Aside from being able to use one of many mail, news, or web readers/browsers inside of emacs, don't forget about tnt. With tnt you can instant message in emacs too!
You don't need much besides emacs and bash... and you don't even need bash really...
Glad to see we're still spending so much money on weapons to fight a non-existant foe (unless the Chinese get really pissy about Taiwan).
You should go live in Haiti or Liberia for a little while and ask the locals if their foes are "non-existant". Judging by your Slashdot ID number, you were literate around the time of the Bosnian genocide too. Was that not real?
It's possible, quite likely in fact, that the people making the decisions on what weapons systems to purchase are basing their decisions on a slightly less narrow and slightly more informed view of the world than you have. It's far less likely that such purchases are a result of a conspiracy and a big gun fetish by a few top military officials.
Too bad only one services the town I live in. In fact, many of the towns in my area own their own power distribution company either on their own or in partnership with a neighboring town, and residents have no choice in what company they use. Also, I live in a part of the country where the average prices are higher. I haven't checked recently, but the average in Eastern Massachusetts was $0.15. The prices are largely government regulated, but a large percentage of the population in my region is of a political persuasion that feels that energy costs are too low. Clearly giving more money to the electric companies and the state will save the environment. Simultaniously they oppose cleaner and more cost friendly production methods, generation at all if it's near them (coal, wind, gas, nuclear, whatever... They're against it), and transmission lines. Want to generate your own with solar, or hydro? Good luck. If your neighbor doesn't oppose your permit you'll spend more on inspections and triple redundant saftey systems, and environmental regulatory compliance than you'd save in 10 years. It's a wonder we're not as bad off as California.
When they added tab support to Gnome Terminal, they removed the "Reset" command from the right click menu. It *used* to be perfect when it was light-weight, tab-free, easily configurable, and (most-importantly) fully usable without the menubar. Now it's more bloated and less functional. It sucks having to turn on the menubar to reset the terminal if it gets messed up and the application running in the terminal isn't a shell...
And what the hell does anybody need tabs for? We have multiple desktops and multiple windows. How many different paradigms of screen space virtualization do we need at one time?
I pay $0.21/kwh. Based on what my meter tells me about my PCs consumption, It costs me over $16/month to leave it on all the time, and that's without the monitor.
Alternatively, we need more crappy management rags to write articles about how scalability is the next new trend in web design. We can get PHB's around the world dragging the corner of their browsers around to make sure that their site is buzzword complient, and we'll have tricked them into technical improvement.
Considering those types of publications will print anything for money, I'm sure that given enough desire we could get this done.
That sounds like a great way to get several parallel development streams with zero colaboration going. This will either end with one working driver and several lesser quality broken drivers, or a whole bunch of half finished pieces of code. Either way you'll have end-user confusion.
There must be a way to get that money used in a way that creates an environment where programmers help each other.
This may not be what you were thinking when you thought "robot" but it uses all the same control principles. Check out John Kleinbauer's site. He's got plans that are great for a beginner. I purchased his "Brute" plans and the really walk you through every step, from finding the materials to programming. I've changed so many things from the plan since I started building that it's barely the same machine, but the plans helped me to avoid problems I'm sure I would have hit without a framework from an experienced designer to follow. Using PVC, Delrin and aluminum as materials makes the construction fairly easy with a minimum of tools too. For one section where I needed an extra precise cut I had a local metal shop make the cut on their abrasive chop saw for me, but other than that the construction has all been done on the tablesaw and drill press. It's been a fun project.
The card reader I bought fills the same purpose as 90% of the other "cool technology crap" that I've purchased in the last decade. It sits in a box doing nothing.
Sure I had cool ideas for it when I saw how cheap they had gotten. Sure I bought the programmer from a less than reputable source. Sure I plugged it in and played with it for a few hours... Wrote some code. Tossed some ideas around... But it's just another unfinished project. Hell, you could say that I'm a collector of unfinished projects.
