Sometimes guessing can be bad, because sometimes k stands for kernel. Ah, but isn't it always fun to tell a newbie that things like kswapd, keventd, and kupdated are leftover KDE processes that can be safely killed after KDE has shut down.
The one thing not mentioned in the article, and the one thing that has me nervous about trying 2.6-test is the changes to alsa. With 2.6, alsa is built into the kernel, so presumably this makes it easier to set up in the first place. But I already have alsa set up perfectly in 2.4, complete with OSS emulation and artsd sound mixing, so that all my apps play nice and just work.
How much deconfiguring and reconfiguring am I going to have to do if I'm going to be jumping back and forth between 2.4 and a possibly unstable 2.6? Especially since I have the rather finicky via82xx driver.
I'm really keen to try out 2.6, but not if I end up breaking sound in the process.
The things I remember about BG that were cool was the tech - the whole idea of an aircraft carrier in space
Really? I was into naval warfare as a kid, and I always that part was totally stunned.
Aircraft carriers became the dominant force in naval warfare because aircraft fly whereas ships don't. Ships are slow because they have to displace thousands of tons of water in order to move. Aircraft have no such limitation, so they are much much faster, giving them a huge advantage over ships.
But in space, small fighters have no such advantage over larger ships. As long as the technologies can scale, and there's little reason why they couldn't, bigger should be better.
Bigger weapons and heavier armour have generally dominated warfare. The major exception is aircraft, but only because their biggest problem is remaining airborne, and heavy armour is rather counterproductive.
Sorry, but the Galactica isn't the equivalent of an aircraft carrier. It's the equivalent of a motor-boat carrier -- a large ship that launches dozens of much much smaller boats -- a concept so fundamentally flawed and useless that it never existed, at least not in a combat role.
Let me rephrase your question, in the hope that the answer becomes obvious:
Why are the producers embracing a trendy new technology that will set their show apart and give them ample publicity and marketing opportunities, instead of just being exactly like the thousands of other shows on the market?
That is a must-have feature in my book. I am so sick of waiting for programs like Evolution and Balsa to render HTML spam. A new message in my preview window has approximately 0.2 seconds to impress me before I hit delete. Having to wait any amount of time for it to render is unacceptable. I don't give a rats ass what RFC 2046 says about proper mail client behavior when it comes to this.
I want an email client that will display the plaintext part above all else, and if there is no plaintext part, will convert the html part to text and display that!
That's what you think. I just created a new language called HelloWorld in which every program outputs "Hello World" by default, unless the first line is the special SuppressHelloWorld command. So now you can do a Hello World program in 0 bytes!
Now there's a Slashdot poll I'd like to see. Though I think there would be a non-disclosure agreement of some kind involved when one gets a Nielsen box.
No problem; here's how you do it:
Do you have a Neilsen box on your TV?
Yes
No
An NDA prevents me from answering that
I don't have TV, you insensitive clod
Cowboy Neal is on my TV
Thanks. That is simpler (though I still have to run int4() on it so that I can do modulo arithmetic (%).)
I actually found the original function from a web/usenet search, after failing to figure one out on my own. Hopefully future generations of people in the same boat will google their way to this thread.:-)
Erm. . . doesn't "\d TABLENAME" give you the information that you want? Or perhaps I'm not understanding what you're looking for.
"\d TABLENAME" only works in the interactive client. It's not a statement that you can pass from a script through an API. SHOW COLUMNS however works just like an SQL query. Consequently, the MySQL database APIs for languages like Tcl and Python can easily get at that information. To do the same in Postgres you have to figure out the structure of the pg_* system tables (which I spent the better part of a day trying to do with little success -- are these things even documented anywhere?)
Apparently though I was wrong in that the Perl API does work (thanks Bronster!). I don't really have first-hand experience with this in Perl (I do in Tcl and Python). I know that the Perl wrapper library that a guy in my company developed can extract table structures from MySQL but not Postgres. My mistake for jumping to conclusions. The fact remains though that it is much easier to create such an API for MySQL over Postgres.
Arrow keys and tab completion seem to work perfectly for me on the Debian box I'm currently working from.
