Re:Waiting for apps isn't annoying, focus stealing
on
GNOME 2.12 Released
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· Score: 2, Informative
KDE introduced focus stealing protection at 3.2. Even OSX and Windows haven't done this yet,
TweakUI has a "Prevent applications from stealing focus" option (General->Focus). You can have Windows either flash the taskbar button X number of times or until it is clicked. Quite useful.
Atheism merely means "without belief in a god or gods", it does not mean lack of "cause, principle, or [a] system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith" (religion). Buddhism is an atheistic religion, for example:
There is no almighty God in Buddhism. There is no one to hand out rewards or punishments on a supposedly Judgement Day. Buddhism is strictly not a religion in the context of being a faith and worship owing allegiance to a supernatural being.
(The last point about Buddhism not strictly being a religion requires strictly definining religion as theism--I used a more reasonable definition that it is a system of beliefs held with faith.)
It does take "more than an atheist viewpoint to make a religion" but an atheistic viewpoint does not preclude being a religion.
You may be able to use Scancode Map in the Registry to remap ~ (or even better, `) to another scancode that you could assign to a small script which opens/closes cmd.
George Washington also argued against political parties in his eerily phophetic Farewell Address in 1796:
In contemplating the causes which may disturb our union it occurs as matter of serious concern that any ground should have been furnished for characterizing parties by geographical discriminations--Northern and Southern, Atlantic and Western -- whence designing men may endeavor to excite a belief that there is a real difference of local interests and views.
One of the expedients of party to acquire influence within particular districts is to misrepresent the opinions and aims of other districts. You can not shield yourselves too much against the jealousies and heartburnings which spring from these misrepresentations; they tend to render alien to each other those who ought to be bound together by fraternal affection....[...]
I have already intimated to you the danger of parties in the State, with particular reference to the founding of them on geographical discriminations. Let me now take a more comprehensive view, and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party generally.
This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind. It exists under different shapes in all governments, more or less stifled, controlled, or repressed; but in those of the popular form it is seen in its greatest rankness and is truly their worst enemy....
It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms; kindles the animosity of one part against another; foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which finds a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passion. Thus the policy and the will of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another. [Hmm...sound familiar?]
There is an opinion that parties in free countries are useful checks upon the administration of the government, and serve to keep alive the spirit of liberty. This within certain limits is probably true; and in governments of a monarchical cast patriotism may look with indulgence, if not with favor, upon the spirit of party. But in those of the popular character, in governments purely elective, it is a spirit not to be encouraged. From their natural tendency it is certain there will always be enough of that spirit for every salutary purpose; and there being constant danger of excess, the effort ought to be by force of public opinion to mitigate and assuage it. A fire not to be quenched, it demands a uniform vigilance to prevent its bursting into a flame, lest, instead of warming, it should consume.
$50?! You were lucky, I had to badger ETS for a month after the test until they sent me my (one) gift certificate. At least they gave out free t-shirts.
There's some validity to your point here. In this case, static typing signals you at compile time that you made a "stupid" mistake (ie, a mistake not caused by an improper understanding of the program requirements). But a dynamic language would signal the error just as quickly, because you'll get a clear, obvious error the first time your code runs.
Though the error may be clear and obvious, knowing it the first time the code runs can be too late. I've wrote code that can only run a few weeks every year (nothing important, but the nature of the program limited it to running only at very specific times), and Python has allowed numerous stupid bugs (typos, etc.) to stay dormant until I was able to run it. Static typing would have been very useful in this case.
Pychecker is a step in the right direction. It doesn't do very advanced type checking, but can warn you about inconsistant return types (returning a string in one path, but another data type in another, for example) at least. MJD's Strong Typing and Perl discusses how strong and static typing can be done right (in ML), in order to prevent many bugs at compile-time (in his case, infinite recursion). I hope we see more options for static typing in Python, if only as an option. I wouldn't want to not ever be able to write simple Python programs without declaring every variable, but for larger programs, static typing is definitely useful. Maybe in the future we'll see more languages that are able to prove that a program is correct (using static typing, etc).
Is GINY still being actively developed? The CVS source tree looks like it hasn't been touched in months, and the latest file release is from last year. Still, looks like an interesting project, and I'll definitely be looking into it in the near future.
