My indirect points through my initial reply are twofold.
1) Its ironic that it is now more difficult and easier to get a hold of people at the same time. More numbers to know or dial. People can be more selective with caller id. etc. I try to be as simple as I can. I tell almost everybody that my phone number is my cell. Many times, they keep asking for more phone numbers. Work? My work gives me a cell phone so they can reach me, that is my work number. Home? I take my cellphone home with me, isn't that good enough? I have a home phone because my cell is owned by my work. Its stupid to have 2 cell phones. I would go nuts! Also my home phone is good for general gabbing, although I only do that with my family (their choice not mine) and one friend that lives out of the state. Its cheaper and more reliable than a cell.
2) The "important" thing that I kept bringing up. I'm just as guilty as the other guy that thinks that other things besides having food, shelter, and people are important. They are not, but we sometimes get wrapped up, angry, frustrated, and depressed over these unimportant things. I find it amusing when all of this "important" stuff is going on, and how all of it comes to a halt when something like a hurricane comes through. Its only at times like these, when people realize what is really important. At least for a short period of time.
First, contrary to popular belief, the sig on the back of the card is not there for identification purposes, but rather to indicate that you accept the terms of your cardholder agreement. If you do not sign the card, you cannot legally use it. Period.
My cards say SEE ID on them as well.
Since I'm using the card illegally, what does that mean?
Am I committing a crime?
Or am I actually responsible for the terms of the credit card, and owe them money and stuff or not?
I think the whole signature thing is stupid. I asked one merchant about them, and she said that she just throws them out at the end of the day. I've been told that you cannot say "I didn't charge that, can I see the signature?" and get out of paying for something (that could be wrong).
Rarely do people check my signature that says SEE ID. Being that a signature is anything, that could be my signature. I've seen worse.
... enough for me to hope he's still being anal raped by some large man named Bubba.
Dude. Regardless of him getting caught, its pretty clear that you were and are much better off, even considering what he did "to you". Even though (I'm assuming here) he didn't know you or do it intentionally to you.
Nobody deserves to be raped. To me its the most degrading thing you can do to a person. The only thing I can think of thats in the same ballpark or worse is torture over time. Rape is not a sexual thing, its a power thing. In prison, you don't have too much power over jack anymore, so establishing dominance over others that is not easily punishable is a thing to do. Rape is one best way to establish said power, and there are few consequences involved.
I've been in jail once for a nonviolent offense in which nobody was hurt, and one morning I was brushing my teeth and out of corner of my right eye I saw a large man, maybe named Bubba, that was looking out of my cell door "to see if the coast was clear". I was terrified, but I had to do something, so I asked him "What's up?" He kept looking, and I heard some people outside in the common area picking a fight or whatever. He was just trying to stay out of it, but let me tell you, I was very scared.
As I said, the whole time you were indirectly and directly involved with this guy, he was already worse off than you. There is no reason to add insult to injury. Maybe this happened to you to teach you some compassion for people. I dunno. But wishing rape on anybody, is pretty fucked up in my opinion.
Actually, my credit cards send these damn checks to me all the time. I have been tempted to ask them what happens if someone takes them and uses them. If I'm responsible for them sending basically cash in the mail that I am responsible for, I would like for them to stop endangering me financially. If they are responsible, who wants to go shopping with me?
Thanks for the flash video link. I thought I would never have said that, but I did.
Reminds me of the days when I used WindowMaker. WindowMaker was also a GNUStep project, and a damn good window manager at the time.
I welcome a more "UNIXy" desktop environment vs KDE or Gnome. To me, those are way too much like the Microsoft Windows interface. Personally, I don't like any of them. Honestly, all GUIs nowadays seem really dated when compared to OS X. Yeah, yeah, call me a fanboy or zealot, but for the look and feel, OS X is pretty slick.
Now that I mentioned OS X, what does it take to come up with a good interface like that? Its pretty much completely different than other GUIs I have used. Things like the way each application has all of their windows grouped together. An application can only be launched once, and doing something like launching an application that is already running, but has no windows in it will open up a new window. Working drag and drop. A working clipboard. A common look and feel between applicatons. The list goes on.
GUI land on UNIX has always been a little lacking. I've been writing and talking about this for many years now. There are many issues, but here are some that I can think of:
Fragmented GUI widget sets. This is big. You have KDE and Gnome. Motif. Xlib. Xaw. Xaw3d, XawWindows95wannabe. You name it. This has to stop.
The whole X server thing. Its a great idea, and has lasted for a long time, but I think its done. The only saving grace I think it has is the ability to remotely run an application and display it and interface it locally. The downside is that local applications are pretty much like remote applications. The graphics are not smooth and jerky at times. They flicker, and just are not as good as graphics on MS Windows or OS X or even a console game. I think X should die. Keep around a compatible way to run X apps like you have for Windows or OS X (hopefully, much better than the OS X way), but there needs to be a new and better integrated and featurefull GUI environment. Kinda like the KDE or Gnome "desktop environment", but a little more low level, and better. It should only have X ability for backwards compatibility, but ditch it from there.
Watched male and female humans in their late teens to mid 20's when they really want a "piece of the action"?
Its almost amusing! Like watching the waggle dance of a bee or something.
Seriously, if your in that age group, do whatever your hormones tell you to do. But for us outside of that, you guys and gals are really funny.
And yes, I've "been there done that". It seemed right at the time (hormones again). But humans when they are at their most "animal-like" are pretty funny. Fights can be a part of it, but those are funny too all to themselves.
Really? I have 4 right now (home, office, cell, fax). Maybe I should quit work. That would at least eliminate one number...
You have a dedicated fax line at home? (I don't count that as a phone number, but other's may differ in opinion).
