1. You can get ligatures, etc. built-in on any Cocoa app. Apple's had that stuff for at least a major OS release or two now.
2. Emacs+LaTeX beats, in terms of power, managability, and expressibility, word any day of the week. Emacs is a much better text editor than word. LaTeX is much better at styles. It's also much better at figure handling.
3. It's nice to have the ability to treat your document the same way you do normal source code, with comments and version control.
4. WYSIWYG interfaces tend to encourage distracting oneself with formatting while they're still writing. I like keeping this stuff separate. When I care about formatting, I just setup the parameters & style data once for the entire document. The rest of the time, I'm free to think about the actual content.
I don't think it'll change that feeling much. I use maybe 25mb a month on data, probably peaking (when traveling) at 50. I don't really care about streaming video or music, just a few web pages and google maps. Mobile optimization for the former and caching for the latter keeps that number from going up very much.
Certainly the service schools will bring in intelligent, hard-working, dedicated people.
But how much natural hacker talent are they going to attract? My main concern with US cyberwarfare capabilities is the culture delta between the classic hackers and literally 'working for the man.'
1. RF (Radio-Frequency) mice. Not Infrared. They operate very well.
2. A single battery usually lasts me months. Too long for me to remember the last time I changed the battery. Additionally, a decent RF mouse has a battery gauge right on there.
3. In a portable setting, wiring is a pain in the ass.
4. Wires still interfere with movement. I've never used a wired mouse that had a cord that didn't give feedback. This is especially bad in portable settings.
Consumer hardware just isn't built to last. Consider some used-but-in-good-condition workstations. E.g. an IBM POWER box, an UltraSparc box, or what was a good x86 server a few years ago (though I'm less confident on the x86 front) . The chips are built to last longer, as are the rest of the parts. Even the drives are selected out of the better lots from the manufacturers. A small RAID array (e.g. just 3 mirrored drives) may not hurt either. Considering how little data he likely needs to store, small, high quality drives wouldn't be terribly expensive, even if they're SAS.
When your customer base is paying for support, you cost-minimize downtime to make them happier and to reduce your own support costs.
Back in the dark tty days, when man, daemon, and pager shared userland, triple-headed kerberos nails were the only things holding the whole thing together... too much? I was going to throw in a little Multics, but that seemed excessive.
Actually, both of you hit two heads of the same nail.
The cleanest model for applications running is that you open documents for them, and you close documents for them. Everything else is OS overhead (e.g. is it running?)
BUT, some apps aren't doc-centric. iTunes shares your music when it's open, and the window is the app -- closed = gone, open = running. There's some opportunistic fuzziness with multiple playlist/store windows open, but it's really more of a desktop accessory than a normal file-editing program.
Question is, is it a problem? Application startup/shutdown for doc-editing apps usually isn't a problem until you want to free up some resources. iTunes runs or it doesn't run, usually not a problem unless you forgot it was open on another virtual desktop.
Look, this can take years and years of litigation and cost a lot of money.
So, how about this?
Just kill IE 6. Either by a forced upgrade from a software update, backdoor worm, I don't care. Just get rid of IE 6.
Reasoning: 1. If you've ever done any AJAX, you're not even reading this far. You know why IE 6 must die. 2. IE 7 and 8 are far more standards compliant. MS's inability/unwillingness to heed standards for IE 6 won't pervert the web to the trash that 6 could take. 3. Then, browsers can compete on features.
Yes, MS will still have a distribution advantage with IE. I guess we'll also have to let hardware vendors include other browsers if they want instead of IE. But, now the real software development advantage of the monopoly power of IE is severely reduced -- writing a renderer to two standards: the w3 spec and the crack-induced thinking of the IE team.
Also, you need something to download a good web browser, and curl/wget's a pain.
The source code likely includes some tables & equations for analyzing the sensor values. Those are probably pretty proprietary, and required a good amount of research & development to get right.
If you want people to stay with old code to run on their boxes, please leave GCC out of the mix.
GCC's had two major improvements over the versions:
1. Better language compliance. It matters *a*lot*. And frankly, you're not going to win an argument against that on a techie forum:-) This included a new hand-written C++ parser in g++ ~3.4 that closed out over 100 bugs at once. You don't ignore hand-written C++ parsers, they're complete bitches to do.
2. Better optimizer.
As for any library bloat, the basic C/C++ libraries are shared by nearly everyone on your system. You pay for them exactly once per running system (minus templates, but I don't know of anyone using template-heavy code on a normal Linux desktop installation).
If you were running Solaris, I'd just tell you to dtrace the system and find out what's making it slow. But, no, *sigh*,
Two suggestions, which you may have already done/tried:
1. Map the delete key by your thumb to Esc. 2. Foot pedal. 3. Emacs. Sorry, mention it is obligatory. I wish I didn't have to, and I hope you understand.
Remap like a mad(wo)man. Only reason I had to buy the new one was that I didn't have any PS/2 ports on my newer machines.