Not to pick nits, but a graph is not a data structure. A graph is an abstract data type, which is commonly implemented using an adjacency matrix or adjacency list. Arrays and linked lists are data structures, graphs are not.
You could, in theory, use SVG to display graphs. I actually considered doing this for a project I was working on last week. Check out, for example, GPS Visualizer. Upload a GPS map with waypoints, and it outputs an SVG file of the map with the access points connected to their locations. (Note that the sample map does not include any waypoints.) Its very neat, you can drag the labels around. With some effort, I'm sure SVG could be used to display an interactive graph that could be manipulated easily. Of course you probably wouldn't want to implement the graph algorithms in JavaScript (to interact with SVG) for any serious application, but there's nothing stopping you. At the very least, SVG might be worth looking into for visualizing the graphs generated by your Java program.
Not all CDs sound equally loud. The perceived loudness of mp3s is even more variable. Whilst different musical moods require that some tracks should sound louder than others, the loudness of a given CD has more to do with the year of issue or the whim of the producer than the intended emotional effect. If we add to this chaos the inconsistent quality of mp3 encoding, it's no wonder that a random play through your music collection can have you leaping for the volume control every other track.
As the website says, The Replay Gain proposal sets out a simple way of calculating and representing the ideal replay gain for every track and album.
The foobar2000 audio player includes built-in support for ReplayGain. MP3 Gain was mentioned in another thread, for the differences, see Difference between Mp3gain and Replaygain.
I see something like:
i++;
and I think "why did he generate a temporary? Is there a side effect to the constructor? What's going on behind the covers? This isn't an issue in c, but in c++ where operator overloading of ++ is common, if your not going to use the temporary, DON'T GENERATE IT. even if the compiler will optimize it away, it is clearer to the reader to see that a temporary is explicitly not needed.
++i also reads better than i++. "Increment i" verses "i increment".
Agreed--take any books a professor wrote himself is using with a grain of salt. Not necessarily for the reason you listed, but often the professor writes a book and only uses it because he wrote it--in choosing a textbook, he's biased. Worse yet, he or she may be able to persuade the whole department to use it for every section of that class at the university.
Your MAC address is (well SHOULD be) "unique and hard-coded to a physical piece of hardware". It is physically tied to your NIC, and you can not change it. What you can do however is change how it is represented in software, so that the other party never sees your actual physical MAC address, but the idea that you can actually change your MAC address is just plain wrong. Feel free to try, change the MAC, then switch the NIC to another machine and see if it retains the original or altered address.
Of course, it all depends on the NIC, but I was able to flash my Orinoco wireless card's firmware, successfully changing its MAC address. My address was retained under Linux and Windows, so I assume it was physically changed. (I also was able to upgrade the Orinoco from Silver to Gold encryption, US to Japan frequencies, and change the serial number). Its true that most people who change the MAC really only change it in software, but its definitely possible to change it in hardware as well. Not that there is any reason to...
In C, multidimensional arrays are a fiction, because a[i][j] is given exactly the semantics of *(*(a + i) + j), instead of *(a + i * second_dim + j). That extra dereference takes away a huge number of optimization opportunities.
You're thinking of Java. Java doesn't have true multidimensional arrays. If you want them you need to calculate the index in a 1D array manually (necessary for faster graphics programs). An interesting side effect of "fictional" multidimensional arrays is they don't have to be rectangular. An array like this is perfectly valid in Java:
It's not like the TCP/IP RFC's were unavailable to Microsoft and they were free to implement their own TCP/IP stack, but Time To Market is important and Bill decided to copy the source code instead, perfectly legal because of the BSD licence.
I view this as a Good Thing(TM). Code reuse saves time, allowing the time to be used to develop other things.
...my Warty CDs just arrived in the mail from Switzerland, and they come out with a new release already! But I'm glad the LiveCD is available for amd64. The Warthy 4.10 CD sets (I ordered all 3 -- ppc, x86, amd64) only included an x86 LiveCD. This is great news for AMD64 users--particularly laptop owners. You can try out Ubuntu today.