Whoever convinced people that being a "server" meant that it needed to be big, fast, and expensive was a marketing genius. In reality though, most servers don't need to be big, fast, or expensive. Sure, there are people with multi-terabyte databases with thousands of users, or file servers for 10,000 employee companies, but for every one of those there are 100 machines that serve a low traffic website, or handle e-mail for less than 1000 people. Why run an 80 watt $600 processor at 90% idle for those tasks? If you ask me, these low end processors are *perfect* for that kind of stuff.
I just finished swapping out 3 dual P3 Xeon machines that were running 4 websites and e-mail for 6 domains with an Athlon XP-M (yes, the mobile version) 2400+ with a PowerNow compliant chipset. Not only is it sufficient, but since it's still not under heavy load it spends most of the time at 800mhz, and total power usage is down from 620 watts to 130 watts. The whole system was less than $500 (not including the SCSI adapter and DLT drive I scavenged from the other servers).
I'm the sysadmin for one company that is running their corporate network (file, mail and web servers) off a pair of Duron 700s. Their 100Mb network and 1.5Mb net connection are more of a bottleneck than the CPUs.
Low end processors exceeded the performance requirements for the majority of servers years ago. It's really unfortunate that the prevailing attitude that servers need to be powerful causes people to waste money on the latest and greatest CPUs when it could be better spent on faster storage, or something else entirely.
Take that a step further though. You're assigning value to an hour of access. Having it built in to the cost of a coffee and a muffin is apparently an acceptable price for people to pay. It would also seem that it's profitable, or at least break-even, for the provider. On the other hand you have T-Mobile apparently charging $6 an hour or $20 a day to access their network. There's a vast price gap there. Clearly the value to the user is soewhere between the overcharge on coffee and a muffin (a few cents an hour?) and $6 and hour. WHy doesn't anybody realize that $6 is overpriced?
Incidentally, there are communications companies making money in all of this... Somebody has to provide the internet connection to the people with the free wireless access. They'll have a hard time convincing me to feel bad that the same old players weren't able to corner this particular market at a 6000% markup.
I've noticed the amount I spend on PS2 games has gropped from close to $900/year to more like $100 a year since EBGames and pretty much every other game store stopped taking returns. Before that I'd go buy any game that looked fun, and return the ones that sucked. Now I can't take the risk, or I'll be stuck with a $50 coaster. Of the 50 or so PS2 games I have, at least 45 of them were from before the policy change. I hope they're stopping enough piracy with the no-returns policy to make up for the lost sales, because I know I'm not the only one...
That's rediculous. 2D games are still *fun*. If they weren't how would you explain the popularity of places like PopCap, and the rise of the puzzle game and web games on the PC? Clearly most PCs are more powerful than the N64 and PSOne by far. Just because you have all that power and because you have all these amazing 3D games doesn't mean you can't have 2D games too... Except that you'll have a hard time getting one published in the early days of a new console.
This mentality is leading to the death of 2D games on consoles.
Once the vendors had the control you describe, they couldn't resist using it for more than guaranteeing the quality of games... They also used it to make it difficult to publish games that they percieved as making their systems look "old". Because of that the GBA is the last bastion of 2D games, and you can be sure they'll pull the same crap with the next generation of handhelds. Soon we'll live in a world where console games are either first person, or 3rd person with crappy camera angles... 2D puzzle and platform and fighting games are done on consoles.
I have four of those adapters. I purchased them back when I had to get my Mac, Windows and Linux boxes working on the same KVM switch. One of them only works in Linux, one works in Windows and Linux, but poorly (caps lock and scroll lock seem to come on if I hit two keys at once) and in MacOS 10.3 not at all, and the others work perfectly. Unfortunatly I don't have the package for the one I have in my office, and it's in cable form with no identifying marking on it, so I can't tell you who made it or anything. It was a major brand... Kensington I think. It's grey with a blue USB plug, and the pink/green colors for the PS/2 keyboard and mouse plugs. The other one is a no-name, but it's a huge (3"x5"x1") plastic box that you wouldn't want to carry around. I can tell you that it's hit or miss with those things though. Try to get a well known vendor, and not some off brand one that probably has a little PIC16cwhatever with the reference code from the Microchip website in it.
