Yes, I agree with you there, but perl makes it easier for even GOOD programmers to write sloppy unintelligble code, and for BAD programmers to write line noise.
I won't argue that there's some nasty-looking Perl code out there, but I also think that if used intelligently, Perl can make it easy to write very concise, intelligible code. For instance, the awk-like regular expression operators are often accused of looking like line noise. But to my eyes, once you learn the syntax (which any Unix person should mostly know to start with), it's a *lot* easier than doing the same thing in C. Likewise, all the modules available from CPAN make it easy to do all *sorts* of things using consistent, widely-used methods, rather than having to roll your own every time.
Personally, I keep my perl code looking as much like C code as I can. That means no fancy-shmancy 12 function, one liners. If I have to press shift + a number more than twice in one line of code, it's a bad line of code
I strongly agree with your rule about making Perl code look as much like C as possible - I am very anal about indentation, spacing and soforth. But your second rule strikes me as rather impractical -- after all, it would mean that:
if ($foo eq $bar) {
is already in violation, with a whopping four shift+number characters...
(While I'm at it, I'll add a perfunctory bitch for Malda to allow use of the html pre tag so people could post actual code fragments in discussions like these...)
I'm glad to see there is growing potential for more decent web browsers for Linux - this has been a sore point for a lot of people for quite some time.
Unfortunately, I personally will probably be stuck using Netscape Navigator for some time. My job requires me access and use a number of web pages which are only accessible with 128-bit (cough cough) "strong" encryption. I haven't been keeping up with any of the other projects - does Mozilla (or anybody else) have plans to implement secure transmission in their browsers?
Y'know, Radio Shack has had so many chances to be a really good, useful store, and they have screwed it up horribly every time. They could have been a great parts repository for people into electronics, a/v, and radio, but the substandard quality of the parts and their blockheaded sales staff truly makes the Rat Shack a last resort for even the smallest purchases (yeah, I'll grit my teeth and go in there for the RCA Y-cable, coz its faster than mail order...)
Likewise, Radio Shack has been around since the very beginning of the personal computer revolution - I wrote my very first program around 1980 on a TRS-80 Model III - but they've just never seemed to "get it". They could've made a killing if they'd jumped the gun selling good quality PC accessories rather than overpriced "Tandy" brand (aka Tandy crashtastic floppies for $30+ a box).
And I just can't resist adding yet another rant about their policy of polling customers for name and address. My last Rat Shack experience was as follows: I needed a pair of mid-range headphones in a hurry, and RS was conviently located. Bought a pair of headphones for ~$40 US, took them home, and one channel didn't work. Went back the next day for an exchange - this time I tested them in the store. ANOTHER defective pair! At this point, I wanted my money back, but had to argue with the salesbeing for a while because it wouldn't give me a refund until I divulged my name & address. When I finally revealed my identity as "Zarathustra Rosenthorpe", the salesbeing finally relented.
As far as the Microsoft partnership is concerned, the deal may get them a little more exposure with Random P. Consumer, almost certainly at the expense of a further tarnished reputation. I expect to see MS displays popping up in McDonalds and 7-11 any minute now...
Re:There is no way to pronounce it.
on
Linux on Jeopardy
·
· Score: 1
So I think there's no "oficial" way, unless Linus says so.
Well, Linus has in fact indicated his prefered pronunciation is LEE-nux (makes sense, since that's how his name is pronounced).
Like "debian", or words like that, that are always typed but never speaked.
I'd say the pronunciation of DEHB-ian (rather than DEEB-ian) would be "more correct", since the distro is named after its two original creators - who are named Deb and Ian.
Yes, I know that it's often necessary to prune the old to make way for new technology, but I'm not at all happy with some of the directions PC hardware is moving in these days.
I *like* serial ports. I prefer serial mice to PS/2 (the unplugging issue). I have a very nice USR external modem that uses a serial port. I wish I had more serial ports - then I could hook up a couple of the DEC terminals sitting in my closet. Serial ports are also great for letting me null-modem files off all my old Atari machines. And though I just barely know my way around a soldering iron, serial ports aren't rocket science, and are an ideal interface for all sorts of hardware projects. And USB may be nice, but right now it still is in a state of Driver Hell. I have *never* found myself in a state of Driver Hell when using serial devices.