Foot pedals are next on my list. I'm afraid of how far this may go. I'm eying the logitech G13 to go with this, the LCD for an emacs buffer list, and God Knows What with all those keys...
Wholeheartedly agree. I think one of the key issues is that we don't want them to fail/right now/. Later changes in product, management, and/or both, are perfectly fine.
ZFS lets you set up a mirror between your HDD and an external USB. When you plug the USB in, it starts to sync immediately. Gosling mentioned doing this a little while ago. It's also drop-dead-simple to backup & restore, and to make data safer on a single disk (end-to-end checksumming and (if desired) redundancy of data on a single disk).
But, really the advantage is that Solaris has some very good developer and analysis tools. Not just dtrace, which is frankly enough by itself (see here for some examples: http://www.brendangregg.com/dtrace.html ), but also some better process analysis tools, such as pldd, pstack, pmap, etc. DTrace gives you wonderful visibility from the kernel up through your userland C app (or vm) into java, ruby, python, and php. (The last 3 were just quick google searches to verify, so YMMV).
I moved from a mac to solaris about 14 months ago, and two weeks ago my old employer called with some problems with an app that was misbehaving. All I kept saying to myself is "this is easy to diagnose, just use X... crap, not solaris."
As for porting FOSS stuff, it was harder at the beginning of 2008, but it's pretty good now. The hard ones are already ported over (e.g. eclipse) and the rest compile pretty easily with the standard./configure..make..make install routine. They've also made it dead-easy to make your own package and submit it for the central repo.
Also, developers need something to work on, and we've been moving to laptops for a *long* time. It's one of the reasons the mac got popular as a dev platform -- solid laptops.
I'll probably get one of these toshiba boxes, and will probably look at their service plans (could end up cheaper than applecare:-) ).
I'm a huge obama supporter, but let's be fair to the guy. He's so out of the tech loop he's not personally responsible for this stuff. His tech people are responsible. Of course, they were all let go Nov 5, so I'm not surprised these last duties were neglected.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope, openmoko.
A few notes:
1. You can get ligatures, etc. built-in on any Cocoa app. Apple's had that stuff for at least a major OS release or two now.
2. Emacs+LaTeX beats, in terms of power, managability, and expressibility, word any day of the week. Emacs is a much better text editor than word. LaTeX is much better at styles. It's also much better at figure handling.
3. It's nice to have the ability to treat your document the same way you do normal source code, with comments and version control.
4. WYSIWYG interfaces tend to encourage distracting oneself with formatting while they're still writing. I like keeping this stuff separate. When I care about formatting, I just setup the parameters & style data once for the entire document. The rest of the time, I'm free to think about the actual content.
Don't forget styles. Word happily redefines styles while editing in such a flimsy way it feels almost arbitrary.
I don't think it'll change that feeling much. I use maybe 25mb a month on data, probably peaking (when traveling) at 50. I don't really care about streaming video or music, just a few web pages and google maps. Mobile optimization for the former and caching for the latter keeps that number from going up very much.
Certainly the service schools will bring in intelligent, hard-working, dedicated people.
But how much natural hacker talent are they going to attract? My main concern with US cyberwarfare capabilities is the culture delta between the classic hackers and literally 'working for the man.'
1. RF (Radio-Frequency) mice. Not Infrared. They operate very well.
2. A single battery usually lasts me months. Too long for me to remember the last time I changed the battery. Additionally, a decent RF mouse has a battery gauge right on there.
3. In a portable setting, wiring is a pain in the ass.
4. Wires still interfere with movement. I've never used a wired mouse that had a cord that didn't give feedback. This is especially bad in portable settings.
Consumer hardware just isn't built to last. Consider some used-but-in-good-condition workstations. E.g. an IBM POWER box, an UltraSparc box, or what was a good x86 server a few years ago (though I'm less confident on the x86 front) . The chips are built to last longer, as are the rest of the parts. Even the drives are selected out of the better lots from the manufacturers. A small RAID array (e.g. just 3 mirrored drives) may not hurt either. Considering how little data he likely needs to store, small, high quality drives wouldn't be terribly expensive, even if they're SAS.
When your customer base is paying for support, you cost-minimize downtime to make them happier and to reduce your own support costs.
Back in the dark tty days, when man, daemon, and pager shared userland, triple-headed kerberos nails were the only things holding the whole thing together. .. too much? I was going to throw in a little Multics, but that seemed excessive.
That's just spooky.
Actually, both of you hit two heads of the same nail.
The cleanest model for applications running is that you open documents for them, and you close documents for them. Everything else is OS overhead (e.g. is it running?)
BUT, some apps aren't doc-centric. iTunes shares your music when it's open, and the window is the app -- closed = gone, open = running. There's some opportunistic fuzziness with multiple playlist/store windows open, but it's really more of a desktop accessory than a normal file-editing program.
Question is, is it a problem? Application startup/shutdown for doc-editing apps usually isn't a problem until you want to free up some resources. iTunes runs or it doesn't run, usually not a problem unless you forgot it was open on another virtual desktop.
