Still irritate my mother when I don't telephone her frequently (Q: nothing new to report, so what's the point in calling her? A: to make her happy. That'll be $2.35 long-distance charge, please).
Yes, although you don't have to be autistic to avoid contacting your mom by letter or phone...
But here's a truly hot recipe for making your Mom (or whoever) a lot happier:
Get your mom on-line.
Teach your mom how to send you email.
Reply to her email using the same compulsive zeal that makes you a Usenet Wraith or "Karma +30" Slashdot poster.
Now, maybe not every mom will get into this as much as others do, but I have seen big positive effects in some cases.
I must point out that this is not the first work showing brain connectivity. In fact, people have been doing this for a decade with MRI, and before that with more invasive means. For example, Douek et al. (Journal of Computer Assisted Tomography, 16(6),923-929:1991) colour mapped myelin fiber orientation in the brain using diffusion weighted MRI.
Well, people in the field know that there has been lots of work going on in this topic (computing the diffusion tensor). It is, after all, a fairly obvious thing to do. What seems to be novel to me about this is that they used the DT to trace out some very long fiber pathways, and they did it with just a wimpy 1.5T Siemens Vision scanner. And the big surprise to me was that the WashU folks beat the MGH group (among others) into print on this topic.
Coupling this information with functional information (regional metabolic activity in the brain also measurable with MRI or PET or SPECT) can provide valuable insight into brain function and dysfunction.
As Barak Pearlmutter mentioned earlier in this thread, this information is an even better fit for techniques that provide much better temporal resolution than fMRI, PET, or SPECT; he mentioned MEG (magnetoencephalogram, although EEG-based methods can also contribute, and I can't help mentioning the amazing new "shoot lasers through the skull and get optical imaging data" technique known as EROS, currently being developed at the University of Missouri and elsewhere.
Jonathan King, Dept. of Psychology, University of Missouri
This modality - MRI - gives excellent spatial resolution. Unfortunately, it is not so good with temporal information, which can be at best on the order of a second, which is much slower than the brain processes information.
Hi, Barak. Being basically a cognitive electrophysiologist, I, of course, have to agree with this, but I do want to point out that the Raichle paper is phenomenally important in that this is the beginning of doing real dynamic processing studies.
The logic for how to use this data is straight-forward enough; you mention MEG, but another technique that should work really well with this the event-related optical signal (EROS) which was pioneered by Dr. Gabriele Gratton at the University of Missouri, and now spreading rapidly elsewhere.
Our code base, both for signal processing and for visualization, is all developed on Debian GNU/Linux machines (both i386 and Alpha) and will all to be released under the GLP. It is also all being ported to SGIs and to large Linux clusters.
That's great! I think you should issue that as a challenge to many other labs out there.
If you're interested in figuring out how the brain works and want to get a PhD or MS in CS at a really funky department while hacking Linux and playing with gonzo brain imaging data, don't be shy - get in touch.
What he said, except ours is a Psychology department (so the department is psycho rather than funky).
All kidding aside, the geek masses yearning to go to grad school despite the difficulties of being a grad student would be well-advised to take a look at the advances being made in human brain imaging and cognitive neuroscience when mapping out their careers.
Jonathan King, Department of Psychology, U. of Missouri
Good engineering can greatly reduce this danger, kind of the opposite of dipping a Twinkie into liquid oxygen and turning it into a deadly explosive.
But can't better engineering greatly enhance this danger by finding a way to say, aerosolize the Twinkie and turn it into a Food Air Explosive (FAE)? Or at least something you could put in a grenade launcher?
MS Office is irrelevant. For these that really desire the 100-pound godawful hodgepodge of features that MS has shoehorned into a 5-pound sack, there is StarOffice.
Well, that's one theory. As much as it pains me to say it, Microsoft Office is light years ahead of StarOffice in the annoyingly important areas of:
Peformance
Powerpoint
comPatibility with Microsoft Office
No, I don't use Microsoft Office when I can avoid it. Unfortunately, however, it has gotten tough to avoid Powerpoint and its stupid.ppt files, and StarOffice really doesn't help there. And even if it could, the last time I tried to use StarOffice it made me envy the dead.
But I'm not wishing for MS to port Office to Linux, and neither should you. What I would really like to see is a truly open API to Windows and the Office applications, so that data trapped within office documents and can be saved to useful formats, and the occasional need to create Powerpoint files for somebody else's presentation can be met.
