The worldwide inter-connectedness of business is a strong argument AGAINST the 9-5 schedule. What good is standardizing on "9-5" when your customer on the west coast and your partners in India, Japan, and England all have their own, different 9-5?
Because, Internet be damned, the vast majority of people still work closely with people immediately nearby. If we were all just working individually with other random people from across the globe then sure, but that's not how society works. Even in a hyper-connected world, you're still going to work more frequently with people nearby.
Even with my almost entirely computer oriented job, nearly all of the people I must contact for work are in the same building and, if not there, then in a nearby state. Now, the business hours don't need to be 9-5, but we do need scheduled hours.
Back on topic, though, DST is pointless. I live in Arizona where we don't do it, but I also just spent three years in Massachusetts which does. I wasn't inconvenienced by having the sun still up at 9PM, but it sure didn't help me in any way either.
Really? I thought the voice acting in Tron 2.0 was rather decent. Also, Bruce Boxleitner (Alan Bradley/Alan One) is featured throughout the game. His voice, that is. He's in much more of the game than just a cameo at the end.
Actually, "hibernate" is no different than "off" from an electricity use perspective. When you hibernate with Linux (or even Windows), the contents of memory are stored to disk and the machine is powered off just as if you had performed a normal shutdown procedure.
At this point, a hibernating system is using exactly as much power as a system that is off. For an ATX system this is not zero since the power supply has to provide some power for the on/off button to function as well as to power the USB ports.
Suspending your system, on the other hand, does use more power since the RAM must be continually refreshed, though most of the other components are off.
I'm not particularly happy about the forthcoming gap in US manned launch capability, but your post really seems to come out of left field. It also jumps all over, from space based resources to tank destroying weapons to spying.
But what really threw me was the mention of Toynbee Tiles. You suggest that it would "behoove" me to find out about them. So I did. Behoove would suggest that it is of no small importance to learn more, but...
How is this relevant at all? The tiles are certainly interesting, but only from an artistic and "huh, that's odd" angle. Going from a space flight capability gap of about 5 years to resurrecting life on one of Jupiter's moons (Europa, I suppose) is one enormous leap to make.
You are likely preaching to the choir when it comes to putting people and things into space and space exploration in general. But trying to "strengthen" your argument with a serious mention of Toynbee Tiles makes it all seem a bit, well, nutty.
By this argument, an SSH connection is then no better than simple telnet? I don't think anybody would accept that.
So how are the two really all that different? I set up machine A with SSH and machine B warns me the first time I connect. It tells me the fingerprint of A's key and asks what to do. I accept (or not) and it stores the key locally so that next time it can tell if it has changed or not.
How are self-signed certs different? When setting up machine A I can create a cert myself. When I first connect, the browser will ask me what to do.
The biggest difference between the two is that FF3 complains much more about an unknown key/cert than SSH does.
He's saying, at first, that if you write your document directly in LaTeX, you need to memorize many different commands (basically, markup tags) to get the job done and you have to worry about what image format you feed the image/figure packages.
Then he's saying that in his quest for better tools he has tried not using straight LaTeX, but rather using some of the front ends, hoping they might ease the pain. For him, it seems, they do not. Or, perhaps, they do not expose enough functionality of raw LaTeX.
That's true, but SuperFetch is still a bad idea here.
Unless you've got an extremely fast connection and many open connections, it's a much more efficient use of resources to just cache on demand as most operating systems do now. The P2P client is only going to be reading small blocks of that file at any given time and even if SuperFetch works on a level smaller than whole files, there's no way it could know the P2P usage pattern for a particular file.
As things stand, I don't think UBI will get the full legal hot water, however, they've just taken a massive PR hit, and the whole "holier than thou" stance taken by the games industry on copy protection has also been tainted.
No, they haven't taken a "massive" PR hit. A massive hit would be this story showing up in, say, the NY Times, followed by industry-wide denouncements.
What has really happened is a minor PR scandal. It's made people who already dislike Ubi (like me) like them even less, and allowed me to get a good laugh in at their expense. Also, I expect to see a good Penny Arcade comic sprout from this incident.
Now, you're right that this *should* be a bigger deal, but sadly I don't think it's going anywhere. Ubi doesn't care, and most other publishers use the same easily broken control schemes and they're unlikely to care either.