Personally, I recommend quitting work, but that's your call.
I dunno, we are talking about having the "connection lines open". Your office phone only works when your in your office. Unless its a general company number, and then its only valid when your at work. Your home number only works, when your home, unless you have a PBX or something.
At least for me, my cell phone in my pocket works when its turned on, and when its off or I ignore the call, its for a reason. I have caller ID. Calling my cell and another number right after that is not going to work. Tried many times, failed every time. Pissed me off every time too. Doubly so if you leave a voice mail at both numbers.
My land line is only for outgoing calls, and long distance incoming calls when I'm going to be on the phone for a while. These people know proper phone etiquette. Otherwise, people try the phone that is in my pocket. Seems to make more sense to call the most likely phone that is nearest to me, but others can be more creative if they try.
I guess I could always tell my wife to schedule any important calls so as to not call while I might be driving. Yes, that sounds like it might work...
Granted, I'm not married and never have been probably never will be, but I've _never_ received an important phone call. Other people thought it was important enough to leave 10 voice mails saying the same unimportant thing ("call me, its important!"), but other than that I don't know what an important phone call could consist of. Somebody dying, I guess. But if I'm driving the opposite direction and am more than 10 or so minutes away, I don't see where I can do anything. I'm not that important I guess.
'more' on commercial UNIXes has been able to do that for ages (though in Solaris and MP-RAS you have to use/usr/xpg4/bin/more instead)
I love and hate solaris for that. Actually, I think I more love it, because Solaris is _very_ slow to change, and that means to us, much fewer surprises. I didn't know (or care) that/usr/xpg4/bin/more could go backwards. Less has been around what, 20 years now. Less is more:)
It's only linux that's dragged behind on this.
I've never really depended on more, because less has always been around. But I checked the more manpage for an older linux distro, RH 7.1, and the manpage says that you can go backwards with b or ^b, I guess it works.
most distros complain that nslookup 'depreciated' and should use dig - nslookup is still the standard on other UNIXes
Yeah, what is up with that? OS X does it too. Its obnoxious, and I will use nslookup until it says "command not found".
head and tail complain that should be using the -n argument instead of the normal "head -#" like UNIX has had for decades. Why???
I've never seen that. That sucks too.
hells wont properly parse:
echo "one two three" | while read blah ; do echo $blah ; done which it will on all other UNIXes.
Works for me(tm). I use zsh, I just tried bash and it works. If a shell can't do that, that is completely broken, and I don't know how that can go unnoticed.
At this time, I use many scripts and whatever on OS X, Linux, and Solaris that have no real surprises. All are good. I'm not trying to advocate Linux to do something that it can't, but/bin/sh, which is bash, is pretty good as/bin/sh (OS X and Linux here). From what I gather it is supposed to be completely Borne shell compliant when called 'sh'. I'm not a bash advocate, but it seems to work OK as far as I've ever known.
(I didn't know this until I learned emacs many years ago and realized that C-a and C-e worked in bash too. Then I noticed, hey, so does C-t, C-p, C-n, etc. C-r [isearch-reverse] is now my favorite bash feature, thanks to emacs. I always like it when learning one thing [emacs] makes another easier [bash].)
As for vi, I know how to do basic stuff in it, but it basically upsets me. I have a wrt54g that doesn't have emacs on it and editing config files is a PITA. Why doesn't vi let me go to the end of the line by pressing, say, end or going to the end of a shorter line and then pressing the up arrow? Irritating. I know a vi guru is going to explain how to do this now, but I don't really care about the answer. What am I going to do the next time I'm stuck in vi and have a problem? (Hint: ESC:q!
Disclaimer, I don't care what you or my neighbors use for a text editor, nor do I care what kind of toilet you prefer to take a dump in. Its not that big of a deal.
I will say, that I find it a little strange that shells come with emacs bindings, when vi is kinda the default. I'm saying this because vi (or for some historical reason, ex) is the default editor and bindings in things like less and more. Aside from ^e and ^a, I don't know any other emacs commands. I do know that most shells will take vi commandline editing commands. Honestly, I forgot how to do this in my shell, zsh. Or maybe its the default. One of the things I like about zsh is that it is the only shell that correctly does multiline editing in vi mode, or at least it was. bash was unusable and broken at least in the past, there is no reason to change now.
Oh, and going to the end of the line and beginning of the line in vi uses the carat ^ to the beginning and $ to go to the end. I've never tried keys that are on the dark side of the keyboard (where my hands aren't), so I don't know about that. The ^ and $ are not that foreign, because they are used to denote the beginning and end of lines in regular expressions. Intuitive? No. Easy to remember and associate with other stuff that I do every day, yup.
As for vi, I know how to do basic stuff in it, but it basically upsets me. I have a wrt54g that doesn't have emacs on it and editing config files is a PITA.
Again, I don't care. But I will say that emacs is not a standard UNIX thing, vi is. vim, my favorite editor, is not. I too have to deal with using "plain vi" sometimes. Its close, but certainly no cigar. I will say, that it is frustrating to work with someone that does not know vi at all. I'm not saying guru, but at least the basics. I would say that ^ and $ are a little beyond the basics, but it is something that someone should be able to pick up and remember after the first time of hearing about it.
Again, vi, vim, or emacs are not better. vim and emacs have been in active development and used extensively over the years. They are both powerful editors. But everybody needs to learn the basics of vi if they are going to be using UNIX systems. Its one of those things. You do not have to like it.
Wow, this AC must have never used vi or vim:) I guess j,k, and / are the most commonly used in command mode, even though / kinda puts you in ex mode because its at the bottom, but I believe all ex commands begin with a :
In a nutshell, most every letter and number on the keyboard has a use, and they are case sensitive.
vim has "IDE" like qualities. You can do:make and it will execute make and open up the warnings and/or errors that you want, but I haven't used that in years.