Now here's a good news/bad news situation. I already used my five moderator points today on another thread, which meant that I couldn't moderate up any of the JWZ posts on this topic. On the other hand, that means I can add my own amplifications on the topic of how much X sucks.
Another sucky thing about X is...is...
Oh, what's the point. I've been an X user for almost fifteen years now. And I'm one of the lucky ones: I've never had to program for it. Fifteen freaking years and I have finally almost got a desktop I actually like. And that's only because the GTk+ people did an end-run around X and I've got a desktop machine that would stomp any supercomputer from the 1985-ish era of the X design. So I have to say that X is quite lovely if you have the luxury of running it on hardware 32,000 times more powerful than it was designed for.
But then Zawinski writes:
But none of that matters. Why? Because it doesn't matter how much X sucks, because X is entrenched. It works badly, but it works well enough. It is the de-facto sub-standard. It cannot be replaced, or even fixed, without rewriting every single graphical application you have ever seen, and that's just not practical.
I feel your pain, but I'm not sure even I am as darkly pessimistic as this. I guess the claim is that replacing X would be too much work, but I think we have plenty of evidence that there are people out there for whom time and duplicated effort have very little meaning. As I write this, there are hundreds of programmers slaving away at the Wine Project in order that we might one day be able to run Microsoft Word in bug-for-bug compatibility mode. Zawinski has already pointed out the amount of wheel-spinning that has gone into the eleventy-seven different toolkits that you can run under X. Emacs now can have a built-in web browser (disclaimer: yes, I sometimes use it) and I personally know the guy who wrote its spreadsheet mode.
No, I think there's enough random energy around to write a completely new GUI for Unix and hack/slay/port all of the most useful applications to it. There are already two or three groups of people who are working on the next X itself.
I'm not sure all of this is the wisest use of one's time, of course, but there you go. Worse may usually be be better, but this cuts both ways. I remember when Linux was still in the.95 days and there was a serious question about how long Linux thing could go on before the *BSD people saved us all. It didn't happen that way for a variety of reasons, and *BSD was a far more likely candidate for world dominance in 1991 than X is in 1999.
I'm running in 1600x1200 now, and I'm having a real hard time imagining why anyone would want to run a web browser any wider than 800 pixels anyway.
One answer is to get really huge fonts. Another answer is to follow your stock portfolio in Yahoo more easily.:-)
Why people maximise a browser window, I will never know. What's the point of having work space at high resolution if you're going to limit yourself to one huge window?
I'm not sure I understand the fetish for ultra high resolution myself. But I can give a really good reason for maximizing browser windows. Some of us use features of current window managers under X that allow us to have a desktop 3 (or 4) screens wide and 3 screens tall, and we can flip back and forth between them without ever taking our hands off the keyboard. In that kind of a system, there's no particular reason why you can't have three maximized browser windows available at once. I know I do. One's usually a search engine, one is work-connected, and the other is to fire up whatever URL turns up as relevant in my travels.
My big gripe is that if Redhat wants to be the leader in the whole Linux/open source movement, well the should look the part.
OK, so I have no idea what this means. I have no idea whether it was intended to mean anything. Do you mean that Redhat should have taken design cues from the people at w3.org, the leader of the whole w3 standards movement? From apache.org, the leader of the whole open source web server movement? I wish they'd taken those cues a little more to heart, actually.
Blazing fast the site maybe, but will anyone stick around to find the info they want without a little eye candy? I doubt it.
I'd have gone with less eye candy, larger fonts, and no animated third party logos myself. Actually, I would have gone one better than that, and allowed users to customize their view of the site.
Return visitors will be hard pressed to see a change in the content within the golden 5 second window. after complete load)
I'm not quite so sure about that. The stuff that you would expect to change the fastest ("The Buzz"...gag) is at the top. I would have preferred the "sidebar" thing on the right to be at the bottom of the page. This would have also enabled them to make the search box big enough not to scroll text.
But I'll actually go further than that. If this is supposed to be the Linux portal of all portals, shouldn't the search box be at the very top? So I can go to the site, type "apache update" and see the real goods? I don't know about you, but I spend more time at sites where I can get information quickly and easily than at sites where I'm forced to wait ten seconds to see whether that last dorky image has content on it or not.
