It's more personal than that
on
The Future of Emacs
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
RMS hated Lucid. Really, really hated Lucid. He saw it as a commercial vampire sucking the life out of the MIT AI Lab. Google around and you'll find his essays on the subject.
When Lucid came to him with Emacs changes, it must have been kinda like if Microsoft started submitting multi-megabyte patch sets for the Linux kernel.
Re:Port to common lisp or scheme already
on
The Future of Emacs
·
· Score: 1
I believe RMS wanted Scheme to be the new direction for FSF scripting languages; that's why Guile is Scheme. Unfortunately, wanting something and being able to achieve it are quite different; see 'Hurd'.
The answer is that emacs used to have a big lead over other free open source multi-platform editors. Therefore an emacs culture grew up, and a lot of people learned its bizarre mnemonic-less key bindings. And it seems as though once you've burnt emacs into enough brain cells, the brain becomes unable to deal with learning anything new.
Assuming the PS3 has the 100% back-compatibility with PS2 and PS1 that's promised, I can see it becoming market leader very rapidly. One of the reasons I bought a PS2 first was I already had a bunch of favorite PS1 games, as opposed to having to start from scratch with a GameCube.
Yes, console market share leads to manufacturers making games for the console.. but equally, games for the console lead to console market share.
My TV died recently, and I got a bonus at about the same time. So, I got an LCD HDTV.
I have a DVD player which upconverts to 720p via Faroudja DCDi. Looks incredible. The limiting factor is generally the DVD encoding and the original film material, since I tend to prefer independent movies.
For TV, I have DirecTV with TiVo. No HD channels. The DirecTV HD package only offers 1 channel I'd actually watch (Discovery HD), and I'm not interested in paying $10.99 a month for that. Particularly not when I'm already paying for all those news and sports channels I never watch. I might drop $25 on an antenna to see if I can get PBS HD.
Regular DirecTV on the HDTV looks just fine. The upconverters on HDTVs are pretty good these days. Cartoons generally work well with "smart stretch", as they aren't accurate reproductions of physical shape anyway. Quite a few shows are letterboxed these days. For the few 4:3 shows I watch, the joy of LCD is I don't need to worry about burn-in of the sidebars.
Give me a way to get HD channels instead of news and sports crap, and I'd take it. But I don't care enough about HD to bloat my bill by another 20%. (And yes, I've seen real HD.)
There used to be a fantastic web site about the Bonzo Dog Band. It had an annotated copy of the lyrics, explaining all the 60s pop culture references and in-jokes.
Some wankers from EMI threatened copyright litigation, and the entire thing was yanked. Even though the information was not available from EMI.
Damn right. I'm amazed by all the pinheads posting about how it's the prudent thing to treat people like criminals as soon as they announce their intention to resign.
If you're a sysadmin or a software developer and you resign, the company basically has two choices.
The first is to have you announce to the team that you are leaving, stop taking on new tasks, finish up any work in progress, make sure all the regular tasks are reassigned, document anything that seems useful, hand over system permissions, and answer questions.
Or, they can treat you like a criminal. Then they can go through a few months of disruption while vital tasks get forgotten, systems have to be hacked to get permissions, people have to spend days working out how stuff is done, disks fill up from uncleared logs, and so on.
And the pinheads say #2 is the prudent option?
There are all kinds of automatic scheduled processes that can blow up if not given regular attention. Damage to systems from lack of organized handover seems to me to be a much bigger risk than damage to systems from an employee suddenly undergoing a mysterious personality change triggered by resigning.
Remember that the cashier is always responsible for the cash in the register matching up to todays sales.
And in this case, the register will have recorded the incorrect low price from the central computer, so the cash in the register will still match the amount it recorded as sold.
Phishing is a crime because it involves deception.
In this case, there was no deception. The guy asked the store if they were SURE that was the right price, they checked and said yes. They offered him a computer at below cost price, he took them up on the offer.
