I went back and looked at pushd again, and tcsh's implementation is really a lot better. It doesn't always echo dirs when you push, so tcsh's pushd is quieter, bash requires passing -P to cd to get it to behave, and bash's pushd doesn't have that option, and bash's pushd doesn't clear out duplicates in its stack.
The quirky scripting syntax aside, tcsh is a really feature-rich, mature shell. I miss it dearly in my heart of hearts.
I just made the switch this year after after being universally mocked for my shell choice for 8 years. I tried bash about every year to see if it could compete with tcsh, and for my purposes it only caught up this year. The default bash on OSX is still old and clunky. I set the following in my.inputrc to get tcsh-like esc-p completion:
"\ep": history-search-backward
Here are some other nice ones that conform to my former tcshrc:
set bell-style none
set completion-ignore-case on
set show-all-if-ambiguous on
set mark-symlinked-directories on
set print-completions-horizontally on
"\en": history-search-forward
"\t": menu-complete
"\C-d": delete-char-or-list
"\C-u": kill-whole-line
I'm surprised by how many longtime bash users just go with the default settings.
I'm happy to have made the switch, since Debian has some incredible completions in/etc/bash_completion, especially for apt-get and ant.
There are still some things that bug me about bash. If anyone knows how to handle them, please reply. I have a hard time writing completion scripts that return a value without appending a space at the end. That wasn't a problem with tcsh. I would like to be able to complete Java class names in a classpath, and I had that working well in tcsh.
I also don't like that it's difficult to control when bash appends a forward slash to directories. It catches me up when I'm removing symbolic links to directories, and the completion adds a forward slash at the end.
It also peeves me that bash escapes $ when I complete on a shell variable that is assigned to a directory. Tcsh would leave it alone, and I had a number of variables assigned to my project directories.
I'm also not happy with how pushd works. In tcsh, pushd without arguments goes to the home directory, and it's easy to alias cd to pushd.
Radiation, yes indeed! You hear the most outrageous lies about it. Half-baked goggle-boxed do-gooders telling everybody it's bad for you. Pernicious nonsense! Everybody could stand a hundred chest X-rays a year. They ought to have 'em too.
The disco bruit label put out a CD of Nanoloop compositions. The lineup is pretty incredible:
Blectum from Blechdom, DAT Politics, Hrvatski, Merzbow, Pita, and Stock, Hausen and Walkman among others. The music was too harsh for my tastes, but fans of Merzbow and Pita won't be disappointed.
In a free market, wages will decline as productivity improves, because the labor pool will become bigger as more people are unemployed. Total buying power doesn't increase unless wages do, so there isn't inherently a market for more stuff. An economy with a big pool of permanently unemployed or underemployed people dragging wages down is economically stable. Most of the third world is stuck in that mode. THe US is headed there.
Fortunately, the US maintains the largest percentage of its population in prison (about.07%), which keeps unemployment down and diminishes the size of the unskilled labor pool. We need to put more white collar criminals in prison to offer new opportunities at top management levels.
With a dynamic language such as Lisp, PHP, Perl, Tcl,...
After all these years, he's still miffed that tcl was displaced by Java in his AOLServer. I noticed that none of his students were using tcl either, which must have displeased him greatly.
Binding variables are trivial in Java if you prepare a statement. Here's what Greenspun himself has to say about it:
Note that JDBC, the Java database connectivity library, uses "?" as a bind variable. It is up to the programmer to count the Nth occurence of the ? in a SQL string and bind a value to that. As you can imagine this process becomes error-prone if the SQL statement contains 15 or more variables, a very common situation in real applications. You can also imagine the possibilities for introducing subtle bugs if the SQL query is changed and the bind variable sequence numbers are not properly updated.
So what he's saying then, is that his students are having a hard time counting!
Just because something is possible, doesn't mean that it makes any sense to do it. Flooz and Beenz couldn't give away their fake currency. Nobody wants micropayments.