I loved the book, especially for quotes like this:
Well... it is probably true that MIT isn't dying to hire me this week.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I wish I could say stuff like that with a straight face. To learn more from the master, spend a few hours at his web site. I highly recommend the section on narcissism. And, it goes without saying, the author would recommend it, too...
The problem with operator overloading
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Java for EGCS
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· Score: 1
I agree overloaded operators are easier to use, and it makes Java very verobose (as well as increasing the inelegant distinction between objects and primtive types).
Indeed. Every sentient being reading this should immediately snarf the paper written by Guy Steele for OOPSLA '98 entitled Growing a Language which makes this point so forcefully you will be dazzled.
The problem with operator overloading is that in long peices of code, it makes it hard to work out what is really going on - you cannot tell whether a + b is just an integer addition or some function call, and then you do not know whether it has the properties you would expect of +.
This is a bit of a red herring. Overloaded methods are at least as open to abuse (e.g., some clown could always define a "print" method that reads files instead...). What they don't do is invite the same expectations. But I think Java has a way out of this: you could have classes implement a standard interface that includes the operators you want to use in your class.
I've always found Java ironic that way; they come up with a truly cool idea like interfaces, then still use inheritance all over the place just to be OO, I suppose.
So, how does this article explain that the people who win the speed-typing contests are always Dvorak typists?
Okay. If this were true, how would it be relevant? Meanwhile, if you take a look at the URL posted on this thread from the U. of T. Dallas researchers, you would find that this isn't (or, at least wasn't) true. Good typists who had a vested interest in typing really fast are the people who win (and have won) speed-typing contests. These days, there really aren't very many typing contests, and I would suspect that the only people with a huge interest in entering or winning them are people who sell either "improved" keyboards or "improved" training programs.
Additionally, the article doesn't say anything about RSI/carpal tunnel -- 'the black lung of hackers' (thanks N. Stephenson for that wonderful imagery!). I was under the impression that Dvorak reduced the damage due to this ailment.
Typing-related injuries are definitely a real problem. But, I just checked the recent psychological and medical literature (Psychlit and Medline) for any references to studies that claimed RSIs could be reduced by keyboard layout. I found nothing, although it could be hiding under a different set of keywords than I used.
This is not to say that current keyboards are perfect; Donald Norman, in particular, has noted that one could potentially improve on the typing speed of either QWERTY or Dvorak with other designs. It is also true that until very recently, nobody even thought much about designing keyboards or keyboard layouts to minimize the effect of carpal-tunnel-like injuries. But I would have to be very skeptical about anybody's untested claim that their favorite keyboard reduces typing injuries.
King Babar
So Gnome has bugs...but why no 1.0.3 RPMs?
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gnome-core-1.0.3 and related goodies were released over the weekend, and yet I haven't been able to find any RPMs of this stuff until, today...sort of. Of course, since gnome 1.0.1 is completely bug-free, this shouldn't really be an issue I guess.
I say "sort of" in the last paragraph because the latest pre-release stuff (RedHat 5.9, aka "Starbuck") that just got leaked onto/. includes these updates, but these haven't made their way back to ftp.gnome.org or some place where you have a chance in the firey place of actually getting them.
I've been on the look-out for gnome-1.03 stuff since the sources came out a few days. No joy there. I'm sure many people out there, while they might not be willing to upgrade everything in the universe, would be interested in upgrading their Gnome stuff, on the off chance that all the bugs got fixed.
Hmm...guess I better throw in a smiley here for the humor-impaired.
...yesterday I tried out the Tk/Perl tax package recently posted on Freshmeat. It failed, saying Tk.pm wasn't installed. I do have both Tk and Perl packages installed but no file by that name. I searched the perl archives and didn't find a Tk.pm file, and there was nothing by that name in the Tk module directory. I'm sure the problem is my lack of familiarity with the Perl module system but I'd appreciate any advice.
I'll make a wild guess that you're getting burned by some historical confusion concerning Tcl/Tk interfaces used by Perl. Unfortunately, there's a Tcl/Tk package (not likely to be what you want), an ancient Tk package (ditto, surprisingly enough) and what you do want: either Tk400.202.tar.gz, or, possibly, Tk800.012.tar.gz (which is based on the version of Tk used in Tcl/Tk 8).
Of course, it's possible that you do have the right version of perl/Tk, but don't have them installed correctly; re-installation might do the trick there.
Or, it's possible that the perl/Tk tax package isn't giving you useful feedback about what it really wants.
