Back when I worked at Sun, I had a nasty experience involving final. I performed the same experiment you did, with the same results, and wrote a paper about it. Yes, it does suck.
I'm sorry, but I discounted this story as soon as I read the words "developed by HP". Any PC developed and/or marketed by HP is almost guaranteed to be garbage, thanks to the pathetic quality control and design at HP.
HP doesn't really even deserve their name anymore. Hewlett and Packard are both dead. All the cool scientific goodies have been spun off into Agilent. HP just killed off ACO after insulting their loyal user community with the 49G. And Carly Fiorina (can you look at her picture and honestly say that she doesn't look like a vulture?) is gleefully turning the remnants of HP into yet another Microsoft whore.
Their printers are the only tolerable product they're still producing, and I hear Epson is rapidly catching up. I have had the worst luck with HP's computer systems, both with the Kayak (their "high-end workstation" that I used at a previous job) and with various Pavilions that I have tried to fix/upgrade for people (oh, and their tech support is useless; try calling and asking what Ethernet card they have inside: "oh, that would be a `10/100' card, sir").
HP has a training program wherein you can get significant discounts on their products if you take online classes. I guess the idea is that retailers will be more eager to sell HP if they have 1) gotten free stuff from HP, and 2) know lots about HP products. Well, the HP PhotoSmart 612 which I got at a nice discount is of horrible quality. The camera design itself is actually pretty decent, but I had to go through 5 cameras before I found 1 without significant CCD defects. What I can tell you from my extensive HP training is this: Don't buy HP, kids. They suck.
Emacs uses a quirky dialect of a rather ancient Lisp. If you want to
learn Common Lisp, you will need to get a Lisp environment. I
recommend CLISP, due to its
extreme portability, simple installation procedure (./configure; make;
su; make install), and relatively friendly CLI when not used via an
editor interface (tab completion mainly).
I recommend using ILISP with Emacs.
It integrates with most of the Lisp environments out there and
provides some neat features such as sending the new version of your
defun to Lisp, and a slightly buggy buffer-package-matching thingy.
Here's the Common Lisp devel stuff in my ~/.emacs:
Well, I would have put it here, except that even with all the text below, the Slashdot lameness filter cens0rizes me. Email me if you're curious and I'll send you a copy.
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Reason: Please use fewer 'junk' characters.
[Sorry about this, but it looks as if I'll have to change the character ratios a bit...] Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this
continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the
proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in
a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so
conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great
battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of
that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their
lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and
proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense, we cannot
dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground.
The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have consecrated
it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will
little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never
forget what they did here. It is for us the living rather to be
dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here
have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here
dedicated to the great task remaining before us--that from these
honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which
they gave the last full measure of devotion--that we here highly
resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this
nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that
government of the people, by the people, for the people shall
not perish from the earth.
CHAPTER 1
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.
The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features. Winston made for the stairs. It was no use trying the lift. Even at the best of times it was seldom working, and at present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours. It was part of the economy drive in preparation for Hate Week. The flat was seven flights up, and Winston, who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went slowly, resting several times on the way. On each landing, opposite the lift-shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.
Inside the flat a fruity voice was reading out a list of figures which had something to do with the production of pig-iron. The voice came from an oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror which formed part of the surface of the right-hand wall. Winston turned a switch and the voice sank somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable. The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely. He moved over to the window: a smallish, frail figure, the meagreness of his body merely emphasized by the blue overalls which were the uniform of the party. His hair was very fair, his face naturally sanguine, his skin roughened by coarse soap and blunt razor blades and the cold of the winter that had just ended.
Outside, even through the shut window-pane, the world looked cold. Down in the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there seemed to be no colour in anything, except the posters that were plastered everywhere. The blackmoustachio'd face gazed down from every commanding corner. There was one on the house-front immediately opposite. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said, while the dark eyes looked deep into Winston's own. Down at streetlevel another poster, torn at one corner, flapped fitfully in the wind, alternately covering and uncovering the single word INGSOC. In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again with a curving flight. It was the police patrol, snooping into people's windows. The patrols did not matter, however. Only the Thought Police mattered.
Behind Winston's back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away about pig-iron and the overfulfilment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live -- did live, from habit that became instinct -- in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.
Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer, though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing. A kilometre away the Ministry of Truth, his place of work, towered vast and white above the grimy landscape. This, he thought with a sort of vague distaste -- this was London, chief city of Airstrip One, itself the third most populous of the provinces of Oceania. He tried to squeeze out some childhood memory that should tell him whether London had always been quite like this. Were there always these vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored up with baulks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions? And the bombed sites where the plaster dust swirled in the air and the willow-herb straggled over the heaps of rubble; and the places where the bombs had cleared a larger patch and there had sprung up sordid colonies of wooden dwellings like chicken-houses? But it was no use, he could not remember: nothing remained of his childhood except a series of bright-lit tableaux occurring against no background and mostly unintelligible.
The Ministry of Truth -- Minitrue, in Newspeak* -- was startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, 300 metres into the air. From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
We in the linux community, instead of bitching, need to look at XP as the new target. Look how good OSX and XP are. If we want to remain a competitor, we need to make our desktops this good. No excuses.
I don't make excuses. When coworkers start singing the praises of XP, I fire up Nautilus on my Slackware-running laptop and watch their jaws drop. Up the zoom level and it shows more information below each icon? "Wow, XP doesn't do that." Hover the pointer over a music file and hear a preview? "Wow, XP doesn't do that." Offer opaque file selection that doesn't skip and hop around grotesquely? "Wow, XP doesn't do that." Use the first few lines of a text file as a thumbnail icon? "Wow, XP doesn't do that."
It used to be that Linux was better as an overall system in terms of stability and fine-grained control, but suffered æsthetically and feature-wise when compared to Macs or even Windows. This has changed, I hope forever. I can honestly say that my "desktop experience" is vastly better in Linux than in Windows. Mozilla, with its tabbed browsing (and the middle mouse button, hooray); a decent window manager; and a file manager that doesn't offend me in every possible manner. And what am I intended to compare this with? IEXPLORE.EXE? rotfl.
(Nautilus, by the way, is the first GUI file manager, aside from the excellent TkDesk, to not disgust me within a minute, and the first to actually impress me on all fronts. I rarely load it, due to a desire to avoid RAM wastage, but it's quite nice, especially for browsing my photo collection. I might try ROX-Filer in the near future, just for variety.)
Not only is it the most widely used, it is easily the only reason many businesses even bother with Microsoft. We'll see if they stick with that once the forced upgrades and rental plans start rolling around...
I've said this before and I'll say it again. I don't in any way expect people to know every detail of how every component in their system works. I do, however, expect them to understand the basics before wreaking havoc upon the lives of others in the community they invade. I also expect them not to run away in disgust when knowledge is presented to them on a silver platter.
I don't know how everything in a car works, but I understand the basics of axles and gears. I don't know every line of telephone switch code by heart, but I understand the basics of country codes, area codes, and prefixes. And so on. For a computer, the equivalent is understanding the basic differences between short-term and long-term storage, how file systems are organized ("This is a folder/directory. You can put files or other folders in it."), and the like. For networks, the basics are host addressing schemes (TLDs, user@host, etc), simple protocol knowledge (no, your mail is not sent over the Web, even though there may be a Web front end, and there is more to the Internet than the WWW), and what "client", "server", "upload", and "download" mean. I have no sympathy whatsoever for anyone who refuses to learn these basics, any more than I would expect sympathy from a police officer if I attempted to drive without first learning what the pretty colors on traffic lights meant.
The second and more important issue I mentioned is that people tend to shun the acquisition of knowledge, especially when computers are involved. No, I don't know everything about how a VCR works. But I had a VHS tape I needed to watch the other day get crumpled, and what did I do? I broke out the screwdriver. And now I know exactly how the VCR releases the locks on the tape spools, how the tape feeds through the cartridge, and all the other knowledge that will let me more quickly diagnose a problem with my VCR if it ever occurs again, and I watched my video on time.
I don't expect every computer user to open the case every time something goes wrong, but I expect it to make at least a token effort at proper use and maintainence of the system it uses on a daily basis. If I say "your file system keeps getting corrupted because you keep turning off your computer when it is writing to disk", I expect you to stop cutting power in that fashion. If I say "the reason it keeps having to write to disk so much is that you need more than 32MB of RAM to run 5 applications at the same time", I expect you to get more RAM or stop whining to me, and certainly not to say "but it has a gigabyte" when I have explained the difference between short-term and long-term memory 5 times in the past 3 minutes.
If someone wants to be lazy and ignorant, that's his problem. But he shouldn't expect his life to be a seamless ocean of perfect technological ecstacy, and he shouldn't expect me to gladly mop up after him for free. I reserve the right to charge high prices for the accumulated technical knowledge of a lifetime, when he could have learned what he needs to know in 5 minutes of his own time.