Check out the documentation. Its excellent. Yes, emacs can edit a text file too, so can many other programs. I personally like a moded editor, and things like being able to copy text above and below the cursor, quick and dirty, yet powerful macros. Yes, I know that at least with some lisp thrown in, emacs can do anything, yes, I've used vip or whatever the vi mode in emacs is. Lets not go there. They both are strong text editors.
[rs]sh - enables me to go places w/o passwords, copy files, and remotely execute commands. I can't live without it
cron - does my work for me while I sleep, and mails me the results in the morning
grep - the filter of filters. Keeps down the signal to noise ratio
less - the pager of pagers. With a proper lessopen/pipe, you can do what no man has done before. You can go backwards in files, although I guess some 'more's can do this now. Less always can. It also highlights text searches so I don't have to search for what I just searched for.
man - that's where they hide the documentation. Shame on those that only provide info, text, or worst, html documentation (or none)
perl - anything that any other command cannot do, or cannot do well enough, perl can with some coaching.
rsync - although its binary diff algorithm is not very good, rsync is close to heavenly, especially
when teamed with [rs]sh and cron
telnet - no, I never telnet to login to a machine, but I do it to test if a port is open, what's listening there, etc. very handy.
vim - good editor, I can live with vi, but that makes me a little grumpy. I simply do not know or care to learn emacs. Its just a text editor.
zsh - excellent shell. Very user friendly, consistent error messages, powerful. It can do anything any other shell can do and more. I understan d that bash has made some progress over the years, but zsh is my friend.
/dev/null - where I put all of my important stuff. So should you!
Honorable mention -/bin/sh Only because it is always there by definition on UNIX systems, and a good shell programming language. tcsh, csh, and zsh are not as good as/bin/sh, and its always available, but a little boring to write about.
interesting, never heard of that. Personally, I don't like it, but I know some people prefer it. Its not that big of a deal because it does have to be declared with a type.
Out of curiosity, does C99 or has C++ ever figured out the scope of a variable declared inside of a for statement like that?
To me, it should be in the current calling scope, so it is available after the bracket (if used) after the for loop. But some interpretations only make it available within the loop.
Keeping your cell phone powered off defeats part of the purpose of having it (someone can contact you wherever you are). A better solution is to also have a pager. Keep the phone off, receive a page, turn on the phone and return the call.
Argggg.
First, it is unsafe and soon to be illegal to talk on the phone when your driving. Second, every cell phone service I know of has the option of having voice mail which works when the phone is off or on. Third, I think its obnoxious when people have 15 different phone numbers and pagers in order to get in touch with them. Anything beyond one is unnecessary. The only exception would be for those that want to separate work/personal or something similar.
Last. If anybody is that important that they need to stop what they are doing at any given time while driving (presumably to somewhere for some reason), then I respect your importance, and you should just stay at home or some other safe location where you are less likely to get hurt or injured (driving is about number one there). I can't believe that anybody that important is allowed to drive a car. That makes no sense to me.
I know there are two camps about dupes. One is a little more benevolent, "Yeah, they do it, we know it, but that is pretty much OK". The other is, "Why don't the people who run this site know their content or are to dumb or lazy to do a simple search like the one above?"
I fall in the later category. The slashdot guys might actually be that dumb or lazy to know how to use google. If thats the case, oh well.
To me, its simply unprofessional and I am embarrassed for the editors. They apparently lack this emotion.
The thing is -- I don't have a problem with dupes. Hell, 99% of the articles are dupes. Anything close to mentioning the RIAA is going to be about the same, any Linux vs Windows TCO article is about the same, there's the tin foiled hat stuff, SCO, etc.
I'm just saying, that all the slashdot guys have to do is either read their daddypants mail that we paying members of this site send to you before an article is released in the wild, do a 10 second google search, or something, and just put a blurb to say "Yeah, we covered this before here and here is new information.
One of two of those simple things that are already in place. That is all I ask.
Its different when you have a conversation with someone and you repeat a story because you don't remember telling the story to that particular person. But this is an electronic document that is searchable.
To me, this really does negatively affect the slashdot experience that I love so much. To me, this is unprofessional. To me, this is completely unnecessary. To me, it is important.
After all this time, and it still keeps happening. I really wonder if this is some kind of a joke or attention getting trick. I don't know because I have not discussed this with any of the editors, but this appears to be some kind of collective behavioral/psychological problem of the editors. Clearly, it is not a technological one.
You don't consider the possibility of a flu outbreak, combined with the rather limited supplies of Tamiflu, a potential problem?
Sure, its a potential problem. So are illegally (or against an agreement) obtained weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a non-benevolent dictator. A large asteroid hitting the Earth is a potential problem. The airline mechanic who ran out of crack and is a little on edge is a potential problem. There are many potential problems.
Again, with my "event" vs "news" thesis. This is not even an event, but a potential event that is always a potential, and like a regular event that is not news, there is nothing that can be done by your average, above average, or below average person. This is fear based propaganda. This is not news.
Now, I know SARS was overhyped to death when it wasn't much of a problem, but given what I've read about avian flu, it seems like it really could be a problem.
What information do you have about it not being a big deal? I'm curious.
None. I don't care. I'm a computer geek, not a health expert. I have no experience with mass disease outbreak aside from what I have read about previous plagues or the AIDS issue in Africa and other places.
Now, lets take this a bit further. Information on the news about lets say AIDS could be news. Lets erase the past for the minute, and pretend that AIDS is a brand new illness and it is now known that it a) is sexually transmitted or transmitted via other bodily fluids like blood b) it has a long gestation period and people can potentially be carriers without being sick, which means that people can give you the virus without any indications that the person has the virus c) it can kill you d) basic precautions like wearing gloves for health care people and using condoms during sex can greatly decrease the likelihood of contracting the virus.