Why does it always seem that Vice Presidents make an ass out of themselves?
Because it goes along with the job description. Seriously, there really isn't very much for a vice president to do.
Officially, the vice president can preside over the Senate. Once in a blue moon he or she can break ties in the Senate. The vice president is usually allowed to attend cabinet meetings.
If the president resigns or dies or becomes incompetent according to some set of criteria, the vice-president can become the president. Officially, the whole job is basically attending meetings, breaking tie votes in the senate, twiddling your thumbs, and waiting for people to die.
Unofficially, the vice president also gets to attend state funerals for people who weren't quite important enough for the president to bother to show up. That's more waiting for people to die.
Then after four or eight years of thumb-twiddling, the vice president gets to run for president. By definition, running for president involves saying idiotic and contradictory things to all kinds of people. And also smiling a lot.
Put it this way: if Al Gore had actually said "Well, the internet is just one of those things that exploded on the scene and surprised the heck out of all of us, even though I always kind of thought it had some potential," he would have been honest...and just as boring as ever. But by trying to take credit for the internet, he'll probably get a couple of hundred people to post vitriolic flames about him on/., and so become just a tiny bit less boring.
Just out of curiosity, why is there "technically" still an NT partition on there? And what exactly does that mean?:)
Well, "technically" just means that the original factory-installed FAT16 partition with NT on it still exists. So if there were ever any reason to reboot my Linux box, I could "theoretically" boot NT.
And, since only NT is "officially" supported here, that partition will stay there in case I have a hardware problem, and need to show somebody that NT is unhappy about it, too.
They aren't going to just put this option anywhere and everywhere. They are most likely going to put it on their workstation & server class PC's (e.g. OptiPlex and Poweredge).
Just a nit here: I think you can add "Precision series", and possibly delete OptiPlex.
Due to annoying purchasing requirements, I "had" to buy a Dell Precision 410 for my first Linux box here. Theoretically, there's still an NT partition on the thing, but in practical reality, it was one of the nicest Linux boxes around in its price/performance range.
I'll confess, I've only ever shopped for ties as gifts for others, but it always seems that the ones that aren't actually hideously ugly cost at least $50
And your point is...?
What do you care what your tie looks like? I mean, it's not like you wear a tie to impress babes^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Himprove your social life or anything.
I'm wearing a tie right now, and I hope it's loud enough for all you out there who get/. from a slow feed...
Panel works fine, for the most things, but yes GMC is buggy as hell and crashy.. thats the only downside.. but applets, conf (e and gnome-conf) all work great
Well...I just got gnome 1.0 up, and my experiences are:
Penguin Toy does not crash or maim my e.
Penguin Toy is really annoying.:-) (Where's the elephant toy?)
I can replicate the "Window Managers" section coredump.:-(
I still can't set XEmacs as my default editor in Gnome Edit Properties.
Gmc isn't crashing on me, but seems to be, um, suboptimal.
The way I have things configured now, some keyboard shortcuts don't seem to be working correctly.:-(
Everything else seems to be okay, so far. I'd be happier if everything were perfect, but I've found no show-stoppers yet. They do need to work on getting more documentation in place; help gives you nothing too much of the time. Installation went smoothly for me after I fixed rpm's "free list corrupt" problem by doing an rpm --rebuilddb.
Gnomophiles will probably like this enough to upgrade now, while others might want to wait a few days for some more kinks to be ironed out.
I don't think anybody has pointed this out yet, but you can apparently read the jokes Linus put up on the screen during his keynote if you look at the file
"My dog rejected her chip implant. What should I do?"
"My pacemaker is sending out spurious ARP packets. Should I be nervous? I upgraded to a development kernel because it has the new anti-fibrillation code, and I *feel* a lot better, but it still worries me."
"My 12-year old son hacked the toaster, and changed the root password. Now it only does peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Do I need to buy a new toaster, or can I use remote aministration for Linux v7.1 to reset it?"
"What do you mean 'there are no penguins left'? What's a nativity scene without any penguins? What do you think they herded, *sheep*? Really, sometimes I despair about young people of today."
"MicroSoft? They used to do computers, right?"
There's also a "slide2", but I'm a lazy bastard.
King Babar
ps--my attempts to post this as html were repeatedly eaten by space aliens. Grrr...
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, although you don't have to be autistic to avoid contacting your mom by letter or phone...