One thing that would get me to come to your store would be if it had a good selection of GameCube games, which many stores seem to be scaling back on. Ditto Game Boy Advance, and to a lesser extent classic PS2 titles.
EB and the like seem to be laser focused on the stuff that came out in the last 6 months. If you want to find a copy of Ico, on the other hand, good luck. They might have a used copy, but that's it.
Generally speaking, the "we're only interested in the very latest releases" trend is worse for Nintendo systems. I'm not sure why, but nobody stocks classic GBA games. For instance, try finding a copy of "Advance Wars" anywhere, or a copy of "Eternal Darkness" for GameCube, or "Rayman 3" for any system. Perhaps it's not so bad for PS2 because most of the good classic titles that I'm actually interested in end up re-released in the Greatest Hits series. Anyhow, I'd suggest that if it got a green rating on Metacritic, you should try to keep 1 copy in stock.
I'd also echo the suggestion other people have posted about making ratings available. If nothing else, put the metacritic %ge on a sticker on the game. Often I'll see something interesting in a store, but I'm not gonna buy it there because I want to check metacritic first to make sure it's not a piece of junk. I've ended up carrying around printouts of metacritic score lists sometimes.
Ideally, you get each person to pay the most that they're willing to pay.
Rebates help accomplish this. A person who makes a high salary will be willing to pay more for an item, and they'll value their time more. They won't send in the rebate.
Ah, but I actively avoid anything with a rebate attached, because a rebate is really saying "Hey, this is priced too high."
So I'd buy from another store instead, or buy a different product.
Why create an unnecessary point of discontinuity in the product line?
So they can sell the new crappy one at a high profit margin, based on the stellar reputation of the old one. If that wasn't the intention, they wouldn't have started selling a completely different product under the same model number, as it creates a support problem for them.
This particular real-world test case tells us that you can get rid of Linux and cut your flash and SDRAM requirements in half.
It doesn't tell us that yet. It's too early to tell whether the new WRT54G is as reliable as the old 54G. Reports from some people who've bought one suggest that it is not.
I have to assume you're not talking about the WGR614. I had one of those and it was a piece of crap. I eventually gave it away and got a WRT54GS, because the 614 wouldn't stay up for more than an hour. The WRT54GS has been running continuously for months in spite of a high load from work, P2P, video chat, and a network of 6 machines.
Some hardware vendors seem to do quite nicely targeting the Mac market. 5% of the PC industry is still an awful lot of potential customers.
I agree with the idea that the Linux community really needs to start voting with its wallet and not buying hardware that lacks open source drivers. Sure, it's a pain, but it's the only way we'll keep the freedom to tinker.
A VIA C3 1GHz on an EPIA-M board can happily run Azureus without significant CPU load. Been there, done that. As for video, it has hardware MPEG-2 acceleration and SSE. There's a reason why so many people use EPIA-Ms for MythTV.
I run Linux 2.6 software RAID-5 on systems with Pentium II 200MHz CPUs, and stick GB-sized databases on top, all on ReiserFS. The guy whose Athlon couldn't cope was clearly doing something wrong.
12W is low power in my book. Sure, maybe a Pentium-M can do it in 5W, but the price difference will buy an awful lot of electricity.
I'd rather buy from VIA, who provide open source drivers for their hardware, than Asus, who are disparaging about open source.
Given that a Pentium II 200MHz can handle RAID-5 without pulling a sweat (I have some seriously obsolete servers running at work), CPU speed really isn't much of an issue for me.
Depends on context. The vandalism, trolling and other kinds of anti-social behavior against the entries for libertarian socialism are almost all from logged in users.
I feel torn over this issue, but I will point out one thing: the credit reporting agencies, who make their fortunes selling information on private citizens of no public interest, are held blameless for the consequences of selling false information about you, unless you raise it as an issue and they refuse to correct it.
even if you raise it as an issue and they refuse to correct it, in my experience. I went as far as the Attorney General's office with my complaints, but the incorrect information stayed in their databases.
