> At the risk of pointing out the obvious, but - does it surprise anyone that the maker of the #1 target for malware writers is actively campagining against ISPs downthrottling infected users' PCs?
Of course, our idiotic "security" bureaucracy would probably put Windows on the short list of approved systems, since it's a Legitimate Product (tm) from a Legitimate Business (tm).
Funny aside, if might be worth switching to Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or Soltice, if it gets you away from the unreasonable expectations so many people have for Christmas.
> names are based on the assumption that nobody can touch-type. ls, rm, df, du, etc . . . did any of the engineers at Bell Labs type 10-fingered?
FWIW, back in the heyday of the VMS CLI, the policy (for DEC) and recommendation (for vendors) was to make every command a verb. The result is that most of the commands were reasonably self-descriptive, and you could usually find what you wanted in help without too much trouble.
The CLI also let you abbreviate to the first four characters (or to the minimal length needed for unambiguity, whichever was longer). The effect was similar to tab completion, except you didn't actually have to complete it.
And of course, they supported aliases, so if you hated to type you could set up your own 1-character name for your most frequently used commands.
> I know a lot of folks who are anti "medication for depression" because someone they knew had a bad experience.
In addition to the pill-pusher problem that I snipped, anti-depressant medicine has come a long way of late. Bad experiences of 20 years ago are completely irrelevant.
An honest doctor will tell you that not every anti-depressant works for everyone, and there's a chance that none will work for you at all. So it may involve trying one for a few months (yes, it can take that long to have any effect even if it does work for you), ditching it and trying another for a few months, repeat until (hopefully) you find one that works.
Also, anti-depressants aren't passive fixme pills. You've got to make up your mind that you're going to try to make it work. This may require giving up some bad habits that are contributing to your problem.
If you visit a doctor who prescribes something without going in to all this, tear up the prescription and go see another doctor.
"Photoshop" sounds like an application for buying photographs. The writer only knows it's a graphics editor because he has read or heard it somewhere. Contrary to a myth promoted by Microsoft and others, you simply can't use a computer without having to learn anything.
Also, FWIW, and unlike any version of Windows I've ever seen, the GNOME "start" menu breaks things down by category, so you can look in the "Graphics" or "Sound and Video" submenus if you have a general idea about what you're looking for. The last Windows I sat down in front of offered me an almost flat menu of two complete columns on a high-resolution screen, and since I rarely use Windows I didn't know what more than a handful of the applications were.
Worse, in those rare instances where things were put into sub-menus, you had to look under the vendor's name to find the product. So you not only had to know that "Photoshop" means "graphics editor", you also had to know that it's published by someone named "Adobe".
Minimize your expectations. Christmas is never going to be as exciting for you as an adult as it was when you were a 4-year-old.
Negotiate a truce with your family and friends so that gifts are only bought for small children. (And only spend a little bit even then, so they won't grow up with unreasonable expectations of Holiday Magic either.)
Use some of your time off (if any) to visit family and friends, but use some of it selfishly as well. Write that program, read that book, or take a nap and kill some time on Slashdot.
Don't go bonkers over all the holiday food. Eating bad makes you feel bad physically, and feeling bad physically makes things worse mentally.
Make trips and go to parties only if you want to. If you treat them as an unwanted obligation, they'll feel like an unwanted obligation.
Act reasonably, and then unapologetic about it.
Re: Other languages
on
Why Use GTK+?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
> So a big question for me is "what other languages does your toolkit support easily?" Is there a good perl interface? python? scheme? What can I use to lash it together quickly?
For GTK+, see http://www.gtk.org/bindings.html, where they have a status table for ~28 languages. Presumably the Qt site does the same thing.
> And when you need an alternative language APIs, we need documentation that is native to those languages. All too many of these toolkits provide some rudimentary alternative UI, but it's just an export of the C++ API, and the programmer is expected to read the C++ documentation, and mentally convert that to the appropriate perl, python or what-have-you alternative.
FWIW, the GtkAda project does provide pretty good documentation, both a User's Guide and a Reference Manual. There are holes sometimes, but they usually tell me everything I need to know.
> for as long as MS/windows holds over 95% of the desktop market there is absolutelly no poit in using gtk
As long as graphical applications are needed for the other 5% of the desktop market (or any percentage of any other market), some toolkit will be needed for those platforms.