As you age, your vision gradually yellows (or has another poster had said, browns). Psilocybin is rumored to temporarily increase visual acuity, comparable to youthful eyesight.
a Not quite. It has 2 limit points +1 and 0. The series doesn't diverge. It just doesn't converge to a unique limit point.
Exactly. The series is conditionally convergent, (the sum of the absolute values of each term does not converge, but the series converges). The terms can be rearranged to add up to any value whatsoever.
Slashdot Mirror
(The last point about Buddhism not strictly being a religion requires strictly definining religion as theism--I used a more reasonable definition that it is a system of beliefs held with faith.)
It does take "more than an atheist viewpoint to make a religion" but an atheistic viewpoint does not preclude being a religion.
Can XPDF or Preview open PDFs in Firefox?
You may be able to use Scancode Map in the Registry to remap ~ (or even better, `) to another scancode that you could assign to a small script which opens/closes cmd.
However, both George Washington (in his Farewell Address) and James Madison (Federalist #10) argued political parties/factions are undesirable.
Yeah - no difference. My school doesn't actually block BT; they detect it and shape it to 1.2 KB/s.
Does anyone have a link to download the file without BitTorrent? (My school blocks BitTorrent.)
$50?! You were lucky, I had to badger ETS for a month after the test until they sent me my (one) gift certificate. At least they gave out free t-shirts.
Though the error may be clear and obvious, knowing it the first time the code runs can be too late. I've wrote code that can only run a few weeks every year (nothing important, but the nature of the program limited it to running only at very specific times), and Python has allowed numerous stupid bugs (typos, etc.) to stay dormant until I was able to run it. Static typing would have been very useful in this case.
Pychecker is a step in the right direction. It doesn't do very advanced type checking, but can warn you about inconsistant return types (returning a string in one path, but another data type in another, for example) at least. MJD's Strong Typing and Perl discusses how strong and static typing can be done right (in ML), in order to prevent many bugs at compile-time (in his case, infinite recursion). I hope we see more options for static typing in Python, if only as an option. I wouldn't want to not ever be able to write simple Python programs without declaring every variable, but for larger programs, static typing is definitely useful. Maybe in the future we'll see more languages that are able to prove that a program is correct (using static typing, etc).
What school is that?
Is GINY still being actively developed? The CVS source tree looks like it hasn't been touched in months, and the latest file release is from last year. Still, looks like an interesting project, and I'll definitely be looking into it in the near future.
Not to pick nits, but a graph is not a data structure. A graph is an abstract data type, which is commonly implemented using an adjacency matrix or adjacency list. Arrays and linked lists are data structures, graphs are not.
You could, in theory, use SVG to display graphs. I actually considered doing this for a project I was working on last week. Check out, for example, GPS Visualizer. Upload a GPS map with waypoints, and it outputs an SVG file of the map with the access points connected to their locations. (Note that the sample map does not include any waypoints.) Its very neat, you can drag the labels around. With some effort, I'm sure SVG could be used to display an interactive graph that could be manipulated easily. Of course you probably wouldn't want to implement the graph algorithms in JavaScript (to interact with SVG) for any serious application, but there's nothing stopping you. At the very least, SVG might be worth looking into for visualizing the graphs generated by your Java program.
The foobar2000 audio player includes built-in support for ReplayGain. MP3 Gain was mentioned in another thread, for the differences, see Difference between Mp3gain and Replaygain.
Agreed--take any books a professor wrote himself is using with a grain of salt. Not necessarily for the reason you listed, but often the professor writes a book and only uses it because he wrote it--in choosing a textbook, he's biased. Worse yet, he or she may be able to persuade the whole department to use it for every section of that class at the university.
...my Warty CDs just arrived in the mail from Switzerland, and they come out with a new release already! But I'm glad the LiveCD is available for amd64. The Warthy 4.10 CD sets (I ordered all 3 -- ppc, x86, amd64) only included an x86 LiveCD. This is great news for AMD64 users--particularly laptop owners. You can try out Ubuntu today.
Posting this as a link so maybe someone will be able to click it. :)
As you age, your vision gradually yellows (or has another poster had said, browns). Psilocybin is rumored to temporarily increase visual acuity, comparable to youthful eyesight.
Frogs.