But here's a truly hot recipe for making your Mom (or whoever) a lot happier:
Now, maybe not every mom will get into this as much as others do, but I have seen big positive effects in some cases.
And, yes, n > 1. :-)
King Babar
Well, people in the field know that there has been lots of work going on in this topic (computing the diffusion tensor). It is, after all, a fairly obvious thing to do. What seems to be novel to me about this is that they used the DT to trace out some very long fiber pathways, and they did it with just a wimpy 1.5T Siemens Vision scanner. And the big surprise to me was that the WashU folks beat the MGH group (among others) into print on this topic.
As Barak Pearlmutter mentioned earlier in this thread, this information is an even better fit for techniques that provide much better temporal resolution than fMRI, PET, or SPECT; he mentioned MEG (magnetoencephalogram, although EEG-based methods can also contribute, and I can't help mentioning the amazing new "shoot lasers through the skull and get optical imaging data" technique known as EROS, currently being developed at the University of Missouri and elsewhere.
Jonathan King,
Dept. of Psychology, University of Missouri
But can't better engineering greatly enhance this danger by finding a way to say, aerosolize the Twinkie and turn it into a Food Air Explosive (FAE)? Or at least something you could put in a grenade launcher?
No?
Rats. Technology is so limited sometimes...
King Babar
Well, that's one theory. As much as it pains me to say it, Microsoft Office is light years ahead of StarOffice in the annoyingly important areas of:
No, I don't use Microsoft Office when I can avoid it. Unfortunately, however, it has gotten tough to avoid Powerpoint and its stupid .ppt files, and StarOffice really doesn't help there. And even if it could, the last time I tried to use StarOffice it made me envy the dead.
But I'm not wishing for MS to port Office to Linux, and neither should you. What I would really like to see is a truly open API to Windows and the Office applications, so that data trapped within office documents and can be saved to useful formats, and the occasional need to create Powerpoint files for somebody else's presentation can be met.
King Babar/strong.
Now here's a good news/bad news situation. I already used my five moderator points today on another thread, which meant that I couldn't moderate up any of the JWZ posts on this topic. On the other hand, that means I can add my own amplifications on the topic of how much X sucks.
Another sucky thing about X is...is...
Oh, what's the point. I've been an X user for almost fifteen years now. And I'm one of the lucky ones: I've never had to program for it. Fifteen freaking years and I have finally almost got a desktop I actually like. And that's only because the GTk+ people did an end-run around X and I've got a desktop machine that would stomp any supercomputer from the 1985-ish era of the X design. So I have to say that X is quite lovely if you have the luxury of running it on hardware 32,000 times more powerful than it was designed for.
But then Zawinski writes:
I feel your pain, but I'm not sure even I am as darkly pessimistic as this. I guess the claim is that replacing X would be too much work, but I think we have plenty of evidence that there are people out there for whom time and duplicated effort have very little meaning. As I write this, there are hundreds of programmers slaving away at the Wine Project in order that we might one day be able to run Microsoft Word in bug-for-bug compatibility mode. Zawinski has already pointed out the amount of wheel-spinning that has gone into the eleventy-seven different toolkits that you can run under X. Emacs now can have a built-in web browser (disclaimer: yes, I sometimes use it) and I personally know the guy who wrote its spreadsheet mode.
No, I think there's enough random energy around to write a completely new GUI for Unix and hack/slay/port all of the most useful applications to it. There are already two or three groups of people who are working on the next X itself.
I'm not sure all of this is the wisest use of one's time, of course, but there you go. Worse may usually be be better, but this cuts both ways. I remember when Linux was still in the .95 days and there was a serious question about how long Linux thing could go on before the *BSD people saved us all. It didn't happen that way for a variety of reasons, and *BSD was a far more likely candidate for world dominance in 1991 than X is in 1999.
King Babar
Actually, I always like to see Optimized for Lynx. :-)
King Babar
One answer is to get really huge fonts. Another answer is to follow your stock portfolio in Yahoo more easily. :-)
I'm not sure I understand the fetish for ultra high resolution myself. But I can give a really good reason for maximizing browser windows. Some of us use features of current window managers under X that allow us to have a desktop 3 (or 4) screens wide and 3 screens tall, and we can flip back and forth between them without ever taking our hands off the keyboard. In that kind of a system, there's no particular reason why you can't have three maximized browser windows available at once. I know I do. One's usually a search engine, one is work-connected, and the other is to fire up whatever URL turns up as relevant in my travels.
