But they do help prevent opportunistic bacterial superinfections that often occur when the body is weakened by viral attack.
Trivial example: if you have a "real" cold, you have a _viral_ illness. If you have _just_ a cold, your snot should actually be clear and runny. If your snot is green or yellow, chances are you actually have a bacterial superinfection that is making things worse. (If you snot is always coloured, like a significant proportion of the population, you probably have a continuous background level of bacterial nastiness living in your nasal passages).
(N.B. superinfection just means an on-top-of-another-infection infection, not some sort of really impressive infection).
ARexx was an Amiga variant of IBM REXX. It appeared in AmigaOS 2.0 and above, so would not have been on the original A500 (unless you upgraded it). It was very, very similar to IBM REXX, but not completely identical - mainly, ARexx had support for Amiga message-passing IPC and an easy way of extending the language libraries via shared libraries. Standardised, system wide scripting via an easy-to-learn language (those were the days when manufacturers included comprehensive printed documentation...) was one of the things that tended to make AmigaOS applications very powerful.
I'm not sure that not liking it because it was on an Amiga is sensible, given how advanced and powerful the Amiga was compared to its peers.
Actually, lots of people would have had a problem with it if they hadn't released it in the first place - hence the popularity of websites purporting to have "leaked government files" and such like. People like to know what their government is up to in america, given that the government is supposed to be working for them, not vice versa.
How long before 1984 is removed from the libraries???
At the same time, if you're dead, you've effectively ceased to exist. Nothing is ever going to matter to you again, you're worm food.
You really shouldn't worry about embarassing yourself...
Physical scientists and engineers still tend to use Fortran for anything and everything. But not Fortran 77 much, anymore. Fortran 90, HPF, and 95 are the norm these days. They're not very much like F77, really (at least as different as C++ to C (or even C++ to BCPL)), and are much more powerful languages. Thing is, you don't run into it much in Linux circles, since there's no GCC "g95" (there is an embryonic project to make one).
Er... one prototype based language has got pretty far. You're very likely running it, given its built into pretty much every GUI web browser on the planet. It's called Javascript by some, or ECMAScript by the rest of us, and is actually quite a nice little language.
Re:"Sorcerer's Stone" vs. "Philosopher's Stone"
on
Review: Harry Potter
·
· Score: 2
Now, I may be compeletly wrong, maybe they think Americans are religiously sensitive?
In Europe, Americans definitely have a reputation for scary religious fundamentalism, particularly for nut-job guitar-strumming "born again christians", creationists and other such loonies.
Now, the vast majority of Americans I've actually met (not particularly representative of the entirety of America, since they were the ones who can afford to wander over to Europe for the hell of it) have not been even remotely religious - but the Americans one sees on T.V. tend to be thanking/praising/frothing-at-mouth to their god at the drop of a hat.
When one sees american christian fundies and middle-eastern islamic fundies on T.V., the similarities tend to worry the average "godless-commie-european", since we're stuck in between (see the recent wonderful american missile defence plans, which intercept missiles headed for America... so that they drop onto Europe instead...)
Yes. Actually, Microsoft and Scientology have repeatedly been linked, and not just by the tinfoil-hat brigade. The german government, in particular, is deeply suspicious after the microsoft/scientologist disk-defragger fiasco.
It wouldn't surprise me if the clam-heads have infiltrated MS middle management. We know they control hollywood and the IRS, and controlling the OS on 90% of the world's computers would certainly be an aim of those power hungry hypnotised wierdos.
The scientologists are quite scary, what with their little fleet in international waters and their mountain full of weapons...
Few real geeks are interested in windows or linux. Most care a lot more about eating bugs and chicken heads.
That said, few people who know much about technology HONESTLY like windows. There are plenty who SAY they do, because their job or fortune is linked to the success of MS (You know who you are. Hi Jez!).
Are you implying some sort of idiot-ifying procedure between receiving the first degree and proceeding to graduate studies?
