I gave away my Amiga 1200 and Amiga 500 almost 10 years ago to a neighbor's kid. Because I couldn't move them at any price. Nobody wanted one.
I guess they've finally reached "collector's item" status, like my old 128K Macintosh. I doubt anyone's spending a hundred quid on an Amiga because it's good value for money, or to do real work on them. People *are* buying PPC Macs because they want to use them, not because they want to put it on display.
Nobody has yet been able to provide me with realistic figures yet on Mac/Linux/Windows users, so I'm dismissing this comment.
You know I'm right: there is no consumer Linux desktop market to speak of, almost all Linux installations are developers or servers. Until the Linux kernel bods settle on stable ABIs for drivers and some distro goes to a package system that doesn't depend on musical repositories (maybe something based on GNUstep) that's not going to change.
I still have not heard anything from you that would explain why vi is working better for you than VIM?
You're not going to. That's a discussion I've had too many times over the years and, well, vim users and the vim developers always end up going either "why on earth would you want to do that" or "if you add this obscure option to your vimrc, I'm sure it'll work". Since I don't *need* to use vim, and I don't *need* to convert you, I'm not going to go through all that again. Just take it as a given that I like vim so much that I ported another vi-like editor (elvis) to the Amiga because vim ticked me off so much maintaining a port was less of a hassle for me.
But, setting that aside... MKS, eh. So they're still around.
I've used MKS toolkit now and then. Back in the '90s it was the bomb. I loved it. It made Windows survivable.
But it soon felt, well, a little dated... and pretty soon Interix and Cygwin pushed it quite out of mind. Yes, I know Cygwin's a security hole waiting to happen... I caught Korn's lecture on that at Usenix... but people still use it because it's maintained and upgraded and not still trying to catch up with 4.2BSD.
And because it's free, of course. But things like shipping "a plain vanilla version of vi" in MKS instead of picking up nvi really doesn't help. And it's BSD licensed, so there's really no reason you can't pick it up...
If you're coming from Windows, then I don't think you're going to find any version of vi more like what you're used to than any other, and you'll never understand why I maintained the Amiga port of a vi clone for years. But I can give you a few suggestions to make vi easier to understand.
The main thing to unlearn is the whole business of "insert mode". VI is not a modal editor, it doesn't have an "insert mode". It's normally described that way, even by the authors, but that's not how it works.
VI is like a stripped down version of TECO. If you don't know what TECO is or was, it doesn't matter.
What matters is that TECO was designed for printing terminals, it did not provide immediate feedback to commands. You'd enter:
IThis is some text I'm inserting
TECO would respond with:
IThis is some text I'm inserting$$
If you wanted to see what the line you were editing you'd use another command to display the line. When you're working at 75 baud on a printing terminal this kind of interface was important.
Now, vi is a lot less powerful than TECO, but it has one feature that makes it a lot friendlier than TECO. And that is, when you enter:
IThis is some text I'm inserting
It shows you what the file looks like it while you're entering the command.
That's what makes people think of that as being an "insert mode" that you end by hitting "escape".
Really, what you're doing is executing an "insert command", and getting immediate feedback as you're entering it. If you stick to treating it like a "command", and always terminate the command with the final escape. You're always in "command mode" because "command mode" is the only mode there is.
The actions are the same, but the way you think about them suddenly makes them make a lot more sense.
Plus, things like applying modifiers to commands work well, too.
So, if you want to create a line with all the tabstops marked with a "|", you'd enter:
9a|
Repeat 9 times, append "|".
Admittedly, applying counts to inserts isn't at the top of anyone's list, but it's not a specific feature of the editor, it's just a side effect of the way the command structure works, and a nice illustration of the difference between the idea of "insert mode" and "there's no modes, there's an insert command".
Whether you're using vim or nvi this viewpoint should serve you well.
Um, no, they don't. Used Amigas are lucky to move for a few bucks. Used PPC Macs still go for hundreds of dollars.
The user base is diminishing.
