Score one for the nerds vs the chavs in Cambridge, I suppose.
I thought Cambridge would be all nice and genteel when I moved here from London six months ago; all punting and Pimms on the river bank. It doesn't seem that way now. The Co-Op on the corner was ram-raided a few days ago, there always seem to be missing persons posters up, there've been several murders and attempted murders, foreign students get harrassed and mugged and the chavs have seriously taken over the city centre.
Absolutely - I put the divide between when I was "just mucking around" and actually being an OSS developer the day I added a set of automated tests to my project. I'm amazed that I managed to release code that ran at all, let alone reliably, before then.
Some day somebody should write a "good development practice" short guide for OSS developers.
There is far more to auto-completion than variable/function names. Does ctags allow vi to generate a tooltip with the function arguments listed - I can't find it in the docs. Not having to look up or remember every function declaration is extremely useful. Was that function "short int do_something(short int number_of_time,short int size)" or "int do_something(int size,int number_of_times)".
Having a C++ parser in the compiler isn't that much use while typing. Source code is highly structured, why not use an IDE that reduces the burden on the developer to remember that structure? While I can program fine with emacs or vi, visual IDEs make developing medium-size and up projects much easier.
I think so - is that where you write a skeleton file and fill in the blanks later?
Vim/Vi has been ported to every platform under the sun,
I know - someone even offered to hire me to port Vim to PalmOS a while back. I turned them down, but it would have been funny to see people trying to type Vi commands with a stylus.
I'm not sure that Vim's autocomplete is anywhere near as advanced as Visual Studio's or KDevelop's. In those IDEs (haven't used KDevelop for ages), you get a completion list for classes with annotations indicating whether they're private or public, members or methods etc.
The completion in Emacs and Vi is far less advanced - it just selects from a list of matching terms. No list, no information and if I mispell a member, I get no indication, the auto-complete just starts selecting random matching symbols from its list that match with the mispelled version (so object->c^p brings up object->char, rather than saying "no completion" if there isn't one).
Precisely. I think there is a lot of macho posturing over programming tools, but if something can reduce the amount of state I have to hold in my head while coding, it's very useful. Of course, the tools can become a crutch - I really struggled going from Visual studio to emacs, because I was used to having everything laid out for me - but for an experienced developer that's not an issue.
The only problem I found with both Kdevelop and Annjuta was that they didn't cope well with annotated function declarations, which rendered their auto-completion and class views useless to me. I use the annotations to define which code segment a function should be in for multi-segment PalmOS apps (Damn 16-bit pointers).
The Monopoly analogy is spot on, AFAICS. MMORPGs provide enough factors that addicted gamers can come up with arguments to convince themselves that what they're doing isn't like buying Boardwalk.
To me it seems like Magic:The Gathering. I was addicted to that for a long time and spent far too much money on cards (can't have a Blue/Red Direct Damage/Jitsu deck without Jokalhaups, Iceberg and a bunch of other rares). You can avoid the problems, but in an open competition the guy with the most expensive deck wins. I fudged the issue for ages, justifying all the money I spent on booster packs and cards.
In a small group of friends, you can play controlled tournaments, with limits on cards or random cards so money doesn't come into it. But go out into the wider world and you can't do that any more. Eventually I realised that I was only doing it because I was addicted, and gave all my cards away (and yes, I do regret giving away my multiple tournament winning, very expensive main deck for free *now*, but at the time it made sense).
Doesn't it cheapen the game and reduce the impact of skill if any PvP or vaguely competitive aspect of the game can be decided by the fact that one player can afford to buy a sword of death+10?
Don't get me started on the fact that people play games that AFK macros can play for them, and so boring that they'd pay to have someone else play for them.
The US must be a really unfriendly place for cats. Here in the UK, I don't know a single cat owner who doesn't have a cat flap and I can't think of anyone who's lost a cat stray or to an accident. One cat I know of died recently at the age of 20, and she was stuck outside most of her life because she was too damn fat to get through the cat flap.
Just train the cat properly to know where it lives.
Bought a dell desktop, everything worked fine except the hard drive made a funny whining noise every 15-20 minutes or so: like there was a small, injured cat trapped inside (I'm not joking - he even recorded the noise and played it to the support guys). He asked tech support "Is this something I should worry about?". They said "It's not on our script".
Eventually, it got annoying enough and he pushed Dell enough that he got it sent it back for a replacement hard drive, with him paying for delivery etc. It came back with *the same hard drive*, same noise, obviously untouched apart from a scribbled note saying "replaced drive".
At this point he got a bit pissed off. Dell told him to get lost until he pointed out that he was a journalist and had just written up a short article about his Dell experience for the Guardian online section. Suddenly a courier was dispatched to collect the computer free of charge and a full refund appeared in his account. The article never got published.