The may be a big headache for somebody at an ISP who needs to help out users, but as somebody who uses ZoneAlarm, I find it to be very useful.
I've got an actual firewall in my router, but that only protects me from what comes in. And I run Linux, so that counters most other random garbage. But, on occasion, I use Windows and ZoneAlarm is very handy because it alerts me when any program is trying to send data out.
*This* is where software firewalls in Windows shine. So many programs in Windows phone home or access the Internet for completely unknown reasons. So, I block it. If it breaks and I really need that particular program, I can unblock it. It's hard to measure how much this really helps, and, of course, I'm sure there are ways to transmit in Windows without the firewall knowing about it. Still, it's nice to be able to say apps X and Y, you get to access the Net. Everybody else has to ask first.
My intent was not to call you out as an uninformed liar. I was merely stating how much really needs to be cleared if all you want is the partition table. Sometimes, such as when your filesystem is good but you've managed to bork your partition table (guilty), you can save yourself a lot of pain by fixing it without nuking the filesystems too.
Just a small correction... that command only writes 5MB, not 16. Also, if all you want to do is zap the boot sector and partition table, 16MB is definitely overkill. The MBR (which contains the partition table) occupies only the first 512 bytes, so it is sufficient to use "bs=512 count=1" to start fresh.
I'm the author of Weasel Reader so I can speak to this as a Palm OS developer. In the beginning it was pretty nice. The OS was clean and easy to program for and the open source toolset worked great.
The people who designed the original Palm OS did a very good job and this lasted up until about OS 3.5. After that... not a whole lot changed. OS 4 came out and there weren't really any compelling reasons to upgrade and the new/changed features sure didn't seem to warrant a major version increase.
It was about this time that the Palm OS hardware market began to diversify and devices with different features began to appear. Things like expansion slots, higher resolutions, more buttons, etc. Unfortunately, they were done in a horribly haphazard manner with little guidance from Palm OS HQ. This meant conflicting ways of doing the same things and, as as developer, it's been a huge pain.
Hi-res has especially been annoying. Originally, all devices were 160x160 so many programs and even the OS made assumptions based on this. Then Handera released a 240x240 device. They made it fairly easy to let your app support this resolution. Soon, Sony released several hi-res Clie devices with resolutions of 320x320 and they used a different method for programming. Finally, Palm woke up and for Palm OS 5 they added the hi-res feature set which did things in an entirely different manner.
Now suppose you want your app to support 160x160 devices, Handera's 240x240, Sony's hi-res, and Palm's new hi-res standard. Not fun at all.
OS 5 was, finally, a substantial improvement. All the newer devices moved from the m68k architecture to ARM CPUs. OS 5 helped to merge a number of divergent developments during the OS 3-4 period. Nearly all code is still m68k running on the PACE emulation layer, though. The *next* release was supposed to be native ARM and have far more support for native ARM apps, but it never came.
The fun continued with other botched features. Even something as simple as extra buttons and keys. Many devices have jog-dials, but they all assign different keycodes to the same thing! Even the 5-way/d-pad buttons on newer Palm devices can work differently depending on what device you have.
And the future? Access owns Palm OS now and they keep talking about a grand new Linux based Palm OS. But it's not out and who knows when it will be. Meanwhile, OS 5.x continues to age, any new features merely hacks glued onto the side of a framework not meant for this sort of customization.
Ah well... it was a good run. I'd be less disappointed if I wasn't the author of software for the platform. I had always assumed that the next major PDA/phone platform would have the sense to license a Palm OS emulation layer. This couldn't cost all that much and would give customers access to thousands of existing PDA programs. And the existing hardware is more than capable of performing this task. Too bad...
excellent post. I don't even port my little indie games to linux, because its' not viable. Not that a lot of lunux gamers would be interested, but the general sense of entitlement to free games by people in that community means that the majority who wanted it would pirate it.
Do you have anything definitive to back this up, or is it just a "gut feeling"? I see this idea brought up a lot, and it's been in nearly every other comment on this story. I'm curious as to whether there is any real data or study to back this up.
Also, entertainment is a different case than a lot of other software. Does it still hold "true"? While most Linux users are accustomed to not paying for most of the software they use, it's also true that they are accustomed to paying for entertainment media/software.