Yeh, in five years or so the PPC Mac user base will be as small as the Linux user base is now.
There are still people developing for the Amiga even now
There are people developing for a Linux distro that happens to have a bunch of ex-Amiga people working on it. That's not the same as "developing for the Amiga".
You have to scroll down pretty far to find it, so...
These probes were radioactively labeled using the Megaprime DNA Labeling system (Amersham Pharmacia). The subsequent hybridization was performed according to Sambrook et al. (1989) with the following modifications: in 50% formamide, 5× SSPE, 0.5% SDS, 5% Bailey's Irish Cream Liquor, 50 g/mL heat denatured salmon sperm DNA at 42C overnight, the filters were subsequently washed to 65C in 0.1× SSC, 0.1% SDS.
I think about that, since unless I'm working somewhere I can plop the laptop down on the cable to hold it in place it invariably gets unplugged when a flea sneezes near the adapter and I end up running the battery down anyway.
They should call it "worksafe", because it keeps you safe from having to actually work.
You can nest smart playlists. I have a series like:
two star = rating is 2 stars and last played is more than 28 days ago three star = rating is 3 stars and last played is more than 14 days ago four star = rating is 4 stars and last played is more than 3 days ago five star = rating is 5 stars and last played is more than 24 hours ago combined = playlist is two star or playlist is three star... noise = genre is opera or genre is hip hop... unambient = a regular playlist for music I like but don't want coming up in party shuffle good no repeats = playlist is combined and playlist is not noise and playlist is not unambient
Feeding that into party shuffle gets a much better "mix" than letting apple's magic 'play higher rated songs more often' fail to work for me...
No preferences, ignores proxy settings, tries to call home, when you close the main window the currently playing song stops (no background operation)... forget it.
If this is supposed to be the preferences panel for the US Government, the RIAA and MPAA seem to have gotten in and locked the settings on the technology tab before I could get there.:(
So, in order to tell them what you think via this site, make sure you want it in the Public Domain, as this implies you agree to that condition to comment.
Huh. I wonder if they can do that?
If this site continues as part of the Government after Inauguration the Freedom of Information Act probably requires it.
iTunes has some feature deficiencies that are solved by user plugins in other competitors.
And they're solved by user plugin in iTunes too!
I don't know where the hell the original author got Hopefully these players will gain traction among OS X users, which will finally force Apple to either step up in terms of features or open up iTunes for extensions. because iTunes has always supported plugins. Some of them are actual plugins, going in the iTunes plugins folder in your preferences folder, and some are external apps that use Applescript to control iTunes.
Solving some of them using AppleScripts is _not_ a solution for the average user.
Solving them by writing plugins is not a solution for the average user either. The average user no more cares whether the plugin they're using uses Applescript, Automator, or the existing native plugin API.
Another issue is that iTunes only supports iPods + iPhone.
I must have been dreaming that I was using my cheap generic off-brand USB-memory-stick-MP3-player from iTunes for three years before it broke and I got an iPod Shuffle. And it worked better with iTunes, in my opinion, than my shuffle does. Drag a playlist out of iTunes into the player. One step. Done. None of this waiting on iTunes when I sync.
Updating tags takes ages and blocks the application.
Gee, and I'm doing that every day. No, wait, I'm not, I use iTunes to play music instead.
But then I'm more interested in listening to music than obsessively collecting mistagged torrents, or whatever it is that all you people who seem to spend all their time using obscure features of other players that I never used even when I was using mPlayer and XMMS under Windowmaker and X11 on free UNIX are doing.
This is because mp3s don't always come perfectly tagged and people like to organize them in folders.
I bet there's an Applescript in one of the Applescript archives on the web that will take your folders, use the folder structure to add any missing tags, and pass them on to iTunes.
It's what I did when I started using iTunes. Don't ask me for the script: that was years ago and I can't be arsed seeing if I can dig out my undocumented Applescript that you'd only have to modify for your folder layout. Get a nice polished on from the web.
In iTunes you can't just click on a song and play it and then decide that you want to listen to this other song next and have it move to that.