That is news. Problem, description, and solution.
Broadcasting about a potential pandemic, is gossip.
Although, the bottom entries don't seem very "pandemicly" to me. SARS killed 800 people. That should not be on the list. Neither should the "Hong Kong" flu. 34,000 Americans dead. The good old regular flu kills what, 20,000 a year.
ASF movies were floating around in the 200MB range (2+ hours) on IRC in the late 1990s. Why couldn't news broadcasts be put out (~45 mins) in the same format for less than 100MB?
Cost/benefit.
Its not uncommon for even a decent commercial website to persevere a good slashdotting. Granted, this was a very extreme example, but during the events on 9/11/01, all of the big brandname internet news sites were completely down. And this is with well less than 1 meg of information from the site at a time. 100 megs to be delivered to each person on a daily basis is a bunch of data at this time.
Now, adopting the evil p2p model, this is entirely possible right now, but these people do not participate in evil.
Unfortunately, I know of no news program on television that really displays such a thing. Sure, there may be some real news here or there, but overall, content is not the important thing here. I personally consider loading CNN's webpage as amusement. I look at it just to know what other people see and think is "news". The current big headline is about a flu pandemic. Ohhhh, scary. If yesterday wasn't halloween, a headline like this might be more effective.
Regarding the age of the anchor people, that is a tough one. Younger people do not consider the words of older people as really authoritative. This is a trend that has been going on for about 30 years plus or minus. My guess is that technology (gadgets) has everything to do with it.
Why should a younger person trust another when they can't even record a program on their VCR?
Thats an older example, but still relevant. I heard of a study from 12+ years ago, that said that the lower your education the more likely you are to be able to program your VCR. The highschool dropout was the most likely, and the PhD was the least likely.
Back to news. I believe that there is a difference between news and events. Events are simply things that happen, like me typing this on a keyboard. News is current information about events that is relevant to someone. By having that new information, someone can think about and/or do something different vs not having that information.
At least where I live, the local news almost always has the "random death and crime" segment. Where they go locally and across the nation and world talking about how somebody might have killed somebody, robbed them, died in a car pileup, or something similar.
Those my friends are purely events, not news. There is nothing anybody can do with that information. Especially when one considers that crime is at an all time low at this time in the US. In the grand picture, those events are even less significant than they could have been, but its still a favorite segment of the televised news.
I'm not sure how to end this rant, so I'll keep rambling. I also read during the 2004 election, that the people that were most informed about the election were people that got their news from places like the "Daily Show". Its a comedy/parody of news with a very sarcastic slant, but if people are getting more relevant news from a source that is not even news when compared to the real news -- to me that says volumes.
How can you be surprised by the success of the video iPod when there are enough people out there willing to pay money to change how their telephone sounds when it rings that it has become a $300 million-a-year business?
In the world of wasting yer money on stupid, ephemeral stuff for digital gizmos...
In 2000, Americans spent $60 billion on carbonated soft drinks. linky. That is flavored sugar water with the addition of carbon dioxide that costs something like pennies a gallon to make. They have no nutritional value, are not very effective in quenching thirst, and are bad for your teeth and stomach.
People should spend more money on rigntones in my opinion.
Everytime some slashdork bitches about how a CD costs $20 for 60 minutes while a DVD costs $20 for 120 minutes or more and what a ripoff a CD is, I want to slap them silly; the two things have nothing in common other than size and shape.
They have tons in common. They are both entertainment/art forms. The difference is one has video and potentially better quality and/or alternate audio tracks. Potentially different video tracks as well.
I'm not going to look up the products and easily karmawhore myself. But look up the most recent releases by Led Zeppelin on CD and DVD. Almost 2x the music on the DVD, I believe 3 audio encodings (DTS, DD, and PCM stereo maybe 24bit, check for yourself).
Again, check for yourself, but I believe that the DVD is less than the CD.
The amount of time and effort that went into the production between the two cannot be anywhere near the same.
Where does all of this money go?
I purposely pick the Zeppelin disks for a reason. They are both by the same band. They are both old material. They both came out about the same time, maybe exactly the same time. The video was not released in theaters, so there is no additional revenue unlike a typical motion picture.
I'm sorry, but there is not that much work that goes into recording and distributing an album. I'm not trying to undermine the audio engineers and artists. Its the labels that I'm pointing the finger at. I record music in my home, go to many concerts, I've been to two recording studios, and have been friends with musicians over the years. No, I can't create recordings as good as a professional studio can yet. But I will say that I can come pretty damn close, and I only have about $6,000 in equipment including my multipurpose computer.
I really, really, really believe that music is too expensive. I have not bought a CD in years because I don't believe they are worth it. Don't get me wrong, I do have about 500 or 600 gigs of music on my computer, but 99% of it is freely available live recordings of concerts.
I'm so glad that Madonna can show me the meaning of her latest club shit, or that Britney Spears can take that electronic noise she (allegedly) vomits out in the studio and dress it up with tight leather clothes. Now I can keep all that wonder of modern music crossover advertising in my pocket so that I can watch twerps like Nickleback remind me why I should grow a Barry Gibb beard and lipsynch pseudo-metal.
Err, you don't have to listen to shitty music or watch their videos.
Slashdot Mirror
Love the conversation.
Thanks.
My indirect points through my initial reply are twofold.