King Babar
OK, so I have no idea what this means. I have no idea whether it was intended to mean anything. Do you mean that Redhat should have taken design cues from the people at w3.org, the leader of the whole w3 standards movement? From apache.org, the leader of the whole open source web server movement? I wish they'd taken those cues a little more to heart, actually.
I'd have gone with less eye candy, larger fonts, and no animated third party logos myself. Actually, I would have gone one better than that, and allowed users to customize their view of the site.
I'm not quite so sure about that. The stuff that you would expect to change the fastest ("The Buzz"...gag) is at the top. I would have preferred the "sidebar" thing on the right to be at the bottom of the page. This would have also enabled them to make the search box big enough not to scroll text.
But I'll actually go further than that. If this is supposed to be the Linux portal of all portals, shouldn't the search box be at the very top? So I can go to the site, type "apache update" and see the real goods? I don't know about you, but I spend more time at sites where I can get information quickly and easily than at sites where I'm forced to wait ten seconds to see whether that last dorky image has content on it or not.
I loved the book, especially for quotes like this:
I don't know about the rest of you, but I wish I could say stuff like that with a straight face. To learn more from the master, spend a few hours at his web site. I highly recommend the section on narcissism. And, it goes without saying, the author would recommend it, too...
Indeed. Every sentient being reading this should immediately snarf the paper written by Guy Steele for OOPSLA '98 entitled Growing a Language which makes this point so forcefully you will be dazzled.
The best place to find this on the net is apparently hanging off the web page of the soon-to-be-slashdotted Phil Wadler; download the postscript version this instant.
This is a bit of a red herring. Overloaded methods are at least as open to abuse (e.g., some clown could always define a "print" method that reads files instead...). What they don't do is invite the same expectations. But I think Java has a way out of this: you could have classes implement a standard interface that includes the operators you want to use in your class.
I've always found Java ironic that way; they come up with a truly cool idea like interfaces, then still use inheritance all over the place just to be OO, I suppose.
King Babar
Okay. If this were true, how would it be relevant? Meanwhile, if you take a look at the URL posted on this thread from the U. of T. Dallas researchers, you would find that this isn't (or, at least wasn't) true. Good typists who had a vested interest in typing really fast are the people who win (and have won) speed-typing contests. These days, there really aren't very many typing contests, and I would suspect that the only people with a huge interest in entering or winning them are people who sell either "improved" keyboards or "improved" training programs.
Typing-related injuries are definitely a real problem. But, I just checked the recent psychological and medical literature (Psychlit and Medline) for any references to studies that claimed RSIs could be reduced by keyboard layout. I found nothing, although it could be hiding under a different set of keywords than I used.
This is not to say that current keyboards are perfect; Donald Norman, in particular, has noted that one could potentially improve on the typing speed of either QWERTY or Dvorak with other designs. It is also true that until very recently, nobody even thought much about designing keyboards or keyboard layouts to minimize the effect of carpal-tunnel-like injuries. But I would have to be very skeptical about anybody's untested claim that their favorite keyboard reduces typing injuries.
King Babar
gnome-core-1.0.3 and related goodies were released over the weekend, and yet I haven't been able to find any RPMs of this stuff until, today...sort of. Of course, since gnome 1.0.1 is completely bug-free, this shouldn't really be an issue I guess.
I say "sort of" in the last paragraph because the latest pre-release stuff (RedHat 5.9, aka "Starbuck") that just got leaked onto /. includes these updates, but these haven't made their way back to ftp.gnome.org or some place where you have a chance in the firey place of actually getting them.
Hint, hint.
King Babar
I've been on the look-out for gnome-1.03 stuff since the sources came out a few days. No joy there. I'm sure many people out there, while they might not be willing to upgrade everything in the universe, would be interested in upgrading their Gnome stuff, on the off chance that all the bugs got fixed.
Hmm...guess I better throw in a smiley here for the humor-impaired.
King Babar
I'll make a wild guess that you're getting burned by some historical confusion concerning Tcl/Tk interfaces used by Perl. Unfortunately, there's a Tcl/Tk package (not likely to be what you want), an ancient Tk package (ditto, surprisingly enough) and what you do want: either Tk400.202.tar.gz, or, possibly, Tk800.012.tar.gz (which is based on the version of Tk used in Tcl/Tk 8).