"Play next in Party Shuffle"
If you don't use Party Shuffle you're missing a good deal.
As for XMMS, I used to use XMMS when my desktop was free UNIX, and I hated its user interface. Horrible crippled thing that used this amazingly broken theming engine - no regular UI for the main window at all. If I couldn't hide it most of the time and drive it from a dock app in Windowmaker I'd have gone stark raving batshit crazy.
Moving to iTunes was painless. My library structure was already pretty much identical to iTunes, so it took me no time at all to decide to let iTunes manage it. I was able to use an Applescript to use the library I had to fix the missing ID3 tags, and Bob's your uncle...
A feature as basic as monitoring a folder and adding the latest music files to the library is unavailable in iTunes.
Why on earth would I need to add such an esoteric feature to a music player, instead of having a smart folder that does the same thing using Applescript or Automator?
There are no plugins or themes.
Application level theming is evil, a nasty horrible idea. Themed applications invariably interact poorly with the OS and fail to provide all the features of the native user interface... this even happens on UNIX where there isn't a native look and feel! If anything, iTunes is already too "themed", though Apple has been toning that down over time.
And iTunes certainly DOES have plugins... I'm using iScrobbler right now... as well as a rich Applescript library that makes it possible to interact with iTunes in ways that make plugins unnecessary.
That's the oldest trick in the book, and it only works against objects that are polaron neutral against the subspace background. And since most variations of phase-harmonic shields break polaron symmetry any military warp-capable ship is immune.
Slashdot Mirror
I sold my Amiga 1200 last week for £120.
I gave away my Amiga 1200 and Amiga 500 almost 10 years ago to a neighbor's kid. Because I couldn't move them at any price. Nobody wanted one.
I guess they've finally reached "collector's item" status, like my old 128K Macintosh. I doubt anyone's spending a hundred quid on an Amiga because it's good value for money, or to do real work on them. People *are* buying PPC Macs because they want to use them, not because they want to put it on display.
Nobody has yet been able to provide me with realistic figures yet on Mac/Linux/Windows users, so I'm dismissing this comment.
You know I'm right: there is no consumer Linux desktop market to speak of, almost all Linux installations are developers or servers. Until the Linux kernel bods settle on stable ABIs for drivers and some distro goes to a package system that doesn't depend on musical repositories (maybe something based on GNUstep) that's not going to change.
Your teachers never explained the difference between "total number of failures" and "failure rate".
I still have not heard anything from you that would explain why vi is working better for you than VIM?
You're not going to. That's a discussion I've had too many times over the years and, well, vim users and the vim developers always end up going either "why on earth would you want to do that" or "if you add this obscure option to your vimrc, I'm sure it'll work". Since I don't *need* to use vim, and I don't *need* to convert you, I'm not going to go through all that again. Just take it as a given that I like vim so much that I ported another vi-like editor (elvis) to the Amiga because vim ticked me off so much maintaining a port was less of a hassle for me.
But, setting that aside... MKS, eh. So they're still around.
I've used MKS toolkit now and then. Back in the '90s it was the bomb. I loved it. It made Windows survivable.
But it soon felt, well, a little dated... and pretty soon Interix and Cygwin pushed it quite out of mind. Yes, I know Cygwin's a security hole waiting to happen... I caught Korn's lecture on that at Usenix... but people still use it because it's maintained and upgraded and not still trying to catch up with 4.2BSD.
And because it's free, of course. But things like shipping "a plain vanilla version of vi" in MKS instead of picking up nvi really doesn't help. And it's BSD licensed, so there's really no reason you can't pick it up...
http://www.bostic.com/vi/
If you're coming from Windows, then I don't think you're going to find any version of vi more like what you're used to than any other, and you'll never understand why I maintained the Amiga port of a vi clone for years. But I can give you a few suggestions to make vi easier to understand.
The main thing to unlearn is the whole business of "insert mode". VI is not a modal editor, it doesn't have an "insert mode". It's normally described that way, even by the authors, but that's not how it works.