Well, the idiotification certainly exists. There's two main process I've encountered:
Aging, a genetically inherited disease that 100% of humanity currently suffers from. Aging of the brain has been experimentally determined to cause the inability to learn and decrease in intelligence
Alcohol abuse. In western society, undergraduates in many universities engage in "drinking games" and the like, which effectively amount to poisoning their own brains. A significant proportion of undergraduates do get noticeably stupider as "student life" takes its toll.
Interesting you should mention the scriptability aspect of Mozilla. No, it's not Guile-scriptable - but it is ECMAScriptable. In fact you can completely change the whole UI via ECMAScript (part of the reason the UI is slow f*cking slow is because it's written thusly - the other reason being they use the same thread to draw the (complex) UI as the page.)
This is actually pretty cool - witness ActiveState's Perl/Python IDE that is entirely based on the Mozilla XUL UI engine...
Really, mozilla has become yet-another-VM, like a JVM, but for ECMAScript.
Um, I think Forte/NetBeans and IBM VisualAge/WebSphereStudio/Eclipse/Whatever have the serious Java IDE market pretty much sewn up between them. Borland used to be a player, but aren't now.
It's been months since I've met anyone who doesn't use Forte/NetBeans, although people targetting IBM Websphere server tend to use VisualAge for Java.
One feature I'd like to see is a "see-through" source pane, showing superclass code with a muted background in the same pane as the class you're editing, so that you don't have to hold so much state (remembering the superclass) in your head, perhaps with a configurable depth to which to walk back up the class hierarchy. This would make working with inheritance easier for dolts like me.
Well, v2.0+ also had system-wide ARexx scripting, a powerful shell, user-space filesystem drivers/translators so you could install a driver to let you cd into compressed files, the window system itself, etc. The entire GNU command-line toolset was also ported to it via a compatibility library called ixemul. The OS was built on a message-passing-by-reference system, which meant that IPC was zero-copy. There was also a very powerful networking add-on called Envoy that provided network-transparent messaging services.
It also had fun late-binding shared libraries, that could be patched dynamically at run-time on a per-function basis, allowing third party hacks to theme the GUI and tune the OS on the fly.
So, it had a kick-ass GUI, but it was good at lots of other stuff too.:-)
Where the OS fell down was its complete lack of true memory protection - at the time however, this had some advantage, since it meant the computers could be made with cheaper MMU-less CPUs, and meant that task-switching was extremely quick. Amiga applications tended to be naturally multi-threaded with non-modal GUIs, so fast task-switching was a definite plus.
Interestingly, there's a re-creation of AmigaOS for x86 available here. It's actually coming along very nicely, but has all of AmigaOS's weaknesses, as well as its strengths - e.g. no memory protection, but ultra-fast reboots for when you do crash:-) (a soft "reboot" actually just vectors back into the kernel entry point, skipping the BIOS and bring the back system up in seconds.)
Er. no. They conspire to make money. They don't really care whether we're down or up, beyond the fact that people who are simultaneously "up" and ill-informed tend to buy more cars.
Background: I am a mechanical engineer. I have encountered, and have even had lectures and exams on, things like planned obsolescence (which is actually a good and necessary thing in many ways for both the producer and consumer (unplanned obsolescence is often much worse), but in today's society mostly the period's so short it's much better for the producer. Witness cars essentially wearing out after 5 years), the formation of price-fixing cartels, and why they're desirable for producers, and on the "cooperation" between the oil and automotive industry that has kept much better technologies on the fringe for years. Technologies, in fact, that undergraduate mechanical engineers happily study, thinking they'll make the world better - of course then they get a bit older and discover that for the most part, those technologies are unlikely to see mass production for petty reasons.
I'm tired now, but here's a rant in roughly the same area that I wrote earlier.
Actually, car companies do cooperate. But they cooperate to make the cheapest, shoddiest product the market will bear, and to price-fix. It's not in their interests to make a clean, energy efficient car.
Don't forget, there isn't a single large-scale example of a pure communist or pure capitalist society. Americans tend to confuse communism with the soviet dictatorships - at no point in time was the USSR a truly communist society, just as America is by no means a purely capitalist society. Anyway, sharing is generally a good thing, and by no means mandatory in most small-scale communes - just don't expect people to share with you if you don't share in return, and expect them to pressure you to leave. I think that's fair enough, really.