Personally, I don't feel entitled to free software, but I realize that for a given need X, there is probably a free alternative that will satisfy my needs, or come very close. For games, though, I find that this is very much not the case.
There are, of course, free games available which I very much enjoy (i.e. NetHack). But there just aren't that many. Most recently, I played the Penny Arcade game (legally purchased) and ran the Linux version. Fun game. It used online verification, but it only the first time you ran it.
As an astronomy and comp. sci. student, my introduction to electronics was a bit more unorthodox. I joined my school's (Univ. of Arizona) student satellite project and worked on the computer team. We didn't accomplish much of anything.
But... that gave way to the more structured Student Satellite Project and that was far more interesting. The goal, building a 10cm Cubesat, was both reasonable and attainable. I was there to program the thing, but I worked hand in hand with the hardware guys, watching their work, commenting when I actually had something useful to say, and asking lots of questions. It wasn't purely idle curiosity, though, as making sure the software worked right for a tiny custom board meant knowing a lot about how the board worked.
That satellite was finished and worked, but, sadly, crashed into the Kazakh desert when the rocket failed.
Later, I worked on a camera board for a different satellite. This project was primarily myself and a retired IBM engineer. The knowledge we brought was, for the most part, in opposition. I knew software and programming very well and he knew electronics like the back of his hand. Fortunately, we were both willing to answer each others myriad questions. I learned a lot about basic electronics and logic design from him.
I completely agree with your suggestion of chips, too. The first satellite used a PIC 16F877 (can't believe I still remember that) and it was huge pain to use and program. The second project used an Atmel ARM7 TDMI (I think that's the one), a 32bit microprocessor. Obviously substantially more complex, but at the same time if you're at all familiar with lower-level stuff on a regular PC, it will seem much more familiar and easy to use.
Most companies were also happy to give us a small number of free samples... not because we would ever have a large production run, but because the sort of people who work on these types of projects will certainly be buying chips for other projects later and it helps to have happy repeat customers. The board-house we were using wasn't quite as cheap as you quote, but that was a few years ago and our board was a bit more complex that a typical newbie attempt.
The summary is ridiculously biased, or shows a shocking level of ignorance. When the summary is so poorly written, it's not unreasonable to rebalance it a little.
But you'll also notice that the summary is entirely a quote from the submitter with none of the commentary coming from the editor. Wouldn't it be more reasonable to assume that this story about a bill in the House of Commons was submitted by somebody in the UK? In that case - a UK story submitted, presumably, by a UK citizen - there seems little need to inject some United States bashing to "rebalance" the issue.
I keep seeing this argument trotted out, and it really needs to stop. Just because my country has done some ass-backward immoral things lately doesn't mean I cannot frown upon stupid acts occurring elsewhere in the world.
You talk of Gitmo and Abu Grahib? Excellent. The more people that do, the better. But, I can also read the news about Britain's detaining people, even citizens, for 42 days without charges or their bizarre need to spy on the populace 24/7 and contemplate just how truly screwed up that is.
My opinions don't magically become invalid just because there's a group of morons in my government right now. You are, of course, perfectly free to completely ignore my opinions.
Is it stupid because you disagree with the terms, or stupid because it will accomplish nothing?
In the latter case, is it still worth the effort to read it before Congress or are you suggesting that this act of grandstanding actually hurts the position (that Bush is bad and needs impeaching)?
Unless there is some real harm from the action, I say go for it. Realistically, nothing will come of it now, though that may change come February. Raising these issues again and again may annoy some, but it's the only way to force discussion and that is something sorely needed.
C3PO and R2D2, using their point of view, is really the most risky and rewarding aspect of star wars. now, i don't think lucas would ever admit it, but i think he was trying to conjure up the same sort of picaresque magic twice... with the character jar jar binks
I always really enjoyed this aspect of the original trilogy, the following of the two droids, though I never knew where the inspiration had come from. And, when the new movies were announced, I was really hoping that Lucas would do the same. He didn't need a new character for that since C3PO and R2D2 are in them as well. Plus, it would have added some uniformity to the style if all six movies had been done in such a manner.
which brings me to a final thought: movie magic isn't easy. i think a lot of fanboys need to cut lucas a break. he gave us star wars. did you forget that? ok, he fumbled with the final 3 movies. but holding him in scorn for that, while
I certainly don't hate Lucas for that. In the same vein, people seem to heap an awful lot of scorn on Mel Brooks because some of his newer movies don't have quite the same magic as Blazing Saddles or Young Frankenstein; as though he should keep up with the masterpieces or quit the business altogether.
