are you aware that X is 15+ yrs old?
X11R1 was released Sept 1987. Not even 15 years! (-:
The day X12R1-pre-alpha is announced on Slashdot, the Internet will break down.
Re:Some Questions I can't find Answers to...
on
Mozilla RC3 Released
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· Score: 1
2) Is Mozilla ever likely to support the auto-update function that Netscape has just included? (Being a sys-admin of 50-odd M$ boxes makes it a nightmare contemplating to update them all with the latest release)
Here's how I solve that problem at my workplace: I always install the latest Mozilla in a directory on one of our Samba shares. It works beautifully. Unless your network is entirely peer-to-peer based (or non-existent), that should work for you, too. Saves a lot of work. The profiles are stored locally, so usually users don't really even notice the transition.
The problem with the OS X port is mainly due to a bug in Apple's Darwin gcc. If it wasn't for that, it would be almost as easy as porting X11 apps like Lyx or FreeCiv. Once that bug (or those bugs?) are fixed, OpenOffice should come to OS X -- at least in a the X-Window server.
What is JediKnight 2 for Windows? I only know JediKnight 2 on OS X, a Cocoa-based Aqua-compliant and all around great IRC client... strange how programmers seem to lack creativity when it comes to naming their apps.
At CeBIT this year, I stopped by a little stand in the Future Park, where a poor neglected man with a laptop was trying to give away software for free. He was employed by the German Ministry of Economy and Science, and the software was GnuPP (The Gnu Privacy Project). Basically, it is a GUI for GnuPG under Windows (called the GPA -- Gnu Privacy Assistant), and a plug-in for Outlook. It's completely Free, and works quite well. I think it's not much different from the commercial PGP program. It offered a little lock icon in the tray on the right of the start bar which let you encrypt and/or sign either your clip-board or the currently active window. You can get it here. (click on "herunterladen"). I doubt it will be impossible to use even for those who don't know German.
It's not really all that hard, and the experience is definately worth it.
I am assuming you want to play the terminal version, and not the X11 version. Unfortunately, fink does not provide a nethack-nox package.
Here's somewhat spartanic instructions; I am not at my Mac right now, else I'd try this myself, but I hope these are at least some pointers in the right direction.
Download the source; I bet it comes with a configure script. In that case, I would do the following:
Fire up Terminal.app and open at least two term windows (unless, of course, like a real geek, you already have them open). cd to the source directory and type./configure. It will ask you where you want to install; I suggest/usr/local/. It will ask you about curses and other stuff. This is where it gets tricky. You may not have some of the required includes -- get them via fink (fink install ncurses, possibly?). They are put in a new root-level directory called sw. Tell the configure script where these the includes are. Ways of finding out their location are either browsing/sw and/usr in that second term window, or by running things like which less when asked where the less paging command is, or find / -name curses* when asked about include files. (Sherlock could come in handy, too...)
I guess the configure script will ask whether or not you want X support. Answer no, and you should be safe. Another non-standard setting on Darwin is the name of the C compiler; it's not gcc, but simply cc.
Once that is done, run make and watch the errors fly by. As long as the whole shebang doesn't fail completely, ignore them.
Then run sudo make install (or, if possible and desired, sudo make install-strip, that saves some space) and the files will be placed under/usr/local.
If/usr/local/bin is in your $PATH variable, you will be able to run nethack simply by typing nethack at the prompt.
Another possiblity is that instead of a script that takes you through the configuration process you have a file called Makefile with lots of comments guiding you through the process of editing it to your needs. In that case you can open the file in TextEdit.app or whatever your preferred editor is (pico and vi are two CLI possiblities) and fill in the parameters.
It only becomes easier the next time... I hope I was able to help at least a bit.
Should anybody ask "How is this a bad thing?", send them to read Privacy and Power: Computer Databases and Metaphors for Information Privacy (linked to here) by Daniel Solove. I personally think it is worth reading the whole thing, but it's kinda long, so maybe this NY Times article is a better suggestion.
It basically says, "You may think Big Brother isn't interested in you, and you may be right, but there is a Big Unknown gathering so much information about you, she could come after you once you become a nuisance to her!", only in a less conspiracy-theoretical way...
