I once worked at a school where we had an computerised register-taking system. The thing is, this thing was a proprietary as hell: a maze of DOS.BAT scripts and FoxPro (or similar) databases and custom applications. While the staff involved were given training in using the system when it worked, any maintenance or troubleshooting was done remotely using PCAnywhere.
Essentially, the remote administration was provided in lieu of any kind of training or detailed documentation, and as a result the school would have to continue paying an annual fee to the company involved for as long as they wished to keep the system running.
In all fairness, many schools must be grateful to be able to look at the system as a black box, and the remote admin we got was very good. --
"Wow, an anti-microsoft book gets headlined on slashdot.org, wonder if a anti-linux book would ever get posted"
If and when such a book is published, I expect we'll see a headline about it here. In the meantime here's a few slashdot stories which refer to criticism against Linux:
"the overarching point being that it isn't the recording space, gear or even engineering that brought those records together, rather it was inspiration, showmanship and a vision of what makes an album a great album."
Also try Michelle Shocked's "Texas Campfire Tapes" -- recorded on a minidisc at a campfire, Gomez's "Bring it On" -- recorded in the band's garage (and IMHO far better than the next album, Liquid Skin, recorded at Abbey Road).
In the realms of Electronica, of course, it's even easier to get a professional sound on a shoestring. All those early Orbital albums... yum.
I would say that perl would be good for writing customized little utilities that can then be tied together in shell scripts.
I'm *forever* using Perl for this. Anything where the natural shell approach would be 'cat file | x | y | z', and (say) z is something that is not obviously achievable with an existing UNIX tool.
Thing is, it usually turns out there's *is* an easy way to to z with a standard UNIX tool: only the other day someone pointed out to me that I'd reimplemented 'uniq -c' in Perl. At the time I was unaware of the -c flag to uniq. --
It is true. To my delight, David Korn sent me a mail explaining it. In a nutshell, it's deliberate. The original Bourne shell interprets " a | b " as "(a) | (b)". Bash and pdksh do the same. Korn thought this was counter-intuitive (he's right), so ksh reads it as " (a) | b ". It works for all shell builtins, not just "read".
Shame I missed the call for questions: I'm interested in a quirk of ksh and its clones:
Consider this code:
x="hello"
echo "goodbye" | read x
echo $x
In both bash and pdksh, running the script would return "hello", because the "read x" would be run in a subshell with its own environment. The subshell would then close without affecting the instance of x in the main shell.
In ksh, however, putting 'read' at the end of a pipeline does not seem to run it in a subshell, so running the script would return "goodbye" just as the naive reader of the code might expect.
Why is this? Is an exception made for the "read" builtin? Is this a deliberate feature that pdksh and bash have failed to clone, or is it happenstance that it came about? I assume David is too busy to be reading, so does anyone else know?
In our ksh-happy shop, we have a lot of scripts that rely on "echo $string | read x y junk" to parse space-seperated lists, and of course these statements don't port well to Bash (you have to do a few backtick/sed operations). --
I have never tried Plan9, but I read a white paper on it a while ago. Isn't one of the innovations of the OS that you can transparently run processes on remote machines over the network, regardless of architecture? Sort of like a remote X client, but neater?
In which case, a headless Dreamcast on the network would be a prefectly acceptable workhorse for a few of your processes... --
This reminds me of TV reports we frequently get after organised robberies. "The gang were very sophisticated, using mobile phones to organise their movements". We still keep hearing this even though over half the schoolkids in the country have a mobile phone and use it habitually.
This does NOT mean that gay men with straight friends will fall in love with them.
Nothing says they will: but they might. Why not? Who dictates who you may or may not fall in love with. My being a heterosexual man does not mean I'm unable / forbidden from falling in love with a lesbian after all. It merely means that love is likely to remain unrequited -- unrequited love is pretty common.
(disclaimer: I am not in love with a lesbian at this point.) --
I find it very strange that banks in the US are so backwards as to necessitate things like PayPal. In the UK (and I think the rest of Europe) as long as you know someone's account number and their branch sort code, you can make an instantaneous transfer into their account, either by telephoning your bank, or through Internet banking -- for free, and without the need to hold a "buffer" of money in a service such as PayPal.
Frankly it beggars belief that this protocol does not extend worldwide. Why can't I pay eBay sellers in the US in this way? I'd even pay a small surcharge, but not the £25 or so that an international banker's draft costs.
Um, this is sort of irrelevant to micropayments (although it points us in the direction of how things *should* be done) but since PayPal got mentioned so often here I thought it was worth dropping into the mix.
