According to the link, it was a conversion from a 64-bit floating point value (presumably IEEE 754?) to a 16-bit signed integer. Basically, they cast a double to a short.
I was specifically thinking about AppleScript when I wrote that post, and also of the older Macro Recorder (or whatever it was called) from the System 6 days. The old "record your mouse and key input" macros were ludicrously useless. AppleScript was a much better attempt, and Apple tried hard to integrate scripting into everything it controlled directly. (AppleScript and speech recognition briefly combined for what was at the time the world's most technologically sophisticated "knock, knock" joke.)
The problem with AppleScript, as I saw it anyway, was that it involved launching full GUI applications to do minor scripting tasks. Those applications were not necessarily designed with launch speed in mind. Also, the application support just wasn't there quickly enough.
(Unix shell scripting requires launching even more subprocesses, but they're typically small ones designed to load quickly.)
The command line has only [two advantages:] its speed, and the possibility of executing extremely complex commands.
I'm not really sure it's faster. Quite to the contrary, I think that a GUI is faster for many tasks. It's just that with a CLI you have a faster perceived response time because the letters appear as you type, so it seems like the computer is responding quickly and you get a good vibe. I would say that the real strength of a good CLI is the ability to write scripts. Over the years different GUIs have tried different systems for scripting, but none work as well as a Unix shell.
I'm not religious, so it always strikes me as strange that people should make a point of how Joseph Smith made the whole thing up. How is this different from how any other religion was founded? That some of them evolved over time, with lots of little stories pulled from whole cloth, while some of them were laid down in one go, with one big story pulled from whole cloth?
Who cares how Mormonism was founded? Well, Mormons do. But so do people who have something against Mormons in particular, because they think it's a "made-up" religion. Talk about missing the forest for the trees. All religions are inventions of man, and Mormonism just happens to be one of the younger ones.
Afterall, watch KillBill. The experience is only entertaining for the first few minutes and then slowly gets boring when a simple use a realism could have changed the effect.
My theory about that movie was that the first 10 minutes were so over-the-top violent in order to desensitize you so you could enjoy the rest of the movie.
I meant "whenever I hear someone complain[ing on slashdot] about packaging on Linux", not "whenever someone asks me for help with a packaging problem on their Linux system".:) What I meant was that people who complain on slashdot about Linux packaging all must be using really crappy distros, because they have problems that I haven't seen in a good Linux distro in years. There are people who apparently remember the libc issues that Red Hat had years ago and think they indicate a problem with dependencies in a modern RPM distro, for example. Obviously "switch distributions" is not practical advice to someone who has a real problem, but sometimes it is the best advice to someone who complains about the packaging in his distro.:)
This is no more true than saying "everyone likes to socialize all the time". Different people have different preferences, and they're not all at the extremes either. People who understand this are much easier to work with and make better leaders.
Yes, but sometimes it's not easy to automatically install a package. You need to ask the user some questions. (Obviously, some distros are designed so that no user input is ever required.)
Also, packages have different names on different systems. And files can have different locations, or even if you make it simple with semantics like "install the package containing an executable named glimpse" you'd have version issues. In general, it's just not portable.
For your kdevelop example, I would suggest that glimpse should be a dependency of kdevelop in the package manager, or perhaps that the kdevelop package should recommend the glimpse package. (See? That's an example of a feature Debian has (recommended dependencies) that RPM doesn't have. Diversity at work.:))
I do agree that it would be nice to have a single set of graphical tools that work with different package managers. I'm not totally sure how well it would work--some distros simply have semantics that are too unusual (like Gentoo) for one tool to do everything. In the real world I think we may have to settle for each distro having an easy to learn GUI for package management.
Pssst... check out my new "bacon and eggs" diet. You can eat as much as you want of steak and chocolate and all that good stuff. Just watch out for bread and pasta...
(I swear, it's a scientific diet! Ignore the giant marketing machine that's profiting from it.)
You know, it's not very polite to imply that someone isn't thinking. Especially when you don't understand what that person is saying.
I was commenting on the way a Linux distribution includes all the software you will probably ever need to use on it. (For example, most distributions include The GIMP, whereas I haven't seen Windows systems that come installed with Photoshop.) The distro maintainers make sure that all that software works together, is installed in standard locations, appears in all the menus, and so on. When pieces of software don't work together, you can file a bug report with the distro instead of the individual pieces of software.