The only people crying for micropayments are websites that produce "content" that's nearly worthless. If the content is worth something, people will make macropayments to subscribe. If the content is essentially worthless, consumers are not going to push to be charged an amount so small that they don't notice it until the end of the month, and deal with the password, account, and billing hassle of playing along.
If you're going to do that, you may as well tack on an ISP tax and create national grants for the weblog arts. It could be like all those cryptic fees tacked on to my phone bill that constitute half my monthly payment.
Oddly enough, it seems that the free market folks are the ones who insist most strongly that this has to exist. I think the market has spoken on micropayments.
The interesting thing about this story has nothing to do with eBay. Slashdot is linking to the Nation! Not Wired, Business 2.0, RedHerring, Fortune, or the IndustryStandard, but the Nation!
Someone needs to patent a few Internet fundraising techniques that apply to political campaigns and PACs. Then we'll see changes in the business patent policy.
My family doctor told me to get a "gripper" when my RSI first set in, and that's what finally put me over the edge. I'm now seeing a occupational medicine specialist, and she literally laughed at the "gripper" when I told her about it. RSI is not caused by lack of strength, it's caused by overuse. Adding 50 more reps to your hands is going to make things worse.
The best thing you can do to prevent RSI is take breaks on the computer and do aerobic exercise. Swimming, walking and elliptical stationary machines are the best, from my experience.
As for the original post, it's inhuman what the US does to meat processing workers. Unfortunately, being white doesn't make my now purple hands feel any better. Everyone needs access to affordable healthcare, physical therapy, and preventative medicine. The current administration's gutting OSHA and undermining its ergonomics recommendations was a terrible blow to everyone.
Sotz artists Komar and Melamid did similar research to create ideal paintings. They broke out their results by country. They did some work with music, as well.
After playing years of the Civ series, and finally a three day solid stint of Alpha Centauri, with about 8 hours total in breaks to sleep, I have severe RSI. It's still hurting me two years after that long weekend, and I really can't play games now (doctor's orders). How's that for affecting me?
I have an older Epia Eden, and I bought this case from case outlet. It comes with a brick power supply, and it was under $300 for the case, mainboard, and internal DVD. I pulled the fan out of the case, and there's only a heatsink on the CPU. I used memory I had laying around.
I picked up a 120G Seagate Barracuda IV for about $140. This drive is impressively quiet. I leave it running at night, and I can't hear it at all. I've had it running 24/7 for about eight months now.
The box makes less noise than my iMac, and it works well as a webserver, mailserver, printserver , and fileserver. It doesn't have the brushed aluminum look of the hush PC or the newer MB/CPU, but it's equally quiet and cost about $200 less.
I have two daughters. The younger just turned one. Here's what I wished someone had told me:
Complete or stabilize any projects you're working on at least a month early. Delivery dates are approximate.
Plan on putting any video games or other compulsive hobbies in storage for about a year.
Don't buy anything except diapers, a car seat, a sealed trashcan, and a half-dozen waterproof changing pads. Buy everything else as you need it.
Contrary to what others have said, the multifunction car seats are a pain. They don't fit infants well and they're not portable. You want something you can take out of your car while your kid's asleep. The infant seats are pretty cheap, anyway.
Support nursing. It's better nutritionally, you don't have to do any prep, and it's emotionally good for the kid.
If one of you can stay home, do it. If not, prepare for battle. My wife and I both tried to work from home when our first was born, and we fought constantly over whose time is a priority. The kid is a full time job, one that you shouldn't trust to anyone else because nobody will do a better job than you will.
If you think you can't afford to stay home, double check your priorities. My brother's been saying he can't afford it, but when I suggested he stop maxing out his 401k for a year or two, he flipped. Same with deferring his wife's student loans. Most people can afford it but aren't willing to make any sacrifices. Kids are actually pretty cheap for the first few years if you avoid daycare.