The file alteration monitor in FC3 is gamin, a lighter replacement for FAM (which was terrible). Replacing the installed version with the latest dev version (RPMs from the developer's website) helps a bit, but gamin is still pretty unreliable. It's early in its development still.
FC3 is terribly unreliable and buggy, but it seems to be about "as good as it gets" for GNOME 2.8 desktops. Gnome-volume-manager, alteration monitoring, gnome-pilot and nautilus have very annoying bugs. Ubuntu had a mostly overlapping set of GNOME bugs, too. It's getting to the point where I might drop work on my own (PalmOS) project for a while to go fix gpilotd, just so I can actually sync my Palm with GNOME. I've also reported bugs against things like gtktextview that really ought to be spotted by unit testing in such an organised project.
That said, I have read GNOME developers saying that 2.6 and 2.8 were bad from a bug point of view and 2.10 is meant to be a major bugfix release, and some KDE releases are just as bad (KDE 3.3.0 was the last release I used).
The first complaint is moot, as you can select multiple files in the open dialog in the standard way by holding down shift.
Your second point seems to have been corrupted by slashdot filters or something. Let me try to rephrase that for you:
Bug Submission #1 Severity: Enhancement Title: Allow quicker navigation through nautilus file windows through keyboard navigation Description: Finding files in a Nautilus directory view could be made much quicker if simple type-ahead find was implemented. Several other GUIs (such as Windows 95) on a keypress in a directory view move the focus to the first file beginning with that letter in the view. This makes keyboard navigation much quicker and reduces the need for the user to move their hand to the mouse.
Personally I like spatial Nautilus, and so do many people. Turn it off if you don't like it.
spend $30 on gold that saves them 10 in-game hours of leveling boredom
I guess people outside the MMORPG world just have trouble understanding why people bother playing games that aren't fun. I mean, if levelling is such a grind that people will spend money to avoid it, why do people do it? Is grinding from level 1-10 really any different from level 10-20, beyond the bigger numbers and fancier spell-effects graphics?
I really just can't understand the morons in online FPSs who go around TKing etc. I've tried talking to them sometimes, asking "why do you do this?" in as nice a way as possible, but of course never got an answer. The idea of playing an MMORPG, where the potential number of morons available to piss me off is so much higher, doesn't appeal to me much.
I have sat and watched someone spend half an hour stacking planes on an aircraft carrier deck so no one could take off (Coral sea,BF1942) before an admin joined and kicked him. What kind of mentality must a person have to waste half an hour doing something incredibly dull and repetitive (enter plane, taxi forwards, exit plane, wait for new plane to spawn, repeat) purely to piss off people he doesn't know who are trying to have fun?
It basically means only servers with admins are worth playing on. I have about five servers in my favourites list that I know have good admins and decent auto-kick settings. I occasionally play on other servers, but I always regret it.
It's readable enough, but it is hackneyed and in general not well written. It overuses devices like cliffhanger chapter endings and foreshadowing, more like some bad soap opera than a novel.
Think "Days of our Lives" in Friends: close-up on character's face as they make a horrifying realisation, background music swells to jarring chord, fade to black and "To be continued...". It works a few times, it just gets annoying after a while.
I know it's pulp fiction, but there's far better pulp fiction out there: early Michael Crichton, for example.
LloydsTSB online has a similar system: Username is a random 8 digit alphanumeric string, then you need a standard password and 3 characters at random from a long passphrase. Plus you need to reenter the password to perform payments, in case you leave a browser session logged in.
OK, who broke slashdot? The comments are messed up big time for me: all AC and from random stories. It's even weirder than Slashdot normally, which is pretty scary.
FC3 includes K3b, a far superior CD burning UI to Nero IMHO. I'm not sure why the GP didn't use that.
Most distros will set up wireless LAN out of the box these days, apart from those cards which require ndiswrapper. But then, installing the netgear wg311 drivers on my win2k system caused it to crash and rendered windows unbootable.
The Australian Consumers? Association has evaluated Xandros,
Is the "?" some kind of joke about the way Australians turn everything they say into a question by going up in tone at the end of every sentence? Or just an unescaped html character?
Because it gets really annoying? Trying to talk to people? When you're not sure whether they're asking a question or telling you something?
Slashdot Mirror
ChavScum is a good place to start the study of this fascinating sub-species of Britons.
Score one for the nerds vs the chavs in Cambridge, I suppose.
I thought Cambridge would be all nice and genteel when I moved here from London six months ago; all punting and Pimms on the river bank. It doesn't seem that way now. The Co-Op on the corner was ram-raided a few days ago, there always seem to be missing persons posters up, there've been several murders and attempted murders, foreign students get harrassed and mugged and the chavs have seriously taken over the city centre.