The major difference being that Sun makes technologically excellent products, and Microsoft makes, well, crap. (Except for MS-badged hardware, which is usually very good.)
So, yes, they're both evil corporate monoliths, but Sun, at least, is a corporate monolith that makes cool stuff, unlike MS, which is a marketing machine dedicated to making shoddy junk look cool to the ignorant masses.
Well, I just investigated the Voodoo Banshee X stuff - seems that it maxes out at a 2048x2048 buffer that you can move the active viewport around on - so definitely amiga-style scrolling is possible for 2D games on my (oldish) card, just not fully possible for very high desktop resolutions. I suspect newer cards have higher limits.
The Culture novels are brilliant, and, to my mind, should form a model for the future development of human society. For those of you who haven't read any Culture books, see the FAQ
Yes, I know. I used to be an Amiga coder. My a+ b explanation was intended to illustrate the method - it just really sucked.
While original PC gfx cards were incredibly dumb framebuffers exactly the size of the physical screen, you can do similar tricks on most new ones, and AFAIK X can control it - when you use the ctrl-alt-+/- combos to change res, the scrolling is doing the buffer-larger-than display part of it anyway. So it's not impossible on modern PC hardware, just impossible on lowest-common-denominator PC hardware.
Amiga people used to always pour scorn on PC scrolling pack in the DOS days, because DOS games tended to use software scrolling algorithms involving stupid amounts of CPU data copying. Ports to DOS like Lemmings and Sensi Soccer were particularly painful. But things have come on a little since then.
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Caffeine itself is a diuretic. So you'll pee more even if you take caffeine tablets...
It's just a shame the Irish public can't get a decent internet connection from anyone. Fuck you very much, eircom!
But they do help prevent opportunistic bacterial superinfections that often occur when the body is weakened by viral attack.
Trivial example: if you have a "real" cold, you have a _viral_ illness. If you have _just_ a cold, your snot should actually be clear and runny. If your snot is green or yellow, chances are you actually have a bacterial superinfection that is making things worse. (If you snot is always coloured, like a significant proportion of the population, you probably have a continuous background level of bacterial nastiness living in your nasal passages).
(N.B. superinfection just means an on-top-of-another-infection infection, not some sort of really impressive infection).
ARexx was an Amiga variant of IBM REXX. It appeared in AmigaOS 2.0 and above, so would not have been on the original A500 (unless you upgraded it). It was very, very similar to IBM REXX, but not completely identical - mainly, ARexx had support for Amiga message-passing IPC and an easy way of extending the language libraries via shared libraries. Standardised, system wide scripting via an easy-to-learn language (those were the days when manufacturers included comprehensive printed documentation...) was one of the things that tended to make AmigaOS applications very powerful.
I'm not sure that not liking it because it was on an Amiga is sensible, given how advanced and powerful the Amiga was compared to its peers.
Actually, lots of people would have had a problem with it if they hadn't released it in the first place - hence the popularity of websites purporting to have "leaked government files" and such like. People like to know what their government is up to in america, given that the government is supposed to be working for them, not vice versa.
How long before 1984 is removed from the libraries???
At the same time, if you're dead, you've effectively ceased to exist. Nothing is ever going to matter to you again, you're worm food.
You really shouldn't worry about embarassing yourself...
Physical scientists and engineers still tend to use Fortran for anything and everything. But not Fortran 77 much, anymore. Fortran 90, HPF, and 95 are the norm these days. They're not very much like F77, really (at least as different as C++ to C (or even C++ to BCPL)), and are much more powerful languages. Thing is, you don't run into it much in Linux circles, since there's no GCC "g95" (there is an embryonic project to make one).
Er... one prototype based language has got pretty far. You're very likely running it, given its built into pretty much every GUI web browser on the planet. It's called Javascript by some, or ECMAScript by the rest of us, and is actually quite a nice little language.
Now, I may be compeletly wrong, maybe they think Americans are religiously sensitive?