VI is like a stripped down version of TECO. If you don't know what TECO is or was, it doesn't matter.
What matters is that TECO was designed for printing terminals, it did not provide immediate feedback to commands. You'd enter:
IThis is some text I'm inserting
TECO would respond with:
IThis is some text I'm inserting$$
If you wanted to see what the line you were editing you'd use another command to display the line. When you're working at 75 baud on a printing terminal this kind of interface was important.
Now, vi is a lot less powerful than TECO, but it has one feature that makes it a lot friendlier than TECO. And that is, when you enter:
IThis is some text I'm inserting
It shows you what the file looks like it while you're entering the command.
That's what makes people think of that as being an "insert mode" that you end by hitting "escape".
Really, what you're doing is executing an "insert command", and getting immediate feedback as you're entering it. If you stick to treating it like a "command", and always terminate the command with the final escape. You're always in "command mode" because "command mode" is the only mode there is.
The actions are the same, but the way you think about them suddenly makes them make a lot more sense.
Plus, things like applying modifiers to commands work well, too.
So, if you want to create a line with all the tabstops marked with a "|", you'd enter:
9a|
Repeat 9 times, append "|".
Admittedly, applying counts to inserts isn't at the top of anyone's list, but it's not a specific feature of the editor, it's just a side effect of the way the command structure works, and a nice illustration of the difference between the idea of "insert mode" and "there's no modes, there's an insert command".
Whether you're using vim or nvi this viewpoint should serve you well.
Used Amigas still sell quite well too.
Um, no, they don't. Used Amigas are lucky to move for a few bucks. Used PPC Macs still go for hundreds of dollars.
The user base is diminishing.
Yeh, in five years or so the PPC Mac user base will be as small as the Linux user base is now.
There are still people developing for the Amiga even now
There are people developing for a Linux distro that happens to have a bunch of ex-Amiga people working on it. That's not the same as "developing for the Amiga".
You have to scroll down pretty far to find it, so...
I never carry my magsafe adapter
I think about that, since unless I'm working somewhere I can plop the laptop down on the cable to hold it in place it invariably gets unplugged when a flea sneezes near the adapter and I end up running the battery down anyway.
They should call it "worksafe", because it keeps you safe from having to actually work.
This would make a great Macbook Pro!
You can nest smart playlists. I have a series like:
two star = rating is 2 stars and last played is more than 28 days ago ... ...
three star = rating is 3 stars and last played is more than 14 days ago
four star = rating is 4 stars and last played is more than 3 days ago
five star = rating is 5 stars and last played is more than 24 hours ago
combined = playlist is two star or playlist is three star
noise = genre is opera or genre is hip hop
unambient = a regular playlist for music I like but don't want coming up in party shuffle
good no repeats = playlist is combined and playlist is not noise and playlist is not unambient
Feeding that into party shuffle gets a much better "mix" than letting apple's magic 'play higher rated songs more often' fail to work for me...
No preferences, ignores proxy settings, tries to call home, when you close the main window the currently playing song stops (no background operation)... forget it.
If this is supposed to be the preferences panel for the US Government, the RIAA and MPAA seem to have gotten in and locked the settings on the technology tab before I could get there. :(
So, in order to tell them what you think via this site, make sure you want it in the Public Domain, as this implies you agree to that condition to comment.
Huh. I wonder if they can do that?
If this site continues as part of the Government after Inauguration the Freedom of Information Act probably requires it.
I personally don't see the point in porting to a architecture that is incapable of attaining new users and dying quickly.
Used PPC Macs are still selling well. In fact a used G5 or G4 is pretty much the only entry-level Mac option.
Ah, add "set compatible" to your .vimrc file and you have 99% vi behavior.
Lies! Oh, the sad day when I believed those lies, and tried to make peace with vim.
I've had up to 20 lines in my vimrc suggested by well meaning idiots like you and still found myself going back to real vi.
Why would you use plain vi, when vim is so much better?
