BTW, my 600MHz machine runs Firefox just fine, thanks. It's over four years old.
I used to use Konquerer and also early builds on Mozilla on much worse machines than that. Like the 133-266mhz range. I'm not kidding. The superiority over Netscape 4 in terms of CSS/HTML correctness was enough to make me put up with the slow startup times.
Fractal, schmactal. Hacked-2-Basics lets you "play" a VT100 like a musical intrument, with sounds derived from things like the Linux kernel and DOOM.WAD interpreted as 8-bit mono PCM samples. Uses pure write(2) to/dev/dsp. Written to run on computers so low-end that a musician can set fire to them onstage.
Yes, I'm blabbering about my own musical project but so is everyone else on this story.
ou can't go and find what unresolved bugs there are for any Microsoft product, can you? No, that's proprietary information, my friend, and you and I are not worthy to view it -- whether we're MS customers or not. What a beautiful example of OSS in action, and a strong alternate point to their argument.
This has nothing to do with open vs. closed. Plenty of closed-source companies allow the public to view their bug databases. Microsoft just isn't one of them.
He calls himselfan 'original gamer" because he's 30 and old enough to remember the 2600. I think that title is reserved for people who were playing games in the arcades and bars before there were home consoles. Which means people who were already old enough to drink when PONG came out. That generation is in their 50's by now.
Audacity is also pretty darn useful on Windows. It fills a niche between Windows' built-in sound recorder program (that will only record one minute) and more advanced non-free (in any sense of the word) apps. I am not aware of another free sound editor for Windows with the features of Audacity.
Then there is the aesthetics of this. The logo is just kinda ugly. These guys are not all that different in appearance from some football hooligans... and after all, there is a strong element of marketing here, whether we like it or not. Would you want to buy an operating systems from these guys?
Devils aside, this obvious parody of American soliders raising the flag on Iwo Jima (or American firemen raising the flag on 9/11) cannot stand in this time of war.
For the gas station example I can see how at many intersections it is much easy to go to the gas station that is on the side of the street that you are already on. If you are low on gas and late for work you might even pay a few more cents per gallon to go the the nearest one. That said, I have never seen two 7-Elevens across the street from each other in the USA.
No, but in the South one sees pairs of Waffle House restaurants on either side of a major highway.
Apparently π is not the HTML entity for pi... Yes it is. Slashdot is filtering it out.
Re:EJB is REALLY Bitter
on
Bitter EJB
·
· Score: 1
Java was created largely to address the "life is too short" problem with C++, largely succesfully (in terms of language design). Nor have I heard many complaints about the lack of generics in Java from practicing Java programmers, as opposed to the numerous armchair quarterbacks who always seem willing to share their opinion.
The current lack of generics doesn't make Java unusable, but as a "praticing Java developer" I can tell you that Java generics (JSR 14) will sure clean up a lot of ugly code. Sure, they are just syntactic sugar, but anything that eliminates many uses of the C-like casting syntax has to be good.
Which code would you rather read or write, thousands of times:
myFoo = (Foo) iterator.next();
or
myFoo = iterator.next();
(Well, I'm sure there probably are a few people somewhere who will pipe up and say that the first is more readable because it self-documents that the variable's type is Foo... these are the same sorts of people who tell you to cast the return value of malloc() in C)
But even those folks probably wouldn't defend this:
( (Foo) iterator.next() ).someMethod();
vs:
iterator.next().someMethod();
Casting is just about the second-ugliest thing in Java's syntax, right after this little jewel:
OuterClass.InnerClass obj = new OuterClass.new InnerClass();
Favorites - in Win2K or XP, why can't it just use my IE favorites?
It does. Automatically. It's called "Imported IE Favorites" in your Bookmarks menu.
The imported favorites are a copy of your IE favorites, copied into your Mozilla profile. If you add new favorites with IE after importing, Mozilla doesn't know about them. New bookmarks added from Mozilla don't show up in IE either.
Remember that IE is so integrated into the Windows shell that a simple directory window has a "favorites" menu, so even if you do all of your web browsing in Mozilla you will still see the favorites everywhere.
Hah! Well there is no C in the key of C# major. The note one semitone above B is B#. See Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. Second note for the right hand, on the second line. Quite clearly a B#.
DHTML and javascript make an excellent combination for displaying animated content.. but the question of browser incompatibilty still remains...