Part of Lucas' problem, though, is that the fame and fortune seem to have gone to his head. I recall reading that, initially, Lucas was planning to direct the first movie and then have others direct the next two, just as he had done with the originals. Why did he scrap that idea? It seems like a winning formula for the originals.
And I still have a hard time with Jar-Jar and the kid who played Anakin. Especially the kid. Just superbly terrible acting. Luke was whiny, yeah, but Anakin was dreadful. Surely there must have been people working on the movie and for Lucas who pointed this out to him.
But, overall, I still enjoy the movies... the original trilogy more than the new ones, though. And a lot of people will be enjoying them for decades to come. That's not a bad achievement.
I'd have to agree with that. If you make a habit of getting rid of compiler warnings as you go, it's very little extra work and can catch some actual bugs.
And, as you said, it makes new problems stick out like a sore thumb and they are far less likely to be overlooked or ignored.
Re:Evolution actually working?
on
Gnome 2.22 Released
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· Score: 4, Informative
If only there were a property to allow setting the locale in the shortcut/launcher thing...
You should be able to do this with a tiny script. Not quite as simple as the launcher GUI, but not bad. Simply create in your home directory (or wherever you like):
#!/bin/sh
LANG=en_US.UTF-8 pidgin
And call it "pidgin-en_US". Make it executable and set the launcher to use that script to launch pidgin and you should be good to go.
Better still, if the launcher config lets you give arguments to the program you tell it to execute (I think you can), you can make just one script:
#!/bin/sh
LANG=$1 pidgin
Call it "pidgin-lang" and in the launcher, set it to execute "/home/foo/pidgin-lang en_US.UTF-8" or whatever other language you want.
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The worldwide inter-connectedness of business is a strong argument AGAINST the 9-5 schedule. What good is standardizing on "9-5" when your customer on the west coast and your partners in India, Japan, and England all have their own, different 9-5?
Because, Internet be damned, the vast majority of people still work closely with people immediately nearby. If we were all just working individually with other random people from across the globe then sure, but that's not how society works. Even in a hyper-connected world, you're still going to work more frequently with people nearby.
Even with my almost entirely computer oriented job, nearly all of the people I must contact for work are in the same building and, if not there, then in a nearby state. Now, the business hours don't need to be 9-5, but we do need scheduled hours.
Back on topic, though, DST is pointless. I live in Arizona where we don't do it, but I also just spent three years in Massachusetts which does. I wasn't inconvenienced by having the sun still up at 9PM, but it sure didn't help me in any way either.
Really? I thought the voice acting in Tron 2.0 was rather decent. Also, Bruce Boxleitner (Alan Bradley/Alan One) is featured throughout the game. His voice, that is. He's in much more of the game than just a cameo at the end.
"Hibernate" does not mean "use no electricity."
Actually, "hibernate" is no different than "off" from an electricity use perspective. When you hibernate with Linux (or even Windows), the contents of memory are stored to disk and the machine is powered off just as if you had performed a normal shutdown procedure.
At this point, a hibernating system is using exactly as much power as a system that is off. For an ATX system this is not zero since the power supply has to provide some power for the on/off button to function as well as to power the USB ports.
Suspending your system, on the other hand, does use more power since the RAM must be continually refreshed, though most of the other components are off.
I'm not particularly happy about the forthcoming gap in US manned launch capability, but your post really seems to come out of left field. It also jumps all over, from space based resources to tank destroying weapons to spying.
But what really threw me was the mention of Toynbee Tiles. You suggest that it would "behoove" me to find out about them. So I did. Behoove would suggest that it is of no small importance to learn more, but...
How is this relevant at all? The tiles are certainly interesting, but only from an artistic and "huh, that's odd" angle. Going from a space flight capability gap of about 5 years to resurrecting life on one of Jupiter's moons (Europa, I suppose) is one enormous leap to make.