Re: GTK is alright...but no raves
on
Why Use GTK+?
·
· Score: 1
> Um, you mean like this C# code?
DialogResult result = MessageBox.Show("Quit without saving?", "", MessageBoxButtons.YesNoCancel);
FWIW, the Ada bindings for GTK+ support that. Actually, all the arguments except the message string are optional, so you can go with:
Result = Message_Dialog ("Quit without saving?");
There are other optional arguments that provide it with more flexibility.
Of course, if you do stuff like this regularly you should already have your own convenience functions in your development libraries. I have everything from a show-hide widget to application-independent data display widgets. If I start developing stuff that needs your example more than a couple of times, I'll build a parameterless function to handle it and stick it in my library. I will probably even include a wrapper around the choice of action, though for flexibility that would require accepting arguments for the relevant quit and save-then-quit procedures.
But it will still be a widget; that's the point of OOP.
The toolkit has to provide maximum flexibility, or else you can't do that. Which convenience functions go in the toolkit vs. which go in your development or application library is a matter of opinion. (In practice, my widgets tend to evolve from application-specific widgets to more general-purpose library widgets.)
> The execution of westerners in Iraq started only after the USA invaded Iraq for no good reason. Confirmed counts of Iraqi civilian deaths due the invasion range from 27,000 to over 30,000.
And this is going to get worse, since the latest plan for reducing our politically unacceptable US casualty rate is to replace boots-on-the-ground with airstrikes, even though most of the fighting is still in urban areas.
We're also learning that "turning security over to the Iraqis" means having US troops cordon off a town while a Shiite milita - supported by US airstrikes - goes in and shoots all the Sunnis that they think need to be shot.
Is it any surprise that this "small" insurgency continues after all our tactical "victories" and the imprisonment of thousands of Iraqis?
> He answered to the voters in 2004 [...] and the voters told him to keep doing what he was doing for another four years.
I.e., cutting taxes and prosecuting a war that he lied to make the voters think was relevant to 9/11.
And even then he only won by the tiniest of margins, and that after a massive smear campaign against his opponent and a major news network squashing an election-week story whose contents we still haven't heard.
> Ah yes, an accident...where they kept changing their story as to why they went in in the first place, where they went in with tanks, machine guns, and all sorts of other military style equipment
Rush probably didn't tell you that they used the armored vehicle to knock holes in the walls for the insertion of a non-lethal gas after a long seige.
> to raid a people doing things for things they were legally entitled to do.
You mean like shooting a federal marshal in the process of serving a properly signed warrant?
> Well, considering the whiny "for the children!" reason, saying they went in because of child abuse...they only started saying that after everything went up in flames. Originally all they talked about was the "massive cache of illegal machine guns" (which is why it was ATF)...which all turned out to actually be perfectly legal. They had to come up with a cover story to...well..cover their asses. So "child abuse" which didn't have to be proven was perfect.
Rush probably forgot to tell you that the Dravidians shot and killed a federal marshal who was trying to serve a warrant.
What do you think the feds were supposed to do? Say "sorry, if we knew you felt so strongly about things we wouldn't have tried to serve the warrant" and walk away from it?
> And what mess did Bush clean up after Clinton? You mean like that $200 billion surplus at the end of the Clinton administration that Bush turned into a $8 trillion deficit while cutting back on education, employment services, health, housing, law enforcement, and other programs that might actually improve our society?
Hey, Bush is just following his mandate: to make sure the rich get richer quicker.
> Not only was Clinton too busy having his dick sucked to take any notice of the largest frauds in American history
What I find funny is that right-wingers are still hauling out Clinton distract attention from the current administration's excesses.
Sure, Clinton, like every other president in living memory - with the possible exception of Carter - was a liar and a crook. Does that mean we should just go along with unjustified wars and the wholesale destruction of our civil liberties?
Do you think Johnson's exploitation of the Tonkin Gulf "incident" was OK on the grounds that Nixon was a liar? Or the Iran-Contra affair was OK because of something Kennedy did?
> There is a war on, and wars always cost some civil liberties.
FYI, Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus and the courts ruled against him, even in a civil war.