1) Its ironic that it is now more difficult and easier to get a hold of people at the same time. More numbers to know or dial. People can be more selective with caller id. etc. I try to be as simple as I can. I tell almost everybody that my phone number is my cell. Many times, they keep asking for more phone numbers. Work? My work gives me a cell phone so they can reach me, that is my work number. Home? I take my cellphone home with me, isn't that good enough? I have a home phone because my cell is owned by my work. Its stupid to have 2 cell phones. I would go nuts! Also my home phone is good for general gabbing, although I only do that with my family (their choice not mine) and one friend that lives out of the state. Its cheaper and more reliable than a cell.
2) The "important" thing that I kept bringing up. I'm just as guilty as the other guy that thinks that other things besides having food, shelter, and people are important. They are not, but we sometimes get wrapped up, angry, frustrated, and depressed over these unimportant things. I find it amusing when all of this "important" stuff is going on, and how all of it comes to a halt when something like a hurricane comes through. Its only at times like these, when people realize what is really important. At least for a short period of time.
First, contrary to popular belief, the sig on the back of the card is not there for identification purposes, but rather to indicate that you accept the terms of your cardholder agreement. If you do not sign the card, you cannot legally use it. Period.
My cards say SEE ID on them as well.
Since I'm using the card illegally, what does that mean?
Am I committing a crime?
Or am I actually responsible for the terms of the credit card, and owe them money and stuff or not?
I think the whole signature thing is stupid. I asked one merchant about them, and she said that she just throws them out at the end of the day. I've been told that you cannot say "I didn't charge that, can I see the signature?" and get out of paying for something (that could be wrong).
Rarely do people check my signature that says SEE ID. Being that a signature is anything, that could be my signature. I've seen worse.
... enough for me to hope he's still being anal raped by some large man named Bubba.
Dude. Regardless of him getting caught, its pretty clear that you were and are much better off, even considering what he did "to you". Even though (I'm assuming here) he didn't know you or do it intentionally to you.
Nobody deserves to be raped. To me its the most degrading thing you can do to a person. The only thing I can think of thats in the same ballpark or worse is torture over time. Rape is not a sexual thing, its a power thing. In prison, you don't have too much power over jack anymore, so establishing dominance over others that is not easily punishable is a thing to do. Rape is one best way to establish said power, and there are few consequences involved.
I've been in jail once for a nonviolent offense in which nobody was hurt, and one morning I was brushing my teeth and out of corner of my right eye I saw a large man, maybe named Bubba, that was looking out of my cell door "to see if the coast was clear". I was terrified, but I had to do something, so I asked him "What's up?" He kept looking, and I heard some people outside in the common area picking a fight or whatever. He was just trying to stay out of it, but let me tell you, I was very scared.
As I said, the whole time you were indirectly and directly involved with this guy, he was already worse off than you. There is no reason to add insult to injury. Maybe this happened to you to teach you some compassion for people. I dunno. But wishing rape on anybody, is pretty fucked up in my opinion.
Actually, my credit cards send these damn checks to me all the time. I have been tempted to ask them what happens if someone takes them and uses them. If I'm responsible for them sending basically cash in the mail that I am responsible for, I would like for them to stop endangering me financially. If they are responsible, who wants to go shopping with me?
Thanks for the flash video link. I thought I would never have said that, but I did.
Reminds me of the days when I used WindowMaker. WindowMaker was also a GNUStep project, and a damn good window manager at the time.
I welcome a more "UNIXy" desktop environment vs KDE or Gnome. To me, those are way too much like the Microsoft Windows interface. Personally, I don't like any of them. Honestly, all GUIs nowadays seem really dated when compared to OS X. Yeah, yeah, call me a fanboy or zealot, but for the look and feel, OS X is pretty slick.
Now that I mentioned OS X, what does it take to come up with a good interface like that? Its pretty much completely different than other GUIs I have used. Things like the way each application has all of their windows grouped together. An application can only be launched once, and doing something like launching an application that is already running, but has no windows in it will open up a new window. Working drag and drop. A working clipboard. A common look and feel between applicatons. The list goes on.
GUI land on UNIX has always been a little lacking. I've been writing and talking about this for many years now. There are many issues, but here are some that I can think of:
Fragmented GUI widget sets. This is big. You have KDE and Gnome. Motif. Xlib. Xaw. Xaw3d, XawWindows95wannabe. You name it. This has to stop.
The whole X server thing. Its a great idea, and has lasted for a long time, but I think its done. The only saving grace I think it has is the ability to remotely run an application and display it and interface it locally. The downside is that local applications are pretty much like remote applications. The graphics are not smooth and jerky at times. They flicker, and just are not as good as graphics on MS Windows or OS X or even a console game. I think X should die. Keep around a compatible way to run X apps like you have for Windows or OS X (hopefully, much better than the OS X way), but there needs to be a new and better integrated and featurefull GUI environment. Kinda like the KDE or Gnome "desktop environment", but a little more low level, and better. It should only have X ability for backwards compatibility, but ditch it from there.
Gotta work...
As long as they hurt google they will do almost anything. Besides, they can break compatibility later.
I'm napping now.
Wake me up when Google is hurt by Microsoft.
These two companies are almost like oil and vinegar. Your choice as to which is which.
Watched male and female humans in their late teens to mid 20's when they really want a "piece of the action"?
Its almost amusing! Like watching the waggle dance of a bee or something.
Seriously, if your in that age group, do whatever your hormones tell you to do. But for us outside of that, you guys and gals are really funny.
And yes, I've "been there done that". It seemed right at the time (hormones again). But humans when they are at their most "animal-like" are pretty funny. Fights can be a part of it, but those are funny too all to themselves.
Really? I have 4 right now (home, office, cell, fax). Maybe I should quit work. That would at least eliminate one number...
You have a dedicated fax line at home? (I don't count that as a phone number, but other's may differ in opinion).