Look, this can take years and years of litigation and cost a lot of money.
So, how about this?
Just kill IE 6. Either by a forced upgrade from a software update, backdoor worm, I don't care. Just get rid of IE 6.
Reasoning:
1. If you've ever done any AJAX, you're not even reading this far. You know why IE 6 must die.
2. IE 7 and 8 are far more standards compliant. MS's inability/unwillingness to heed standards for IE 6 won't pervert the web to the trash that 6 could take.
3. Then, browsers can compete on features.
Yes, MS will still have a distribution advantage with IE. I guess we'll also have to let hardware vendors include other browsers if they want instead of IE. But, now the real software development advantage of the monopoly power of IE is severely reduced -- writing a renderer to two standards: the w3 spec and the crack-induced thinking of the IE team.
Also, you need something to download a good web browser, and curl/wget's a pain.
Indeed. Or inappropriately sensitive to other legal chemicals in your breath, like listerine, nyquil, whatever?
The source code likely includes some tables & equations for analyzing the sensor values. Those are probably pretty proprietary, and required a good amount of research & development to get right.
s/monkey/troll/g
I think it'd be more fun if we used the Lala from TikiBarTV, but maybe that's just me.
If you want people to stay with old code to run on their boxes, please leave GCC out of the mix.
GCC's had two major improvements over the versions:
1. Better language compliance. It matters *a*lot*. And frankly, you're not going to win an argument against that on a techie forum :-) This included a new hand-written C++ parser in g++ ~3.4 that closed out over 100 bugs at once. You don't ignore hand-written C++ parsers, they're complete bitches to do.
2. Better optimizer.
As for any library bloat, the basic C/C++ libraries are shared by nearly everyone on your system. You pay for them exactly once per running system (minus templates, but I don't know of anyone using template-heavy code on a normal Linux desktop installation).
If you were running Solaris, I'd just tell you to dtrace the system and find out what's making it slow. But, no, *sigh*,
Two suggestions, which you may have already done/tried:
1. Map the delete key by your thumb to Esc.
2. Foot pedal.
3. Emacs. Sorry, mention it is obligatory. I wish I didn't have to, and I hope you understand.
Cheers,
-ls
Ultimate. Emacs. Keyboard.
Remap like a mad(wo)man. Only reason I had to buy the new one was that I didn't have any PS/2 ports on my newer machines.
Foot pedals are next on my list. I'm afraid of how far this may go. I'm eying the logitech G13 to go with this, the LCD for an emacs buffer list, and God Knows What with all those keys...
nah, that's camel caps. This is what you want:
LLPCSVNneumann
(Long Long, as we're on 64 bit machines, prof, cs, von) neumann.
Wholeheartedly agree. I think one of the key issues is that we don't want them to fail /right now/. Later changes in product, management, and/or both, are perfectly fine.
Also, Chrysler's probably got to go.
ZFS lets you set up a mirror between your HDD and an external USB. When you plug the USB in, it starts to sync immediately. Gosling mentioned doing this a little while ago. It's also drop-dead-simple to backup & restore, and to make data safer on a single disk (end-to-end checksumming and (if desired) redundancy of data on a single disk).
But, really the advantage is that Solaris has some very good developer and analysis tools. Not just dtrace, which is frankly enough by itself (see here for some examples: http://www.brendangregg.com/dtrace.html ), but also some better process analysis tools, such as pldd, pstack, pmap, etc. DTrace gives you wonderful visibility from the kernel up through your userland C app (or vm) into java, ruby, python, and php. (The last 3 were just quick google searches to verify, so YMMV).
I moved from a mac to solaris about 14 months ago, and two weeks ago my old employer called with some problems with an app that was misbehaving. All I kept saying to myself is "this is easy to diagnose, just use X... crap, not solaris."
As for porting FOSS stuff, it was harder at the beginning of 2008, but it's pretty good now. The hard ones are already ported over (e.g. eclipse) and the rest compile pretty easily with the standard ./configure..make..make install routine. They've also made it dead-easy to make your own package and submit it for the central repo.
Also, developers need something to work on, and we've been moving to laptops for a *long* time. It's one of the reasons the mac got popular as a dev platform -- solid laptops.
I'll probably get one of these toshiba boxes, and will probably look at their service plans (could end up cheaper than applecare :-) ).
I'm a huge obama supporter, but let's be fair to the guy. He's so out of the tech loop he's not personally responsible for this stuff. His tech people are responsible. Of course, they were all let go Nov 5, so I'm not surprised these last duties were neglected.
You're going to have to tier your data into different (cost of archive, cost of loss) groups, and set up procedures for that.
I generally have two tiers, one for professional/academic concerns, another for large media (video, not music).
The latter's on a spare USB drive, the former's on a few drives and an off-site backup service. Not expensive (~$30/mon) for my data needs.
I must disagree.
An accidental rm -rf backups/foo/crap-that-washn't-what-I-meant can be pretty bad.
A backup you keep and manually pull up when needed is safer in this regard.