motes aren't small enough or cheap ($250) enough to produce en masse
You've got that backwards -- they aren't cheap because they aren't produced en masse. Start cranking them out by the tens of thousands and the price would drop to the couple of dollars range. Still a few tweaks (like power supply) to do before it's worth producing them in that volume, though.
remember the 2 AA batteries? Anything that'll run off 2 AAs will run of 2 AAAs for a shorter period of time, or nickel-size 2032 battery for a little while. But yeah, batteries are a limitation -- they need some way to get power from their environment (induction, photoelectric, thermoelectric, whatever...)
The H2 isn't a real Hummer. Yeah, it carries the Hummer brand, but it's built on another chassis (Tahoe?), not the Humvee chassis of the original (and more expensive) Hummer.
Mind, the original Hummer is/was available in both gas and diesel versions.
i didn't actually realize people wrote code using them.
Heck, I've even written code with a keypunch. Actually I don't remember if I was writing new code, debugging something or just running some scripts, I just know it was something I had to finish up that night. (Especially since this was out of town at a client site.) The system was a DEC 10. Gads, I might even have been using TECO.
Yeah, nowadays dot matrix is still good for preprinted forms (like checks) or multipart forms. But text editing on a hardcopy terminal is a pain (and waste of paper) -- although that's why stuff like "ed" and "ex" is still around.
I've done that -- not a house fuse, but the "slow-blow" fuse protecting the motor in a (now ancient) Decwriter dot matrix terminal. (As I said, ancient technology). It was late, I was fixing some code, and a piece of paper jammed the print head and the fuse blew. No spare fuses. So I got a foil-wrapped chocolate bar out of the vending machine, wrapped some foil around the burnt-out fuse, replaced it and kept coding.
And yes, left a note to remind myself or whoever used the terminal next to replace it with a proper fuse.
Sort of. The transformer itself was underground in a utility hole. I was just starting across the street when it blew, and the manhole cover went about 15-20 feet in the air, followed by thick clouds of brown smoke. Fortunately nobody was hit by the manhole cover.
110 is really more of a tickle and certainly won't kill you.
Yeah, I used to think that too -- as a kid (well, teenager) playing with ungrounded appliances, or one time a couple of us forming a human chain between an electrically leaky record player (that dates me) and chasing a third guy around who didn't want to get shocked. In retrospect, that was pretty low current.
More recently (some years back) I was investigating what seemed to be a wiring problem in an old Sun "shoe box" external hard drive, and managed to get my hand on the (grounded) case while my elbow brushed against a bare conductor in the PSU. That was not a tickle. I've never been hit with a stun gun, but I could barely move my arm for several minutes after that (aside from the initial reaction that jerked the box halfway across the room). I'm just thankful that the conductive path wasn't across my heart.
It isn't the voltage that kills you, it's the amperage (or milliamperage, it doesn't take much in the wrong place). The voltage just helps overcome the resistance of your skin and body. And 60 Hz is too low by orders of magnitude for the current to all pass through your skin rather than your body.
And even if the current doesn't manage to screw up your heartbeat to the point it can't sync itself again, you can get some really nasty burns. Ever seen the demo of cooking a hot dog in a couple of seconds by passing 110V through it?
The Great Eastern Seabord Blackout -- blacked out everything from Toronto to, at one point, northern Florida, with large parts (particularly New York area) out for circa 18 hours or so.
Had nothing to do with deregulation, since there wasn't any at the time.
Easy to find if you know what you're looking for (ie, you know the function name, you just need to remind yourself of the type and order of the parameters).
Nothing beats browsing a book, though, to find functions that you didn't know existed but realize you can put to good use. (Sure, you can browse on-line too, but a book is more convenient for places like the bathroom...)
Better yet, just configure your SMTP server to include that notice in the 220 response it sends on connection.
It's not your problem if their mail software doesn't report such comments back to the sender, the point is that your software announced it immediately upon connection.
Okay, so there's still one XView user out there;-)
Seriously, I always liked OpenLook's look over Motif but found myself working in Motif shops. The Xol (OpenLook based on Xt) library was a nice compromise -- using it I once converted a 20,000 line Motif app to OpenLook in about a day, mostly converting a lot of Xm strings to their identical Xt equivalents and changing a few library calls (the result compiled to either Motif or OpenLook with a few #ifs and a link to the appropriate library).
Alas there don't seem to be any free Xol libraries around, not that I've looked very hard. Maybe I'll do my next project in XView just to annoy the GTK/Qt whippersnappers;-)
Hardly. If you're doing Xlib programming (Vol 1), then you'll also want Vol 2 (Xlib Reference Manual). Granted, Vol 3 (X Users Guide) probably won't tell X programmers much they don't know, and if you're using one of the non- Xt-derived toolkits (GTK, Qt, etc) then the later volumes (4 & 5, Xt Programming and Reference Manuals respectively, and 6, Motif) aren't necessary -- unless you ever hope to figure out how some of the older code out there works.