Who moderated this as "funny"? I'd *love* a MAME port on Dreamcast. I think it's eminently doable, too. Maybe 1500 games is a little ambitious: an initial Dreamcast port would not be as fast as MAME on the equivalent PC (because it would use C emulation cores instead of the faster x86 ASM cores), meaning only older games would work, and in addition many of the newer MAME games have enormous ROM images which would not fit in a Dreamcast's RAM.
Nonetheless, all those Pac Man / Invaders / Galaga / Q-Bert era games should work a treat, and I really hope someone does the port. --
As I look at the history of communist nations, they seem to eliminate the economic gaps between rich and poor by making everyone poor. An elegant, but hardly optimal solution.
... and for (partly) that reason, I was not advocating communism -- merely pointing out that an economic divide is an unavoidable fact of life in its absence. And (to wrench this back onto topic) governments would do well to make sure that financial poverty does not lead to intellectial poverty. Public libraries have served this purpose in the past (and will continue to do so). Initiatives such as this Brazilian one are a modern extension of that ideal. --
A computer is a luxury. In the real world, people who have money for luxuries can afford one (normally, after they get a TV. NOBODY would buy a PC before a TV - if you think they would, you need to leave pixel land and return to reality).
"Nobody" isn't many people... In fact I know a couple of people who own a computer and no TV.
Regardless of that, you're correct that this is the status quo, but remember not so long ago a telephone was a luxury (even in my youth, the late 1970s, we shared a line with our neighbours) -- now a telephone can be considered a basic need.
If a government manages to get near 100% internet coverage, imagine the savings it could make in terms of communicating with the proles? In the 1980s the French government did something similar -- they issued *every* household with a "Minitel", basically a 12" terminal with a built in modem, for free. Minitel provided character mode equivalents to much of the stuff you now find on the net -- home shopping, chat, news, even porn -- as well as local and national government stuff, yellow pages, etc. (imagine the cost of sending out those thousands of thick phone books every year).
An economic gap will exist for as long as people resist communism. It would be nice that the cash have-nots aren't also information have-nots. --
I don't have access to the specs, but the whole of/usr and/bin can be read-only filesystems - hence it would be possible to put these on ROM (much cheaper than flash RAM). --
And wrt emacs baiting: I guess you guys aren't smart enough to use meta-x global-set-key, huh?
Well the emacs-baiting was intended as a light-hearted quip, as I'm sure you'll appreciate. However, I've admired emacs' rich feature set from afar many times, and sat down to do the tutorial on three different occasions, and each time I ended up going back to vi, so I guess I'm *not* smart enough to use meta-x global-set-key...;)
But, I don't like editor wars: I say, if you like it, use it. --
Typing CTRL-B is surely quicker than saying "bold on" surely? Hitting alt-tab a couple of times is quicker than saying "mail window" surely?
Maybe Emacs users would benefit, since it probably *is* quicker to say "bold" than it is to type "meta-x-embolden-text" or whatever;)
Emacs baiting aside, though, this is great news for a segment of the disabled market, but I really don't see the mainstream applications. Not to mention how awful a place the average open-plan office would become if voice-recognition took off... --
Pace SkyDigital set top boxes crash disturbingly frequently. The MPEG decoder keeps on working, but the UI freezes so you can't switch channel, browse the schedules, etc until you do a hard power cycle (which involves unplugging the unit's power, since there's no hard power switch). --
I'd just like to point out to those people intent on bringing up the Amazon One-Click patent, that One-Click was one of the bounties - posted 10.18.2000, expired 1.18.2001
Hey, let's take another look at that assassination attempt to see WHO was actually firing. NO WAY, Let's make sure that the reciever made his two steps in bounds before he went out!
The thing with sport is that you can tell with some certainty that something worth filming is going to happen within a certain range of space and time.
If you could do the same with asassinations, then, sure, you could point a few dozen cameras at it and generate bullet-time recreations. Or, you could intervene and prevent it from happening. Let me know when you have this technology.
Now there are probably newsworthy events that could possibly benefit from this stuff -- but I can't for the life of me think of anything that would give you long enough to set up the equipment *and* is action-oriented enough to warrant the effort. --
Slashdot Mirror
Think early Playstation 1 games vs. Nintendo 64. N64 uses much more antialiasing, resulting in a smoother (blurred?) look.
AFAIK that's not antialiasing: that's merely blurring -- properly antialiased images do not appear blurred (just look at fonts on Windows and Mac).
--
I once worked at a school where we had an computerised register-taking system. The thing is, this thing was a proprietary as hell: a maze of DOS .BAT scripts and FoxPro (or similar) databases and custom applications. While the staff involved were given training in using the system when it worked, any maintenance or troubleshooting was done remotely using PCAnywhere.