Now you are stuck: Hire a contract UNIX programmer who may not be able to do anything, Accept MyPOS may eat it once in a while, or buy new hardware with better drivers.
Or you could hire Joe. Yes, you might have to pay him more than you would like if he doesn't jump at the chance to maintain his code for money. But guess what? People are under no obligation to give you free services.
Scale this up and this is open source. It's fine if your home Pentium server crashes and takes out your MP3s, Pron, and Warez archives, but if your in a mission critical situation and your accounting file server crashes, it's a little different.
"Mission critical." Haha. I've stopped listening to such garbage. NASA? Sure. Military, paramedics, police? Yeah. But "accounting file server"? Please. I really couldn't care less about how well the wheels of business keep turning at this point.
Accountability. If my MacOS X server dies and it was a code flaw, I sue Apple.
You go right ahead, and then you watch that suit get thrown out of court because the disclaimers stated that it was not to be used in "mission critical" situations, and the license agreement said that you would not hold them liable.
If my Windows server dies based on a line of defective drives from IBM, I sue IBM.
Cool. You might get a coupon for some discounts on IBM floppy disks or something.
If my Linux server crashes because Steve's New Kernel Patch sucks, there's no recourse.
Am I supposed to think this is a problem? There are lots of things in life for which there is no recourse. People make mistakes. Get over it. Tell your manager, "I chose this technology because based upon my judgement and professional experience, which was why you hired me, it did and still does appear to be the best solution.".
Mainly, grow a spine and accept some responsibility for your own choices in life for once.
I just checked the HTML source, and it doesn't appear to be using tags. One thing I have noticed with Mozilla, though, is that if you are using tabbed browsing, any page with tags will cause the "Site Navigation Bar" to be displayed in that window. (And here's a bug... None of the buttons are even grayed out.)
Never mind... I just switched out of light mode, and Slashdot is indeed producing <link> tags. Which leads me to the question: Why does light mode leave out some genuinely useful stuff, like the aforementioned tags which could actually speed up browsing on slow links, and like being able to get the comment number right off a comment, without having to copy the "Reply To" link and hack it?
I own the VisorPhone, and I absolutely love it, both as a phone, and as the organizer that it integrates with. I can keep all my contact information in one place — every phone number goes straight into the Address database — and I can dial any of those people with 2-3 taps of the stylus. It's not horribly inconvenient to hold up to my head, and if I'm using it for any length of time, I generally plug in my EarBoom headset.
Those are just its phone capabilities. The internet features are incredible. VoiceStream doesn't charge extra for data use, so it just comes out of my normal minutes (I do need a dialup account, however). I can read and post to Slashdot. I can check my mail and reply to anything urgent. And for longer emails/posts, I pull out my fold-up Stowaway keyboard and type at full speed.
And John Q. Public loves this thing, if every single person who sees it saying "that's dope/cool/really neat/interesting" is any indication...
wasn't the addition of hyperlinks to the page without the author's knowledge one of the features that was widely critizied in the upcoming version of Internet Explorer?
Not by me it wasn't (you may have to scroll down a bit).
Ah, my bad. I have only done this on machines without NS4 installed. I guess it looks for genuine Netscape first, and then falls back to Mozilla, instead of doing the sane thing, which is installing itself into all plugin directories on your system. Or even better, displaying a list of installed browsers and asking which to install into.
The fact that you can not get the Flash plugin for Mozilla when running it on Windows 98.
Yes you can. Just go to Macromedia's site, do the "get flash" thing, and select the Windows plugin for Netscape browsers. The installer will automatically detect Mozilla and install the plugin. You may need to restart Mozilla afterward, but then you are set.
I decided to do what is called a cut in Prolog and not investigate further.
I almost mocked you for trolling and making ridiculous analogies, but I realized that you know at least the basics of Prolog and the analogy is in fact quite apt.
If you don't mind my curiosity, what Prolog experience do you have, what do/did you do with it, and what do you think of it? I still have childhood nostalgia from playing with Prolog (in my opinion the best AI/expert system language)...
Many pro porn folks have hundreds or thousands of little web sites
Vile domain grabbing conglomerates!
and filling out a web form evaluating each one is too much work. Something like a simple "" tag would be so much more easily adopted. (Not that exactly, but something that at least you didn't need to register in a database via a web form).
Except that you don't need to register in a database. The Web tools exist merely as helpful "wizards", as it were, to generate the tags. You can write one by hand, if you wish, and slap it in your site. No outside interaction required.