Likewise for ISA. ISA is way more hacker-friendly than PCI. And as others have said, 4-5 PCI slots often just isn't enough. I'm stuck using an ISA sound card at the moment because 2 video cards + ethernet + SCSI leaves me with room for nothing else. I know that when I upgrade my machine, AGP will fix part of the problem, and I can always opt for onboard ethernet and SCSI if I want, but I'm not entirely sold on integrated motherboard peripherals - if my network card goes south, I can just plug in a new one, rather than having to take out the whole motherboard.
In general, some of the new "friendly" or "economical" features of new PCs just don't sit right with me. The new Dell machines I've seen have only one serial port, and even better, won't boot unless there is a monitor plugged into them. What a *stupid* idea!
In any case, don't get me wrong - I think the idea of a machine with a tight, integrated architecture is a great one - I'm just not sure the PC is the best candidate for the job. The PC's strength over the competition (Macs, Suns, etc.) has always been its openness and potential for configuration. Get rid of that and you not only lose one of the platform's big selling points, but also have nearly two decades of legacy software and mentality to deal with.
Ho hum. It's been at *least* 15 years since I saw people (don't know if it's the same company) claiming to sell blocks of land on Mars ("for novelty purposes only"). They used to advertise in GAMES magazine and OMNI, and you could also buy an entry in their name-a-star database.
A decent article, but I think it was a little rough on the Dreamcast, calling it "inferior" to two machines which aren't even released yet. Yes, I think the PSX2 will be a very impressive machine, and I am curious how the tech of the two will compare, but the DC is here now, and is nothing to sneeze at.
I also reacted dubiously to the author's statement that the only Dreamcast title that had received "glowing reviews" was Power Stone. Power Stone is a good title, but he is ignoring the two star Dreamcast titles - Soul Calibur and NFL2K. I literally have not seen a single magazine give either of these titles less than a 9/10 score, and many people (including myself) have bought a DC almost completely on the merits of these two games.
In any case, I -am- an enthusiastic Dreamcast owner, but am not a biased Sega fanatic - I am genuinely interested to see what the new Sony and Nintendo systems will be able to do. It just seemed to me that the Salon article went a little overboard bashing the Dreamcast, espescially when its competitors won't even exist for several months.
Of course Netscape's bot would walk just kinda lumber around, but I'd be worried about taking on, say, Apache...
This raises all sorts of possibilities like having Netscape be represented by a big, regenerating boss creature (to simulate memory leaks). Hit points should be directly related to the memory use of a process, and CPU load could control offensive capability or something. Those big skull-spitting Pain Elementals could simulate multithreaded processes. There should be cloning monsters to handle forks and execs.
Of course, extending the metaphor beyond DOOM offers other possibilities, like a Fantasy RPG where root-owned processes can only be killed with magic weapons. Killing zombies would require some special method as well (hmm, now I'm imagining a fusion between 'top' and 'House of the Dead'...)
XF86Setup is your friend. I've set up X on all sorts of machines and haven't touched a modeline in years (though it is nice to have such low-level access if you want to really squeeze every last bit of performance out of your hardware). I'm assuming everybody knows about xvidtune as well.
I am trying to figure out just when it was that MTV really started to suck. Everyone will say it happened when they stopped playing music videos... but when did that happen? My memory has begun to fade on me, but I really do remember enjoying MTV at some point!
I'd say the beginning of the decline was in the late 80s or so, when Empty Vee started the trend of "genre" video shows - a rap hour, a metal hour, etc. (Though they *did* used to have an alternative show on Sunday nights that I enjoyed, whose name I am unable to remember.) Before this, it wasn't exactly underground, but it wasn't so rigidly compartimentalized either.
For a few years after this, the network still had its high points -- The State, Liquid Television, and Beavis & Butthead all had their time in the sun. But there was still a definite downward trend, and the arrival of the game shows was probably the final nail in the coffin.