What the targeted college students _should_ get...
on
I Want My MTV... PC?
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· Score: 1
An iMac has four wires to plug in. The Internet Computer has five, but the additional one is for something the iMac doesn't have: A connection to your TV antenna or cable TV line.
That means even your average PCU pot-head could check his Hotmail and watch MTV on a single machine.
And did I mention it runs Linux? That means one could technically do lots more with it.
Scurra: Hiya. How does Russian software development differ from the software development that you've done. I mean, do they program in Cyrillic? Are the Russians keen on something like Linux?
Mark Shuttleworth: I think Linux is pretty popular here, which is great. Most programming languages don't change, but obviously they use Unicode and DBCS to present the Cyrillic characters in the UI. They have fantastic programmers here (Dmitry Sklyralov (sp?) is Russian;-)
I know it's the "early morning" time frame, but who knows how long the server will take this load... (besides, I may get some cheap karma...)
Project Overview
Anthill is a framework aimed at supporting the design, development and analysis
of peer-to-peer protocols and algorithms. The goals of Anthill are to: (i) provide an
environment for simplifying the design and deployment of new P2P systems, and (ii) provide a
"testbed'' for studying and experimenting with P2P systems in order to understand their properties and evaluate
their performance. Anthill is based on the multi-agent systems (MAS) paradigm. A MAS is a collection of
autonomous agents that can observe their environment and perform simple local computations leading to actions based on these
observations. The behavior of an agent may be non-deterministic and its actions may modify the agent environment as well as the agent location
within the environment. What distinguishes MAS from other agent models is that there is no central coordination of
activity. MAS often exhibit a property called swarm intelligence whereby a collection of simple agents of very
limited individual capabilities achieves ``intelligent'' collective behavior. In this manner, they are able to
solve problems that are beyond the capabilities or knowledge of individual
agents. For example, ant colonies, which are natural instances of MAS, are known to be capable of solving complex
optimization problems including those arising in communication networks. In our
opinion, MAS can be profitably adopted for the design of innovative peer-to-peer
algorithms.
Anthill uses terminology derived from the ant colony metaphor. A P2P
system based on Anthill is composed of a network of interconnected nests. Each nest is a peer entity capable of performing
computations and hosting resources. Nests handle requests coming from users by generating one or more
ants --- autonomous agents that travel across the nest network trying to satisfy the request. Ants
interact indirectly with each other by modifying their environment by updating the information stored in the visited nests.
This form of indirect communication, used also by real ants, is known as stigmergy.
Developers wishing to experiment with new P2P protocols need to focus only on writing
appropriate ant algorithms using the Anthill API and defining the structure of the P2P system.
The current version of Anthill includes a simulation environment to help developers analyze and evaluate the behavior of
P2P systems. Ant algorithms are executed in simulated nest networks and various properties such as performance, fault-tolerance and
availability are measured. Simulation parameters, such as the characteristics of the network, the type of ant algorithms deployed,
the kind of workload presented to the system, and the properties to be measured, are easily defined using
XML.
How "lightweight" a language can you produce, yet keep it usuaable?
To me, it would seem that the lighest I can come up with is: <snip>
You sir, are mistaken. The only ability a programming language really needs is to output "Hello world" to the screen. Here's an interpreter (in Perl), let's see if you can guess the syntax:
Some researchers at FH Potsdam (in.de) are using it for an interface to a database.
Infodata is a bibliographic database specialising in information sciences provided
by the Center for Information Sciences and Practice at the University of Applied Sciences
Potsdam. The "VRML-Document-Viewer" was integrated into the database system as a visual
user interface so that queries can now be carried out either in a text-based or visual mode.
What you describe reminds me of that "futuristic" interface in Jurassic Park 1 that the little girl has to use to control parts of the park.
In
Jurassic Park, the young girl figures out how to reboot the computer
system by sitting down at it, seeing a really nifty 3-D interface, and exclaiming,
"It's UNIX! I know that." First off, if she wasn't so young, I'd marry her. Any woman who knows and likes UNIX is OK in my books. Secondly, that line
made everyone who knew UNIX burst out laughing. UNIX is a notorious command-line
prompt like DOS, but with even more computer-like commands ('ls' instead of
'dir', 'rm' instead of 'del').