As well known as all the protocols may be, you'd be suprised at the way they manage to screw those things up.
What you say only makes sense if you take my comment out of the context of the thread, which is something that happens around here all too often. Given the fact that so many people don't stay on topic, I guess I can see why you thought it might be reasonable to think that I stopped talking about the question that was asked, and started talking about problems I have with my headphones, but it's just plain silly to assume I meant to type a word that I didn't type, when the word I used makes perfect sense in context. That is especially true when the word that I typed makes the comment useful advice, and the other word turns the comment into stupidity, since being so sure that the mental transposition was what I really meant to write that he'd comment to tell me how I was wrong means he was assuming I was wrong and he was on the attack to begin with. Either that or he's just trigger happy on the submit button and doesn't bother to reread the comments he replies to before responding. As such I don't mind coming off as a jerk in response to people who come off a jerks themselves. Perhaps I should reconsider that position though, as clearly it causes people to come to the defense of people who probably don't deserve it otherwise.
For the usage you indented, you would have wanted to explicitly state your "neighbors".
Why would I have said that, when I meant "he" as in "the guy asking the question", or "the guy you were talking about in the post I'm responding to?"
Now that I've put way too much time into this line of conversation....
Care to fill me in on why overloading the drag operation is a good idea *ever*?
Dragging is for selecting. I don't want dragging to do something different some of the time and not others. It's bad enough (broken enough if you ask me) that dragging URLs in most browsers doesn't select the text. Please, please, PLEASE, don't let theis behavior spread. Pick an operation for dragging, and stick to it.
Dragging objects is terrible anyway, because it doesn't work well with multiple desktops. Much better that you should be able to drag to select the object, then middle click to drop it somewhere else. Textual encodings of objects can, and already do in many applications, allow this to happen.
Sadly most people don't know that Infinity and ClearChannel exist. The ones that do already have a clue and don't listen. People think that what CC and Infinity feed them is good. Remember... People are sheep.
They don't need to know.
When dealing with one huge entity like ClearChannel, the musical interests of said sheep become homoginized. The revenue of a single album becomes the focus of a record company for weeks at a time. If the diversity of popular music were increased it could reduce piracy. When a track becomes popular in one locality it would be less available on file sharing services as a song that becomes a more universal hit, since less people would be interested in it. As an added benefit, if an album does become widely availble in pirated form it wouldn't be such a huge hit to their main revenue stream, as they'd have other acts and other albums to fall back on.
Read what I said again. I'm saying that what the headphones are supposed to do is the opposite of what the parent to my comment was intending from them to do. Note that the subject of that sentence in my comment is 'he', refering to the person asking the question, and not 'they,' which is what I would have written were I saying the headphones worked improperly. Luckily for you this isn't an SAT question.
The headphones work as intended, not as the misguided advice-giver thinks they do.
This is the way to go. I have HD-495s and I love them. They're way better with an amp though. I got one that was built into a Stereo-Link 1200 and bypassed the super-crappy, extra-noisy, on-board soundcard in the stardard issue Dell desktop they have where I work at the same time. They sound pretty good plugged into the iPod too, though the bass isn't as impressive.
Why soundproof a 10'x10' area when you only need to soundproof the 1' cube around your head?
When I wear my Bose noise canceling headphones, I find it makes it easier to hear conversations and music from neighbor's cubicles, since they signifigantly lower the ambient noise but only mildly reduce more dynamic sounds like talking or music. Seems like the opposite of what he should do.
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320x240 is great if you're comparing it to a PalmPilot.
Half the resolution is "great"?
That's funny. Looks to me like they're trying to bulid competition for the Playstation portable. Seems like an ages old market...
Aside from being able to use one of many mail, news, or web readers/browsers inside of emacs, don't forget about tnt. With tnt you can instant message in emacs too!