You are likely preaching to the choir when it comes to putting people and things into space and space exploration in general. But trying to "strengthen" your argument with a serious mention of Toynbee Tiles makes it all seem a bit, well, nutty.
By this argument, an SSH connection is then no better than simple telnet? I don't think anybody would accept that.
So how are the two really all that different? I set up machine A with SSH and machine B warns me the first time I connect. It tells me the fingerprint of A's key and asks what to do. I accept (or not) and it stores the key locally so that next time it can tell if it has changed or not.
How are self-signed certs different? When setting up machine A I can create a cert myself. When I first connect, the browser will ask me what to do.
The biggest difference between the two is that FF3 complains much more about an unknown key/cert than SSH does.
He's saying, at first, that if you write your document directly in LaTeX, you need to memorize many different commands (basically, markup tags) to get the job done and you have to worry about what image format you feed the image/figure packages.
Then he's saying that in his quest for better tools he has tried not using straight LaTeX, but rather using some of the front ends, hoping they might ease the pain. For him, it seems, they do not. Or, perhaps, they do not expose enough functionality of raw LaTeX.
That's true, but SuperFetch is still a bad idea here.
Unless you've got an extremely fast connection and many open connections, it's a much more efficient use of resources to just cache on demand as most operating systems do now. The P2P client is only going to be reading small blocks of that file at any given time and even if SuperFetch works on a level smaller than whole files, there's no way it could know the P2P usage pattern for a particular file.
We'd need air to breathe and protection from the sulfuric acid in the atmosphere.
Oh, and floating cities. We'll need those, too.
Honestly, now... one of these problems sounds solvable. The other one... slightly less so.
As things stand, I don't think UBI will get the full legal hot water, however, they've just taken a massive PR hit, and the whole "holier than thou" stance taken by the games industry on copy protection has also been tainted.
No, they haven't taken a "massive" PR hit. A massive hit would be this story showing up in, say, the NY Times, followed by industry-wide denouncements.
What has really happened is a minor PR scandal. It's made people who already dislike Ubi (like me) like them even less, and allowed me to get a good laugh in at their expense. Also, I expect to see a good Penny Arcade comic sprout from this incident.
Now, you're right that this *should* be a bigger deal, but sadly I don't think it's going anywhere. Ubi doesn't care, and most other publishers use the same easily broken control schemes and they're unlikely to care either.
The may be a big headache for somebody at an ISP who needs to help out users, but as somebody who uses ZoneAlarm, I find it to be very useful.
I've got an actual firewall in my router, but that only protects me from what comes in. And I run Linux, so that counters most other random garbage. But, on occasion, I use Windows and ZoneAlarm is very handy because it alerts me when any program is trying to send data out.
*This* is where software firewalls in Windows shine. So many programs in Windows phone home or access the Internet for completely unknown reasons. So, I block it. If it breaks and I really need that particular program, I can unblock it. It's hard to measure how much this really helps, and, of course, I'm sure there are ways to transmit in Windows without the firewall knowing about it. Still, it's nice to be able to say apps X and Y, you get to access the Net. Everybody else has to ask first.
My intent was not to call you out as an uninformed liar. I was merely stating how much really needs to be cleared if all you want is the partition table. Sometimes, such as when your filesystem is good but you've managed to bork your partition table (guilty), you can save yourself a lot of pain by fixing it without nuking the filesystems too.
Just a small correction... that command only writes 5MB, not 16. Also, if all you want to do is zap the boot sector and partition table, 16MB is definitely overkill. The MBR (which contains the partition table) occupies only the first 512 bytes, so it is sufficient to use "bs=512 count=1" to start fresh.
This is so painfully true...
I'm the author of Weasel Reader so I can speak to this as a Palm OS developer. In the beginning it was pretty nice. The OS was clean and easy to program for and the open source toolset worked great.
The people who designed the original Palm OS did a very good job and this lasted up until about OS 3.5. After that... not a whole lot changed. OS 4 came out and there weren't really any compelling reasons to upgrade and the new/changed features sure didn't seem to warrant a major version increase.
It was about this time that the Palm OS hardware market began to diversify and devices with different features began to appear. Things like expansion slots, higher resolutions, more buttons, etc. Unfortunately, they were done in a horribly haphazard manner with little guidance from Palm OS HQ. This meant conflicting ways of doing the same things and, as as developer, it's been a huge pain.