Despite all this, I still do have fond memories of staying up late watching Billy Idol and David Lee Roth videos introduced by Adam Curry and Martha Quinn. (Oh yeah, and I've always thought Kennedy was a hottie).
Gimme a bottle of anything, and a glazed donut... to go...
The "every OS" thing was a figurative and exagerated statement. I've installed NT (and W95), BeOS, Solaris, BSD on it. They all installed without any complaints at all. Linux could find my CD-ROM on my SCSI controller (AHA-2940 series) so I tried BusLogic. It still couldn't find it. It could see the hard drives but not the CD-ROM. Go figure.
Did you enable SCSI CD-ROM support in the kernel? Yes, it's a seperate option from plain SCSI, and I made the same mistake myself, but my Adaptec 2940 controller sees all sorts of CD-ROM drives just fine.
This sort of thing could potentially be seen as a strike against the user friendliness of Linux, but it took me all of a day to solve, and then the solution was as simple as toggling an option box during 'make menuconfig'.
Unfortunately, the whole point of real player is to *prevent* you from saving it. I wish there was a MPEG or such avalible.
This is easy enough to get around. Streaming Realplayer files come in two pieces; the audio/video clip itself (.ra for pure audio,.rm for movies), and a stub file, which has a.ram extension. The.ram file is just a 1-line text file which points to the URL of the actual content. This is so the browser knows to start the streaming media player plugin, rather than having the download the whole X megabytes of content first.
In most cases, you can just download the.ram file to find out the URL of the actual content, and then get your browser (or better yet, something like wget) to pull down the.ra or.rm file for your archives. Of course, this doesn't work with "live" streaming content (like a concert simulcast) but for any pre-recorded clip it should work just fine.
I agree that "Lost Boys" has a lot of structural faults as a novel, but I still enjoyed reading it. If nothing else, it gives a lot of insight into Card's real-life beliefs and personality, and I found many of the characters appealing even if it didn't all fit together too tightly. The main plot sometimes seemed to get lost in the minor details, but I really liked the details - espescially the computer stuff.
Overall, though, it's definitely not one of Card's best books. I thoroughly enjoyed all the "Ender" books (except for "Ender's Shadow", which I haven't read yet), and also highly recommend the Tales of Alvin Maker series ("Seventh Son", "Red Prophet", "Prentice Alvin", etc.)
Card's novel "Lost Boys" (no relation to the vampire movie) is worth reading to gain a better insight towards his Mormon beliefs and how they affect his writing. The book is, at times, a little dense in its moral introspection, but is well written and an interesting change of pace from his other novels. The story concerns a Mormon family who moves to the east coast when the narrator (the father) gets a job as a computer game programmer. Much of the book is about the family trying to face the challenges of their new life, but there's also a fantasy/supernatural plot twist than lends an eerie edge to the whole thing. It's not my favorite of Card's books, but is well written and is worth reading just for the excellent depiction of the early 80's personal computer scene (Atari 800/C64/Apple ][).
Overall, I have a lot of respect for Card and the way he expresses his beliefs -- even when he is on the verge of being heavy-handed, he never proselytyzes or insults the reader's intelligence
The site where I work has a 4-processor HP/UX machine with 4GB of RAM, running an Oracle backend for one of the webservers. It's woefully inadequate during peak times, and there are plans to upgrade it to something more robust in a few months.
I think it's very telling that Scott Berinato, the author of this piece of non-news, did not deign to offer up so much as an email address for himself, nevermind a phone number, fax, or voicemail.
Mr. Berinato is in fact so throughly ensconced in his ivory fortress of journalism that those wishing to respond to his story are directed to the "talkback" forum at the bottom of the page. This "talkback" forum, in turn, is no longer accepting new posts, but instead directs readers to the ZDNet "News Forum Board", which requires one to register for an account before posting.
he said he belonged to the 5% ers, anyone heard of this?