Ignore all the baby books on the market. I've gone through 3 that were considered the best, and my wife did half a dozen. They're all heavily politically motivated (your infant needs independence -- daycare -- is a common theme in the newer ones) or smeared with psychoanalitical garbage. The mothering magazines are lousy, too.
By all means do not bake the birthday cake in the What to Expect in the First Year book! I know several people who tried it, including myself, and there's no way to make anything except a brick. It makes fruitcake look fluffy. It is a curse on our generation that will spoil far too many first birthdays.
The second time around, my wife and I dumped the crib and got a second bed for my wife and new daughter. My wife can keep my daughter asleep most days until about 8, and when she was first born, they stayed in bed most of the day sleeping. They were considerably happier, and needless to say, I sleep well. Co-sleeping, as the pros call it, should only be a problem if you're massively overweight or drink heavily. Keep the baby on its back and away from blankets. Even if you don't set out to sleep with your infant, you'll end up doing it anyway.
Prepare to be amazed at how child-unfriendly US society is.
SonicBlue's Pearl plays Ogg. It was demoed at CES this year, so it should be on the streets by this fall. A SonicBlue employee reported
on RioWorld that it supports Ogg. It also has an ethernet base, which is unusual and forward thinking.
1. Ars should have put a medical warning up front. They give all sorts of disclaimers when they discuss overclocking and hardware modifications. Splinting is a physical modification and should be taken as seriously.
2. The review treated the splints like a new MS mouse, video card, or other general use computing accessory, which they are not. The reviewer didn't offer much context for his medical condition, and his method of testing them (12 hours+ for over 3 weeks?) could be damaging. They're medical devices and don't need burn-in.
3. Their treatment/resource section at the end was heavily biased toward surgery. There was very little on the proper techniques to prevent RSI. Ars has done incredibly detailed and informative reviews of new technology (OSX, CPUs) and this was really weak, given the serious nature of the topic.
4. They lump hand conditions together as "Carpal Tunnel", which is outdated and misleading. There are a number of hand injuries that can be caused by overcomputing. Carpal Tunnel Syndrome is only one of them.
5. The Ars forum has a couple bad suggestions, which could cause additional damage to an injured person. Ars should have consulted a medical expert to dispel some myths up front.
To clarify, my 15 point "treatment plan" isn't really treatment, and I hope nobody takes it as medical advice. I'm not a doctor, and the points I listed are preventative measures that I've informally discovered through my own research and discussion with my doctor.
Check out the Ars forum and give them the hits they deserve for at least addressing the subject. I'd like to see them do a
an in-depth follow-up with their usual thoroughness.
Nothing sucks worse that people who mock up systems in Access, then pat themselves on the back for saving huge amounts of development time.
I don't mean to attack you personally, since you understand that there's a difference between a mock up in Access and a real GUI/DB implementation. Your tech lead was probably just trying to make you suffer for blurring the difference.
The reason the techs take a few months to create something is that it results in maintainable, scalable, and possibly reusable code (if they're good). I don't have a problem with RAD tools, and Excel/Access can be great for that sort of thing, but I'd never want to use them for more than on-the-fly number crunching.
If you had your tech people replaced and did everything with Access, you'd eventually have to hire back Access developers to maintain your queries, forms, and VB, once you started doing serious work instead of simple SQL.
I had to do Access programming in the past, and I currently have a Access hugger architect managing me, so I speak from experience.
He flips every time I make an estimate (though he admits later that my estimates are right) because he knows that he can do it in half the time in Access. The problem is, the product is in Java, not in Access, and I write unit tests for everything I do. After I write code I have to build, test in staging, update everything in CVS, and the rest of the process of software development that Access folk just don't understand.
> if the damn PC makers would embrace SCSI, then the cost of SCSI would come down to near parity from the volume of sales.
This just isn't the case. Apple products used SCSI exclusively for at least a decade and sold a pretty high volume of them. There were even SCSI scanners and a whole slew of SCSI external drives before USB. I still have an Adaptec SCSI card that came free with a scanner. All this never made a dent in SCSI prices.