The interface she was using is called 'fsn' and is a
demonstration from Silicon Graphics, Inc. to show off their 3-D workstations.
It makes sense considering Silicon Graphics was a major product placement sponsor
of the movie.
I have yet to see the EU write one single peice [sic] of legislation that a) makes sense, b) actually has an effect other than to annoy people c) does any good. d) doesnt cost tonnes [sic] of money for sod all.
Yeah, tell my French and Greek colleagues that... Openyoureyes, man. EU legislation is changing the way we live in Europe (our part of it, at least), and though it isn't always comfortable, it is very useful, makes sense, and often means less cost, less administration (true, the EU is very bureaucratic, but think of all the national instituions that are no longer needed due to the EU's multilateral institutions) and less annoyance (e.g. I'll be able to drive 45 mins. without having to exchange currency).
Slashdot Mirror
See also: http://www.researchoninnovation.org.
are you aware that X is 15+ yrs old? X11R1 was released Sept 1987. Not even 15 years! (-: The day X12R1-pre-alpha is announced on Slashdot, the Internet will break down.
(among others, like OpenVMS and OS/2)
bash: apt-get: command not found
Anybody else experiencing this problem?
The problem with the OS X port is mainly due to a bug in Apple's Darwin gcc. If it wasn't for that, it would be almost as easy as porting X11 apps like Lyx or FreeCiv. Once that bug (or those bugs?) are fixed, OpenOffice should come to OS X -- at least in a the X-Window server.
What is JediKnight 2 for Windows? I only know JediKnight 2 on OS X, a Cocoa-based Aqua-compliant and all around great IRC client... strange how programmers seem to lack creativity when it comes to naming their apps.
At CeBIT this year, I stopped by a little stand in the Future Park, where a poor neglected man with a laptop was trying to give away software for free. He was employed by the German Ministry of Economy and Science, and the software was GnuPP (The Gnu Privacy Project). Basically, it is a GUI for GnuPG under Windows (called the GPA -- Gnu Privacy Assistant), and a plug-in for Outlook. It's completely Free, and works quite well. I think it's not much different from the commercial PGP program. It offered a little lock icon in the tray on the right of the start bar which let you encrypt and/or sign either your clip-board or the currently active window. You can get it here. (click on "herunterladen"). I doubt it will be impossible to use even for those who don't know German.
Ooops, yeah, you can get it there, too, I guess...
I am assuming you want to play the terminal version, and not the X11 version. Unfortunately, fink does not provide a nethack-nox package.
Here's somewhat spartanic instructions; I am not at my Mac right now, else I'd try this myself, but I hope these are at least some pointers in the right direction.
Download the source; I bet it comes with a configure script. In that case, I would do the following:
Fire up Terminal.app and open at least two term windows (unless, of course, like a real geek, you already have them open). cd to the source directory and type ./configure. It will ask you where you want to install; I suggest /usr/local/. It will ask you about curses and other stuff. This is where it gets tricky. You may not have some of the required includes -- get them via fink (fink install ncurses, possibly?). They are put in a new root-level directory called sw. Tell the configure script where these the includes are. Ways of finding out their location are either browsing /sw and /usr in that second term window, or by running things like which less when asked where the less paging command is, or find / -name curses* when asked about include files. (Sherlock could come in handy, too...)
I guess the configure script will ask whether or not you want X support. Answer no, and you should be safe. Another non-standard setting on Darwin is the name of the C compiler; it's not gcc, but simply cc.
Once that is done, run make and watch the errors fly by. As long as the whole shebang doesn't fail completely, ignore them.
Then run sudo make install (or, if possible and desired, sudo make install-strip, that saves some space) and the files will be placed under /usr/local.
If /usr/local/bin is in your $PATH variable, you will be able to run nethack simply by typing nethack at the prompt.