This is an idea which (if memory serves me) was originally perpetuated by the Nation of Islam. It states that in any large group of people, 85% of the population is basically ignorant. Of the remainder, there is 10% who are "in the know" and working to keep people in the dark to maintain their own power (i.e. the government/corporations/mass media), and 5% who are in the know and working to educate and enlighten the other 85%.
Huh? I doubt many hackers call around looking for folks who have set their software up to answer when somebody calls.
15 years ago, this is *exactly* what people did to find machines to hack. There were a ton of programs called "war dialers" for the Atari 800, Commodore 64, etc. that would dial through a large range of phone numbers and flag those that had a modem at the other end.
Do you feel that having a Slashdot interview about an 18 year old who got to be on MTV is sad evidence of Slashdot's decline into media-whoring pablum? I mean, sure there are countless programmers, writers, artists, thinkers, or developers with something intelligent to say, but dude, have any of THEM been on MTV?
I've noticed this also, and my guess is that the blame lays somewhere between X and GTK. I've specifically noticed that the problem gets worse when using some of the fancier GTK themes with lots of custom bitmaps, gradients, etc. On my work machine (PII-266 w/32MB RAM), the lag time when switching applications (to redraw widgets) is prohibitively slow if I turn make things look too fancy.
Hand-tweaked assembly isn't the answer, since neither GTK nor Enlightenment are Intel-specific. I *do* think that GTK/GNOME and Enlightenment are both at the point where stability and performance need to be emphasized over more gee-whiz eye candy -- these are great apps to show off to the Unix-curious, and I do use a handful of GTK apps, but for real day-to-day work, it's olvwm and GNU Emacs all the way.
Okay, I have to ask, and this isn't a flame, but what do people see in Scheme? Perl was a little obtuse initially, but not a difficult language to learn. Scheme just makes my brain hurt -- the syntax is ++ugly and I just can't seem to wrap my head around it.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I agree with you there, but perl makes it easier for even GOOD programmers to write sloppy unintelligble code, and for BAD programmers to write line noise.
I won't argue that there's some nasty-looking Perl code out there, but I also think that if used intelligently, Perl can make it easy to write very concise, intelligible code. For instance, the awk-like regular expression operators are often accused of looking like line noise. But to my eyes, once you learn the syntax (which any Unix person should mostly know to start with), it's a *lot* easier than doing the same thing in C. Likewise, all the modules available from CPAN make it easy to do all *sorts* of things using consistent, widely-used methods, rather than having to roll your own every time.
Personally, I keep my perl code looking as much like C code as I can. That means no fancy-shmancy 12 function, one liners. If I have to press shift + a number more than twice in one line of code, it's a bad line of code
I strongly agree with your rule about making Perl code look as much like C as possible - I am very anal about indentation, spacing and soforth. But your second rule strikes me as rather impractical -- after all, it would mean that:
if ($foo eq $bar) {
is already in violation, with a whopping four shift+number characters...
(While I'm at it, I'll add a perfunctory bitch for Malda to allow use of the html pre tag so people could post actual code fragments in discussions like these...)
I'm glad to see there is growing potential for more decent web browsers for Linux - this has been a sore point for a lot of people for quite some time.
Unfortunately, I personally will probably be stuck using Netscape Navigator for some time. My job requires me access and use a number of web pages which are only accessible with 128-bit (cough cough) "strong" encryption. I haven't been keeping up with any of the other projects - does Mozilla (or anybody else) have plans to implement secure transmission in their browsers?
*My* big question is this: Is there a "Mahir Cagri Ate My Balls" page yet? Please post the URL if anyone gets inspired.
A "Mahir Dance" page (in the fine hamster tradition) might also be vaguely amusing.
I kiss you!
Y'know, Radio Shack has had so many chances to be a really good, useful store, and they have screwed it up horribly every time. They could have been a great parts repository for people into electronics, a/v, and radio, but the substandard quality of the parts and their blockheaded sales staff truly makes the Rat Shack a last resort for even the smallest purchases (yeah, I'll grit my teeth and go in there for the RCA Y-cable, coz its faster than mail order...)
