Tom Christiansen's article is explaining why csh shouldn't be used for PROGRAMMING.
Nobody's suggesting that tsch be used for programming. Least of all Apple, who don't provide any kind of development documentation for it beyond the man page. Scripting on the Mac is best done in AppleScript. Scripting on UNIX is best done with Python, Perl or Ruby.
You can run any shell's scripts from your choice of shell, and anyone writing shell scripts more than a couple of dozen lines long ought to be taken out and shot anyway, so there's absolutely no reason to pick your interactive shell based on its scripting capabilities. That's like picking your web browser based on how well it does "display source of page".
Fact is, tcsh is a better interactive shell than bash for newbies, thanks to intelligent command completion. (No, I don't mean the "complete the program name" stuff bash has, I mean the way tcsh knows about common arguments and options of the most-used programs, and can fill those in for you as well.)
If you're writing non-trivial scripts, you would do far better to use a decent scripting language like Ruby, Perl or Python, all of which are more portable than bash, not to mention more robust and less likely to result in scripts filled with security holes.
The bash shell is really the tool of choice for people who can only deal with one tool. For interactive use, tcsh is better, and for scripting almost anything is better.
Basically, bash tries to be jack-of-all-trades, with all that that implies. But to FSF folks, who use emacs, "jack of all trades" is a way of life.
I've had zero viruses. My mail filters already pick out all Windoze-only content and delete the e-mail. Even if they didn't, I don't own any Windoze machines.
However, the flood of incorrect bounce messages and virus warnings is harder to filter. I've had to resort to bouncing every e-mail from mailer-daemon@aol.com, for example.
...the open source community should get together and start implementing the DirectX API in open, cross-platform (Mac and Linux) code, licensed under the LGPL.
The CF slot isn't just for microdrives, it's usable for CF memory cards too.
And Memory Stick Pro 1GB units are available right now, which seems to me to be plenty of capacity for this camera. That's over 50 RAW image files, way more capacity per unit than a film camera.
...is a documentary about all the nuts who sold their houses and moved to deserted islands in 1999 so they could avoid the rampaging hordes of starving urban gangs when civilization collapsed after Y2K.
Surely someone has interviewed them?
Re:Everyone misunderstands the branding change
on
Palm Reveals New Name
·
· Score: 1
I think I'm going to be insisting on calling it "p.a. one m. one" myself.
I kinda hoped that in the future, I would be able to have my entire music collection in one little box, in a format that wouldn't get scratched no matter how often I played it, and that I'd be able to access any track I wanted at a moment's notice.
I got an M-Audio USB unit, and I was amazed by the sound quality improvement over the built-in audio on my Mac... and Macs are known for having pretty good audio to start with.
No problems digitizing at 24 bit accuracy across USB 1.1.
The announcement is hopelessly vague, though. "...addresses problems relating to java..." No, really? A release of a Java program for building Java programs addresses problems which are related to Java? I'd never have guessed.
I think Microsoft should be required to put a notice on the box, saying "Using Windows XP for Internet access requires a broadband connection". If you've got dialup, there's just no way you're going to be downloading those 50MB service packs, and if you're not downloading them, you're a menace to the rest of the net.
(Or at least, the rest of the net that's dumb enough to run Windows.)
Well, (a) the Mac has an eject button, (b) there are requests for inserting discs if it needs them, (c) the Mac only demands a disc to shut down if it needs to write to the disc or read something from it.
The absolute worst thing about Linux, beyond a doubt, is sound. It
doesn't freakin' work. What is it, three different APIs? And none
of them work properly on any of the half dozen machines I've tried
installing Linux on. Finding out why is hellish too--you have your
kernel drivers, then ALSA and OSS add a layer of complexity, then
libao adds another layer of crap to deal with, then KDE adds its
own set of daemons... If you've got a generic SoundBlaster card
everything might work without screwing around; anything else, good
luck. The best bet seems to be to go with the latest bleeding-edge
kernel and ALSA releases, cross your fingers, and wave a dead
chicken over the speakers. OK, I have sound now, at least on my own
machine, even if/dev/sndstat doesn't exist the way the FAQs assure me it
should. Hopefully some time soon they'll fix that buzzing problem...
The second worst thing about Linux is missing documentation, like all the
FSF software that has either no manual page at all, or no useful manual page.