The US Constitution simply doesn't give the executive branch to do whatever it thinks necessary in a crisis. (And rightly not: the "continual crisis" is probably the historically most popular mechanism for destroying nations' freedoms.)
> They asked him it during a sexual harrassment trial...where his sexual history, particularly his on the fucking job sexual history is actually relevant to the case....in other words, they actually had a right to ask him.
Actually, judge Wright ultimately ruled otherwise. She did allow it in the depositions, but later ruled it inadmissable as evidence in the case.
> I have heard from several people that Bush won't be impeached over this. I see no way around an impeachment now that he has admitted to violating the law.
There's no one who can compel the Congress to impeach him, and no way in hell a Republican Congress will impeach him.
Right now there is only one person identified as having had his civil rights violated by this presidential order, and his lawyer is fishing around for someone big enough to manage a suit against the president, but IIRC there are shield laws that would prevent any such suit while a President is in office.
> In short, there's absolutely nothing anybody can do about him. There are no effective safeguards and no meaningful counterbalances for this kind of situation.
There's a weak check on it in the form of next year's congressional elections. Most of the legislature is up for re-election, and legislators need to CTA with the local voters. So for the past few months Republican legislators have been increasingly willing to break ranks with a president who much of the public sees as having gone too far. Look at how poorly the legislature supported the administration's agenda this past week.
OTOH, Bush's ratings are on the rebound; it seems that Americans are quicker to be outraged by high gasoline prices than by a government that has run off the rails.
On the third hand, I don't think there have been any new polls since the privacy invasions became front-page news, so maybe it's too soon to write off the US public. There have been several revelations in the past 10 days or so: the Pentagon is spying on such "threatening" peace groups as the Quakers, NSA is spying on citizens, and just yesterday word came out that someone has been sniffing mosques and other Muslim meeting places for radation. The next opinion poll should tell us whether the public cares about invasions of privacy.
Slashdot Mirror
> At the risk of pointing out the obvious, but - does it surprise anyone that the maker of the #1 target for malware writers is actively campagining against ISPs downthrottling infected users' PCs?
Of course, our idiotic "security" bureaucracy would probably put Windows on the short list of approved systems, since it's a Legitimate Product (tm) from a Legitimate Business (tm).
> KDE is the same. For example, I can open the menu, and go to "Graphics | Image Editor (The GIMP)", or "Internet | Instant Messenger (Kopete)".
That sounds even better!
> Your argument is more Devil's advocate than anything substance. You just can't bring yourself to admit that Linux isn't perfect.
Linux isn't perfect. Linux applications aren't perfect. The writer is still a moron, for reasons already explained.
Funny aside, if might be worth switching to Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or Soltice, if it gets you away from the unreasonable expectations so many people have for Christmas.
> names are based on the assumption that nobody can touch-type. ls, rm, df, du, etc . . . did any of the engineers at Bell Labs type 10-fingered?
FWIW, back in the heyday of the VMS CLI, the policy (for DEC) and recommendation (for vendors) was to make every command a verb. The result is that most of the commands were reasonably self-descriptive, and you could usually find what you wanted in help without too much trouble.
The CLI also let you abbreviate to the first four characters (or to the minimal length needed for unambiguity, whichever was longer). The effect was similar to tab completion, except you didn't actually have to complete it.
And of course, they supported aliases, so if you hated to type you could set up your own 1-character name for your most frequently used commands.
> I know a lot of folks who are anti "medication for depression" because someone they knew had a bad experience.
In addition to the pill-pusher problem that I snipped, anti-depressant medicine has come a long way of late. Bad experiences of 20 years ago are completely irrelevant.
An honest doctor will tell you that not every anti-depressant works for everyone, and there's a chance that none will work for you at all. So it may involve trying one for a few months (yes, it can take that long to have any effect even if it does work for you), ditching it and trying another for a few months, repeat until (hopefully) you find one that works.
Also, anti-depressants aren't passive fixme pills. You've got to make up your mind that you're going to try to make it work. This may require giving up some bad habits that are contributing to your problem.
If you visit a doctor who prescribes something without going in to all this, tear up the prescription and go see another doctor.
"Photoshop" sounds like an application for buying photographs. The writer only knows it's a graphics editor because he has read or heard it somewhere. Contrary to a myth promoted by Microsoft and others, you simply can't use a computer without having to learn anything.