Likewise, Radio Shack has been around since the very beginning of the personal computer revolution - I wrote my very first program around 1980 on a TRS-80 Model III - but they've just never seemed to "get it". They could've made a killing if they'd jumped the gun selling good quality PC accessories rather than overpriced "Tandy" brand (aka Tandy crashtastic floppies for $30+ a box).
And I just can't resist adding yet another rant about their policy of polling customers for name and address. My last Rat Shack experience was as follows: I needed a pair of mid-range headphones in a hurry, and RS was conviently located. Bought a pair of headphones for ~$40 US, took them home, and one channel didn't work. Went back the next day for an exchange - this time I tested them in the store. ANOTHER defective pair! At this point, I wanted my money back, but had to argue with the salesbeing for a while because it wouldn't give me a refund until I divulged my name & address. When I finally revealed my identity as "Zarathustra Rosenthorpe", the salesbeing finally relented.
As far as the Microsoft partnership is concerned, the deal may get them a little more exposure with Random P. Consumer, almost certainly at the expense of a further tarnished reputation. I expect to see MS displays popping up in McDonalds and 7-11 any minute now...
So I think there's no "oficial" way, unless Linus says so.
Well, Linus has in fact indicated his prefered pronunciation is LEE-nux (makes sense, since that's how his name is pronounced).
Like "debian", or words like that, that are always typed but never speaked.
I'd say the pronunciation of DEHB-ian (rather than DEEB-ian) would be "more correct", since the distro is named after its two original creators - who are named Deb and Ian.
Yes, I know that it's often necessary to prune the old to make way for new technology, but I'm not at all happy with some of the directions PC hardware is moving in these days.
I *like* serial ports. I prefer serial mice to PS/2 (the unplugging issue). I have a very nice USR external modem that uses a serial port. I wish I had more serial ports - then I could hook up a couple of the DEC terminals sitting in my closet. Serial ports are also great for letting me null-modem files off all my old Atari machines. And though I just barely know my way around a soldering iron, serial ports aren't rocket science, and are an ideal interface for all sorts of hardware projects. And USB may be nice, but right now it still is in a state of Driver Hell. I have *never* found myself in a state of Driver Hell when using serial devices.
Likewise for ISA. ISA is way more hacker-friendly than PCI. And as others have said, 4-5 PCI slots often just isn't enough. I'm stuck using an ISA sound card at the moment because 2 video cards + ethernet + SCSI leaves me with room for nothing else. I know that when I upgrade my machine, AGP will fix part of the problem, and I can always opt for onboard ethernet and SCSI if I want, but I'm not entirely sold on integrated motherboard peripherals - if my network card goes south, I can just plug in a new one, rather than having to take out the whole motherboard.
In general, some of the new "friendly" or "economical" features of new PCs just don't sit right with me. The new Dell machines I've seen have only one serial port, and even better, won't boot unless there is a monitor plugged into them. What a *stupid* idea!
In any case, don't get me wrong - I think the idea of a machine with a tight, integrated architecture is a great one - I'm just not sure the PC is the best candidate for the job. The PC's strength over the competition (Macs, Suns, etc.) has always been its openness and potential for configuration. Get rid of that and you not only lose one of the platform's big selling points, but also have nearly two decades of legacy software and mentality to deal with.
Ho hum. It's been at *least* 15 years since I saw people (don't know if it's the same company) claiming to sell blocks of land on Mars ("for novelty purposes only"). They used to advertise in GAMES magazine and OMNI, and you could also buy an entry in their name-a-star database.
A decent article, but I think it was a little rough on the Dreamcast, calling it "inferior" to two machines which aren't even released yet. Yes, I think the PSX2 will be a very impressive machine, and I am curious how the tech of the two will compare, but the DC is here now, and is nothing to sneeze at.
I also reacted dubiously to the author's statement that the only Dreamcast title that had received "glowing reviews" was Power Stone. Power Stone is a good title, but he is ignoring the two star Dreamcast titles - Soul Calibur and NFL2K. I literally have not seen a single magazine give either of these titles less than a 9/10 score, and many people (including myself) have bought a DC almost completely on the merits of these two games.