Hi-res has especially been annoying. Originally, all devices were 160x160 so many programs and even the OS made assumptions based on this. Then Handera released a 240x240 device. They made it fairly easy to let your app support this resolution. Soon, Sony released several hi-res Clie devices with resolutions of 320x320 and they used a different method for programming. Finally, Palm woke up and for Palm OS 5 they added the hi-res feature set which did things in an entirely different manner.
Now suppose you want your app to support 160x160 devices, Handera's 240x240, Sony's hi-res, and Palm's new hi-res standard. Not fun at all.
OS 5 was, finally, a substantial improvement. All the newer devices moved from the m68k architecture to ARM CPUs. OS 5 helped to merge a number of divergent developments during the OS 3-4 period. Nearly all code is still m68k running on the PACE emulation layer, though. The *next* release was supposed to be native ARM and have far more support for native ARM apps, but it never came.
The fun continued with other botched features. Even something as simple as extra buttons and keys. Many devices have jog-dials, but they all assign different keycodes to the same thing! Even the 5-way/d-pad buttons on newer Palm devices can work differently depending on what device you have.
And the future? Access owns Palm OS now and they keep talking about a grand new Linux based Palm OS. But it's not out and who knows when it will be. Meanwhile, OS 5.x continues to age, any new features merely hacks glued onto the side of a framework not meant for this sort of customization.
Ah well... it was a good run. I'd be less disappointed if I wasn't the author of software for the platform. I had always assumed that the next major PDA/phone platform would have the sense to license a Palm OS emulation layer. This couldn't cost all that much and would give customers access to thousands of existing PDA programs. And the existing hardware is more than capable of performing this task. Too bad...
Doesn't exactly seem like the most glamorous lab job, but the potential for learning seems amazing.
"So, what did you do after college?
"I personally helped a genius for two years."
Heck, even if he told you to not ask questions, you could probably absorb a surprising amount just being close by.
Do you have anything definitive to back this up, or is it just a "gut feeling"? I see this idea brought up a lot, and it's been in nearly every other comment on this story. I'm curious as to whether there is any real data or study to back this up.
Also, entertainment is a different case than a lot of other software. Does it still hold "true"? While most Linux users are accustomed to not paying for most of the software they use, it's also true that they are accustomed to paying for entertainment media/software.
Personally, I don't feel entitled to free software, but I realize that for a given need X, there is probably a free alternative that will satisfy my needs, or come very close. For games, though, I find that this is very much not the case.
There are, of course, free games available which I very much enjoy (i.e. NetHack). But there just aren't that many. Most recently, I played the Penny Arcade game (legally purchased) and ran the Linux version. Fun game. It used online verification, but it only the first time you ran it.
Indeed. I had forgotten what paragons of virtue most people in other countries are. Remember one of Carlin's great lines:
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realize that half of them are dumber than that."
I fail to see how people in any random country are different in this regard. Face it, we could all use some enlightenment at one time or another.
Here are some quick facts to help you get started:
Nobody's perfect...
Ah, the fun. :)
As an astronomy and comp. sci. student, my introduction to electronics was a bit more unorthodox. I joined my school's (Univ. of Arizona) student satellite project and worked on the computer team. We didn't accomplish much of anything.
But... that gave way to the more structured Student Satellite Project and that was far more interesting. The goal, building a 10cm Cubesat, was both reasonable and attainable. I was there to program the thing, but I worked hand in hand with the hardware guys, watching their work, commenting when I actually had something useful to say, and asking lots of questions. It wasn't purely idle curiosity, though, as making sure the software worked right for a tiny custom board meant knowing a lot about how the board worked.
That satellite was finished and worked, but, sadly, crashed into the Kazakh desert when the rocket failed.
Later, I worked on a camera board for a different satellite. This project was primarily myself and a retired IBM engineer. The knowledge we brought was, for the most part, in opposition. I knew software and programming very well and he knew electronics like the back of his hand. Fortunately, we were both willing to answer each others myriad questions. I learned a lot about basic electronics and logic design from him.