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RMS hated Lucid. Really, really hated Lucid. He saw it as a commercial vampire sucking the life out of the MIT AI Lab. Google around and you'll find his essays on the subject.
When Lucid came to him with Emacs changes, it must have been kinda like if Microsoft started submitting multi-megabyte patch sets for the Linux kernel.
I believe RMS wanted Scheme to be the new direction for FSF scripting languages; that's why Guile is Scheme. Unfortunately, wanting something and being able to achieve it are quite different; see 'Hurd'.
The answer is that emacs used to have a big lead over other free open source multi-platform editors. Therefore an emacs culture grew up, and a lot of people learned its bizarre mnemonic-less key bindings. And it seems as though once you've burnt emacs into enough brain cells, the brain becomes unable to deal with learning anything new.
Assuming the PS3 has the 100% back-compatibility with PS2 and PS1 that's promised, I can see it becoming market leader very rapidly. One of the reasons I bought a PS2 first was I already had a bunch of favorite PS1 games, as opposed to having to start from scratch with a GameCube.
Yes, console market share leads to manufacturers making games for the console.. but equally, games for the console lead to console market share.
Times New Roman I can stand. It's Courier and Courier New I never want to see again.
My TV died recently, and I got a bonus at about the same time. So, I got an LCD HDTV.
I have a DVD player which upconverts to 720p via Faroudja DCDi. Looks incredible. The limiting factor is generally the DVD encoding and the original film material, since I tend to prefer independent movies.
For TV, I have DirecTV with TiVo. No HD channels. The DirecTV HD package only offers 1 channel I'd actually watch (Discovery HD), and I'm not interested in paying $10.99 a month for that. Particularly not when I'm already paying for all those news and sports channels I never watch. I might drop $25 on an antenna to see if I can get PBS HD.
Regular DirecTV on the HDTV looks just fine. The upconverters on HDTVs are pretty good these days. Cartoons generally work well with "smart stretch", as they aren't accurate reproductions of physical shape anyway. Quite a few shows are letterboxed these days. For the few 4:3 shows I watch, the joy of LCD is I don't need to worry about burn-in of the sidebars.
Give me a way to get HD channels instead of news and sports crap, and I'd take it. But I don't care enough about HD to bloat my bill by another 20%. (And yes, I've seen real HD.)
There was another case, too.
There used to be a fantastic web site about the Bonzo Dog Band. It had an annotated copy of the lyrics, explaining all the 60s pop culture references and in-jokes.
Some wankers from EMI threatened copyright litigation, and the entire thing was yanked. Even though the information was not available from EMI.
The GameCube was easier to port to than the PS2, and look at how well that worked.
[I own one of each, thanks.]
Damn right. I'm amazed by all the pinheads posting about how it's the prudent thing to treat people like criminals as soon as they announce their intention to resign.
If you're a sysadmin or a software developer and you resign, the company basically has two choices.
The first is to have you announce to the team that you are leaving, stop taking on new tasks, finish up any work in progress, make sure all the regular tasks are reassigned, document anything that seems useful, hand over system permissions, and answer questions.
Or, they can treat you like a criminal. Then they can go through a few months of disruption while vital tasks get forgotten, systems have to be hacked to get permissions, people have to spend days working out how stuff is done, disks fill up from uncleared logs, and so on.
And the pinheads say #2 is the prudent option?
There are all kinds of automatic scheduled processes that can blow up if not given regular attention. Damage to systems from lack of organized handover seems to me to be a much bigger risk than damage to systems from an employee suddenly undergoing a mysterious personality change triggered by resigning.
I wanted to try Red Bull after seeing ads for it in WipeOut XL back in 1996. Took me ages to find some.
And in this case, the register will have recorded the incorrect low price from the central computer, so the cash in the register will still match the amount it recorded as sold.
Phishing is a crime because it involves deception.
In this case, there was no deception. The guy asked the store if they were SURE that was the right price, they checked and said yes. They offered him a computer at below cost price, he took them up on the offer.