Because of this fact, it's very easy to use PICS tags. Just generate the tag once and then cut&paste it into each site created (I imagine they would all have similar nudity values), just editing the site name. No different than the process used to create those "hundreds or thousands of little web sites", I'd imagine...
This sounds exactly like PICS. In fact, I can't find a single mention of how it's different, except that this is promoted by "industry leaders" (such as Yahoo!, AOL-TW, and MSN, oh joy) instead of actually technically competent engineers like the ones who invented PICS. Oh, and that it requires a "free filtering program that will be available next spring" (vaporware). Which of course will almost certainly leave Mac and *nix users out in the cold. Wanna bet that they leech some personal spam fodder in exchange for the "free" program?
The only mention that could possibly be of PICS is the following:
A previous set of filtering standards was less specific, but shipped with Internet browsers.
Which is so vague as to be useless. And the exclusion of any mention of the existing voluntary granular filtering system makes me wonder why they're scared of comparing themselves to it. Also I'd like to find out how this new "standard" is more specific.
at least he's honest about it...
on
Slashdot Updates
·
· Score: 1
I'm wireless on my Visor now, so I'll keep this short, but it's a lot less offensive when Taco:
explains the situation, instead of just implementing the New Policy
gives us an option to support the site in other ways (I would pay for ZDNet, too; that is, if they let me, and if their site actually had content like their magazines used to, before they switched to mindless accolades for anything Microsoft)
I'll gladly pay for Slashdot, provided that the fee is reasonable and on a month-to-month basis. Oh, and that they do something about that WWWWWWW crap, without introducing even more URL breakage. And while they're at it, fix the existing breakage.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't suppose it matters that Common Lisp has had accessors and SYMBOL-MACROLET since, well, forever, does it? *sigh*
Back when I worked at Sun, I had a nasty experience involving final. I performed the same experiment you did, with the same results, and wrote a paper about it. Yes, it does suck.
HP doesn't really even deserve their name anymore. Hewlett and Packard are both dead. All the cool scientific goodies have been spun off into Agilent. HP just killed off ACO after insulting their loyal user community with the 49G. And Carly Fiorina (can you look at her picture and honestly say that she doesn't look like a vulture?) is gleefully turning the remnants of HP into yet another Microsoft whore.
Their printers are the only tolerable product they're still producing, and I hear Epson is rapidly catching up. I have had the worst luck with HP's computer systems, both with the Kayak (their "high-end workstation" that I used at a previous job) and with various Pavilions that I have tried to fix/upgrade for people (oh, and their tech support is useless; try calling and asking what Ethernet card they have inside: "oh, that would be a `10/100' card, sir").
HP has a training program wherein you can get significant discounts on their products if you take online classes. I guess the idea is that retailers will be more eager to sell HP if they have 1) gotten free stuff from HP, and 2) know lots about HP products. Well, the HP PhotoSmart 612 which I got at a nice discount is of horrible quality. The camera design itself is actually pretty decent, but I had to go through 5 cameras before I found 1 without significant CCD defects. What I can tell you from my extensive HP training is this: Don't buy HP, kids. They suck.
I did that today, even. Mmm, veggie sandwich with honey mustard on parmesan oregano.
Are you talking about SCSI cables like these?
I recommend using ILISP with Emacs. It integrates with most of the Lisp environments out there and provides some neat features such as sending the new version of your defun to Lisp, and a slightly buggy buffer-package-matching thingy. Here's the Common Lisp devel stuff in my ~/.emacs:
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted! Reason: Please use fewer 'junk' characters.
[Sorry about this, but it looks as if I'll have to change the character ratios a bit...] Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us--that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion--that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.
CHAPTER 1
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.
The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features. Winston made for the stairs. It was no use trying the lift. Even at the best of times it was seldom working, and at present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours. It was part of the economy drive in preparation for Hate Week. The flat was seven flights up, and Winston, who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went slowly, resting several times on the way. On each landing, opposite the lift-shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.
Inside the flat a fruity voice was reading out a list of figures which had something to do with the production of pig-iron. The voice came from an oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror which formed part of the surface of the right-hand wall. Winston turned a switch and the voice sank somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable. The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely. He moved over to the window: a smallish, frail figure, the meagreness of his body merely emphasized by the blue overalls which were the uniform of the party. His hair was very fair, his face naturally sanguine, his skin roughened by coarse soap and blunt razor blades and the cold of the winter that had just ended.