You don't need much besides emacs and bash... and you don't even need bash really...
Glad to see we're still spending so much money on weapons to fight a non-existant foe (unless the Chinese get really pissy about Taiwan).
You should go live in Haiti or Liberia for a little while and ask the locals if their foes are "non-existant". Judging by your Slashdot ID number, you were literate around the time of the Bosnian genocide too. Was that not real?
It's possible, quite likely in fact, that the people making the decisions on what weapons systems to purchase are basing their decisions on a slightly less narrow and slightly more informed view of the world than you have. It's far less likely that such purchases are a result of a conspiracy and a big gun fetish by a few top military officials.
Just slightly longer than it will take for the nuclear reactor that they use to power it to become generally available for home use.
Would it be fine again if they put the reset back?
Yup.
I don't mind the tabs because you can turn them off. I just don't understand liking them, is all.
There are lots of them...
Too bad only one services the town I live in. In fact, many of the towns in my area own their own power distribution company either on their own or in partnership with a neighboring town, and residents have no choice in what company they use. Also, I live in a part of the country where the average prices are higher. I haven't checked recently, but the average in Eastern Massachusetts was $0.15. The prices are largely government regulated, but a large percentage of the population in my region is of a political persuasion that feels that energy costs are too low. Clearly giving more money to the electric companies and the state will save the environment. Simultaniously they oppose cleaner and more cost friendly production methods, generation at all if it's near them (coal, wind, gas, nuclear, whatever... They're against it), and transmission lines. Want to generate your own with solar, or hydro? Good luck. If your neighbor doesn't oppose your permit you'll spend more on inspections and triple redundant saftey systems, and environmental regulatory compliance than you'd save in 10 years. It's a wonder we're not as bad off as California.
When they added tab support to Gnome Terminal, they removed the "Reset" command from the right click menu. It *used* to be perfect when it was light-weight, tab-free, easily configurable, and (most-importantly) fully usable without the menubar. Now it's more bloated and less functional. It sucks having to turn on the menubar to reset the terminal if it gets messed up and the application running in the terminal isn't a shell...
And what the hell does anybody need tabs for? We have multiple desktops and multiple windows. How many different paradigms of screen space virtualization do we need at one time?
Grr.
Or he pays way more for electricity than you.
I pay $0.21/kwh. Based on what my meter tells me about my PCs consumption, It costs me over $16/month to leave it on all the time, and that's without the monitor.
Summing up, we need more professionalism!
Alternatively, we need more crappy management rags to write articles about how scalability is the next new trend in web design. We can get PHB's around the world dragging the corner of their browsers around to make sure that their site is buzzword complient, and we'll have tricked them into technical improvement.
Considering those types of publications will print anything for money, I'm sure that given enough desire we could get this done.
That sounds like a great way to get several parallel development streams with zero colaboration going. This will either end with one working driver and several lesser quality broken drivers, or a whole bunch of half finished pieces of code. Either way you'll have end-user confusion.
There must be a way to get that money used in a way that creates an environment where programmers help each other.
This may not be what you were thinking when you thought "robot" but it uses all the same control principles. Check out John Kleinbauer's site. He's got plans that are great for a beginner. I purchased his "Brute" plans and the really walk you through every step, from finding the materials to programming. I've changed so many things from the plan since I started building that it's barely the same machine, but the plans helped me to avoid problems I'm sure I would have hit without a framework from an experienced designer to follow. Using PVC, Delrin and aluminum as materials makes the construction fairly easy with a minimum of tools too. For one section where I needed an extra precise cut I had a local metal shop make the cut on their abrasive chop saw for me, but other than that the construction has all been done on the tablesaw and drill press. It's been a fun project.
The card reader I bought fills the same purpose as 90% of the other "cool technology crap" that I've purchased in the last decade. It sits in a box doing nothing.