If you can deprecate Netscape 4 and below and IE 5.0 and below (5.5 is generally OK), the incompatibilities really aren't all that bad. Newer versions of the "big two" are mostly standard-compliant, or at least compatible with each other.
There are a few annoyances such as different levels of support for CSS, but these are nothing compared to the nightmare that was cross-browser DHTML just a couple of years ago.
Ok, if I own the book, I'm not going to take the time to read this "review". If I don't own the book I obviously have NO FREAKING clue what figure 7-1 looks like! Also, does "Emphasizing with a dinosour" involve time travel and a shitload of highlighters or what? Or does it mean you hire a dinosour to stand next to you for emphasis? I don't get it...
I have Practical C Programming by the same author, and it has a Figure 6-1 "The Software Lifecycle" that also uses a dinosaur to represent the software. I wonder how similar these two books are? Is the C-like subset of C++ taught by just reprinting parts of the older book?
People like HTML mail. It's easy to make tables, highlight important points, bullets, headings colored text, etc... Simply because a few aging hippies don't like it - it's not going away. It has nothing to do with spam.
I like the idea of HTML mail. But it is true that most of the HTML mail I get is spam, and most of the spam is get is HTML.
I guess if all (or most) clients capable of displaying HTML mail blocked all images, and Spammers knew this, they would stop using it as a tool.
Sadly, the only book I ever use these days is the Dynamic HTML Reference and SDK from Micro$oft (basically the same info you can get for free from msdn)
M$, on the other hand, wins big time by having an entire AOL base suddenly switch to IE
Who modded this up so high?
The entire AOL base (at least on Windows) has been using IE for quite some time. The AOL desktop application uses the IE rendering engine. (Again, on Windows... I have no idea what it does on Mac)
What patents still exist that cover Unix? Don't they expire after 17 years? I don't think patents filed for "time sharing systems" or "virtual memory" in the seventies are still applicable.
Not to mention that neither of those were Unix innovations anyway. Maybe a patent on pipes, or something.
Actually, re-use of standard music in trailers has become more and more annoying and obvious. ..
My favorite was when they used something that sounded like a re-make of Led Zeppelin's "Bring it on Home" in the trailer for the Flipper movie, starring Elijah Wood, Paul "Crocodile Dundee" Hogan, and a smart-ass dolphin.
But they should be the same species. A timber wolf is no less like a husky than a toy poodle is, and they can interbreed, etc.
Some biologists do indeed classify the domestic dog as a subspecies of wolf, Canis lupus familiaris.
There is also some debate as to whether coyotes should be classified with wolves, as they are genetically capable of interbreeding. The fact that they rarely do so in the wild, even though they share large areas of their range, is used as an argument for keeping coyotes in a separate species Canis latrans.
The JBuilder, IntelliJ IDEA, and Eclipse IDEs are all pure Java, so much so that you can copy the files from Windows to Linux and they still work. None of them have any performance problems that I can notice. Even garbage collection pauses have gone away over the last year or two.
I don't know about the others, but Eclipse is most certainly not "pure Java". The windows version installs several.dll files. I assume the Linux does the same with.so files.
Still, I'm looking forward to the day when normal people don't need C/C++ compilers anymore because everything's written in VHLLs
Do Java and C# qualify as "VHLL" to you? If so then you may get your wish. However, you probably meant true scripting languages.
Almost every user application except for cutting edge games could be written in Perl/tk or Python or XUL or something. Unfortunately, the ability to do this has existed for years if people aren't using it now I don't predict that they'll start.
(Aside: Back when Java first came out, I remember thinking that it seemed really ass-backwards to try to force the old "compiler" paradigm back into a world (the web) where scripting had already become ubiquitous. Obviously I underestimated the power of the "we're better than you script idiots" elite programmer mindset (And I mean elite, not l33t. The kind of people I'm talking about tend to spell things correctly (and I'm saying all of this as a former scripter who has managed to become "one of them" for the money (HDANCN?)))).
I am now in serious danger of getting modded off-topic.
Slashdot Mirror
BTW, my 600MHz machine runs Firefox just fine, thanks. It's over four years old.
I used to use Konquerer and also early builds on Mozilla on much worse machines than that. Like the 133-266mhz range. I'm not kidding. The superiority over Netscape 4 in terms of CSS/HTML correctness was enough to make me put up with the slow startup times.