Often there's just a note challenging you to try and find the information
in their crappy info hypertext system. I don't care if RMS likes emacs,
the standard for accessing UNIX documentation is man. It doesn't
help that all the info browsers I've tried are godawful. The Debian
guys have the right idea here--missing man pages are a software
defect, and defective software should not be included in the
distribution.
The third worst thing about Linux is KDE vs Gnome. I side with KDE on
everything--Gnome was a butt-headed political decision, and should have
been abandoned once Qt was made available under the (L)GPL. But no, the
obstinate FSF egos had to waste their time implementing an overcomplicated
CORBA architecture to provide functionality hardly anyone needed for a desktop
system nobody wanted.
The fourth worst thing is the plague of window managers. Every time I
look, there's another forking window manager. (Looking at one list I found
via Google, it seems there are over 90 of the things.) It wouldn't be so bad,
except that almost all of them suck by default. "Yeah," say the handful
of people using each one, "but you can configure it to be really good."
Yes, but I can configure almost any wm to be really good, given enough
time to spend in pointless dicking around. In fact, you can pretty
much configure any of these window managers to look like any of
the others. What is it about Linux programmers that everyone wants
to write a window manager, and nobody seems to be able to get around
to writing an MP3 player that's even as good as iTunes?
The fifth thing, suggested by the window manager plague, is that Linux
suffers a lot from needless configurability and rampant optionitis. The
original UNIX idea (circa v7) was that you wrote a program to do one task,
do it properly, and do it well. If you wanted your directory listing
sorted into reverse order, you piped it through sort; if you wanted it in
columns, you piped it through column.
Take a look at the man page for GNU cat. I particularly like that they've added options -A, -e and -t just to save you
from having to type two options, and given you an option -u that doesn't do anything. That's
almost as good as the -d option to diff.
Intel marketed its product -- a chunk of finely-etched silicon in a plastic box -- with a bunch of blue guys. What expectations are appropriate in that case?
I'd expect it to be hugely overpriced, given how much all those TV ads cost. And guess what?
There are exceptions. I pay for AppleCare, because I know that Apple generally does an exceptionally good job of dealing with problems. Stories about of people having their iBook screens die, and having Apple replace the screen and overhaul the entire machine and get it back to them in 48 hours. Hot-plugging a dodgy peripheral fried a Firewire port? They'll swap out the motherboard, no problem. I believe Apple does quite well at selling AppleCare to customers.
IBM has a similar reputation for ThinkPad customer support, which is why a lot of people won't touch any other PC laptop.
But yeah, most people buy Dell:-)
Also, I only provide free tech support for Linux and Mac problems. If people have problems with Windows, I tell 'em to call Microsoft or the OEM. So at least I try not to enable evil.
I even told my parents I wasn't going to support Windows for them any more. Faced with the option of Windows reliability backed by Microsoft customer support, they're running Linux now.
A lot of people confuse marketing and advertising. Speaking as someone who has worked in a marketing group...
Marketing is the science of analyzing the market and investigating customer needs and desires, in order to produce requirements that can drive product design. On the output side, marketing also take the product and devise a marketing strategy based on the same analysis.
Advertising is the art of persuading people to buy stuff by describing what it will do, how it looks, how it will make people relate to you, how you should perceive the company, and so on.
So marketing is finding out what people want, and trying to frame what you have on offer in terms of what you've found people want. Whereas advertising is the communications process of telling people about your stuff and trying to get them to buy it.
So the original article probably should have said "Am I going to use this software as it has been advertised?"
Please 1) release some codecs, 2) document your file formats so we can build code to play your encoded content, or 3) crawl off into a corner and die as quickly as possible.
Right now Real-encoded content is the most incredible PITA, because there's lots of it, and converting it to MP3 to listen to on my portable MP3 player can only be done in real time.
Perhaps if you (Real) hadn't kept your file formats proprietary, everyone would be using Real players instead of MP3 players. But hey, you made your bed, now lie in it: we all want MP3 or plain audio. Give us a way to get it, or we aren't touching your crap.
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Tom Christiansen's article is explaining why csh shouldn't be used for PROGRAMMING.
Nobody's suggesting that tsch be used for programming. Least of all Apple, who don't provide any kind of development documentation for it beyond the man page. Scripting on the Mac is best done in AppleScript. Scripting on UNIX is best done with Python, Perl or Ruby.
You can run any shell's scripts from your choice of shell, and anyone writing shell scripts more than a couple of dozen lines long ought to be taken out and shot anyway, so there's absolutely no reason to pick your interactive shell based on its scripting capabilities. That's like picking your web browser based on how well it does "display source of page".