Sure I had cool ideas for it when I saw how cheap they had gotten. Sure I bought the programmer from a less than reputable source. Sure I plugged it in and played with it for a few hours... Wrote some code. Tossed some ideas around... But it's just another unfinished project. Hell, you could say that I'm a collector of unfinished projects.
Whoever convinced people that being a "server" meant that it needed to be big, fast, and expensive was a marketing genius. In reality though, most servers don't need to be big, fast, or expensive. Sure, there are people with multi-terabyte databases with thousands of users, or file servers for 10,000 employee companies, but for every one of those there are 100 machines that serve a low traffic website, or handle e-mail for less than 1000 people. Why run an 80 watt $600 processor at 90% idle for those tasks? If you ask me, these low end processors are *perfect* for that kind of stuff.
I just finished swapping out 3 dual P3 Xeon machines that were running 4 websites and e-mail for 6 domains with an Athlon XP-M (yes, the mobile version) 2400+ with a PowerNow compliant chipset. Not only is it sufficient, but since it's still not under heavy load it spends most of the time at 800mhz, and total power usage is down from 620 watts to 130 watts. The whole system was less than $500 (not including the SCSI adapter and DLT drive I scavenged from the other servers).
I'm the sysadmin for one company that is running their corporate network (file, mail and web servers) off a pair of Duron 700s. Their 100Mb network and 1.5Mb net connection are more of a bottleneck than the CPUs.
Low end processors exceeded the performance requirements for the majority of servers years ago. It's really unfortunate that the prevailing attitude that servers need to be powerful causes people to waste money on the latest and greatest CPUs when it could be better spent on faster storage, or something else entirely.
Take that a step further though. You're assigning value to an hour of access. Having it built in to the cost of a coffee and a muffin is apparently an acceptable price for people to pay. It would also seem that it's profitable, or at least break-even, for the provider. On the other hand you have T-Mobile apparently charging $6 an hour or $20 a day to access their network. There's a vast price gap there. Clearly the value to the user is soewhere between the overcharge on coffee and a muffin (a few cents an hour?) and $6 and hour. WHy doesn't anybody realize that $6 is overpriced?
Incidentally, there are communications companies making money in all of this... Somebody has to provide the internet connection to the people with the free wireless access. They'll have a hard time convincing me to feel bad that the same old players weren't able to corner this particular market at a 6000% markup.
I've noticed the amount I spend on PS2 games has gropped from close to $900/year to more like $100 a year since EBGames and pretty much every other game store stopped taking returns. Before that I'd go buy any game that looked fun, and return the ones that sucked. Now I can't take the risk, or I'll be stuck with a $50 coaster. Of the 50 or so PS2 games I have, at least 45 of them were from before the policy change. I hope they're stopping enough piracy with the no-returns policy to make up for the lost sales, because I know I'm not the only one...
That's rediculous. 2D games are still *fun*. If they weren't how would you explain the popularity of places like PopCap, and the rise of the puzzle game and web games on the PC? Clearly most PCs are more powerful than the N64 and PSOne by far. Just because you have all that power and because you have all these amazing 3D games doesn't mean you can't have 2D games too... Except that you'll have a hard time getting one published in the early days of a new console.
This mentality is leading to the death of 2D games on consoles.
Once the vendors had the control you describe, they couldn't resist using it for more than guaranteeing the quality of games... They also used it to make it difficult to publish games that they percieved as making their systems look "old". Because of that the GBA is the last bastion of 2D games, and you can be sure they'll pull the same crap with the next generation of handhelds. Soon we'll live in a world where console games are either first person, or 3rd person with crappy camera angles... 2D puzzle and platform and fighting games are done on consoles.
I have four of those adapters. I purchased them back when I had to get my Mac, Windows and Linux boxes working on the same KVM switch. One of them only works in Linux, one works in Windows and Linux, but poorly (caps lock and scroll lock seem to come on if I hit two keys at once) and in MacOS 10.3 not at all, and the others work perfectly. Unfortunatly I don't have the package for the one I have in my office, and it's in cable form with no identifying marking on it, so I can't tell you who made it or anything. It was a major brand... Kensington I think. It's grey with a blue USB plug, and the pink/green colors for the PS/2 keyboard and mouse plugs. The other one is a no-name, but it's a huge (3"x5"x1") plastic box that you wouldn't want to carry around. I can tell you that it's hit or miss with those things though. Try to get a well known vendor, and not some off brand one that probably has a little PIC16cwhatever with the reference code from the Microchip website in it.