SCSI had its chance on the desktop and blew it.
I'm writing this on a SCSI-based box, so I know how smooth-n-creamy the SCSI experience is. The problem was, SCSI had to be cheap before it would be adopted over IDE, not the other way around. Now more than ever the performance doesn't justify the price, unless you have an IT budget.
Slashdot Mirror
The quirky scripting syntax aside, tcsh is a really feature-rich, mature shell. I miss it dearly in my heart of hearts.
"\ep": history-search-backward
Here are some other nice ones that conform to my former tcshrc:
set bell-style none
set completion-ignore-case on
set show-all-if-ambiguous on
set mark-symlinked-directories on
set print-completions-horizontally on
"\en": history-search-forward
"\t": menu-complete
"\C-d": delete-char-or-list
"\C-u": kill-whole-line
I'm surprised by how many longtime bash users just go with the default settings.
I'm happy to have made the switch, since Debian has some incredible completions in /etc/bash_completion, especially for apt-get and ant.
There are still some things that bug me about bash. If anyone knows how to handle them, please reply. I have a hard time writing completion scripts that return a value without appending a space at the end. That wasn't a problem with tcsh. I would like to be able to complete Java class names in a classpath, and I had that working well in tcsh.
I also don't like that it's difficult to control when bash appends a forward slash to directories. It catches me up when I'm removing symbolic links to directories, and the completion adds a forward slash at the end.
It also peeves me that bash escapes $ when I complete on a shell variable that is assigned to a directory. Tcsh would leave it alone, and I had a number of variables assigned to my project directories.
I'm also not happy with how pushd works. In tcsh, pushd without arguments goes to the home directory, and it's easy to alias cd to pushd.
Radiation, yes indeed! You hear the most outrageous lies about it. Half-baked goggle-boxed do-gooders telling everybody it's bad for you. Pernicious nonsense! Everybody could stand a hundred chest X-rays a year. They ought to have 'em too.
I can tell you one thing, around my house Fritz is definitely winning. I ceded in the man vs machine battle a long time ago.
The disco bruit label put out a CD of Nanoloop compositions. The lineup is pretty incredible: Blectum from Blechdom, DAT Politics, Hrvatski, Merzbow, Pita, and Stock, Hausen and Walkman among others. The music was too harsh for my tastes, but fans of Merzbow and Pita won't be disappointed.
Sorry, I put the decimal in the wrong place. It's 0.7% of the population in jail, 2 million out of 281 million in the 50 states.
In a free market, wages will decline as productivity improves, because the labor pool will become bigger as more people are unemployed. Total buying power doesn't increase unless wages do, so there isn't inherently a market for more stuff. An economy with a big pool of permanently unemployed or underemployed people dragging wages down is economically stable. Most of the third world is stuck in that mode. THe US is headed there.
Fortunately, the US maintains the largest percentage of its population in prison (about .07%), which keeps unemployment down and diminishes the size of the unskilled labor pool. We need to put more white collar criminals in prison to offer new opportunities at top management levels.
With a dynamic language such as Lisp, PHP, Perl, Tcl, ...
After all these years, he's still miffed that tcl was displaced by Java in his AOLServer. I noticed that none of his students were using tcl either, which must have displeased him greatly.
Binding variables are trivial in Java if you prepare a statement. Here's what Greenspun himself has to say about it:
Note that JDBC, the Java database connectivity library, uses "?" as a bind variable. It is up to the programmer to count the Nth occurence of the ? in a SQL string and bind a value to that. As you can imagine this process becomes error-prone if the SQL statement contains 15 or more variables, a very common situation in real applications. You can also imagine the possibilities for introducing subtle bugs if the SQL query is changed and the bind variable sequence numbers are not properly updated.
So what he's saying then, is that his students are having a hard time counting!