In any case, I -am- an enthusiastic Dreamcast owner, but am not a biased Sega fanatic - I am genuinely interested to see what the new Sony and Nintendo systems will be able to do. It just seemed to me that the Salon article went a little overboard bashing the Dreamcast, espescially when its competitors won't even exist for several months.
Of course Netscape's bot would walk just kinda lumber around, but I'd be worried about taking on, say, Apache...
This raises all sorts of possibilities like having Netscape be represented by a big, regenerating boss creature (to simulate memory leaks). Hit points should be directly related to the memory use of a process, and CPU load could control offensive capability or something. Those big skull-spitting Pain Elementals could simulate multithreaded processes. There should be cloning monsters to handle forks and execs.
Of course, extending the metaphor beyond DOOM offers other possibilities, like a Fantasy RPG where root-owned processes can only be killed with magic weapons. Killing zombies would require some special method as well (hmm, now I'm imagining a fusion between 'top' and 'House of the Dead'...)
Modeline calculations scare me
XF86Setup is your friend. I've set up X on all sorts of machines and haven't touched a modeline in years (though it is nice to have such low-level access if you want to really squeeze every last bit of performance out of your hardware). I'm assuming everybody knows about xvidtune as well.
I don't get it... Why didn't Chewbacca just save himself by using the Chewbacca defense?
It does not make sense!
I am trying to figure out just when it was that MTV really started to suck. Everyone will say it happened when they stopped playing music videos... but when did that happen? My memory has begun to fade on me, but I really do remember enjoying MTV at some point!
I'd say the beginning of the decline was in the late 80s or so, when Empty Vee started the trend of "genre" video shows - a rap hour, a metal hour, etc. (Though they *did* used to have an alternative show on Sunday nights that I enjoyed, whose name I am unable to remember.) Before this, it wasn't exactly underground, but it wasn't so rigidly compartimentalized either.
For a few years after this, the network still had its high points -- The State, Liquid Television, and Beavis & Butthead all had their time in the sun. But there was still a definite downward trend, and the arrival of the game shows was probably the final nail in the coffin.
Despite all this, I still do have fond memories of staying up late watching Billy Idol and David Lee Roth videos introduced by Adam Curry and Martha Quinn. (Oh yeah, and I've always thought Kennedy was a hottie).
Gimme a bottle of anything, and a glazed donut... to go...
Did you enable SCSI CD-ROM support in the kernel? Yes, it's a seperate option from plain SCSI, and I made the same mistake myself, but my Adaptec 2940 controller sees all sorts of CD-ROM drives just fine.
This sort of thing could potentially be seen as a strike against the user friendliness of Linux, but it took me all of a day to solve, and then the solution was as simple as toggling an option box during 'make menuconfig'.
Unfortunately, the whole point of real player is to *prevent* you from saving it. I wish there was a MPEG or such avalible.
This is easy enough to get around. Streaming Realplayer files come in two pieces; the audio/video clip itself (.ra for pure audio, .rm for movies), and a stub file, which has a .ram extension. The .ram file is just a 1-line text file which points to the URL of the actual content. This is so the browser knows to start the streaming media player plugin, rather than having the download the whole X megabytes of content first.
In most cases, you can just download the .ram file to find out the URL of the actual content, and then get your browser (or better yet, something like wget) to pull down the .ra or .rm file for your archives. Of course, this doesn't work with "live" streaming content (like a concert simulcast) but for any pre-recorded clip it should work just fine.
I agree that "Lost Boys" has a lot of structural faults as a novel, but I still enjoyed reading it. If nothing else, it gives a lot of insight into Card's real-life beliefs and personality, and I found many of the characters appealing even if it didn't all fit together too tightly. The main plot sometimes seemed to get lost in the minor details, but I really liked the details - espescially the computer stuff.
Overall, though, it's definitely not one of Card's best books. I thoroughly enjoyed all the "Ender" books (except for "Ender's Shadow", which I haven't read yet), and also highly recommend the Tales of Alvin Maker series ("Seventh Son", "Red Prophet", "Prentice Alvin", etc.)