Fact is, tcsh is a better interactive shell than bash for newbies, thanks to intelligent command completion. (No, I don't mean the "complete the program name" stuff bash has, I mean the way tcsh knows about common arguments and options of the most-used programs, and can fill those in for you as well.)
If you're writing non-trivial scripts, you would do far better to use a decent scripting language like Ruby, Perl or Python, all of which are more portable than bash, not to mention more robust and less likely to result in scripts filled with security holes.
The bash shell is really the tool of choice for people who can only deal with one tool. For interactive use, tcsh is better, and for scripting almost anything is better.
Basically, bash tries to be jack-of-all-trades, with all that that implies. But to FSF folks, who use emacs, "jack of all trades" is a way of life.
Maybe next year the university will recommend that students bring Macs.
Norton Internet Security lets you block based on content. So you can, for example, block any TCP/IP connection which includes your MAC address.
Of course, they could always encrypt it, but then you could block encrypted (i.e. not FTP-like) traffic.
I'm with you on this one.
I've had zero viruses. My mail filters already pick out all Windoze-only content and delete the e-mail. Even if they didn't, I don't own any Windoze machines.
However, the flood of incorrect bounce messages and virus warnings is harder to filter. I've had to resort to bouncing every e-mail from mailer-daemon@aol.com, for example.
...the open source community should get together and start implementing the DirectX API in open, cross-platform (Mac and Linux) code, licensed under the LGPL.
Then we'd see a lot more cross-platform games.
"cheaper" wasn't the argument being made.
If you want to say that you won't buy Sony because it's too expensive, well fine, that's a sensible argument.
The CF slot isn't just for microdrives, it's usable for CF memory cards too.
And Memory Stick Pro 1GB units are available right now, which seems to me to be plenty of capacity for this camera. That's over 50 RAW image files, way more capacity per unit than a film camera.
...is a documentary about all the nuts who sold their houses and moved to deserted islands in 1999 so they could avoid the rampaging hordes of starving urban gangs when civilization collapsed after Y2K.
Surely someone has interviewed them?
I think I'm going to be insisting on calling it "p.a. one m. one" myself.
Not yet.
I kinda hoped that in the future, I would be able to have my entire music collection in one little box, in a format that wouldn't get scratched no matter how often I played it, and that I'd be able to access any track I wanted at a moment's notice.
And I pretty much have that.
I got an M-Audio USB unit, and I was amazed by the sound quality improvement over the built-in audio on my Mac... and Macs are known for having pretty good audio to start with.
No problems digitizing at 24 bit accuracy across USB 1.1.
Although "everything off" is good, "everything uninstalled" is better.
One of the things I like about my little Gentoo box is I don't even have the telnet and ftp daemons on disk, let alone open to hacker attack.
I used 'vanilla' Debian, KNOPPIX, RedHat, Mandrake and Xandros (Debian-based) before settling on Gentoo.
Portage isn't hugely better than apt, but it's enough of an improvement to be worth switching, and I found Gentoo's installation easier.
I'd certainly be using Debian if Gentoo didn't exist, though.
Maybe it's all a matter of naming.
Perhaps 'unstable' should be renamed 'standard', and 'stable' should be renamed 'conservative'.
CLUE: Ant is the Java equivalent of make.
The announcement is hopelessly vague, though. "...addresses problems relating to java..." No, really? A release of a Java program for building Java programs addresses problems which are related to Java? I'd never have guessed.
I think Microsoft should be required to put a notice on the box, saying "Using Windows XP for Internet access requires a broadband connection". If you've got dialup, there's just no way you're going to be downloading those 50MB service packs, and if you're not downloading them, you're a menace to the rest of the net.
(Or at least, the rest of the net that's dumb enough to run Windows.)
Well, (a) the Mac has an eject button, (b) there are requests for inserting discs if it needs them, (c) the Mac only demands a disc to shut down if it needs to write to the disc or read something from it.