The only people crying for micropayments are websites that produce "content" that's nearly worthless. If the content is worth something, people will make macropayments to subscribe. If the content is essentially worthless, consumers are not going to push to be charged an amount so small that they don't notice it until the end of the month, and deal with the password, account, and billing hassle of playing along.
If you're going to do that, you may as well tack on an ISP tax and create national grants for the weblog arts. It could be like all those cryptic fees tacked on to my phone bill that constitute half my monthly payment.
Oddly enough, it seems that the free market folks are the ones who insist most strongly that this has to exist. I think the market has spoken on micropayments.
The interesting thing about this story has nothing to do with eBay. Slashdot is linking to the Nation! Not Wired, Business 2.0, RedHerring, Fortune, or the IndustryStandard, but the Nation!
And don't forget AppleTalk! Everyone always forgets AppleTalk.
Someone needs to patent a few Internet fundraising techniques that apply to political campaigns and PACs. Then we'll see changes in the business patent policy.
The best thing you can do to prevent RSI is take breaks on the computer and do aerobic exercise. Swimming, walking and elliptical stationary machines are the best, from my experience.
As for the original post, it's inhuman what the US does to meat processing workers. Unfortunately, being white doesn't make my now purple hands feel any better. Everyone needs access to affordable healthcare, physical therapy, and preventative medicine. The current administration's gutting OSHA and undermining its ergonomics recommendations was a terrible blow to everyone.
Whenever a company has multiple family members as executive officers, you know you're in for trouble.
Sotz artists Komar and Melamid did similar research to create ideal paintings. They broke out their results by country. They did some work with music, as well.
After playing years of the Civ series, and finally a three day solid stint of Alpha Centauri, with about 8 hours total in breaks to sleep, I have severe RSI. It's still hurting me two years after that long weekend, and I really can't play games now (doctor's orders). How's that for affecting me?
I picked up a 120G Seagate Barracuda IV for about $140. This drive is impressively quiet. I leave it running at night, and I can't hear it at all. I've had it running 24/7 for about eight months now.
The box makes less noise than my iMac, and it works well as a webserver, mailserver, printserver , and fileserver. It doesn't have the brushed aluminum look of the hush PC or the newer MB/CPU, but it's equally quiet and cost about $200 less.
Complete or stabilize any projects you're working on at least a month early. Delivery dates are approximate.
Plan on putting any video games or other compulsive hobbies in storage for about a year.
Don't buy anything except diapers, a car seat, a sealed trashcan, and a half-dozen waterproof changing pads. Buy everything else as you need it.
Contrary to what others have said, the multifunction car seats are a pain. They don't fit infants well and they're not portable. You want something you can take out of your car while your kid's asleep. The infant seats are pretty cheap, anyway.
Support nursing. It's better nutritionally, you don't have to do any prep, and it's emotionally good for the kid.
If one of you can stay home, do it. If not, prepare for battle. My wife and I both tried to work from home when our first was born, and we fought constantly over whose time is a priority. The kid is a full time job, one that you shouldn't trust to anyone else because nobody will do a better job than you will.
If you think you can't afford to stay home, double check your priorities. My brother's been saying he can't afford it, but when I suggested he stop maxing out his 401k for a year or two, he flipped. Same with deferring his wife's student loans. Most people can afford it but aren't willing to make any sacrifices. Kids are actually pretty cheap for the first few years if you avoid daycare.
Still not convinced? See Harry Harlow's hideous experiments. Full-time daycare for infants == wire monkey.
Ignore all the baby books on the market. I've gone through 3 that were considered the best, and my wife did half a dozen. They're all heavily politically motivated (your infant needs independence -- daycare -- is a common theme in the newer ones) or smeared with psychoanalitical garbage. The mothering magazines are lousy, too.
By all means do not bake the birthday cake in the What to Expect in the First Year book! I know several people who tried it, including myself, and there's no way to make anything except a brick. It makes fruitcake look fluffy. It is a curse on our generation that will spoil far too many first birthdays.