Card's novel "Lost Boys" (no relation to the vampire movie) is worth reading to gain a better insight towards his Mormon beliefs and how they affect his writing. The book is, at times, a little dense in its moral introspection, but is well written and an interesting change of pace from his other novels. The story concerns a Mormon family who moves to the east coast when the narrator (the father) gets a job as a computer game programmer. Much of the book is about the family trying to face the challenges of their new life, but there's also a fantasy/supernatural plot twist than lends an eerie edge to the whole thing. It's not my favorite of Card's books, but is well written and is worth reading just for the excellent depiction of the early 80's personal computer scene (Atari 800/C64/Apple ][).
Overall, I have a lot of respect for Card and the way he expresses his beliefs -- even when he is on the verge of being heavy-handed, he never proselytyzes or insults the reader's intelligence
The site where I work has a 4-processor HP/UX machine with 4GB of RAM, running an Oracle backend for one of the webservers. It's woefully inadequate during peak times, and there are plans to upgrade it to something more robust in a few months.
from the new-book's-to-read dept.
That apostrophe just sets my teeth on edge. For those whose obviously slept through English class, here's how it works:
I think it's very telling that Scott Berinato, the author of this piece of non-news, did not deign to offer up so much as an email address for himself, nevermind a phone number, fax, or voicemail.
Mr. Berinato is in fact so throughly ensconced in his ivory fortress of journalism that those wishing to respond to his story are directed to the "talkback" forum at the bottom of the page. This "talkback" forum, in turn, is no longer accepting new posts, but instead directs readers to the ZDNet "News Forum Board", which requires one to register for an account before posting.
he said he belonged to the 5% ers, anyone heard of this?
This is an idea which (if memory serves me) was originally perpetuated by the Nation of Islam. It states that in any large group of people, 85% of the population is basically ignorant. Of the remainder, there is 10% who are "in the know" and working to keep people in the dark to maintain their own power (i.e. the government/corporations/mass media), and 5% who are in the know and working to educate and enlighten the other 85%.
Huh? I doubt many hackers call around looking for folks who have set their software up to answer when somebody calls.
15 years ago, this is *exactly* what people did to find machines to hack. There were a ton of programs called "war dialers" for the Atari 800, Commodore 64, etc. that would dial through a large range of phone numbers and flag those that had a modem at the other end.
Dear so-called punk so-called hacker kid,
Do you feel that having a Slashdot interview about an 18 year old who got to be on MTV is sad evidence of Slashdot's decline into media-whoring pablum? I mean, sure there are countless programmers, writers, artists, thinkers, or developers with something intelligent to say, but dude, have any of THEM been on MTV?
Stuff that matters indeed.
Sure there is; it's called ispell, and it works independently or inside emacs + other editors. For "ballon", it suggests:
(0) gallon (1) ball-on (2) ball on (3) ballot (4) balloon
(Proud contributor to the teach-a-/.-admin-to-spell foundation)
I've noticed this also, and my guess is that the blame lays somewhere between X and GTK. I've specifically noticed that the problem gets worse when using some of the fancier GTK themes with lots of custom bitmaps, gradients, etc. On my work machine (PII-266 w/32MB RAM), the lag time when switching applications (to redraw widgets) is prohibitively slow if I turn make things look too fancy.
Hand-tweaked assembly isn't the answer, since neither GTK nor Enlightenment are Intel-specific. I *do* think that GTK/GNOME and Enlightenment are both at the point where stability and performance need to be emphasized over more gee-whiz eye candy -- these are great apps to show off to the Unix-curious, and I do use a handful of GTK apps, but for real day-to-day work, it's olvwm and GNU Emacs all the way.
Okay, I have to ask, and this isn't a flame, but what do people see in Scheme? Perl was a little obtuse initially, but not a difficult language to learn. Scheme just makes my brain hurt -- the syntax is ++ugly and I just can't seem to wrap my head around it.