In Europe, Americans definitely have a reputation for scary religious fundamentalism, particularly for nut-job guitar-strumming "born again christians", creationists and other such loonies.
Now, the vast majority of Americans I've actually met (not particularly representative of the entirety of America, since they were the ones who can afford to wander over to Europe for the hell of it) have not been even remotely religious - but the Americans one sees on T.V. tend to be thanking/praising/frothing-at-mouth to their god at the drop of a hat.
When one sees american christian fundies and middle-eastern islamic fundies on T.V., the similarities tend to worry the average "godless-commie-european", since we're stuck in between (see the recent wonderful american missile defence plans, which intercept missiles headed for America... so that they drop onto Europe instead...)
Yes. Actually, Microsoft and Scientology have repeatedly been linked, and not just by the tinfoil-hat brigade. The german government, in particular, is deeply suspicious after the microsoft/scientologist disk-defragger fiasco.
It wouldn't surprise me if the clam-heads have infiltrated MS middle management. We know they control hollywood and the IRS, and controlling the OS on 90% of the world's computers would certainly be an aim of those power hungry hypnotised wierdos.
The scientologists are quite scary, what with their little fleet in international waters and their mountain full of weapons...
Few real geeks are interested in windows or linux. Most care a lot more about eating bugs and chicken heads.
That said, few people who know much about technology HONESTLY like windows. There are plenty who SAY they do, because their job or fortune is linked to the success of MS (You know who you are. Hi Jez!).
Are you implying some sort of idiot-ifying procedure between receiving the first degree and proceeding to graduate studies?
Well, the idiotification certainly exists. There's two main process I've encountered:
Aging, a genetically inherited disease that 100% of humanity currently suffers from. Aging of the brain has been experimentally determined to cause the inability to learn and decrease in intelligence
Alcohol abuse. In western society, undergraduates in many universities engage in "drinking games" and the like, which effectively amount to poisoning their own brains. A significant proportion of undergraduates do get noticeably stupider as "student life" takes its toll.
Interesting you should mention the scriptability aspect of Mozilla. No, it's not Guile-scriptable - but it is ECMAScriptable. In fact you can completely change the whole UI via ECMAScript (part of the reason the UI is slow f*cking slow is because it's written thusly - the other reason being they use the same thread to draw the (complex) UI as the page.)
This is actually pretty cool - witness ActiveState's Perl/Python IDE that is entirely based on the Mozilla XUL UI engine...
Really, mozilla has become yet-another-VM, like a JVM, but for ECMAScript.
It is indeed good - when I last used it, it only did Java 1.1., and failed to handle inner classses, though. Obviously, that was some time ago.
Um, I think Forte/NetBeans and IBM VisualAge/WebSphereStudio/Eclipse/Whatever have the serious Java IDE market pretty much sewn up between them. Borland used to be a player, but aren't now.
It's been months since I've met anyone who doesn't use Forte/NetBeans, although people targetting IBM Websphere server tend to use VisualAge for Java.
One feature I'd like to see is a "see-through" source pane, showing superclass code with a muted background in the same pane as the class you're editing, so that you don't have to hold so much state (remembering the superclass) in your head, perhaps with a configurable depth to which to walk back up the class hierarchy. This would make working with inheritance easier for dolts like me.
Well, unfortunately, Mp3.com's my.mp3.com gave the RIAA a tailor-made wide-open avenue to sue mp3.com. It was a deeply stupid move by mp3.com
it was completely GUI orientated.
:-)
:-) (a soft "reboot" actually just vectors back into the kernel entry point, skipping the BIOS and bring the back system up in seconds.)
Well, v2.0+ also had system-wide ARexx scripting, a powerful shell, user-space filesystem drivers/translators so you could install a driver to let you cd into compressed files, the window system itself, etc. The entire GNU command-line toolset was also ported to it via a compatibility library called ixemul. The OS was built on a message-passing-by-reference system, which meant that IPC was zero-copy. There was also a very powerful networking add-on called Envoy that provided network-transparent messaging services.
It also had fun late-binding shared libraries, that could be patched dynamically at run-time on a per-function basis, allowing third party hacks to theme the GUI and tune the OS on the fly.