Outside, even through the shut window-pane, the world looked cold. Down in the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there seemed to be no colour in anything, except the posters that were plastered everywhere. The blackmoustachio'd face gazed down from every commanding corner. There was one on the house-front immediately opposite. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said, while the dark eyes looked deep into Winston's own. Down at streetlevel another poster, torn at one corner, flapped fitfully in the wind, alternately covering and uncovering the single word INGSOC. In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again with a curving flight. It was the police patrol, snooping into people's windows. The patrols did not matter, however. Only the Thought Police mattered.
Behind Winston's back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away about pig-iron and the overfulfilment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live -- did live, from habit that became instinct -- in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.
Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer, though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing. A kilometre away the Ministry of Truth, his place of work, towered vast and white above the grimy landscape. This, he thought with a sort of vague distaste -- this was London, chief city of Airstrip One, itself the third most populous of the provinces of Oceania. He tried to squeeze out some childhood memory that should tell him whether London had always been quite like this. Were there always these vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored up with baulks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions? And the bombed sites where the plaster dust swirled in the air and the willow-herb straggled over the heaps of rubble; and the places where the bombs had cleared a larger patch and there had sprung up sordid colonies of wooden dwellings like chicken-houses? But it was no use, he could not remember: nothing remained of his childhood except a series of bright-lit tableaux occurring against no background and mostly unintelligible.
The Ministry of Truth -- Minitrue, in Newspeak* -- was startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, 300 metres into the air. From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:
I don't make excuses. When coworkers start singing the praises of XP, I fire up Nautilus on my Slackware-running laptop and watch their jaws drop. Up the zoom level and it shows more information below each icon? "Wow, XP doesn't do that." Hover the pointer over a music file and hear a preview? "Wow, XP doesn't do that." Offer opaque file selection that doesn't skip and hop around grotesquely? "Wow, XP doesn't do that." Use the first few lines of a text file as a thumbnail icon? "Wow, XP doesn't do that."
It used to be that Linux was better as an overall system in terms of stability and fine-grained control, but suffered æsthetically and feature-wise when compared to Macs or even Windows. This has changed, I hope forever. I can honestly say that my "desktop experience" is vastly better in Linux than in Windows. Mozilla, with its tabbed browsing (and the middle mouse button, hooray); a decent window manager; and a file manager that doesn't offend me in every possible manner. And what am I intended to compare this with? IEXPLORE.EXE? rotfl.
(Nautilus, by the way, is the first GUI file manager, aside from the excellent TkDesk, to not disgust me within a minute, and the first to actually impress me on all fronts. I rarely load it, due to a desire to avoid RAM wastage, but it's quite nice, especially for browsing my photo collection. I might try ROX-Filer in the near future, just for variety.)
Not only is it the most widely used, it is easily the only reason many businesses even bother with Microsoft. We'll see if they stick with that once the forced upgrades and rental plans start rolling around...
I don't know how everything in a car works, but I understand the basics of axles and gears. I don't know every line of telephone switch code by heart, but I understand the basics of country codes, area codes, and prefixes. And so on. For a computer, the equivalent is understanding the basic differences between short-term and long-term storage, how file systems are organized ("This is a folder/directory. You can put files or other folders in it."), and the like. For networks, the basics are host addressing schemes (TLDs, user@host, etc), simple protocol knowledge (no, your mail is not sent over the Web, even though there may be a Web front end, and there is more to the Internet than the WWW), and what "client", "server", "upload", and "download" mean. I have no sympathy whatsoever for anyone who refuses to learn these basics, any more than I would expect sympathy from a police officer if I attempted to drive without first learning what the pretty colors on traffic lights meant.
The second and more important issue I mentioned is that people tend to shun the acquisition of knowledge, especially when computers are involved. No, I don't know everything about how a VCR works. But I had a VHS tape I needed to watch the other day get crumpled, and what did I do? I broke out the screwdriver. And now I know exactly how the VCR releases the locks on the tape spools, how the tape feeds through the cartridge, and all the other knowledge that will let me more quickly diagnose a problem with my VCR if it ever occurs again, and I watched my video on time.
I don't expect every computer user to open the case every time something goes wrong, but I expect it to make at least a token effort at proper use and maintainence of the system it uses on a daily basis. If I say "your file system keeps getting corrupted because you keep turning off your computer when it is writing to disk", I expect you to stop cutting power in that fashion. If I say "the reason it keeps having to write to disk so much is that you need more than 32MB of RAM to run 5 applications at the same time", I expect you to get more RAM or stop whining to me, and certainly not to say "but it has a gigabyte" when I have explained the difference between short-term and long-term memory 5 times in the past 3 minutes.