Essentially, the remote administration was provided in lieu of any kind of training or detailed documentation, and as a result the school would have to continue paying an annual fee to the company involved for as long as they wished to keep the system running.
In all fairness, many schools must be grateful to be able to look at the system as a black box, and the remote admin we got was very good.
--
Critisism of Israel is anti-semitism, not racism.
Criticism's of "Jews" is racism, criticism of Israeli foreign policy is merely politics.
AFAIK isn't anti-semitism just a subset of racism?
--
"Wow, an anti-microsoft book gets headlined on slashdot.org, wonder if a anti-linux book would ever get posted"
If and when such a book is published, I expect we'll see a headline about it here. In the meantime here's a few slashdot stories which refer to criticism against Linux:
1
2
3
Obviously there are more.
--
"GUI's are like mules. All GUI's have been born of text; but they, in and of themselves, cannot reproduce."
In the immortal words of Homer Simpson: "Hehe -- 'mule'".
--
"the overarching point being that it isn't the recording space, gear or even engineering that brought those records together, rather it was inspiration, showmanship and a vision of what makes an album a great album."
Also try Michelle Shocked's "Texas Campfire Tapes" -- recorded on a minidisc at a campfire, Gomez's "Bring it On" -- recorded in the band's garage (and IMHO far better than the next album, Liquid Skin, recorded at Abbey Road).
In the realms of Electronica, of course, it's even easier to get a professional sound on a shoestring. All those early Orbital albums... yum.
--
I would say that perl would be good for writing customized little utilities that can then be tied together in shell scripts.
I'm *forever* using Perl for this. Anything where the natural shell approach would be 'cat file | x | y | z', and (say) z is something that is not obviously achievable with an existing UNIX tool.
Thing is, it usually turns out there's *is* an easy way to to z with a standard UNIX tool: only the other day someone pointed out to me that I'd reimplemented 'uniq -c' in Perl. At the time I was unaware of the -c flag to uniq.
--
If true, that's an interesting little problem,
It is true. To my delight, David Korn sent me a mail explaining it. In a nutshell, it's deliberate. The original Bourne shell interprets " a | b " as "(a) | (b)". Bash and pdksh do the same. Korn thought this was counter-intuitive (he's right), so ksh reads it as " (a) | b ". It works for all shell builtins, not just "read".
--
While for AIX and others the default shell is ksh.
--
Shame I missed the call for questions: I'm interested in a quirk of ksh and its clones:
Consider this code:
x="hello"
echo "goodbye" | read x
echo $x
In both bash and pdksh, running the script would return "hello", because the "read x" would be run in a subshell with its own environment. The subshell would then close without affecting the instance of x in the main shell.
In ksh, however, putting 'read' at the end of a pipeline does not seem to run it in a subshell, so running the script would return "goodbye" just as the naive reader of the code might expect.
Why is this? Is an exception made for the "read" builtin? Is this a deliberate feature that pdksh and bash have failed to clone, or is it happenstance that it came about? I assume David is too busy to be reading, so does anyone else know?
In our ksh-happy shop, we have a lot of scripts that rely on "echo $string | read x y junk" to parse space-seperated lists, and of course these statements don't port well to Bash (you have to do a few backtick/sed operations).
--
I have never tried Plan9, but I read a white paper on it a while ago. Isn't one of the innovations of the OS that you can transparently run processes on remote machines over the network, regardless of architecture? Sort of like a remote X client, but neater?
In which case, a headless Dreamcast on the network would be a prefectly acceptable workhorse for a few of your processes...
--
This reminds me of TV reports we frequently get after organised robberies. "The gang were very sophisticated, using mobile phones to organise their movements". We still keep hearing this even though over half the schoolkids in the country have a mobile phone and use it habitually.
People use crypto.
Criminals are people.
--
This does NOT mean that gay men with straight friends will fall in love with them.
Nothing says they will: but they might. Why not? Who dictates who you may or may not fall in love with. My being a heterosexual man does not mean I'm unable / forbidden from falling in love with a lesbian after all. It merely means that love is likely to remain unrequited -- unrequited love is pretty common.
(disclaimer: I am not in love with a lesbian at this point.)
--
I find it very strange that banks in the US are so backwards as to necessitate things like PayPal. In the UK (and I think the rest of Europe) as long as you know someone's account number and their branch sort code, you can make an instantaneous transfer into their account, either by telephoning your bank, or through Internet banking -- for free, and without the need to hold a "buffer" of money in a service such as PayPal.
Frankly it beggars belief that this protocol does not extend worldwide. Why can't I pay eBay sellers in the US in this way? I'd even pay a small surcharge, but not the £25 or so that an international banker's draft costs.
Um, this is sort of irrelevant to micropayments (although it points us in the direction of how things *should* be done) but since PayPal got mentioned so often here I thought it was worth dropping into the mix.