Also, FWIW, and unlike any version of Windows I've ever seen, the GNOME "start" menu breaks things down by category, so you can look in the "Graphics" or "Sound and Video" submenus if you have a general idea about what you're looking for. The last Windows I sat down in front of offered me an almost flat menu of two complete columns on a high-resolution screen, and since I rarely use Windows I didn't know what more than a handful of the applications were.
Worse, in those rare instances where things were put into sub-menus, you had to look under the vendor's name to find the product. So you not only had to know that "Photoshop" means "graphics editor", you also had to know that it's published by someone named "Adobe".
Idiot-level apologetics.
Minimize your expectations. Christmas is never going to be as exciting for you as an adult as it was when you were a 4-year-old.
Negotiate a truce with your family and friends so that gifts are only bought for small children. (And only spend a little bit even then, so they won't grow up with unreasonable expectations of Holiday Magic either.)
Use some of your time off (if any) to visit family and friends, but use some of it selfishly as well. Write that program, read that book, or take a nap and kill some time on Slashdot.
Don't go bonkers over all the holiday food. Eating bad makes you feel bad physically, and feeling bad physically makes things worse mentally.
Make trips and go to parties only if you want to. If you treat them as an unwanted obligation, they'll feel like an unwanted obligation.
Act reasonably, and then unapologetic about it.
> So a big question for me is "what other languages does your toolkit support easily?" Is there a good perl interface? python? scheme? What can I use to lash it together quickly?
For GTK+, see http://www.gtk.org/bindings.html, where they have a status table for ~28 languages. Presumably the Qt site does the same thing.
> And when you need an alternative language APIs, we need documentation that is native to those languages. All too many of these toolkits provide some rudimentary alternative UI, but it's just an export of the C++ API, and the programmer is expected to read the C++ documentation, and mentally convert that to the appropriate perl, python or what-have-you alternative.
FWIW, the GtkAda project does provide pretty good documentation, both a User's Guide and a Reference Manual. There are holes sometimes, but they usually tell me everything I need to know.
> for as long as MS/windows holds over 95% of the desktop market there is absolutelly no poit in using gtk
As long as graphical applications are needed for the other 5% of the desktop market (or any percentage of any other market), some toolkit will be needed for those platforms.
Of course, if you do stuff like this regularly you should already have your own convenience functions in your development libraries. I have everything from a show-hide widget to application-independent data display widgets. If I start developing stuff that needs your example more than a couple of times, I'll build a parameterless function to handle it and stick it in my library. I will probably even include a wrapper around the choice of action, though for flexibility that would require accepting arguments for the relevant quit and save-then-quit procedures.
But it will still be a widget; that's the point of OOP.
The toolkit has to provide maximum flexibility, or else you can't do that. Which convenience functions go in the toolkit vs. which go in your development or application library is a matter of opinion. (In practice, my widgets tend to evolve from application-specific widgets to more general-purpose library widgets.)
> GTK+ is a graphical user interface (GUI) tool kit.
And all this time I thought everyone was talking about a game called "Grand Theft Potassium Ion".
Why don't they quit the pretense and call it BIG-DICK?
> The survivors (you know there were survivors right?) were aquitted of all charges. You know that right?
Does that mean the warrant shouldn't have been served, or that the Dravidians were justified in shooting at the marshals who tried to do so?
> The execution of westerners in Iraq started only after the USA invaded Iraq for no good reason. Confirmed counts of Iraqi civilian deaths due the invasion range from 27,000 to over 30,000.
And this is going to get worse, since the latest plan for reducing our politically unacceptable US casualty rate is to replace boots-on-the-ground with airstrikes, even though most of the fighting is still in urban areas.
Though we're still being told that the war is going well, the number of airstrikes per month has risen five-fold over the course of this year, and civilians are dying as a result.
We're also learning that "turning security over to the Iraqis" means having US troops cordon off a town while a Shiite milita - supported by US airstrikes - goes in and shoots all the Sunnis that they think need to be shot.
Is it any surprise that this "small" insurgency continues after all our tactical "victories" and the imprisonment of thousands of Iraqis?
> He answered to the voters in 2004 [...] and the voters told him to keep doing what he was doing for another four years.