If someone wants to be lazy and ignorant, that's his problem. But he shouldn't expect his life to be a seamless ocean of perfect technological ecstacy, and he shouldn't expect me to gladly mop up after him for free. I reserve the right to charge high prices for the accumulated technical knowledge of a lifetime, when he could have learned what he needs to know in 5 minutes of his own time.
...all the "sign out" buttons on Hotmail have just transformed into XP-looking ".net sign out" buttons.
Or you could hire Joe. Yes, you might have to pay him more than you would like if he doesn't jump at the chance to maintain his code for money. But guess what? People are under no obligation to give you free services.
"Mission critical." Haha. I've stopped listening to such garbage. NASA? Sure. Military, paramedics, police? Yeah. But "accounting file server"? Please. I really couldn't care less about how well the wheels of business keep turning at this point.
You go right ahead, and then you watch that suit get thrown out of court because the disclaimers stated that it was not to be used in "mission critical" situations, and the license agreement said that you would not hold them liable.
Cool. You might get a coupon for some discounts on IBM floppy disks or something.
Am I supposed to think this is a problem? There are lots of things in life for which there is no recourse. People make mistakes. Get over it. Tell your manager, "I chose this technology because based upon my judgement and professional experience, which was why you hired me, it did and still does appear to be the best solution.".
Mainly, grow a spine and accept some responsibility for your own choices in life for once.
Not in light mode, it's not. Please reread my comment.
Never mind... I just switched out of light mode, and Slashdot is indeed producing <link> tags. Which leads me to the question: Why does light mode leave out some genuinely useful stuff, like the aforementioned tags which could actually speed up browsing on slow links, and like being able to get the comment number right off a comment, without having to copy the "Reply To" link and hack it?
But that's still handy to know about Mozilla...
Those are just its phone capabilities. The internet features are incredible. VoiceStream doesn't charge extra for data use, so it just comes out of my normal minutes (I do need a dialup account, however). I can read and post to Slashdot. I can check my mail and reply to anything urgent. And for longer emails/posts, I pull out my fold-up Stowaway keyboard and type at full speed.
And John Q. Public loves this thing, if every single person who sees it saying "that's dope/cool/really neat/interesting" is any indication...
Not by me it wasn't (you may have to scroll down a bit).
Ah, my bad. I have only done this on machines without NS4 installed. I guess it looks for genuine Netscape first, and then falls back to Mozilla, instead of doing the sane thing, which is installing itself into all plugin directories on your system. Or even better, displaying a list of installed browsers and asking which to install into.
Yes you can. Just go to Macromedia's site, do the "get flash" thing, and select the Windows plugin for Netscape browsers. The installer will automatically detect Mozilla and install the plugin. You may need to restart Mozilla afterward, but then you are set.
Could you do something like this with VMWare? Does VMWare require admin privileges to run? Just a thought...
I almost mocked you for trolling and making ridiculous analogies, but I realized that you know at least the basics of Prolog and the analogy is in fact quite apt.
If you don't mind my curiosity, what Prolog experience do you have, what do/did you do with it, and what do you think of it? I still have childhood nostalgia from playing with Prolog (in my opinion the best AI/expert system language)...
Vile domain grabbing conglomerates!
Except that you don't need to register in a database. The Web tools exist merely as helpful "wizards", as it were, to generate the tags. You can write one by hand, if you wish, and slap it in your site. No outside interaction required.
Because of this fact, it's very easy to use PICS tags. Just generate the tag once and then cut&paste it into each site created (I imagine they would all have similar nudity values), just editing the site name. No different than the process used to create those "hundreds or thousands of little web sites", I'd imagine...
The only mention that could possibly be of PICS is the following:
Which is so vague as to be useless. And the exclusion of any mention of the existing voluntary granular filtering system makes me wonder why they're scared of comparing themselves to it. Also I'd like to find out how this new "standard" is more specific.
...a Furbeowulf cluster of these things!
I'll gladly pay for Slashdot, provided that the fee is reasonable and on a month-to-month basis. Oh, and that they do something about that WWWWWWW crap, without introducing even more URL breakage. And while they're at it, fix the existing breakage.
...a Furbeowulf cluster of these things!
It's not the same name. QT == QuickTime. Qt == TrollTech's widget set.
Caps matter!