The absolute worst thing about Linux, beyond a doubt, is sound. It doesn't freakin' work. What is it, three different APIs? And none of them work properly on any of the half dozen machines I've tried installing Linux on. Finding out why is hellish too--you have your kernel drivers, then ALSA and OSS add a layer of complexity, then libao adds another layer of crap to deal with, then KDE adds its own set of daemons... If you've got a generic SoundBlaster card everything might work without screwing around; anything else, good luck. The best bet seems to be to go with the latest bleeding-edge kernel and ALSA releases, cross your fingers, and wave a dead chicken over the speakers. OK, I have sound now, at least on my own machine, even if /dev/sndstat doesn't exist the way the FAQs assure me it
should. Hopefully some time soon they'll fix that buzzing problem...
The second worst thing about Linux is missing documentation, like all the FSF software that has either no manual page at all, or no useful manual page. Often there's just a note challenging you to try and find the information in their crappy info hypertext system. I don't care if RMS likes emacs, the standard for accessing UNIX documentation is man. It doesn't help that all the info browsers I've tried are godawful. The Debian guys have the right idea here--missing man pages are a software defect, and defective software should not be included in the distribution.
The third worst thing about Linux is KDE vs Gnome. I side with KDE on everything--Gnome was a butt-headed political decision, and should have been abandoned once Qt was made available under the (L)GPL. But no, the obstinate FSF egos had to waste their time implementing an overcomplicated CORBA architecture to provide functionality hardly anyone needed for a desktop system nobody wanted.
The fourth worst thing is the plague of window managers. Every time I look, there's another forking window manager. (Looking at one list I found via Google, it seems there are over 90 of the things.) It wouldn't be so bad, except that almost all of them suck by default. "Yeah," say the handful of people using each one, "but you can configure it to be really good." Yes, but I can configure almost any wm to be really good, given enough time to spend in pointless dicking around. In fact, you can pretty much configure any of these window managers to look like any of the others. What is it about Linux programmers that everyone wants to write a window manager, and nobody seems to be able to get around to writing an MP3 player that's even as good as iTunes?
The fifth thing, suggested by the window manager plague, is that Linux suffers a lot from needless configurability and rampant optionitis. The original UNIX idea (circa v7) was that you wrote a program to do one task, do it properly, and do it well. If you wanted your directory listing sorted into reverse order, you piped it through sort; if you wanted it in columns, you piped it through column.
Take a look at the man page for GNU cat. I particularly like that they've added options -A, -e and -t just to save you from having to type two options, and given you an option -u that doesn't do anything. That's almost as good as the -d option to diff.
Uh, how do you feel that the Mac and Amiga ways of handling removable media differ?
I'd expect it to be hugely overpriced, given how much all those TV ads cost. And guess what?
There are exceptions. I pay for AppleCare, because I know that Apple generally does an exceptionally good job of dealing with problems. Stories about of people having their iBook screens die, and having Apple replace the screen and overhaul the entire machine and get it back to them in 48 hours. Hot-plugging a dodgy peripheral fried a Firewire port? They'll swap out the motherboard, no problem. I believe Apple does quite well at selling AppleCare to customers.
:-)
IBM has a similar reputation for ThinkPad customer support, which is why a lot of people won't touch any other PC laptop.
But yeah, most people buy Dell
Also, I only provide free tech support for Linux and Mac problems. If people have problems with Windows, I tell 'em to call Microsoft or the OEM. So at least I try not to enable evil.
I even told my parents I wasn't going to support Windows for them any more. Faced with the option of Windows reliability backed by Microsoft customer support, they're running Linux now.
A lot of people confuse marketing and advertising. Speaking as someone who has worked in a marketing group...
Marketing is the science of analyzing the market and investigating customer needs and desires, in order to produce requirements that can drive product design. On the output side, marketing also take the product and devise a marketing strategy based on the same analysis.
Advertising is the art of persuading people to buy stuff by describing what it will do, how it looks, how it will make people relate to you, how you should perceive the company, and so on.
So marketing is finding out what people want, and trying to frame what you have on offer in terms of what you've found people want. Whereas advertising is the communications process of telling people about your stuff and trying to get them to buy it.
So the original article probably should have said "Am I going to use this software as it has been advertised?"
Please 1) release some codecs, 2) document your file formats so we can build code to play your encoded content, or 3) crawl off into a corner and die as quickly as possible.
Right now Real-encoded content is the most incredible PITA, because there's lots of it, and converting it to MP3 to listen to on my portable MP3 player can only be done in real time.
Perhaps if you (Real) hadn't kept your file formats proprietary, everyone would be using Real players instead of MP3 players. But hey, you made your bed, now lie in it: we all want MP3 or plain audio. Give us a way to get it, or we aren't touching your crap.