In summary: be polite when responding to a post, especially when you don't take the time to read that post. Whether polite or not you'll come out looking like an idiot, but at least a polite idiot is likely to get a polite response. Idiot.
I firmly believe the Amiga User Interface Style Guide should be required reading before anyone is allowed to even install a compiler with the ability to create GUIs. [emphasis added]
Isn't this just a tad bit harsh? Imagine someone opening his TiVo box:
TiVo Quick Start Installation Instructions
Step 1: Your TiVo runs the Linux operating system, and if you install development tools you can use it to create graphical user interfaces or GUIs. Therefore, before you finish setting up your new TiVo, please read the Amiga User Interface Style Guide.
Step 2: Unpack the TiVo and the AC adapter (figure 1).
[...]
Step 55: Quick quiz: what do the Amiga User Interface Style Guide say about resizing windows that have widgets in a grid layout? Have the answer ready before you call Technical Support, or you will be put on hold while you reread the Amiga User Interface Style Guide.
I understand what you want, but I respectfully disagree. One of the advantages of having multiple Linux distributions is that they can experiment and improve their package management. Asking for distros to unify package management at this stage is like asking them to unify their installers, control panels, and so on. Different distros have different needs. I have yet to see a package management system that would fit the needs to Debian, Mandrake, and Gentoo all at once. By letting each distro have its own package manager, the marketplace of ideas will produce better choices for users.
If you were talking about programs for which you use an Automake-generated "make install", you should know that there is a "make uninstall" available. Then again, it's not a substitute for a real package manager. There is some talk on the Automake lists of having "make install" produce and install an uninstall script, but IMHO this is still just a hack for people too poor to afford a package manager.
RPM has problems with dependencies? That's news to me. My distro gives me a tool that lets me specify a package by name and in response it fetches the package and all its dependencies, rather like apt-get. And RPM does a fine job of handling dependencies; whether your distro does or not is a different story. And though I admit I'm not as familiar with Debian, it is my understanding that apt-get is just a convenience tool like the one I described; if you download a package from some third party source you can still install it with dpkg.
That's completely distro-dependent. A good package manager makes installing and uninstalling software easy. Whenever I hear someone complain about packaging on Linux, I ask them what distro they're using, and if they've considered trying alternatives...
I've always thought that this is one of the biggest selling features for Linux. You don't just get a kernel, you get a whole distribution that aims to provide all the software you need. That sort of thing simply doesn't exist in the Windows world.
Even if you go out and buy or download all the extra software you need to make your Windows computer useful as a desktop, there's no guarantee that it works together and no one will take responsibility for fixing it if the software conflicts.
Some PC sellers like to bundle lots of software, but it tends to be either crappy software (MS Works) or crippled "beginner" versions of expensive commercial software.
No, there's simply nothing in the Windows world that's a quarter as complete as a Linux distribution. It's an amazing amount of software, and when done right, amazingly well integrated.
Yeah, not only do I keep my old hardware around, I keep running it. All of it. All the time. I have a dozen 386s running OpenBSD that act as my firewall. (Each of them handles 1 in every 12 packets that comes in... keeps the load from going above 0.0001.) I run so much old hardware, I really should get some sort of "environmental award". Hell, I figure I'm single-handedly executing a "preemptive strike" at global warming.
Yeah, and consider also the reason they're used for so much longer. With all the money people spend on Macs, they can't afford SUVs or coal-burning MP3 players or cigarettes, thus helping to save the environment.
Voters in Texas last year approved an amendment to the state constitution (which is longer and more convoluted than the W2K source code) allowing the legislature to limit awards. If the legislature hasn't done so yet, I'd imagine they'd pass such a law very soon, since that was their intention all along.
The start menu is fine. Expected, in fact; I'd be bothered if it wasn't there.
I think what bothers the author of the grandparent post is when an app places shortcuts in the root of the Start Menu, or even directly under Program Files, instead of in an app-specific directory within Program Files. These apps arrogantly believe that they're so important that the user needs to see their shortcuts as soon as possible. (Unfortunately MS sets the bad example here; I'm pretty sure Office has done this for a while now.)