Of course, it's possible that you do have the right version of perl/Tk, but don't have them installed correctly; re-installation might do the trick there.
Or, it's possible that the perl/Tk tax package isn't giving you useful feedback about what it really wants.
King Babar
Because it goes along with the job description. Seriously, there really isn't very much for a vice president to do.
Officially, the vice president can preside over the Senate. Once in a blue moon he or she can break ties in the Senate. The vice president is usually allowed to attend cabinet meetings.
If the president resigns or dies or becomes incompetent according to some set of criteria, the vice-president can become the president. Officially, the whole job is basically attending meetings, breaking tie votes in the senate, twiddling your thumbs, and waiting for people to die.
Unofficially, the vice president also gets to attend state funerals for people who weren't quite important enough for the president to bother to show up. That's more waiting for people to die.
Then after four or eight years of thumb-twiddling, the vice president gets to run for president. By definition, running for president involves saying idiotic and contradictory things to all kinds of people. And also smiling a lot.
Put it this way: if Al Gore had actually said "Well, the internet is just one of those things that exploded on the scene and surprised the heck out of all of us, even though I always kind of thought it had some potential," he would have been honest...and just as boring as ever. But by trying to take credit for the internet, he'll probably get a couple of hundred people to post vitriolic flames about him on /., and so become just a tiny bit less boring.
King Babar
Well, "technically" just means that the original factory-installed FAT16 partition with NT on it still exists. So if there were ever any reason to reboot my Linux box, I could "theoretically" boot NT.
And, since only NT is "officially" supported here, that partition will stay there in case I have a hardware problem, and need to show somebody that NT is unhappy about it, too.
King Babar
Just a nit here: I think you can add "Precision series", and possibly delete OptiPlex.
Due to annoying purchasing requirements, I "had" to buy a Dell Precision 410 for my first Linux box here. Theoretically, there's still an NT partition on the thing, but in practical reality, it was one of the nicest Linux boxes around in its price/performance range.
King Babar
And your point is...?
What do you care what your tie looks like? I mean, it's not like you wear a tie to impress babes^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Himprove your social life or anything.
I'm wearing a tie right now, and I hope it's loud enough for all you out there who get /. from a slow feed...
King Babar
I just clicked on the Gnome Help Browser from the pane. It appears to work, but on start-up, two Gtk-CRITICAL errors popped up in a console box.
I'd have to say that parts of this release do seem to be lightly tested. I think its bad karma when the help system pumps out debugging output. :-(
King Babar
- Penguin Toy does not crash or maim my e.
- Penguin Toy is really annoying.
:-) (Where's the elephant toy?) - I can replicate the "Window Managers" section coredump.
:-( - I still can't set XEmacs as my default editor in Gnome Edit Properties.
- Gmc isn't crashing on me, but seems to be, um, suboptimal.
- The way I have things configured now, some keyboard shortcuts don't seem to be working correctly.
:-(
Everything else seems to be okay, so far. I'd be happier if everything were perfect, but I've found no show-stoppers yet. They do need to work on getting more documentation in place; help gives you nothing too much of the time. Installation went smoothly for me after I fixed rpm's "free list corrupt" problem by doing an rpm --rebuilddb.Gnomophiles will probably like this enough to upgrade now, while others might want to wait a few days for some more kinks to be ironed out.
King Babar
I don't think anybody has pointed this out yet, but you can apparently read the jokes Linus put up on the screen during his keynote if you look at
i de1.jpg
the file
http://deal.unl.edu/linuxexpo/images/keynote/sl
What I can read of these is:
What Then?
(What our grandchildren will say)
World Domination. It's just the first step.
"My dog rejected her chip implant. What should I do?"
"My pacemaker is sending out spurious ARP packets. Should I be nervous? I upgraded to a development kernel because it has the new anti-fibrillation code, and I *feel* a lot better, but it still worries me."
"My 12-year old son hacked the toaster, and changed the root password. Now it only does peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Do I need to buy a new toaster, or can I use remote aministration for Linux v7.1 to reset it?"
"What do you mean 'there are no penguins left'? What's a nativity scene without any penguins? What do you think they herded, *sheep*? Really, sometimes I despair about young people of today."
"MicroSoft? They used to do computers, right?"
There's also a "slide2", but I'm a lazy bastard.
King Babar
ps--my attempts to post this as html were repeatedly eaten by space aliens. Grrr...