Nobody uses XView (Vol 7) any more (do they?) and the X Window SysAdmin's Guide (Vol 8) is useful only to sysadmins of large X-based thin client installations (such as Largo City FL, perhaps?), but I wouldn't exactly call them "fluff".
(And yeah, I've got the whole set, including both "regular" and "Motif" editions of some, plus the R6 supplement, and the "Nutshell" volume -- which is actually pretty handy as a desk reference over the thicker volumes. But then I've been doing X Windows programming since late X10 days circa 1987.)
Yeah, I RTFA and know he disses them with "too hard, too much like Xlib" (actually they're built on Xt, which is built on top of Xlib).
But anybody who thinks Xt is "too hard" probably is out of their depth programming GUIs anyway. (Now, if you think it's ugly, that's a whole 'nother discussion...) And nothing else gives you that level of flexibility and control. (Well, nothing else sane -- if you want to code direct to the X protocol, go right ahead...)
Remember, when you have one finger pointing at someone, there are 4 four more pointing right back at you.
I've always wondered about this. Is your thumb double-jointed? Do you have polydactylism? Most I can get pointing back at me is 3, with my thumb pointing off in some not quite orthogonal direction, or possibly parallel to the finger pointing at someone else. Hmm, no opposable thumb, perhaps?
what happens when the computer won't boot because the / filesystem is damaged?
What happens on Windows when it won't boot because the C: filesystem is damaged?
For most users the answer's the same either way -- reinstall the OS, and lose anything not backed up or on a different partition. (And reinstalling is probably a lot easier these days for commercial Linux systems than for Windows.)
Trying to cover up the internals of an operating system is not a good way to get people to use said OS.
That was a joke, right? You do know that Windows (and MacOS for that matter) does its best to cover up the internals?
What seems to be happening if most linux appliactions have 3 interfaces:
Welcome to the model/view/controller paradigm, or perhaps more correctly isolation of interface from implementation. Last time I looked, all those GUIs for cdrecord actually invoked the command line program after getting the parameters with the GUI.
This is the way apps should be written, it makes them vastly more (re)usable. (Interactive programs can still do this via an app-specific text-based protocol -- and thus become easily scriptable or controllable from another app.)
3. Modifiers to move and resize windows without having to aim for title bars or borders.
Hey, I didn't know you could do that. I just tried it and like it. Cool.
Re:There's one good thing about it.
on
Perl 1.0?
·
· Score: 1
Perl is more like a swiss army knife than a hammer.
Fair enough. But while I use my swiss army knife a lot, I'd still rather use the right tool for the job if it's available.
Re:There's one good thing about it.
on
Perl 1.0?
·
· Score: 1
If I had to run back to C every time I needed to look for "Foo" in a database
Um, what have you got against whatever flavor of interactive SQL your DB supports?
or "Bar" in a logfile to replace it with its lowercase equivalent
Um, vi? or awk? or sed? or even ed?
Maybe the reason Perl programmers like it so much is that they're too lazy to learn any other tool. Just as if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail, then if you're a Perl hacker, every problem looks like it needs a Perl solution...
Basically it provides for sepirating Presentation, Logic, and Data
Or in other words, Model (Data), View (Presentation) and Controller (Logic). (Although arguably in the MVC pattern the model can also include some logic, just not view-related logic. Think of triggers and constraints in the RDBMS.) Either way, separation of these is generally a Good Thing.
Well, you can't blame the compiler for not catching what you meant if that's not what you wrote.
GCC 3.2 (what I'm currently running) will give you a warning for assigning to a const, and an error for assigning to an enum literal. G++ gives an error for both.
I've found that enums in other languages which enforce the sequential order and must start at 0 are pretty much useless in most cases.
Sounds like you're using enum where you should be using const, in that case. In a true enumeration (think Pascal or Ada) you should neither know nor care what the internal representation is. Consider something like typdef enum {red, yellow, green, blue} color; why do you give a rat's ass whether 'yellow' was stored internally as 1, 2, 27 or even "yellow" ?
If you want to use symbolic constants that the compiler recognizes and can typecheck (instead of #defines in the preprocesser), then use them: const int fred=36; and so on. And pay attention to the compiler warning (which really ought to be an error).
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motes aren't small enough or cheap ($250) enough to produce en masse
You've got that backwards -- they aren't cheap because they aren't produced en masse. Start cranking them out by the tens of thousands and the price would drop to the couple of dollars range. Still a few tweaks (like power supply) to do before it's worth producing them in that volume, though.
remember the 2 AA batteries?