I imagine 100 years from now a PDA will have a baseline of 1TB of memory [anything less will just be inhuman].
Yeah, in the distant future we won't even need to worry about releasing memory that we allocate. We'll just lose the pointer and cackle with glee as we drive around in our flying cars.
Yeah, but if the president knows they're not going to get past a confirmation hearing, he can use a "recess appointment", in which he appoints them during recess.
Slashdot Mirror
According to the link, it was a conversion from a 64-bit floating point value (presumably IEEE 754?) to a 16-bit signed integer. Basically, they cast a double to a short.
I was specifically thinking about AppleScript when I wrote that post, and also of the older Macro Recorder (or whatever it was called) from the System 6 days. The old "record your mouse and key input" macros were ludicrously useless. AppleScript was a much better attempt, and Apple tried hard to integrate scripting into everything it controlled directly. (AppleScript and speech recognition briefly combined for what was at the time the world's most technologically sophisticated "knock, knock" joke.)
The problem with AppleScript, as I saw it anyway, was that it involved launching full GUI applications to do minor scripting tasks. Those applications were not necessarily designed with launch speed in mind. Also, the application support just wasn't there quickly enough.
(Unix shell scripting requires launching even more subprocesses, but they're typically small ones designed to load quickly.)
I'm not really sure it's faster. Quite to the contrary, I think that a GUI is faster for many tasks. It's just that with a CLI you have a faster perceived response time because the letters appear as you type, so it seems like the computer is responding quickly and you get a good vibe. I would say that the real strength of a good CLI is the ability to write scripts. Over the years different GUIs have tried different systems for scripting, but none work as well as a Unix shell.
I'm not religious, so it always strikes me as strange that people should make a point of how Joseph Smith made the whole thing up. How is this different from how any other religion was founded? That some of them evolved over time, with lots of little stories pulled from whole cloth, while some of them were laid down in one go, with one big story pulled from whole cloth?
Who cares how Mormonism was founded? Well, Mormons do. But so do people who have something against Mormons in particular, because they think it's a "made-up" religion. Talk about missing the forest for the trees. All religions are inventions of man, and Mormonism just happens to be one of the younger ones.
My theory about that movie was that the first 10 minutes were so over-the-top violent in order to desensitize you so you could enjoy the rest of the movie.
Yeah, and the mini-iPods manage space-time but in a smaller area.
I meant "whenever I hear someone complain[ing on slashdot] about packaging on Linux", not "whenever someone asks me for help with a packaging problem on their Linux system". :) What I meant was that people who complain on slashdot about Linux packaging all must be using really crappy distros, because they have problems that I haven't seen in a good Linux distro in years. There are people who apparently remember the libc issues that Red Hat had years ago and think they indicate a problem with dependencies in a modern RPM distro, for example. Obviously "switch distributions" is not practical advice to someone who has a real problem, but sometimes it is the best advice to someone who complains about the packaging in his distro. :)
This is no more true than saying "everyone likes to socialize all the time". Different people have different preferences, and they're not all at the extremes either. People who understand this are much easier to work with and make better leaders.
Yes, but sometimes it's not easy to automatically install a package. You need to ask the user some questions. (Obviously, some distros are designed so that no user input is ever required.)
:))
Also, packages have different names on different systems. And files can have different locations, or even if you make it simple with semantics like "install the package containing an executable named glimpse" you'd have version issues. In general, it's just not portable.
For your kdevelop example, I would suggest that glimpse should be a dependency of kdevelop in the package manager, or perhaps that the kdevelop package should recommend the glimpse package. (See? That's an example of a feature Debian has (recommended dependencies) that RPM doesn't have. Diversity at work.
I do agree that it would be nice to have a single set of graphical tools that work with different package managers. I'm not totally sure how well it would work--some distros simply have semantics that are too unusual (like Gentoo) for one tool to do everything. In the real world I think we may have to settle for each distro having an easy to learn GUI for package management.
Pssst... check out my new "bacon and eggs" diet. You can eat as much as you want of steak and chocolate and all that good stuff. Just watch out for bread and pasta...
(I swear, it's a scientific diet! Ignore the giant marketing machine that's profiting from it.)