As well known as all the protocols may be, you'd be suprised at the way they manage to screw those things up.
What you say only makes sense if you take my comment out of the context of the thread, which is something that happens around here all too often. Given the fact that so many people don't stay on topic, I guess I can see why you thought it might be reasonable to think that I stopped talking about the question that was asked, and started talking about problems I have with my headphones, but it's just plain silly to assume I meant to type a word that I didn't type, when the word I used makes perfect sense in context. That is especially true when the word that I typed makes the comment useful advice, and the other word turns the comment into stupidity, since being so sure that the mental transposition was what I really meant to write that he'd comment to tell me how I was wrong means he was assuming I was wrong and he was on the attack to begin with. Either that or he's just trigger happy on the submit button and doesn't bother to reread the comments he replies to before responding. As such I don't mind coming off as a jerk in response to people who come off a jerks themselves. Perhaps I should reconsider that position though, as clearly it causes people to come to the defense of people who probably don't deserve it otherwise.
For the usage you indented, you would have wanted to explicitly state your "neighbors".
Why would I have said that, when I meant "he" as in "the guy asking the question", or "the guy you were talking about in the post I'm responding to?"
Now that I've put way too much time into this line of conversation....
I'm going to have nightmares now. Thanks a lot.
Care to fill me in on why overloading the drag operation is a good idea *ever*?
Dragging is for selecting. I don't want dragging to do something different some of the time and not others. It's bad enough (broken enough if you ask me) that dragging URLs in most browsers doesn't select the text. Please, please, PLEASE, don't let theis behavior spread. Pick an operation for dragging, and stick to it.
Dragging objects is terrible anyway, because it doesn't work well with multiple desktops. Much better that you should be able to drag to select the object, then middle click to drop it somewhere else. Textual encodings of objects can, and already do in many applications, allow this to happen.
"Intuitive" != "Like Windows"
Sadly most people don't know that Infinity and ClearChannel exist. The ones that do already have a clue and don't listen. People think that what CC and Infinity feed them is good. Remember... People are sheep.
They don't need to know.
When dealing with one huge entity like ClearChannel, the musical interests of said sheep become homoginized. The revenue of a single album becomes the focus of a record company for weeks at a time. If the diversity of popular music were increased it could reduce piracy. When a track becomes popular in one locality it would be less available on file sharing services as a song that becomes a more universal hit, since less people would be interested in it. As an added benefit, if an album does become widely availble in pirated form it wouldn't be such a huge hit to their main revenue stream, as they'd have other acts and other albums to fall back on.
Read what I said again. I'm saying that what the headphones are supposed to do is the opposite of what the parent to my comment was intending from them to do. Note that the subject of that sentence in my comment is 'he', refering to the person asking the question, and not 'they,' which is what I would have written were I saying the headphones worked improperly. Luckily for you this isn't an SAT question.
The headphones work as intended, not as the misguided advice-giver thinks they do.
This is the way to go. I have HD-495s and I love them. They're way better with an amp though. I got one that was built into a Stereo-Link 1200 and bypassed the super-crappy, extra-noisy, on-board soundcard in the stardard issue Dell desktop they have where I work at the same time. They sound pretty good plugged into the iPod too, though the bass isn't as impressive.
Why soundproof a 10'x10' area when you only need to soundproof the 1' cube around your head?
When I wear my Bose noise canceling headphones, I find it makes it easier to hear conversations and music from neighbor's cubicles, since they signifigantly lower the ambient noise but only mildly reduce more dynamic sounds like talking or music. Seems like the opposite of what he should do.