Absolutely - I put the divide between when I was "just mucking around" and actually being an OSS developer the day I added a set of automated tests to my project. I'm amazed that I managed to release code that ran at all, let alone reliably, before then.
Some day somebody should write a "good development practice" short guide for OSS developers.
But it isn't much of a game if the 30 hours to get a sword is neither fun nor requires any skill, is it?
There is far more to auto-completion than variable/function names. Does ctags allow vi to generate a tooltip with the function arguments listed - I can't find it in the docs. Not having to look up or remember every function declaration is extremely useful. Was that function "short int do_something(short int number_of_time,short int size)" or "int do_something(int size,int number_of_times)".
Having a C++ parser in the compiler isn't that much use while typing. Source code is highly structured, why not use an IDE that reduces the burden on the developer to remember that structure? While I can program fine with emacs or vi, visual IDEs make developing medium-size and up projects much easier.
I think so - is that where you write a skeleton file and fill in the blanks later?
This is a joke, right?
Vim/Vi has been ported to every platform under the sun,
I know - someone even offered to hire me to port Vim to PalmOS a while back. I turned them down, but it would have been funny to see people trying to type Vi commands with a stylus.
I'm not sure that Vim's autocomplete is anywhere near as advanced as Visual Studio's or KDevelop's. In those IDEs (haven't used KDevelop for ages), you get a completion list for classes with annotations indicating whether they're private or public, members or methods etc.
The completion in Emacs and Vi is far less advanced - it just selects from a list of matching terms. No list, no information and if I mispell a member, I get no indication, the auto-complete just starts selecting random matching symbols from its list that match with the mispelled version (so object->c^p brings up object->char, rather than saying "no completion" if there isn't one).
Precisely. I think there is a lot of macho posturing over programming tools, but if something can reduce the amount of state I have to hold in my head while coding, it's very useful. Of course, the tools can become a crutch - I really struggled going from Visual studio to emacs, because I was used to having everything laid out for me - but for an experienced developer that's not an issue.
The only problem I found with both Kdevelop and Annjuta was that they didn't cope well with annotated function declarations, which rendered their auto-completion and class views useless to me. I use the annotations to define which code segment a function should be in for multi-segment PalmOS apps (Damn 16-bit pointers).
The Monopoly analogy is spot on, AFAICS. MMORPGs provide enough factors that addicted gamers can come up with arguments to convince themselves that what they're doing isn't like buying Boardwalk.
To me it seems like Magic:The Gathering. I was addicted to that for a long time and spent far too much money on cards (can't have a Blue/Red Direct Damage/Jitsu deck without Jokalhaups, Iceberg and a bunch of other rares). You can avoid the problems, but in an open competition the guy with the most expensive deck wins. I fudged the issue for ages, justifying all the money I spent on booster packs and cards.
In a small group of friends, you can play controlled tournaments, with limits on cards or random cards so money doesn't come into it. But go out into the wider world and you can't do that any more. Eventually I realised that I was only doing it because I was addicted, and gave all my cards away (and yes, I do regret giving away my multiple tournament winning, very expensive main deck for free *now*, but at the time it made sense).
Doesn't it cheapen the game and reduce the impact of skill if any PvP or vaguely competitive aspect of the game can be decided by the fact that one player can afford to buy a sword of death+10?
Don't get me started on the fact that people play games that AFK macros can play for them, and so boring that they'd pay to have someone else play for them.
The US must be a really unfriendly place for cats. Here in the UK, I don't know a single cat owner who doesn't have a cat flap and I can't think of anyone who's lost a cat stray or to an accident. One cat I know of died recently at the age of 20, and she was stuck outside most of her life because she was too damn fat to get through the cat flap.
Just train the cat properly to know where it lives.
My father's experience with them:
Bought a dell desktop, everything worked fine except the hard drive made a funny whining noise every 15-20 minutes or so: like there was a small, injured cat trapped inside (I'm not joking - he even recorded the noise and played it to the support guys). He asked tech support "Is this something I should worry about?". They said "It's not on our script".
Eventually, it got annoying enough and he pushed Dell enough that he got it sent it back for a replacement hard drive, with him paying for delivery etc. It came back with *the same hard drive*, same noise, obviously untouched apart from a scribbled note saying "replaced drive".
At this point he got a bit pissed off. Dell told him to get lost until he pointed out that he was a journalist and had just written up a short article about his Dell experience for the Guardian online section. Suddenly a courier was dispatched to collect the computer free of charge and a full refund appeared in his account. The article never got published.