Personally, I recommend quitting work, but that's your call.
I dunno, we are talking about having the "connection lines open". Your office phone only works when your in your office. Unless its a general company number, and then its only valid when your at work. Your home number only works, when your home, unless you have a PBX or something.
At least for me, my cell phone in my pocket works when its turned on, and when its off or I ignore the call, its for a reason. I have caller ID. Calling my cell and another number right after that is not going to work. Tried many times, failed every time. Pissed me off every time too. Doubly so if you leave a voice mail at both numbers.
My land line is only for outgoing calls, and long distance incoming calls when I'm going to be on the phone for a while. These people know proper phone etiquette. Otherwise, people try the phone that is in my pocket. Seems to make more sense to call the most likely phone that is nearest to me, but others can be more creative if they try.
I guess I could always tell my wife to schedule any important calls so as to not call while I might be driving. Yes, that sounds like it might work...
Granted, I'm not married and never have been probably never will be, but I've _never_ received an important phone call. Other people thought it was important enough to leave 10 voice mails saying the same unimportant thing ("call me, its important!"), but other than that I don't know what an important phone call could consist of. Somebody dying, I guess. But if I'm driving the opposite direction and am more than 10 or so minutes away, I don't see where I can do anything. I'm not that important I guess.
'more' on commercial UNIXes has been able to do that for ages (though in Solaris and MP-RAS you have to use /usr/xpg4/bin/more instead)
/usr/xpg4/bin/more could go backwards. Less has been around what, 20 years now. Less is more :)
/bin/sh, which is bash, is pretty good as /bin/sh (OS X and Linux here). From what I gather it is supposed to be completely Borne shell compliant when called 'sh'. I'm not a bash advocate, but it seems to work OK as far as I've ever known.
I love and hate solaris for that. Actually, I think I more love it, because Solaris is _very_ slow to change, and that means to us, much fewer surprises. I didn't know (or care) that
It's only linux that's dragged behind on this.
I've never really depended on more, because less has always been around. But I checked the more manpage for an older linux distro, RH 7.1, and the manpage says that you can go backwards with b or ^b, I guess it works.
most distros complain that nslookup 'depreciated' and should use dig - nslookup is still the standard on other UNIXes
Yeah, what is up with that? OS X does it too. Its obnoxious, and I will use nslookup until it says "command not found".
head and tail complain that should be using the -n argument instead of the normal "head -#" like UNIX has had for decades. Why???
I've never seen that. That sucks too.
hells wont properly parse:
echo "one two three" | while read blah ; do echo $blah ; done
which it will on all other UNIXes.
Works for me(tm). I use zsh, I just tried bash and it works. If a shell can't do that, that is completely broken, and I don't know how that can go unnoticed.
At this time, I use many scripts and whatever on OS X, Linux, and Solaris that have no real surprises. All are good. I'm not trying to advocate Linux to do something that it can't, but
(I didn't know this until I learned emacs many years ago and realized that C-a and C-e worked in bash too. Then I noticed, hey, so does C-t, C-p, C-n, etc. C-r [isearch-reverse] is now my favorite bash feature, thanks to emacs. I always like it when learning one thing [emacs] makes another easier [bash].)
:q!
As for vi, I know how to do basic stuff in it, but it basically upsets me. I have a wrt54g that doesn't have emacs on it and editing config files is a PITA. Why doesn't vi let me go to the end of the line by pressing, say, end or going to the end of a shorter line and then pressing the up arrow? Irritating. I know a vi guru is going to explain how to do this now, but I don't really care about the answer. What am I going to do the next time I'm stuck in vi and have a problem? (Hint: ESC
Disclaimer, I don't care what you or my neighbors use for a text editor, nor do I care what kind of toilet you prefer to take a dump in. Its not that big of a deal.
I will say, that I find it a little strange that shells come with emacs bindings, when vi is kinda the default. I'm saying this because vi (or for some historical reason, ex) is the default editor and bindings in things like less and more. Aside from ^e and ^a, I don't know any other emacs commands. I do know that most shells will take vi commandline editing commands. Honestly, I forgot how to do this in my shell, zsh. Or maybe its the default. One of the things I like about zsh is that it is the only shell that correctly does multiline editing in vi mode, or at least it was. bash was unusable and broken at least in the past, there is no reason to change now.
Oh, and going to the end of the line and beginning of the line in vi uses the carat ^ to the beginning and $ to go to the end. I've never tried keys that are on the dark side of the keyboard (where my hands aren't), so I don't know about that. The ^ and $ are not that foreign, because they are used to denote the beginning and end of lines in regular expressions. Intuitive? No. Easy to remember and associate with other stuff that I do every day, yup.
As for vi, I know how to do basic stuff in it, but it basically upsets me. I have a wrt54g that doesn't have emacs on it and editing config files is a PITA.
Again, I don't care. But I will say that emacs is not a standard UNIX thing, vi is. vim, my favorite editor, is not. I too have to deal with using "plain vi" sometimes. Its close, but certainly no cigar. I will say, that it is frustrating to work with someone that does not know vi at all. I'm not saying guru, but at least the basics. I would say that ^ and $ are a little beyond the basics, but it is something that someone should be able to pick up and remember after the first time of hearing about it.
Again, vi, vim, or emacs are not better. vim and emacs have been in active development and used extensively over the years. They are both powerful editors. But everybody needs to learn the basics of vi if they are going to be using UNIX systems. Its one of those things. You do not have to like it.
screen is also useful for silly commands like some java programs and some bittorent clients that require a tty in order to run "in the background".
and yeah, its kickass to be able to ^A and d etach a program, and go to another computer and have your stuff running without incident.