I completely agree with your suggestion of chips, too. The first satellite used a PIC 16F877 (can't believe I still remember that) and it was huge pain to use and program. The second project used an Atmel ARM7 TDMI (I think that's the one), a 32bit microprocessor. Obviously substantially more complex, but at the same time if you're at all familiar with lower-level stuff on a regular PC, it will seem much more familiar and easy to use.
Most companies were also happy to give us a small number of free samples... not because we would ever have a large production run, but because the sort of people who work on these types of projects will certainly be buying chips for other projects later and it helps to have happy repeat customers. The board-house we were using wasn't quite as cheap as you quote, but that was a few years ago and our board was a bit more complex that a typical newbie attempt.
But you'll also notice that the summary is entirely a quote from the submitter with none of the commentary coming from the editor. Wouldn't it be more reasonable to assume that this story about a bill in the House of Commons was submitted by somebody in the UK? In that case - a UK story submitted, presumably, by a UK citizen - there seems little need to inject some United States bashing to "rebalance" the issue.
I keep seeing this argument trotted out, and it really needs to stop. Just because my country has done some ass-backward immoral things lately doesn't mean I cannot frown upon stupid acts occurring elsewhere in the world.
You talk of Gitmo and Abu Grahib? Excellent. The more people that do, the better. But, I can also read the news about Britain's detaining people, even citizens, for 42 days without charges or their bizarre need to spy on the populace 24/7 and contemplate just how truly screwed up that is.
My opinions don't magically become invalid just because there's a group of morons in my government right now. You are, of course, perfectly free to completely ignore my opinions.
Is it stupid because you disagree with the terms, or stupid because it will accomplish nothing?
In the latter case, is it still worth the effort to read it before Congress or are you suggesting that this act of grandstanding actually hurts the position (that Bush is bad and needs impeaching)?
Unless there is some real harm from the action, I say go for it. Realistically, nothing will come of it now, though that may change come February. Raising these issues again and again may annoy some, but it's the only way to force discussion and that is something sorely needed.
And yet they find low /. IDs strangely fascinating...
I always really enjoyed this aspect of the original trilogy, the following of the two droids, though I never knew where the inspiration had come from. And, when the new movies were announced, I was really hoping that Lucas would do the same. He didn't need a new character for that since C3PO and R2D2 are in them as well. Plus, it would have added some uniformity to the style if all six movies had been done in such a manner.
which brings me to a final thought: movie magic isn't easy. i think a lot of fanboys need to cut lucas a break. he gave us star wars. did you forget that? ok, he fumbled with the final 3 movies. but holding him in scorn for that, whileI certainly don't hate Lucas for that. In the same vein, people seem to heap an awful lot of scorn on Mel Brooks because some of his newer movies don't have quite the same magic as Blazing Saddles or Young Frankenstein; as though he should keep up with the masterpieces or quit the business altogether.
Part of Lucas' problem, though, is that the fame and fortune seem to have gone to his head. I recall reading that, initially, Lucas was planning to direct the first movie and then have others direct the next two, just as he had done with the originals. Why did he scrap that idea? It seems like a winning formula for the originals.
And I still have a hard time with Jar-Jar and the kid who played Anakin. Especially the kid. Just superbly terrible acting. Luke was whiny, yeah, but Anakin was dreadful. Surely there must have been people working on the movie and for Lucas who pointed this out to him.
But, overall, I still enjoy the movies... the original trilogy more than the new ones, though. And a lot of people will be enjoying them for decades to come. That's not a bad achievement.
124937? It's just sad what passes for impressive these days. Have you all become so jaded?!?
I'd have to agree with that. If you make a habit of getting rid of compiler warnings as you go, it's very little extra work and can catch some actual bugs.
And, as you said, it makes new problems stick out like a sore thumb and they are far less likely to be overlooked or ignored.
You should be able to do this with a tiny script. Not quite as simple as the launcher GUI, but not bad. Simply create in your home directory (or wherever you like):
And call it "pidgin-en_US". Make it executable and set the launcher to use that script to launch pidgin and you should be good to go.
Better still, if the launcher config lets you give arguments to the program you tell it to execute (I think you can), you can make just one script:
Call it "pidgin-lang" and in the launcher, set it to execute "/home/foo/pidgin-lang en_US.UTF-8" or whatever other language you want.