I'm envious. It's broken on the Debian box of our only Postgres-using client, and it's also broken by default on Mandrake 7.2, which is what's running on our older linux machines. That's 75% of the systems I work with Postgres on. I agree with Bronster that this is a problem with the distro, not Postgres, but regardless of who's to blame, it hasn't helped warm me to working with Postgres:-)
I agree that feature for feature, Postgres is far superior. I agree that for serious database use, Postgres is the way to go. But my company develops web-based applications that have to work with both Postgres and MySQL. So all of the amazing stuff that Postgres can do and MySQL can't is pretty much useless to us, as we generally have to code to the lowest common denominator.
Oh, and thanks for the links to the online books. I'll check 'em out.
For simple applications I far prefer working with MySQL. The following things really annoy me with Postgres.
No simple equivalent of SHOW COLUMNS. Consequently, it's hard to find any high level language API that allows you to read the structure of a database. Python... nope. Tcl... nope. Perl... nope. (Or at least not the last time I checked).
Proper keyboard support for the psql client is broken by default on many of the linux installs I work on (debian seems to be particularly bad). It's *very* frustrating trying when the arrow keys and tab completion doesn't work.
The documentation is tough reading. Very formal. Obviously done by comp-sci academics.
No matter how hard I try, I cannot grok the date-time functions, which I find to be extremely cryptic. For example, the simplest way I've found to calculate the number of days elapsed between today and a given date is:
Back in the days of my 486, I even wrote a single-byte DOS program that was functional: reboot.com I leave it to the reader to figure out what it did:-)
I'm amazed the article doesn't mention SRPMs which I've found to be a very reliable way of getting the newest and latest software to work on my Mandrake 7.2 boxes. It can be a pain getting all the *-devel packages you need, but once you do, you get your own nice shiny RPM that you can drop onto on any identical system that you're running.
What scares me off using something like apt-get is that my home computer is on a dial-up. I don't want to unleash some automated system that's going to go and stupidly try to jam 50MB worth of packages down my pipe. With RPMs I can control how much gets downloaded and when. And I have the nice SRPM fallback when things don't work.
I wouldn't call that sad fanboy crap. You hit the nail square on the head.
What one character tells another character is no basis whatsoever for criticising the realism of a movie. People lie or get things wrong in real life all the time, so why should it be any different in movies?
Maybe Morpheus lied to help motivate Neo. Maybe humans in the movie have an exaggerated, incomplete, or totally false understanding of their role in the Matrix. Why should anyone blindly accept Morpheus' battery explanation as the b-all-and-end-all of what is actually supposed to be going on in the movie?
It's like when all those lawyers got their knickers in a knot over the movie Double Jeopardy (woman convicted of killing husband, only he didn't really die, so now she can kill him with impunity as she's already been convicted of the crime) because the premise was legal hogwash (crimes are specific events, so it would not be the same crime). But the movie never actually got double jeopardy wrong; it was a character who got it wrong. Huge difference.
If you want to talk about disasterous naval design flaws, then the British K-Boat probably takes the cake. A WWI steam-powered submarine, the K-Boats suffered from numerous flaws in design and engineering and as a consequence fell victim to many dozens of accidents and mis-haps, including the so-called "Battle of May Island" in which a flotilla of K-Boats was decimated by a string of collisions during night-time fleet training maneuvers. The K-Boats killed many hundreds of their crew, without ever inflicting damage on the enemy.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I know, I'm pure evil.
The one thing not mentioned in the article, and the one thing that has me nervous about trying 2.6-test is the changes to alsa. With 2.6, alsa is built into the kernel, so presumably this makes it easier to set up in the first place. But I already have alsa set up perfectly in 2.4, complete with OSS emulation and artsd sound mixing, so that all my apps play nice and just work. How much deconfiguring and reconfiguring am I going to have to do if I'm going to be jumping back and forth between 2.4 and a possibly unstable 2.6? Especially since I have the rather finicky via82xx driver. I'm really keen to try out 2.6, but not if I end up breaking sound in the process.
Really? I was into naval warfare as a kid, and I always that part was totally stunned.