I don't religiously use screen, but its very handy. But I don't use it much, if ever, for system administration.
which grep
grep: aliased to egrep
I've used netcat a long time ago, I'll look back into it. I forgot about it.
Oh, and another command:
netstat
Everyone I know switched to SSH and dumped RSH. Keyfiles are your friend.
:)
I use rsh/rcp on private networks. Less overhead, no need for keys, and it reminds me of the good old days when the internet was a friendly place
I require ssh to access a machine from the outside world, but once your in, we are all friends again.
Yeah, du is arguably top 10 or 20. gzip/bzip/tar definitely top 20, but boring.
I cannot believe that I forgot truss/strace/ktrace.
That family of commands are top 10 to knock somebody off. Don't know whats going on? These guys will tell you.
Cron is more server process, I wouldnt coun't it as a command.
True.
I also guess sed is top 10 or 20 as well. Top 10 is rough for UNIX because there are so many small utilities that do killer stuff.
Here you go:
http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/
most used keystrokes
Wow, this AC must have never used vi or vim
In a nutshell, most every letter and number on the keyboard has a use, and they are case sensitive.
vim has "IDE" like qualities. You can do
Check out the documentation. Its excellent. Yes, emacs can edit a text file too, so can many other programs. I personally like a moded editor, and things like being able to copy text above and below the cursor, quick and dirty, yet powerful macros. Yes, I know that at least with some lisp thrown in, emacs can do anything, yes, I've used vip or whatever the vi mode in emacs is. Lets not go there. They both are strong text editors.
d that bash has made some progress over the years, but zsh is my friend.
for (int i = 0; i
interesting, never heard of that. Personally, I don't like it, but I know some people prefer it. Its not that big of a deal because it does have to be declared with a type.
Out of curiosity, does C99 or has C++ ever figured out the scope of a variable declared inside of a for statement like that?
To me, it should be in the current calling scope, so it is available after the bracket (if used) after the for loop. But some interpretations only make it available within the loop.
Offsubject, but relevant I guess.
Keeping your cell phone powered off defeats part of the purpose of having it (someone can contact you wherever you are). A better solution is to also have a pager. Keep the phone off, receive a page, turn on the phone and return the call.
Argggg.
First, it is unsafe and soon to be illegal to talk on the phone when your driving. Second, every cell phone service I know of has the option of having voice mail which works when the phone is off or on. Third, I think its obnoxious when people have 15 different phone numbers and pagers in order to get in touch with them. Anything beyond one is unnecessary. The only exception would be for those that want to separate work/personal or something similar.
Last. If anybody is that important that they need to stop what they are doing at any given time while driving (presumably to somewhere for some reason), then I respect your importance, and you should just stay at home or some other safe location where you are less likely to get hurt or injured (driving is about number one there). I can't believe that anybody that important is allowed to drive a car. That makes no sense to me.
But typing something like site:slashdot.org cell phone traffic and looking at the first link is a bit much.
I know there are two camps about dupes. One is a little more benevolent, "Yeah, they do it, we know it, but that is pretty much OK". The other is, "Why don't the people who run this site know their content or are to dumb or lazy to do a simple search like the one above?"
I fall in the later category. The slashdot guys might actually be that dumb or lazy to know how to use google. If thats the case, oh well.
To me, its simply unprofessional and I am embarrassed for the editors. They apparently lack this emotion.
The thing is -- I don't have a problem with dupes. Hell, 99% of the articles are dupes. Anything close to mentioning the RIAA is going to be about the same, any Linux vs Windows TCO article is about the same, there's the tin foiled hat stuff, SCO, etc.
I'm just saying, that all the slashdot guys have to do is either read their daddypants mail that we paying members of this site send to you before an article is released in the wild, do a 10 second google search, or something, and just put a blurb to say "Yeah, we covered this before here and here is new information.
One of two of those simple things that are already in place. That is all I ask.
Its different when you have a conversation with someone and you repeat a story because you don't remember telling the story to that particular person. But this is an electronic document that is searchable.
To me, this really does negatively affect the slashdot experience that I love so much. To me, this is unprofessional. To me, this is completely unnecessary. To me, it is important.
After all this time, and it still keeps happening. I really wonder if this is some kind of a joke or attention getting trick. I don't know because I have not discussed this with any of the editors, but this appears to be some kind of collective behavioral/psychological problem of the editors. Clearly, it is not a technological one.
You don't consider the possibility of a flu outbreak, combined with the rather limited supplies of Tamiflu, a potential problem?
Sure, its a potential problem. So are illegally (or against an agreement) obtained weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a non-benevolent dictator. A large asteroid hitting the Earth is a potential problem. The airline mechanic who ran out of crack and is a little on edge is a potential problem. There are many potential problems.
Again, with my "event" vs "news" thesis. This is not even an event, but a potential event that is always a potential, and like a regular event that is not news, there is nothing that can be done by your average, above average, or below average person. This is fear based propaganda. This is not news.
Now, I know SARS was overhyped to death when it wasn't much of a problem, but given what I've read about avian flu, it seems like it really could be a problem.
What information do you have about it not being a big deal? I'm curious.
None. I don't care. I'm a computer geek, not a health expert. I have no experience with mass disease outbreak aside from what I have read about previous plagues or the AIDS issue in Africa and other places.
Now, lets take this a bit further. Information on the news about lets say AIDS could be news. Lets erase the past for the minute, and pretend that AIDS is a brand new illness and it is now known that it a) is sexually transmitted or transmitted via other bodily fluids like blood b) it has a long gestation period and people can potentially be carriers without being sick, which means that people can give you the virus without any indications that the person has the virus c) it can kill you d) basic precautions like wearing gloves for health care people and using condoms during sex can greatly decrease the likelihood of contracting the virus.