I.e., cutting taxes and prosecuting a war that he lied to make the voters think was relevant to 9/11.
And even then he only won by the tiniest of margins, and that after a massive smear campaign against his opponent and a major news network squashing an election-week story whose contents we still haven't heard.
> Ah yes, an accident...where they kept changing their story as to why they went in in the first place, where they went in with tanks, machine guns, and all sorts of other military style equipment
Rush probably didn't tell you that they used the armored vehicle to knock holes in the walls for the insertion of a non-lethal gas after a long seige.
> to raid a people doing things for things they were legally entitled to do.
You mean like shooting a federal marshal in the process of serving a properly signed warrant?
> Well, considering the whiny "for the children!" reason, saying they went in because of child abuse...they only started saying that after everything went up in flames. Originally all they talked about was the "massive cache of illegal machine guns" (which is why it was ATF)...which all turned out to actually be perfectly legal. They had to come up with a cover story to...well..cover their asses. So "child abuse" which didn't have to be proven was perfect.
Rush probably forgot to tell you that the Dravidians shot and killed a federal marshal who was trying to serve a warrant.
What do you think the feds were supposed to do? Say "sorry, if we knew you felt so strongly about things we wouldn't have tried to serve the warrant" and walk away from it?
> Which reminds me: before you impeach Bush and remove him from office, remember who then gets sworn in.
Cheney's already running the country anyway, with a little input from Rumsfeld.
> And what mess did Bush clean up after Clinton? You mean like that $200 billion surplus at the end of the Clinton administration that Bush turned into a $8 trillion deficit while cutting back on education, employment services, health, housing, law enforcement, and other programs that might actually improve our society?
Hey, Bush is just following his mandate: to make sure the rich get richer quicker.
> Not only was Clinton too busy having his dick sucked to take any notice of the largest frauds in American history
What I find funny is that right-wingers are still hauling out Clinton distract attention from the current administration's excesses.
Sure, Clinton, like every other president in living memory - with the possible exception of Carter - was a liar and a crook. Does that mean we should just go along with unjustified wars and the wholesale destruction of our civil liberties?
Do you think Johnson's exploitation of the Tonkin Gulf "incident" was OK on the grounds that Nixon was a liar? Or the Iran-Contra affair was OK because of something Kennedy did?
> There is a war on, and wars always cost some civil liberties.
FYI, Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus and the courts ruled against him, even in a civil war.
The US Constitution simply doesn't give the executive branch to do whatever it thinks necessary in a crisis. (And rightly not: the "continual crisis" is probably the historically most popular mechanism for destroying nations' freedoms.)
> They asked him it during a sexual harrassment trial...where his sexual history, particularly his on the fucking job sexual history is actually relevant to the case....in other words, they actually had a right to ask him.
Actually, judge Wright ultimately ruled otherwise. She did allow it in the depositions, but later ruled it inadmissable as evidence in the case.
> I have heard from several people that Bush won't be impeached over this. I see no way around an impeachment now that he has admitted to violating the law.
There's no one who can compel the Congress to impeach him, and no way in hell a Republican Congress will impeach him.
Right now there is only one person identified as having had his civil rights violated by this presidential order, and his lawyer is fishing around for someone big enough to manage a suit against the president, but IIRC there are shield laws that would prevent any such suit while a President is in office.
> In short, there's absolutely nothing anybody can do about him. There are no effective safeguards and no meaningful counterbalances for this kind of situation.
There's a weak check on it in the form of next year's congressional elections. Most of the legislature is up for re-election, and legislators need to CTA with the local voters. So for the past few months Republican legislators have been increasingly willing to break ranks with a president who much of the public sees as having gone too far. Look at how poorly the legislature supported the administration's agenda this past week.
OTOH, Bush's ratings are on the rebound; it seems that Americans are quicker to be outraged by high gasoline prices than by a government that has run off the rails.
On the third hand, I don't think there have been any new polls since the privacy invasions became front-page news, so maybe it's too soon to write off the US public. There have been several revelations in the past 10 days or so: the Pentagon is spying on such "threatening" peace groups as the Quakers, NSA is spying on citizens, and just yesterday word came out that someone has been sniffing mosques and other Muslim meeting places for radation. The next opinion poll should tell us whether the public cares about invasions of privacy.