Fractal, schmactal. Hacked-2-Basics lets you "play" a VT100 like a musical intrument, with sounds derived from things like the Linux kernel and DOOM.WAD interpreted as 8-bit mono PCM samples. Uses pure write(2) to /dev/dsp. Written to run on computers so low-end that a musician can set fire to them onstage.
Yes, I'm blabbering about my own musical project but so is everyone else on this story.
ou can't go and find what unresolved bugs there are for any Microsoft product, can you? No, that's proprietary information, my friend, and you and I are not worthy to view it -- whether we're MS customers or not. What a beautiful example of OSS in action, and a strong alternate point to their argument.
This has nothing to do with open vs. closed. Plenty of closed-source companies allow the public to view their bug databases. Microsoft just isn't one of them.
He calls himselfan 'original gamer" because he's 30 and old enough to remember the 2600. I think that title is reserved for people who were playing games in the arcades and bars before there were home consoles. Which means people who were already old enough to drink when PONG came out. That generation is in their 50's by now.
Audacity is also pretty darn useful on Windows. It fills a niche between Windows' built-in sound recorder program (that will only record one minute) and more advanced non-free (in any sense of the word) apps. I am not aware of another free sound editor for Windows with the features of Audacity.
Then there is the aesthetics of this. The logo is just kinda ugly. These guys are not all that different in appearance from some football hooligans... and after all, there is a strong element of marketing here, whether we like it or not. Would you want to buy an operating systems from these guys?
Devils aside, this obvious parody of American soliders raising the flag on Iwo Jima (or American firemen raising the flag on 9/11) cannot stand in this time of war.
Also, it looks like an orgy.
For the gas station example I can see how at many intersections it is much easy to go to the gas station that is on the side of the street that you are already on. If you are low on gas and late for work you might even pay a few more cents per gallon to go the the nearest one. That said, I have never seen two 7-Elevens across the street from each other in the USA.
No, but in the South one sees pairs of Waffle House restaurants on either side of a major highway.
Apparently π is not the HTML entity for pi...
Yes it is. Slashdot is filtering it out.
Java was created largely to address the "life is too short" problem with C++, largely succesfully (in terms of language design). Nor have I heard many complaints about the lack of generics in Java from practicing Java programmers, as opposed to the numerous armchair quarterbacks who always seem willing to share their opinion.
The current lack of generics doesn't make Java unusable, but as a "praticing Java developer" I can tell you that Java generics (JSR 14) will sure clean up a lot of ugly code. Sure, they are just syntactic sugar, but anything that eliminates many uses of the C-like casting syntax has to be good.
Which code would you rather read or write, thousands of times:
myFoo = (Foo) iterator.next();
or
myFoo = iterator.next();
(Well, I'm sure there probably are a few people somewhere who will pipe up and say that the first is more readable because it self-documents that the variable's type is Foo... these are the same sorts of people who tell you to cast the return value of malloc() in C)
But even those folks probably wouldn't defend this:
( (Foo) iterator.next() ).someMethod();
vs:
iterator.next().someMethod();
Casting is just about the second-ugliest thing in Java's syntax, right after this little jewel:
OuterClass.InnerClass obj = new OuterClass.new InnerClass();
Favorites - in Win2K or XP, why can't it just use my IE favorites?
It does. Automatically. It's called "Imported IE Favorites" in your Bookmarks menu.
The imported favorites are a copy of your IE favorites, copied into your Mozilla profile. If you add new favorites with IE after importing, Mozilla doesn't know about them. New bookmarks added from Mozilla don't show up in IE either.
Remember that IE is so integrated into the Windows shell that a simple directory window has a "favorites" menu, so even if you do all of your web browsing in Mozilla you will still see the favorites everywhere.
Hah! Well there is no C in the key of C# major. The note one semitone above B is B#. See Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. Second note for the right hand, on the second line. Quite clearly a B#.
s/major/minor/g
does anyone else find it VERY ODD that a C++ IDE is written in Java Swing?
It's probably using a lot of the same code as JBuilder.
I'm sure this is a drive to get the Blogger userbase as big as possible, then they'll roll out the ads.
The ads are already rolled out. The free Blogger already had ads before Google bought it.
DHTML and javascript make an excellent combination for displaying animated content.. but the question of browser incompatibilty still remains...