Anything that'll run off 2 AAs will run of 2 AAAs for a shorter period of time, or nickel-size 2032 battery for a little while. But yeah, batteries are a limitation -- they need some way to get power from their environment (induction, photoelectric, thermoelectric, whatever...)
The H2 isn't a real Hummer. Yeah, it carries the Hummer brand, but it's built on another chassis (Tahoe?), not the Humvee chassis of the original (and more expensive) Hummer.
Mind, the original Hummer is/was available in both gas and diesel versions.
I count two: an odd C++/Java-ish hybrid (spoken with three different accents) and something almost but not completely unlike BASIC.
i didn't actually realize people wrote code using them.
Heck, I've even written code with a keypunch. Actually I don't remember if I was writing new code, debugging something or just running some scripts, I just know it was something I had to finish up that night. (Especially since this was out of town at a client site.) The system was a DEC 10. Gads, I might even have been using TECO.
Yeah, nowadays dot matrix is still good for preprinted forms (like checks) or multipart forms. But text editing on a hardcopy terminal is a pain (and waste of paper) -- although that's why stuff like "ed" and "ex" is still around.
For the 2.4.19 kernel (as in SuSE 8.1):
Better than 5 million, of course that includes comments, white space, and all architectures.fixed a fuse with tinfoil
I've done that -- not a house fuse, but the "slow-blow" fuse protecting the motor in a (now ancient) Decwriter dot matrix terminal. (As I said, ancient technology). It was late, I was fixing some code, and a piece of paper jammed the print head and the fuse blew. No spare fuses. So I got a foil-wrapped chocolate bar out of the vending machine, wrapped some foil around the burnt-out fuse, replaced it and kept coding.
And yes, left a note to remind myself or whoever used the terminal next to replace it with a proper fuse.
Ever see a transformer blow up?
Sort of. The transformer itself was underground in a utility hole. I was just starting across the street when it blew, and the manhole cover went about 15-20 feet in the air, followed by thick clouds of brown smoke. Fortunately nobody was hit by the manhole cover.
110 is really more of a tickle and certainly won't kill you.
Yeah, I used to think that too -- as a kid (well, teenager) playing with ungrounded appliances, or one time a couple of us forming a human chain between an electrically leaky record player (that dates me) and chasing a third guy around who didn't want to get shocked. In retrospect, that was pretty low current.
More recently (some years back) I was investigating what seemed to be a wiring problem in an old Sun "shoe box" external hard drive, and managed to get my hand on the (grounded) case while my elbow brushed against a bare conductor in the PSU. That was not a tickle. I've never been hit with a stun gun, but I could barely move my arm for several minutes after that (aside from the initial reaction that jerked the box halfway across the room). I'm just thankful that the conductive path wasn't across my heart.
It isn't the voltage that kills you, it's the amperage (or milliamperage, it doesn't take much in the wrong place). The voltage just helps overcome the resistance of your skin and body. And 60 Hz is too low by orders of magnitude for the current to all pass through your skin rather than your body.
And even if the current doesn't manage to screw up your heartbeat to the point it can't sync itself again, you can get some really nasty burns. Ever seen the demo of cooking a hot dog in a couple of seconds by passing 110V through it?
The Great Eastern Seabord Blackout -- blacked out everything from Toronto to, at one point, northern Florida, with large parts (particularly New York area) out for circa 18 hours or so.
Had nothing to do with deregulation, since there wasn't any at the time.
Stuff happens.
I'm the father of 8 month old twin boys and _I_ found it funny.
Ditto, and I'm the father of twin 4 year old boys. Heck, there are times when the idea is almost appealing (just kidding!).
eldest, by two minutes
Pretty dang close together -- ditto for mine, and the doc said he's rarely seen them that close together even by C-section.
Easy to find if you know what you're looking for (ie, you know the function name, you just need to remind yourself of the type and order of the parameters).
Nothing beats browsing a book, though, to find functions that you didn't know existed but realize you can put to good use. (Sure, you can browse on-line too, but a book is more convenient for places like the bathroom...)
Better yet, just configure your SMTP server to include that notice in the 220 response it sends on connection.
It's not your problem if their mail software doesn't report such comments back to the sender, the point is that your software announced it immediately upon connection.
Okay, so there's still one XView user out there ;-)
;-)
Seriously, I always liked OpenLook's look over Motif but found myself working in Motif shops. The Xol (OpenLook based on Xt) library was a nice compromise -- using it I once converted a 20,000 line Motif app to OpenLook in about a day, mostly converting a lot of Xm strings to their identical Xt equivalents and changing a few library calls (the result compiled to either Motif or OpenLook with a few #ifs and a link to the appropriate library).
Alas there don't seem to be any free Xol libraries around, not that I've looked very hard. Maybe I'll do my next project in XView just to annoy the GTK/Qt whippersnappers
the rest are fluff, imnsho.