So, it had a kick-ass GUI, but it was good at lots of other stuff too.
Where the OS fell down was its complete lack of true memory protection - at the time however, this had some advantage, since it meant the computers could be made with cheaper MMU-less CPUs, and meant that task-switching was extremely quick. Amiga applications tended to be naturally multi-threaded with non-modal GUIs, so fast task-switching was a definite plus.
Interestingly, there's a re-creation of AmigaOS for x86 available here. It's actually coming along very nicely, but has all of AmigaOS's weaknesses, as well as its strengths - e.g. no memory protection, but ultra-fast reboots for when you do crash
Er. no. They conspire to make money. They don't really care whether we're down or up, beyond the fact that people who are simultaneously "up" and ill-informed tend to buy more cars.
Background: I am a mechanical engineer. I have encountered, and have even had lectures and exams on, things like planned obsolescence (which is actually a good and necessary thing in many ways for both the producer and consumer (unplanned obsolescence is often much worse), but in today's society mostly the period's so short it's much better for the producer. Witness cars essentially wearing out after 5 years), the formation of price-fixing cartels, and why they're desirable for producers, and on the "cooperation" between the oil and automotive industry that has kept much better technologies on the fringe for years. Technologies, in fact, that undergraduate mechanical engineers happily study, thinking they'll make the world better - of course then they get a bit older and discover that for the most part, those technologies are unlikely to see mass production for petty reasons.
I'm tired now, but here's a rant in roughly the same area that I wrote earlier.
Actually, car companies do cooperate. But they cooperate to make the cheapest, shoddiest product the market will bear, and to price-fix. It's not in their interests to make a clean, energy efficient car.
Don't forget, there isn't a single large-scale example of a pure communist or pure capitalist society. Americans tend to confuse communism with the soviet dictatorships - at no point in time was the USSR a truly communist society, just as America is by no means a purely capitalist society. Anyway, sharing is generally a good thing, and by no means mandatory in most small-scale communes - just don't expect people to share with you if you don't share in return, and expect them to pressure you to leave. I think that's fair enough, really.
The major difference being that Sun makes technologically excellent products, and Microsoft makes, well, crap. (Except for MS-badged hardware, which is usually very good.)
So, yes, they're both evil corporate monoliths, but Sun, at least, is a corporate monolith that makes cool stuff, unlike MS, which is a marketing machine dedicated to making shoddy junk look cool to the ignorant masses.
Well, I just investigated the Voodoo Banshee X stuff - seems that it maxes out at a 2048x2048 buffer that you can move the active viewport around on - so definitely amiga-style scrolling is possible for 2D games on my (oldish) card, just not fully possible for very high desktop resolutions. I suspect newer cards have higher limits.
or a windshield for a recumbent bicycle
:-)
That was my final year project in University.
The Culture novels are brilliant, and, to my mind, should form a model for the future development of human society. For those of you who haven't read any Culture books, see the FAQ
Er... don't you know about tab-key completion in UNIX shells like bash (the default on linux boxes) ???
/M[Tab]F[Tab]S[Tab]T[Tab] [Enter]
Your example would be
cd
on any linux box running bash (and approximately all linux boxes run bash). If there's multiple similar entries, then you'd type e.g. "Ma[Tab]"
(This is even possile in the WNT cmd.exe shell with a registry key tweak.)
Yes, I know. I used to be an Amiga coder. My a+ b explanation was intended to illustrate the method - it just really sucked.
While original PC gfx cards were incredibly dumb framebuffers exactly the size of the physical screen, you can do similar tricks on most new ones, and AFAIK X can control it - when you use the ctrl-alt-+/- combos to change res, the scrolling is doing the buffer-larger-than display part of it anyway. So it's not impossible on modern PC hardware, just impossible on lowest-common-denominator PC hardware.
Amiga people used to always pour scorn on PC scrolling pack in the DOS days, because DOS games tended to use software scrolling algorithms involving stupid amounts of CPU data copying. Ports to DOS like Lemmings and Sensi Soccer were particularly painful. But things have come on a little since then.