The second time around, my wife and I dumped the crib and got a second bed for my wife and new daughter. My wife can keep my daughter asleep most days until about 8, and when she was first born, they stayed in bed most of the day sleeping. They were considerably happier, and needless to say, I sleep well. Co-sleeping, as the pros call it, should only be a problem if you're massively overweight or drink heavily. Keep the baby on its back and away from blankets. Even if you don't set out to sleep with your infant, you'll end up doing it anyway.
Prepare to be amazed at how child-unfriendly US society is.
SonicBlue's Pearl plays Ogg. It was demoed at CES this year, so it should be on the streets by this fall. A SonicBlue employee reported on RioWorld that it supports Ogg. It also has an ethernet base, which is unusual and forward thinking.
If it ever comes out, someone will probably port Mac on Linux to it.
IBM was already in the PDA market. They had a rebranded Palm device.
1. Ars should have put a medical warning up front. They give all sorts of disclaimers when they discuss overclocking and hardware modifications. Splinting is a physical modification and should be taken as seriously.
2. The review treated the splints like a new MS mouse, video card, or other general use computing accessory, which they are not. The reviewer didn't offer much context for his medical condition, and his method of testing them (12 hours+ for over 3 weeks?) could be damaging. They're medical devices and don't need burn-in.
3. Their treatment/resource section at the end was heavily biased toward surgery. There was very little on the proper techniques to prevent RSI. Ars has done incredibly detailed and informative reviews of new technology (OSX, CPUs) and this was really weak, given the serious nature of the topic.
4. They lump hand conditions together as "Carpal Tunnel", which is outdated and misleading. There are a number of hand injuries that can be caused by overcomputing. Carpal Tunnel Syndrome is only one of them.
5. The Ars forum has a couple bad suggestions, which could cause additional damage to an injured person. Ars should have consulted a medical expert to dispel some myths up front.
To clarify, my 15 point "treatment plan" isn't really treatment, and I hope nobody takes it as medical advice. I'm not a doctor, and the points I listed are preventative measures that I've informally discovered through my own research and discussion with my doctor.
Check out the Ars forum and give them the hits they deserve for at least addressing the subject. I'd like to see them do a an in-depth follow-up with their usual thoroughness.
I don't mean to attack you personally, since you understand that there's a difference between a mock up in Access and a real GUI/DB implementation. Your tech lead was probably just trying to make you suffer for blurring the difference.
The reason the techs take a few months to create something is that it results in maintainable, scalable, and possibly reusable code (if they're good). I don't have a problem with RAD tools, and Excel/Access can be great for that sort of thing, but I'd never want to use them for more than on-the-fly number crunching.
If you had your tech people replaced and did everything with Access, you'd eventually have to hire back Access developers to maintain your queries, forms, and VB, once you started doing serious work instead of simple SQL.
I had to do Access programming in the past, and I currently have a Access hugger architect managing me, so I speak from experience.
He flips every time I make an estimate (though he admits later that my estimates are right) because he knows that he can do it in half the time in Access. The problem is, the product is in Java, not in Access, and I write unit tests for everything I do. After I write code I have to build, test in staging, update everything in CVS, and the rest of the process of software development that Access folk just don't understand.
This just isn't the case. Apple products used SCSI exclusively for at least a decade and sold a pretty high volume of them. There were even SCSI scanners and a whole slew of SCSI external drives before USB. I still have an Adaptec SCSI card that came free with a scanner. All this never made a dent in SCSI prices.
SCSI had its chance on the desktop and blew it.
I'm writing this on a SCSI-based box, so I know how smooth-n-creamy the SCSI experience is. The problem was, SCSI had to be cheap before it would be adopted over IDE, not the other way around. Now more than ever the performance doesn't justify the price, unless you have an IT budget.
> The release date was 9-30. Is this is a news site or what? /. was waiting for C|Net to report on it so they'd have somewhere to link to.