That is news. Problem, description, and solution.
Broadcasting about a potential pandemic, is gossip.
Wikipedia has some info about pandemics here.
Although, the bottom entries don't seem very "pandemicly" to me. SARS killed 800 people. That should not be on the list. Neither should the "Hong Kong" flu. 34,000 Americans dead. The good old regular flu kills what, 20,000 a year.
ASF movies were floating around in the 200MB range (2+ hours) on IRC in the late 1990s. Why couldn't news broadcasts be put out (~45 mins) in the same format for less than 100MB?
Cost/benefit.
Its not uncommon for even a decent commercial website to persevere a good slashdotting. Granted, this was a very extreme example, but during the events on 9/11/01, all of the big brandname internet news sites were completely down. And this is with well less than 1 meg of information from the site at a time. 100 megs to be delivered to each person on a daily basis is a bunch of data at this time.
Now, adopting the evil p2p model, this is entirely possible right now, but these people do not participate in evil.
All I want is content...
Unfortunately, I know of no news program on television that really displays such a thing. Sure, there may be some real news here or there, but overall, content is not the important thing here. I personally consider loading CNN's webpage as amusement. I look at it just to know what other people see and think is "news". The current big headline is about a flu pandemic. Ohhhh, scary. If yesterday wasn't halloween, a headline like this might be more effective.
Regarding the age of the anchor people, that is a tough one. Younger people do not consider the words of older people as really authoritative. This is a trend that has been going on for about 30 years plus or minus. My guess is that technology (gadgets) has everything to do with it.
Why should a younger person trust another when they can't even record a program on their VCR?
Thats an older example, but still relevant. I heard of a study from 12+ years ago, that said that the lower your education the more likely you are to be able to program your VCR. The highschool dropout was the most likely, and the PhD was the least likely.
Back to news. I believe that there is a difference between news and events. Events are simply things that happen, like me typing this on a keyboard. News is current information about events that is relevant to someone. By having that new information, someone can think about and/or do something different vs not having that information.
At least where I live, the local news almost always has the "random death and crime" segment. Where they go locally and across the nation and world talking about how somebody might have killed somebody, robbed them, died in a car pileup, or something similar.
Those my friends are purely events, not news. There is nothing anybody can do with that information. Especially when one considers that crime is at an all time low at this time in the US. In the grand picture, those events are even less significant than they could have been, but its still a favorite segment of the televised news.
I'm not sure how to end this rant, so I'll keep rambling. I also read during the 2004 election, that the people that were most informed about the election were people that got their news from places like the "Daily Show". Its a comedy/parody of news with a very sarcastic slant, but if people are getting more relevant news from a source that is not even news when compared to the real news -- to me that says volumes.
I theorize that the 'toxic' blocking is done by hostname, because I can go to www.bbc.co.uk but not news.bbc.co.uk.
Test it by IP address. They are:
www.bbc.co.uk is an alias for www.bbc.net.uk.
www.bbc.net.uk has address 212.58.240.110
news.bbc.co.uk is an alias for newswww.bbc.net.uk.
newswww.bbc.net.uk has address 212.58.240.43
How can you be surprised by the success of the video iPod when there are enough people out there willing to pay money to change how their telephone sounds when it rings that it has become a $300 million-a-year business?
In the world of wasting yer money on stupid, ephemeral stuff for digital gizmos...
In 2000, Americans spent $60 billion on carbonated soft drinks. linky. That is flavored sugar water with the addition of carbon dioxide that costs something like pennies a gallon to make. They have no nutritional value, are not very effective in quenching thirst, and are bad for your teeth and stomach.
People should spend more money on rigntones in my opinion.
Everytime some slashdork bitches about how a CD costs $20 for 60 minutes while a DVD costs $20 for 120 minutes or more and what a ripoff a CD is, I want to slap them silly; the two things have nothing in common other than size and shape.
They have tons in common. They are both entertainment/art forms. The difference is one has video and potentially better quality and/or alternate audio tracks. Potentially different video tracks as well.
I'm not going to look up the products and easily karmawhore myself. But look up the most recent releases by Led Zeppelin on CD and DVD. Almost 2x the music on the DVD, I believe 3 audio encodings (DTS, DD, and PCM stereo maybe 24bit, check for yourself).
Again, check for yourself, but I believe that the DVD is less than the CD.
The amount of time and effort that went into the production between the two cannot be anywhere near the same.
Where does all of this money go?
I purposely pick the Zeppelin disks for a reason. They are both by the same band. They are both old material. They both came out about the same time, maybe exactly the same time. The video was not released in theaters, so there is no additional revenue unlike a typical motion picture.
I'm sorry, but there is not that much work that goes into recording and distributing an album. I'm not trying to undermine the audio engineers and artists. Its the labels that I'm pointing the finger at. I record music in my home, go to many concerts, I've been to two recording studios, and have been friends with musicians over the years. No, I can't create recordings as good as a professional studio can yet. But I will say that I can come pretty damn close, and I only have about $6,000 in equipment including my multipurpose computer.
I really, really, really believe that music is too expensive. I have not bought a CD in years because I don't believe they are worth it. Don't get me wrong, I do have about 500 or 600 gigs of music on my computer, but 99% of it is freely available live recordings of concerts.
I'm so glad that Madonna can show me the meaning of her latest club shit, or that Britney Spears can take that electronic noise she (allegedly) vomits out in the studio and dress it up with tight leather clothes. Now I can keep all that wonder of modern music crossover advertising in my pocket so that I can watch twerps like Nickleback remind me why I should grow a Barry Gibb beard and lipsynch pseudo-metal.
Err, you don't have to listen to shitty music or watch their videos.
In fact, I don't recommend it at all.