Hardly. If you're doing Xlib programming (Vol 1), then you'll also want Vol 2 (Xlib Reference Manual). Granted, Vol 3 (X Users Guide) probably won't tell X programmers much they don't know, and if you're using one of the non- Xt-derived toolkits (GTK, Qt, etc) then the later volumes (4 & 5, Xt Programming and Reference Manuals respectively, and 6, Motif) aren't necessary -- unless you ever hope to figure out how some of the older code out there works.
Nobody uses XView (Vol 7) any more (do they?) and the X Window SysAdmin's Guide (Vol 8) is useful only to sysadmins of large X-based thin client installations (such as Largo City FL, perhaps?), but I wouldn't exactly call them "fluff".
(And yeah, I've got the whole set, including both "regular" and "Motif" editions of some, plus the R6 supplement, and the "Nutshell" volume -- which is actually pretty handy as a desk reference over the thicker volumes. But then I've been doing X Windows programming since late X10 days circa 1987.)
Yeah, I RTFA and know he disses them with "too hard, too much like Xlib" (actually they're built on Xt, which is built on top of Xlib).
But anybody who thinks Xt is "too hard" probably is out of their depth programming GUIs anyway. (Now, if you think it's ugly, that's a whole 'nother discussion...) And nothing else gives you that level of flexibility and control. (Well, nothing else sane -- if you want to code direct to the X protocol, go right ahead...)
Remember, when you have one finger pointing at someone, there are 4 four more pointing right back at you.
I've always wondered about this. Is your thumb double-jointed? Do you have polydactylism? Most I can get pointing back at me is 3, with my thumb pointing off in some not quite orthogonal direction, or possibly parallel to the finger pointing at someone else. Hmm, no opposable thumb, perhaps?
what happens when the computer won't boot because the / filesystem is damaged?
What happens on Windows when it won't boot because the C: filesystem is damaged?
For most users the answer's the same either way -- reinstall the OS, and lose anything not backed up or on a different partition. (And reinstalling is probably a lot easier these days for commercial Linux systems than for Windows.)
Trying to cover up the internals of an operating system is not a good way to get people to use said OS.
That was a joke, right? You do know that Windows (and MacOS for that matter) does its best to cover up the internals?
What seems to be happening if most linux appliactions have 3 interfaces:
Welcome to the model/view/controller paradigm, or perhaps more correctly isolation of interface from implementation. Last time I looked, all those GUIs for cdrecord actually invoked the command line program after getting the parameters with the GUI.
This is the way apps should be written, it makes them vastly more (re)usable. (Interactive programs can still do this via an app-specific text-based protocol -- and thus become easily scriptable or controllable from another app.)
3. Modifiers to move and resize windows without having to aim for title bars or borders.
Hey, I didn't know you could do that. I just tried it and like it. Cool.
Perl is more like a swiss army knife than a hammer.
Fair enough. But while I use my swiss army knife a lot, I'd still rather use the right tool for the job if it's available.
If I had to run back to C every time I needed to look for "Foo" in a database
Um, what have you got against whatever flavor of interactive SQL your DB supports?
or "Bar" in a logfile to replace it with its lowercase equivalent
Um, vi? or awk? or sed? or even ed?
Maybe the reason Perl programmers like it so much is that they're too lazy to learn any other tool. Just as if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail, then if you're a Perl hacker, every problem looks like it needs a Perl solution...
Novell: Utah's answer to Corel.
Hmmm... Nov-El, Cor-El. Can we deduce, then, that Kryptonians* are lousy at running software companies?
(* Best known Kryptonian: Kal-El)
Basically it provides for sepirating Presentation, Logic, and Data
Or in other words, Model (Data), View (Presentation) and Controller (Logic). (Although arguably in the MVC pattern the model can also include some logic, just not view-related logic. Think of triggers and constraints in the RDBMS.) Either way, separation of these is generally a Good Thing.
the compiler probably won't tell you a thing
Well, you can't blame the compiler for not catching what you meant if that's not what you wrote.
GCC 3.2 (what I'm currently running) will give you a warning for assigning to a const, and an error for assigning to an enum literal. G++ gives an error for both.
Need to upgrade your compiler?
I've found that enums in other languages which enforce the sequential order and must start at 0 are pretty much useless in most cases.
Sounds like you're using enum where you should be using const, in that case. In a true enumeration (think Pascal or Ada) you should neither know nor care what the internal representation is. Consider something like typdef enum {red, yellow, green, blue} color; why do you give a rat's ass whether 'yellow' was stored internally as 1, 2, 27 or even "yellow" ?
If you want to use symbolic constants that the compiler recognizes and can typecheck (instead of #defines in the preprocesser), then use them: const int fred=36; and so on. And pay attention to the compiler warning (which really ought to be an error).