Especially since the wireless throughput on all the Sveasoft firmware images I tried was half that of the official firmware.
It seems that they've got round this problem now by including some non-GPL elements in the image.
The file alteration monitor in FC3 is gamin, a lighter replacement for FAM (which was terrible). Replacing the installed version with the latest dev version (RPMs from the developer's website) helps a bit, but gamin is still pretty unreliable. It's early in its development still.
FC3 is terribly unreliable and buggy, but it seems to be about "as good as it gets" for GNOME 2.8 desktops. Gnome-volume-manager, alteration monitoring, gnome-pilot and nautilus have very annoying bugs. Ubuntu had a mostly overlapping set of GNOME bugs, too. It's getting to the point where I might drop work on my own (PalmOS) project for a while to go fix gpilotd, just so I can actually sync my Palm with GNOME. I've also reported bugs against things like gtktextview that really ought to be spotted by unit testing in such an organised project.
That said, I have read GNOME developers saying that 2.6 and 2.8 were bad from a bug point of view and 2.10 is meant to be a major bugfix release, and some KDE releases are just as bad (KDE 3.3.0 was the last release I used).
The first complaint is moot, as you can select multiple files in the open dialog in the standard way by holding down shift.
Your second point seems to have been corrupted by slashdot filters or something. Let me try to rephrase that for you:
Bug Submission #1
Severity: Enhancement
Title: Allow quicker navigation through nautilus file windows through keyboard navigation
Description: Finding files in a Nautilus directory view could be made much quicker if simple type-ahead find was implemented. Several other GUIs (such as Windows 95) on a keypress in a directory view move the focus to the first file beginning with that letter in the view. This makes keyboard navigation much quicker and reduces the need for the user to move their hand to the mouse.
Personally I like spatial Nautilus, and so do many people. Turn it off if you don't like it.
spend $30 on gold that saves them 10 in-game hours of leveling boredom
I guess people outside the MMORPG world just have trouble understanding why people bother playing games that aren't fun. I mean, if levelling is such a grind that people will spend money to avoid it, why do people do it? Is grinding from level 1-10 really any different from level 10-20, beyond the bigger numbers and fancier spell-effects graphics?
I really just can't understand the morons in online FPSs who go around TKing etc. I've tried talking to them sometimes, asking "why do you do this?" in as nice a way as possible, but of course never got an answer. The idea of playing an MMORPG, where the potential number of morons available to piss me off is so much higher, doesn't appeal to me much.
I have sat and watched someone spend half an hour stacking planes on an aircraft carrier deck so no one could take off (Coral sea,BF1942) before an admin joined and kicked him. What kind of mentality must a person have to waste half an hour doing something incredibly dull and repetitive (enter plane, taxi forwards, exit plane, wait for new plane to spawn, repeat) purely to piss off people he doesn't know who are trying to have fun?
It basically means only servers with admins are worth playing on. I have about five servers in my favourites list that I know have good admins and decent auto-kick settings. I occasionally play on other servers, but I always regret it.
It's readable enough, but it is hackneyed and in general not well written. It overuses devices like cliffhanger chapter endings and foreshadowing, more like some bad soap opera than a novel.
Think "Days of our Lives" in Friends: close-up on character's face as they make a horrifying realisation, background music swells to jarring chord, fade to black and "To be continued...". It works a few times, it just gets annoying after a while.
I know it's pulp fiction, but there's far better pulp fiction out there: early Michael Crichton, for example.
Now where'd I put that 200MIPS SparcStation to run it on...
LloydsTSB online has a similar system: Username is a random 8 digit alphanumeric string, then you need a standard password and 3 characters at random from a long passphrase. Plus you need to reenter the password to perform payments, in case you leave a browser session logged in.
John Peel was the best example of the power of radio to introduce new things to a country's musical tastes.
OK, who broke slashdot? The comments are messed up big time for me: all AC and from random stories. It's even weirder than Slashdot normally, which is pretty scary.
MacOS X Panther from the Australian Apple store is $229(Aus). Apple stuff is always much more expensive outside the US.
Or maybe Australians quote prices in Australian Dollars? Just an idea.
FC3 includes K3b, a far superior CD burning UI to Nero IMHO. I'm not sure why the GP didn't use that.
Most distros will set up wireless LAN out of the box these days, apart from those cards which require ndiswrapper. But then, installing the netgear wg311 drivers on my win2k system caused it to crash and rendered windows unbootable.
The Australian Consumers? Association has evaluated Xandros,
Is the "?" some kind of joke about the way Australians turn everything they say into a question by going up in tone at the end of every sentence? Or just an unescaped html character?
Because it gets really annoying? Trying to talk to people? When you're not sure whether they're asking a question or telling you something?