If you can deprecate Netscape 4 and below and IE 5.0 and below (5.5 is generally OK), the incompatibilities really aren't all that bad. Newer versions of the "big two" are mostly standard-compliant, or at least compatible with each other.
There are a few annoyances such as different levels of support for CSS, but these are nothing compared to the nightmare that was cross-browser DHTML just a couple of years ago.
Ok, if I own the book, I'm not going to take the time to read this "review". If I don't own the book I obviously have NO FREAKING clue what figure 7-1 looks like! Also, does "Emphasizing with a dinosour" involve time travel and a shitload of highlighters or what? Or does it mean you hire a dinosour to stand next to you for emphasis? I don't get it...
I have Practical C Programming by the same author, and it has a Figure 6-1 "The Software Lifecycle" that also uses a dinosaur to represent the software. I wonder how similar these two books are? Is the C-like subset of C++ taught by just reprinting parts of the older book?
People like HTML mail. It's easy to make tables, highlight important points, bullets, headings colored text, etc... Simply because a few aging hippies don't like it - it's not going away. It has nothing to do with spam.
I like the idea of HTML mail. But it is true that most of the HTML mail I get is spam, and most of the spam is get is HTML.
I guess if all (or most) clients capable of displaying HTML mail blocked all images, and Spammers knew this, they would stop using it as a tool.
Lawyers don't have time to do more lawyering "in their spare time"
I think they call it pro bono.
Sadly, the only book I ever use these days is the Dynamic HTML Reference and SDK from Micro$oft (basically the same info you can get for free from msdn)
Why buy it? MSDN is more navigable than a book.
SGI's attitude that XFS is unbreakable, therefore they don't need to make tools to fix it is a pain in the arse
Kind of like how Microsoft said "NTFS can't get fragmented, so there's no need to ship the OS with a defragging tool".
M$, on the other hand, wins big time by having an entire AOL base suddenly switch to IE
Who modded this up so high?
The entire AOL base (at least on Windows) has been using IE for quite some time. The AOL desktop application uses the IE rendering engine. (Again, on Windows... I have no idea what it does on Mac)
What patents still exist that cover Unix? Don't they expire after 17 years? I don't think patents filed for "time sharing systems" or "virtual memory" in the seventies are still applicable.
Not to mention that neither of those were Unix innovations anyway. Maybe a patent on pipes, or something.
Actually, re-use of standard music in trailers has become more and more annoying and obvious. . .
My favorite was when they used something that sounded like a re-make of Led Zeppelin's "Bring it on Home" in the trailer for the Flipper movie, starring Elijah Wood, Paul "Crocodile Dundee" Hogan, and a smart-ass dolphin.
But they should be the same species. A timber wolf is no less like a husky than a toy poodle is, and they can interbreed, etc.
Some biologists do indeed classify the domestic dog as a subspecies of wolf, Canis lupus familiaris.
There is also some debate as to whether coyotes should be classified with wolves, as they are genetically capable of interbreeding. The fact that they rarely do so in the wild, even though they share large areas of their range, is used as an argument for keeping coyotes in a separate species Canis latrans.
The JBuilder, IntelliJ IDEA, and Eclipse IDEs are all pure Java, so much so that you can copy the files from Windows to Linux and they still work. None of them have any performance problems that I can notice. Even garbage collection pauses have gone away over the last year or two.
.dll files. I assume the Linux does the same with .so files.
I don't know about the others, but Eclipse is most certainly not "pure Java". The windows version installs several
Still, I'm looking forward to the day when normal people don't need
C/C++ compilers anymore because everything's written in VHLLs
Do Java and C# qualify as "VHLL" to you? If so then you may get your wish. However, you probably meant true scripting languages.
Almost every user application except for cutting edge games could be written in Perl/tk or Python or XUL or something. Unfortunately, the ability to do this has existed for years if people aren't using it now I don't predict that they'll start.
(Aside: Back when Java first came out, I remember thinking that it seemed really ass-backwards to try to force the old "compiler" paradigm back into a world (the web) where scripting had already become ubiquitous. Obviously I underestimated the power of the "we're better than you script idiots" elite programmer mindset (And I mean elite, not l33t. The kind of people I'm talking about tend to spell things correctly (and I'm saying all of this as a former scripter who has managed to become "one of them" for the money (HDANCN?)))).
I am now in serious danger of getting modded off-topic.