, etc.) The shock and horror of my experience was, even only changing a couple things to satisfy 'f90' warnings and errors, *by hand*, the old pre-f77-code really ran differently (and not meaning that the precision changed the last sig.fig slightly... ASCII output graphs suddenly had no data traces in them, file output format was hosed as to be useless... very very frightening. I could only somewhat sympathize with the unfortunate 'owner' of that code when I was forced to say, "Well, it'll never work, here, with f90; I understand f77 is going away, and I understand Unix is also [mostly] going away, but there is nothing I can do." (Worse still for him, no one understood the vagaries of what it did, there is/was no documentation, and what little I could untangle was so inefficiently written as to make BASIC a nice alternative.) I went home and lamented what might've otherwise been a nice, useful, maintainable code.
Forget euthanasia... it needs to be taken out behind the barn by a large farm boy with an axe handle and severely beaten to a pulp.
Let me somewhat answer w/ what I know from the basis of Fortran '90; I haven't seen anything specific on 2000. Where I work (large aerospace industry company) all the Fortran code is still the old-school stuff (F'77... or older); there's so much of it, and it uses so many anachronisms and non-ANSI (machine and/or compiler dependent tricks / hacks / bugs / unknown evil things) code constructs that the majority of it just *cannot* even be ported to '90. (I know... I tried porting a rather small thing over to only compile with the new compiler, and all the output was way, way wrong, owing to an unknown issue that I didn't have the skill and the boss didn't have the money to chase.)
Now, F'90 didn't have true OO in it; it had just introduced "MODULE"s, and for those couple of us rebellious "young'uns" that embraced it, '90 was far and away better. I'm personally a big fan of more complete OO programming, but the bosses and supervisors here just cannot comprehend what it even is. (I've tried to explain it several times... their perspective, and perhaps refusal to learn from someone half their age, prevents their understanding at why OO is, generally, a Good Thing). Are the current Fortran languages similar? Well, in the sense that C++ is (or can be) similar to C, then yes... assuming you only code to the bits that you understand. But doing so really defeats the whole purpose of having revised the language.
For my $0.02, with where Fortran seems to be trying to head (not that I've read the referenced draft; I haven't), we might as well write and compile with C++; the vaunted speed advantage starts bleeding away with (direct or indirect) access to pointers and other things, and my experience here the past several years is that said speed difference is mainly a function of the quality of the compiler anyway. (And ours sucks big hairy ones, and I won't say which one it is.)
The biggest insurmountable hurdle here is that Fortran now-a-days is really only *used* in the scientific community, and, by and large, such community is less concerned with staying up with the new learning curve of programming practices and more concerned with getting the next thing done. (For a humorous semi-related example of this, consider our recent "port" of a well-used CFD code into Fortran '90... we changed the make file to use "f90" rather than "f77" and made sure it still compiled... huzzah! we now have a Fortran '90 program *cough*NOT*cough*...)
I read an article in Sci-Am (I believe it was; June or July-ish; the cover refers to alternative explanation to dark matter, yatta yatta) where they discussed scientific work done with respect to brain wave responses to people "hearing" the "r" and "l" sound. For "us Westerners", each sound produced two distinct lobes in a response/feedback (bleh... I'm no brain scientist) map thing, which denotes our brains ability to hear and be affected by the differences in the sound. Japanese natives, however, say their "r" with a slight tapping of the roof of the mouth (somewhat similar to Spanish, if your teacher was good enough to beat the fact into your pronunciation)... and the sound for a single "ra" sorta sounds like "rla". They studied such people, and the response/feedback map showed just a single lobe for both "r" and "l", which seems to indicate (according to the article) that their brains can't easily distinguish a difference between the sounds. (Granted, that's probably a consequence of their syllabary versus ours, and no doubt with training they can 'learn' (to hear and speak) the difference just as Westeners have from an early age.) Anyway, I found article rather interesting to have covered this.
I was looking to do the same thing. On my system, nautilus is embarrassingly un-usable. But, I couldn't find "gmc" for the life of my. I found a "gnome-commander" a couple places, but it looked like it was tagged 'beta', and the installation did not produce the old familiar "gmc" command. Can you or anyone tell me what the story is here?
JINI is a programmatic API based on Java. It, in and of itself, doesn't understand hardware. This discussion is in regards to (to put it crudely) hardware connector types/protocols. Now, putting/embedding JINI code and a micro JVM inside a physical device (as you may be remembering a write-up about) may be neat, but it is still working in a different realm since, from what I'm gathering of the discussions here, the current USB can't talk directly peripheral-to-peripheral w/out your system's processor to intermediate.