--
Who moderated this as "funny"? I'd *love* a MAME port on Dreamcast. I think it's eminently doable, too. Maybe 1500 games is a little ambitious: an initial Dreamcast port would not be as fast as MAME on the equivalent PC (because it would use C emulation cores instead of the faster x86 ASM cores), meaning only older games would work, and in addition many of the newer MAME games have enormous ROM images which would not fit in a Dreamcast's RAM.
Nonetheless, all those Pac Man / Invaders / Galaga / Q-Bert era games should work a treat, and I really hope someone does the port.
--
As I look at the history of communist nations, they seem to eliminate the economic gaps between rich and poor by making everyone poor. An elegant, but hardly optimal solution.
... and for (partly) that reason, I was not advocating communism -- merely pointing out that an economic divide is an unavoidable fact of life in its absence. And (to wrench this back onto topic) governments would do well to make sure that financial poverty does not lead to intellectial poverty. Public libraries have served this purpose in the past (and will continue to do so). Initiatives such as this Brazilian one are a modern extension of that ideal.
--
A computer is a luxury. In the real world, people who have money for luxuries can afford one (normally, after they get a TV. NOBODY would buy a PC before a TV - if you think they would, you need to leave pixel land and return to reality).
"Nobody" isn't many people... In fact I know a couple of people who own a computer and no TV.
Regardless of that, you're correct that this is the status quo, but remember not so long ago a telephone was a luxury (even in my youth, the late 1970s, we shared a line with our neighbours) -- now a telephone can be considered a basic need.
If a government manages to get near 100% internet coverage, imagine the savings it could make in terms of communicating with the proles? In the 1980s the French government did something similar -- they issued *every* household with a "Minitel", basically a 12" terminal with a built in modem, for free. Minitel provided character mode equivalents to much of the stuff you now find on the net -- home shopping, chat, news, even porn -- as well as local and national government stuff, yellow pages, etc. (imagine the cost of sending out those thousands of thick phone books every year).
An economic gap will exist for as long as people resist communism. It would be nice that the cash have-nots aren't also information have-nots.
--
I don't have access to the specs, but the whole of /usr and /bin can be read-only filesystems - hence it would be possible to put these on ROM (much cheaper than flash RAM).
--
And wrt emacs baiting: I guess you guys aren't smart enough to use meta-x global-set-key, huh?
... ;)
Well the emacs-baiting was intended as a light-hearted quip, as I'm sure you'll appreciate. However, I've admired emacs' rich feature set from afar many times, and sat down to do the tutorial on three different occasions, and each time I ended up going back to vi, so I guess I'm *not* smart enough to use meta-x global-set-key
But, I don't like editor wars: I say, if you like it, use it.
--
"albeit narrated by old Six-shooter Chuck Heston himself"
Nope. He wanted Heston, but he didn't get him. Yeah, if you skim-read the article you could go away thinking they got Shoot-First-Chuck.
--
Typing CTRL-B is surely quicker than saying "bold on" surely? Hitting alt-tab a couple of times is quicker than saying "mail window" surely?
;)
Maybe Emacs users would benefit, since it probably *is* quicker to say "bold" than it is to type "meta-x-embolden-text" or whatever
Emacs baiting aside, though, this is great news for a segment of the disabled market, but I really don't see the mainstream applications. Not to mention how awful a place the average open-plan office would become if voice-recognition took off...
--
Pace SkyDigital set top boxes crash disturbingly frequently. The MPEG decoder keeps on working, but the UI freezes so you can't switch channel, browse the schedules, etc until you do a hard power cycle (which involves unplugging the unit's power, since there's no hard power switch).
--
I'd just like to point out to those people intent on bringing up the Amazon One-Click patent, that One-Click was one of the bounties - posted 10.18.2000, expired 1.18.2001
--
IBM are already "partners" with a number of distribution makers -- among them RedHat, Pacific HiTech, SuSe, um, others.
IBM is publicly and heavily behind Linux, as you'll find if you go to http://www.ibm.com/linux/
--
Hey, let's take another look at that assassination attempt to see WHO was actually firing. NO WAY, Let's make sure that the reciever made his two steps in bounds before he went out!
The thing with sport is that you can tell with some certainty that something worth filming is going to happen within a certain range of space and time.
If you could do the same with asassinations, then, sure, you could point a few dozen cameras at it and generate bullet-time recreations. Or, you could intervene and prevent it from happening. Let me know when you have this technology.
Now there are probably newsworthy events that could possibly benefit from this stuff -- but I can't for the life of me think of anything that would give you long enough to set up the equipment *and* is action-oriented enough to warrant the effort.
--