I'm so glad I wasn't the only person disgusted by the fact that nobody apparently saw anything wrong with the idea.
I can't see how it can get any worse; after all, Bush got elected, even after his performance in the first term.
Something I haven't seen anyone else mention...
One thing that would get me to come to your store would be if it had a good selection of GameCube games, which many stores seem to be scaling back on. Ditto Game Boy Advance, and to a lesser extent classic PS2 titles.
EB and the like seem to be laser focused on the stuff that came out in the last 6 months. If you want to find a copy of Ico, on the other hand, good luck. They might have a used copy, but that's it.
Generally speaking, the "we're only interested in the very latest releases" trend is worse for Nintendo systems. I'm not sure why, but nobody stocks classic GBA games. For instance, try finding a copy of "Advance Wars" anywhere, or a copy of "Eternal Darkness" for GameCube, or "Rayman 3" for any system. Perhaps it's not so bad for PS2 because most of the good classic titles that I'm actually interested in end up re-released in the Greatest Hits series. Anyhow, I'd suggest that if it got a green rating on Metacritic, you should try to keep 1 copy in stock.
I'd also echo the suggestion other people have posted about making ratings available. If nothing else, put the metacritic %ge on a sticker on the game. Often I'll see something interesting in a store, but I'm not gonna buy it there because I want to check metacritic first to make sure it's not a piece of junk. I've ended up carrying around printouts of metacritic score lists sometimes.
Ah, but I actively avoid anything with a rebate attached, because a rebate is really saying "Hey, this is priced too high."
So I'd buy from another store instead, or buy a different product.
So they can sell the new crappy one at a high profit margin, based on the stellar reputation of the old one. If that wasn't the intention, they wouldn't have started selling a completely different product under the same model number, as it creates a support problem for them.
It doesn't tell us that yet. It's too early to tell whether the new WRT54G is as reliable as the old 54G. Reports from some people who've bought one suggest that it is not.
I have to assume you're not talking about the WGR614. I had one of those and it was a piece of crap. I eventually gave it away and got a WRT54GS, because the 614 wouldn't stay up for more than an hour. The WRT54GS has been running continuously for months in spite of a high load from work, P2P, video chat, and a network of 6 machines.
Some hardware vendors seem to do quite nicely targeting the Mac market. 5% of the PC industry is still an awful lot of potential customers.
I agree with the idea that the Linux community really needs to start voting with its wallet and not buying hardware that lacks open source drivers. Sure, it's a pain, but it's the only way we'll keep the freedom to tinker.
A VIA C3 1GHz on an EPIA-M board can happily run Azureus without significant CPU load. Been there, done that. As for video, it has hardware MPEG-2 acceleration and SSE. There's a reason why so many people use EPIA-Ms for MythTV.
I run Linux 2.6 software RAID-5 on systems with Pentium II 200MHz CPUs, and stick GB-sized databases on top, all on ReiserFS. The guy whose Athlon couldn't cope was clearly doing something wrong.
12W is low power in my book. Sure, maybe a Pentium-M can do it in 5W, but the price difference will buy an awful lot of electricity.
I'd rather buy from VIA, who provide open source drivers for their hardware, than Asus, who are disparaging about open source.
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Given that a Pentium II 200MHz can handle RAID-5 without pulling a sweat (I have some seriously obsolete servers running at work), CPU speed really isn't much of an issue for me.
As for the C3 being out of date, well, yes, that's why there's the VIA C7, which looks like it may leapfrog the Pentium-M in CPU power per watt. http://www.viaarena.com/default.aspx?PageID=5&Art
Depends on context. The vandalism, trolling and other kinds of anti-social behavior against the entries for libertarian socialism are almost all from logged in users.
even if you raise it as an issue and they refuse to correct it, in my experience. I went as far as the Attorney General's office with my complaints, but the incorrect information stayed in their databases.
Trans Union are a bunch of lying crooks.
I guess we should consider ourselves lucky you don't work at Los Alamos or something.