You know, it's not very polite to imply that someone isn't thinking. Especially when you don't understand what that person is saying.
I was commenting on the way a Linux distribution includes all the software you will probably ever need to use on it. (For example, most distributions include The GIMP, whereas I haven't seen Windows systems that come installed with Photoshop.) The distro maintainers make sure that all that software works together, is installed in standard locations, appears in all the menus, and so on. When pieces of software don't work together, you can file a bug report with the distro instead of the individual pieces of software.
In summary: be polite when responding to a post, especially when you don't take the time to read that post. Whether polite or not you'll come out looking like an idiot, but at least a polite idiot is likely to get a polite response. Idiot.
Isn't this just a tad bit harsh? Imagine someone opening his TiVo box:
I understand what you want, but I respectfully disagree. One of the advantages of having multiple Linux distributions is that they can experiment and improve their package management. Asking for distros to unify package management at this stage is like asking them to unify their installers, control panels, and so on. Different distros have different needs. I have yet to see a package management system that would fit the needs to Debian, Mandrake, and Gentoo all at once. By letting each distro have its own package manager, the marketplace of ideas will produce better choices for users.
If you were talking about programs for which you use an Automake-generated "make install", you should know that there is a "make uninstall" available. Then again, it's not a substitute for a real package manager. There is some talk on the Automake lists of having "make install" produce and install an uninstall script, but IMHO this is still just a hack for people too poor to afford a package manager.
RPM has problems with dependencies? That's news to me. My distro gives me a tool that lets me specify a package by name and in response it fetches the package and all its dependencies, rather like apt-get. And RPM does a fine job of handling dependencies; whether your distro does or not is a different story. And though I admit I'm not as familiar with Debian, it is my understanding that apt-get is just a convenience tool like the one I described; if you download a package from some third party source you can still install it with dpkg.
That's completely distro-dependent. A good package manager makes installing and uninstalling software easy. Whenever I hear someone complain about packaging on Linux, I ask them what distro they're using, and if they've considered trying alternatives...
I've always thought that this is one of the biggest selling features for Linux. You don't just get a kernel, you get a whole distribution that aims to provide all the software you need. That sort of thing simply doesn't exist in the Windows world.
Even if you go out and buy or download all the extra software you need to make your Windows computer useful as a desktop, there's no guarantee that it works together and no one will take responsibility for fixing it if the software conflicts.
Some PC sellers like to bundle lots of software, but it tends to be either crappy software (MS Works) or crippled "beginner" versions of expensive commercial software.
No, there's simply nothing in the Windows world that's a quarter as complete as a Linux distribution. It's an amazing amount of software, and when done right, amazingly well integrated.
Yeah but he's obviously only got Canadian dollars, and it would take a lot of those to afford a generator...
Yeah, not only do I keep my old hardware around, I keep running it. All of it. All the time. I have a dozen 386s running OpenBSD that act as my firewall. (Each of them handles 1 in every 12 packets that comes in... keeps the load from going above 0.0001.) I run so much old hardware, I really should get some sort of "environmental award". Hell, I figure I'm single-handedly executing a "preemptive strike" at global warming.
Yeah, and consider also the reason they're used for so much longer. With all the money people spend on Macs, they can't afford SUVs or coal-burning MP3 players or cigarettes, thus helping to save the environment.
Voters in Texas last year approved an amendment to the state constitution (which is longer and more convoluted than the W2K source code) allowing the legislature to limit awards. If the legislature hasn't done so yet, I'd imagine they'd pass such a law very soon, since that was their intention all along.
I think what bothers the author of the grandparent post is when an app places shortcuts in the root of the Start Menu, or even directly under Program Files, instead of in an app-specific directory within Program Files. These apps arrogantly believe that they're so important that the user needs to see their shortcuts as soon as possible. (Unfortunately MS sets the bad example here; I'm pretty sure Office has done this for a while now.)
Yeah, in the distant future we won't even need to worry about releasing memory that we allocate. We'll just lose the pointer and cackle with glee as we drive around in our flying cars.
Finally! I'm important!
Good luck just fitting the paging code into 64MB! :)
Yeah, but if the president knows they're not going to get past a confirmation hearing, he can use a "recess appointment", in which he appoints them during recess.