Because the latest version of vi, nvi, is even better.
iTunes has some feature deficiencies that are solved by user plugins in other competitors.
And they're solved by user plugin in iTunes too!
I don't know where the hell the original author got Hopefully these players will gain traction among OS X users, which will finally force Apple to either step up in terms of features or open up iTunes for extensions. because iTunes has always supported plugins. Some of them are actual plugins, going in the iTunes plugins folder in your preferences folder, and some are external apps that use Applescript to control iTunes.
Solving some of them using AppleScripts is _not_ a solution for the average user.
Solving them by writing plugins is not a solution for the average user either. The average user no more cares whether the plugin they're using uses Applescript, Automator, or the existing native plugin API.
Another issue is that iTunes only supports iPods + iPhone.
I must have been dreaming that I was using my cheap generic off-brand USB-memory-stick-MP3-player from iTunes for three years before it broke and I got an iPod Shuffle. And it worked better with iTunes, in my opinion, than my shuffle does. Drag a playlist out of iTunes into the player. One step. Done. None of this waiting on iTunes when I sync.
Updating tags takes ages and blocks the application.
Gee, and I'm doing that every day. No, wait, I'm not, I use iTunes to play music instead.
But then I'm more interested in listening to music than obsessively collecting mistagged torrents, or whatever it is that all you people who seem to spend all their time using obscure features of other players that I never used even when I was using mPlayer and XMMS under Windowmaker and X11 on free UNIX are doing.
This is because mp3s don't always come perfectly tagged and people like to organize them in folders.
I bet there's an Applescript in one of the Applescript archives on the web that will take your folders, use the folder structure to add any missing tags, and pass them on to iTunes.
It's what I did when I started using iTunes. Don't ask me for the script: that was years ago and I can't be arsed seeing if I can dig out my undocumented Applescript that you'd only have to modify for your folder layout. Get a nice polished on from the web.
In iTunes you can't just click on a song and play it and then decide that you want to listen to this other song next and have it move to that.
"Play next in Party Shuffle"
If you don't use Party Shuffle you're missing a good deal.
As for XMMS, I used to use XMMS when my desktop was free UNIX, and I hated its user interface. Horrible crippled thing that used this amazingly broken theming engine - no regular UI for the main window at all. If I couldn't hide it most of the time and drive it from a dock app in Windowmaker I'd have gone stark raving batshit crazy.
Moving to iTunes was painless. My library structure was already pretty much identical to iTunes, so it took me no time at all to decide to let iTunes manage it. I was able to use an Applescript to use the library I had to fix the missing ID3 tags, and Bob's your uncle...
A feature as basic as monitoring a folder and adding the latest music files to the library is unavailable in iTunes.
Why on earth would I need to add such an esoteric feature to a music player, instead of having a smart folder that does the same thing using Applescript or Automator?
There are no plugins or themes.
Application level theming is evil, a nasty horrible idea. Themed applications invariably interact poorly with the OS and fail to provide all the features of the native user interface... this even happens on UNIX where there isn't a native look and feel! If anything, iTunes is already too "themed", though Apple has been toning that down over time.
And iTunes certainly DOES have plugins... I'm using iScrobbler right now... as well as a rich Applescript library that makes it possible to interact with iTunes in ways that make plugins unnecessary.
Has the author of this abstract ever used iTunes?
Or even a Mac?
VIM is a "stupid vi trick".
Every time I update OS X no I have to dike it out and put the REAL "vi" back.
What happened to Berlin/Fiesta?
Since OS X doesn't have an option to turn off compositing, shouldn't it be comparing Ubuntu with Compiz enabled?
Is this because it doesn't do an fsync, or is it vecause it returns from the fsync once the journal is written?
If it's the latter, why is that cheating?
That's the oldest trick in the book, and it only works against objects that are polaron neutral against the subspace background. And since most variations of phase-harmonic shields break polaron symmetry any military warp-capable ship is immune.
I'd rather see Marcus Ranum there.
That kind of glaring kernel bug counts as spontaneous generation of trout.