Another possiblity is that instead of a script that takes you through the configuration process you have a file called Makefile with lots of comments guiding you through the process of editing it to your needs. In that case you can open the file in TextEdit.app or whatever your preferred editor is (pico and vi are two CLI possiblities) and fill in the parameters.
It only becomes easier the next time... I hope I was able to help at least a bit.
ThinkGeek for all your caffeine needs.
Should anybody ask "How is this a bad thing?", send them to read Privacy and Power: Computer Databases and Metaphors for Information Privacy (linked to here) by Daniel Solove. I personally think it is worth reading the whole thing, but it's kinda long, so maybe this NY Times article is a better suggestion.
It basically says, "You may think Big Brother isn't interested in you, and you may be right, but there is a Big Unknown gathering so much information about you, she could come after you once you become a nuisance to her!", only in a less conspiracy-theoretical way...And did I mention it runs Linux? That means one could technically do lots more with it.
Just another bug report on Slashdot, only this time it doesn't involve MS...
At least according to Slashdot's values...
In a recent chat-room interview in ZA:
Scurra: Hiya. How does Russian software development differ from the software development that you've done. I mean, do they program in Cyrillic? Are the Russians keen on something like Linux?
Project Overview
Anthill is a framework aimed at supporting the design, development and analysis of peer-to-peer protocols and algorithms. The goals of Anthill are to: (i) provide an environment for simplifying the design and deployment of new P2P systems, and (ii) provide a "testbed'' for studying and experimenting with P2P systems in order to understand their properties and evaluate their performance. Anthill is based on the multi-agent systems (MAS) paradigm. A MAS is a collection of autonomous agents that can observe their environment and perform simple local computations leading to actions based on these observations. The behavior of an agent may be non-deterministic and its actions may modify the agent environment as well as the agent location within the environment. What distinguishes MAS from other agent models is that there is no central coordination of activity. MAS often exhibit a property called swarm intelligence whereby a collection of simple agents of very limited individual capabilities achieves ``intelligent'' collective behavior. In this manner, they are able to solve problems that are beyond the capabilities or knowledge of individual agents. For example, ant colonies, which are natural instances of MAS, are known to be capable of solving complex optimization problems including those arising in communication networks. In our opinion, MAS can be profitably adopted for the design of innovative peer-to-peer algorithms.
Anthill uses terminology derived from the ant colony metaphor. A P2P system based on Anthill is composed of a network of interconnected nests. Each nest is a peer entity capable of performing computations and hosting resources. Nests handle requests coming from users by generating one or more ants --- autonomous agents that travel across the nest network trying to satisfy the request. Ants interact indirectly with each other by modifying their environment by updating the information stored in the visited nests. This form of indirect communication, used also by real ants, is known as stigmergy.
Developers wishing to experiment with new P2P protocols need to focus only on writing appropriate ant algorithms using the Anthill API and defining the structure of the P2P system. The current version of Anthill includes a simulation environment to help developers analyze and evaluate the behavior of P2P systems. Ant algorithms are executed in simulated nest networks and various properties such as performance, fault-tolerance and availability are measured. Simulation parameters, such as the characteristics of the network, the type of ant algorithms deployed, the kind of workload presented to the system, and the properties to be measured, are easily defined using XML.
This is a powerful, intuitive, interpreted, simple, no-point-oriented (NPO) helloworlding-language.
See my posts here. I guess I should read more of the discussion before posting. If you know French, a great resource is at Workspace3D.ath.cx.
So, if anyone out there runs IRIX version 5.3 or below, you might want to try this, it's freeware.
source: http://www.geocities.com/naran500/features/comp_sc i/comp_sci_ui.html
Yeah, just as unfair as the fact that you have to learn to read before you can read a book.
No, he still has to say, "Give me some sugar, baby!"
Yeah, tell my French and Greek colleagues that... Open your eyes, man. EU legislation is changing the way we live in Europe (our part of it, at least), and though it isn't always comfortable, it is very useful, makes sense, and often means less cost, less administration (true, the EU is very bureaucratic, but think of all the national instituions that are no longer needed due to the EU's multilateral institutions) and less annoyance (e.g. I'll be able to drive 45 mins. without having to exchange currency).
(Watch Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb for an explanation.)