Must say I agree. I similarly go to the theater less and less these days to see movies: for the effort, increasing prices, increasing ambient noise levels (general rude-ness and cell-phones), bad pop-corn... well, it takes a really good movie for me to want to bother, and so I become quite selective. But it isn't just the environmental issues. Maybe I'm just getting old[er] and [more] crotchety, but the overall quality of films that purport to appeal to my demographic have really gone into the crapper the past few years (rare, notable exceptions are present), and since they don't do too well in the theater, they come out in the rental stores a bit more quickly, so then there's even less reason to go spend $20+ (me and the misses) when I/we can otherwise rent it for $3, drive through $fast_food_place for $10, possibly see it many times, (plus bonus DVD footage not in the theater) and quite decidely fast-fwd through the commercials. Bleh.
I think a phone call into product activation would've been a hoot.
Product Activation: "Hello, Product Activation center. What can I do to help you today?"
Crafty Hacker: "Uh, yeah. I need to re-activate my XP installation. I changed a couple things and it apparently tripped something."
PA: "Okay, sure. First, what's the CD Key on your XP installation disk?"
CH: "Err, its [rattles off numbers/letters]."
PA: "Right. Okay. What type of system do you have it running on now,then? I need your make/model, processor speed, [etc.]"
CH: "Well, I guess the system is a Microsoft XBOX. [starts ratting off rest of system specs] --"
PA: "A What? It doesn't run on that. Are you sure you don't mean--"
CH: "No, really... the verification hash of the system is [rattles off numbers/letters]"
PA: "That seems like a valid hash, but..." (Increasingly nervous product activation employee has a panic attack as a manager tries to make sense of the ensuing chaos.)
Wouldn't casually substituting "microsoft" for "linux" in the previous thread result in a FAQ about a rant/discussion to call it GNU/microsoft? Do we really want to go that route? *shudders while pondering the ensuing flame wars*
The very fact that a newbie is still a newbie at a higher level is the problem. I'm in recovery now, but I used to play EQ a bit into the upper 30's levels. You could spot people that had pre-purchased a similarly level character by the fact that they had no idea how to play; as the overall setup of EQ favors group-play, one such person in a 6-person group is dangerous and stupid. They'll likely get the party wiped out and either (1) make a bad name for themself or if pre-purchase gets too commonplace (2) cause "legitimate players" to give up and take their subscription dollars elsewhere (which should point out why EQ's owning company didn't like people doing that).
I have [currently] three PCs at home connected in some crude network. The sum of their processor "MHz" ratings are just barely over 1GHz. My K6-2/400 box runs Linux so I can get e-mail and read slashdot. The CPU meter got boring sitting at "0" all the time. (I guess I'm saving even more system power to not draw "0%" on the screen. ;) My wife's K6-2/500 box dual's between Linux (for e-mail and web) and Win'98 for Word, Money, and BG2, the last of which runs just fine for my needs. (It only started taxing down in Chapter 7, but that was fine since I was getting owned anyway ;) The last box runs an ancient P-166 for Linux to basically maintain the network connection and share the modem. Aside from being lazy and/or broke (which are the main reasons preventing me from upgrading "on principle"), what *need* do *I* really have for even one box to be 1+ GHz, let alone to have two or three at 2+ GHz each? I'll answer that : I don't have any such current need; that said, the overall power of "CPU"s has exceeded my need a while ago. I'm focusing my dollars more recently on those other bits like video cards, sound cards, monitors, hub devices, more ergo mice/keyboards, etc. [shrug]
I thought I would chip in my two cents. Disclaimer: I have no strong preference between WP and Word; I've probably used both equally, but in spurts.
;) My ability to deal with Word involves finding all the user preferences and turning them off. No auto-correct, no grammar/spellcheck squiggles showing in real-time, make sure the revealed codes are turned off (yes, there is a user pref. to show them; the grad. student lab computers always had Word revealing codes when I would use them). Then, very carefully setup the formatting for the document up per the college's strict requirements *BEFORE* typing in a single character. This went a long way to eliminating Word's default "helpful" behavior to screw my formatting over. That done, I just started banging out text and dealing with my advisers criticisms.
... used ... Word ... for this?" (since it followed their question of "Looks nice... what'd you use?") But really, if you actually take time to find the user preference controls, rather than dealing with the stock defaults, it can get the job done. The version I was using, though, did have its problems dealing with the sheer quantity of material, so I will grant that as a weak point. I did have to resort to splitting the document up into a file each for my various chapters (at which point pagination became tricky, but still far from impossible).
I actually typed and formatted my Master's thesis in MS Word, and I did not have any real great pains doing so. It was on the order of 70-some pages, had lots of figures and lots of "Equation" objects. (Now, granted MS Equation editor truly is distilled evil, but the topic is the word processor itself.
I admit that, yes, a true geek probably uses LaTeX for this, and I did get more than a few surprised gasps of "You
The Foxwoods casino is indeed in CT, as is the Mohegan Sun casino.