Aircraft carriers became the dominant force in naval warfare because aircraft fly whereas ships don't. Ships are slow because they have to displace thousands of tons of water in order to move. Aircraft have no such limitation, so they are much much faster, giving them a huge advantage over ships.
But in space, small fighters have no such advantage over larger ships. As long as the technologies can scale, and there's little reason why they couldn't, bigger should be better.
Bigger weapons and heavier armour have generally dominated warfare. The major exception is aircraft, but only because their biggest problem is remaining airborne, and heavy armour is rather counterproductive.
Sorry, but the Galactica isn't the equivalent of an aircraft carrier. It's the equivalent of a motor-boat carrier -- a large ship that launches dozens of much much smaller boats -- a concept so fundamentally flawed and useless that it never existed, at least not in a combat role.
Why are the producers embracing a trendy new technology that will set their show apart and give them ample publicity and marketing opportunities, instead of just being exactly like the thousands of other shows on the market?
I want an email client that will display the plaintext part above all else, and if there is no plaintext part, will convert the html part to text and display that!
Top that!
No problem; here's how you do it:
Do you have a Neilsen box on your TV?
Yes
No
An NDA prevents me from answering that
I don't have TV, you insensitive clod
Cowboy Neal is on my TV
I actually found the original function from a web/usenet search, after failing to figure one out on my own. Hopefully future generations of people in the same boat will google their way to this thread. :-)
Al/
"\d TABLENAME" only works in the interactive client. It's not a statement that you can pass from a script through an API. SHOW COLUMNS however works just like an SQL query. Consequently, the MySQL database APIs for languages like Tcl and Python can easily get at that information. To do the same in Postgres you have to figure out the structure of the pg_* system tables (which I spent the better part of a day trying to do with little success -- are these things even documented anywhere?)
Apparently though I was wrong in that the Perl API does work (thanks Bronster!). I don't really have first-hand experience with this in Perl (I do in Tcl and Python). I know that the Perl wrapper library that a guy in my company developed can extract table structures from MySQL but not Postgres. My mistake for jumping to conclusions. The fact remains though that it is much easier to create such an API for MySQL over Postgres.
I'm envious. It's broken on the Debian box of our only Postgres-using client, and it's also broken by default on Mandrake 7.2, which is what's running on our older linux machines. That's 75% of the systems I work with Postgres on. I agree with Bronster that this is a problem with the distro, not Postgres, but regardless of who's to blame, it hasn't helped warm me to working with PostgresI agree that feature for feature, Postgres is far superior. I agree that for serious database use, Postgres is the way to go. But my company develops web-based applications that have to work with both Postgres and MySQL. So all of the amazing stuff that Postgres can do and MySQL can't is pretty much useless to us, as we generally have to code to the lowest common denominator.
Oh, and thanks for the links to the online books. I'll check 'em out.
Al/
Ugh, painful!
Al/
And I never said it was safe. I wish I could remember more about why I did it that way, but unfortunately the source code is not well documented :-)
Back in the days of my 486, I even wrote a single-byte DOS program that was functional: reboot.com I leave it to the reader to figure out what it did :-)
What scares me off using something like apt-get is that my home computer is on a dial-up. I don't want to unleash some automated system that's going to go and stupidly try to jam 50MB worth of packages down my pipe. With RPMs I can control how much gets downloaded and when. And I have the nice SRPM fallback when things don't work.
How easy is Debian to maintain on a dial-up?
What one character tells another character is no basis whatsoever for criticising the realism of a movie. People lie or get things wrong in real life all the time, so why should it be any different in movies?
Maybe Morpheus lied to help motivate Neo. Maybe humans in the movie have an exaggerated, incomplete, or totally false understanding of their role in the Matrix. Why should anyone blindly accept Morpheus' battery explanation as the b-all-and-end-all of what is actually supposed to be going on in the movie?
It's like when all those lawyers got their knickers in a knot over the movie Double Jeopardy (woman convicted of killing husband, only he didn't really die, so now she can kill him with impunity as she's already been convicted of the crime) because the premise was legal hogwash (crimes are specific events, so it would not be the same crime). But the movie never actually got double jeopardy wrong; it was a character who got it wrong. Huge difference.
See http://www.brisray.co.uk/misc/mind.htm (scroll down) for more info.