It's a bit annoying. You have to download a whole bunch of zip files listed there and put them into a directory like C:\gimp. Then, you have to unzip them (preserving directory structure). After that, you have to add c:\gimp\bin and c:\gimp\lib to the system path, and you'll have to rename some misnamed DLL files (the instructions only tell you about some of them, but gimp-1.3.exe will tell you which ones are missine), and you might have to search the web for a copy of msvcr70.dll (I had to), and keep in mind that they direct link to the 1.2 version of gettext, but the file isn't there. Just look in the directory from which the file is linked, and you'll find the 1.3 version of gettext, and that'll work.
A lot of effort to get it to work. Looks pretty cool, though. Still, I hate it when an app doesn't provide an optional MDI. I have too many task buttons on my taskbar as it is!
I'm taking a look at KDE 3.1's file open dialog box via an impromptu vnc session on a lonely ratpoison'd X session. I haven't played with the WinXP's dialog box, but here's the things that make the KDE dialog box more innovative than the one in Windows 2000:
A) You can right-click to add, delete and edit the shortcuts in the "Navigation Panel" (that's what KDE calls the "Places Bar"). In Windows, you'd have to add a registry key in a rather nonintuitive place ("HKCU\ Software\ Microsoft\ Windows\ CurrentVersion\ Policies\ ComDlg32\ Placesbar")
B) You can hide and unhide the Navigation panel via the mouse or the keybinding. In Win2k, you would have to play with the registry for this, which makes it rather annoying if you'd prefer to have the Places Bar hidden 90% of the time, only to be revealed when needed.
C) You can customize the Navigation Panel so that there are shortcuts common to all KDE apps and also shortcuts individual to each application. I frequently visit "/mnt/niven/code" from kate (a text editor with syntax highlighting), but I'd have no reason to go there from K3b (a rather sweet CD/DVD burning app).
D) You can swap between large and small icon size for shortcuts in the Navigation Panel. Nice if your current program has a ton of shortcuts. Oh, there's a scrollbar for when you have too many icons to fit in the visible space.
E) There's a button to refresh the current directory listing. I have to hit "F5" in Win2k more often than you'd think, so mouse access for this is kinda neat.
F) A bookmarking system is built into the selector. I don't use this, but I can see how it might be useful for some people who need a little more flexibility than you'd get from the regular, flat Navigation Panel.
G) Sorting is a little more flexible, allowing you to sort in any view mode without having to right-click (in Win2k, you have to do this unless you're in "Detailed" view mode). It also allows you to decide whether the sort is case sensitive, and it's easier to reverse sorts. And you can specify whether you want directories all listed above the files or intermingled in the sort.
H) You can dynamically toggle the listing of hidden files (there's a menu button for it, or you can just hit "F8"). That's a far cry from the more time consuming "explorer.exe, Tools->Folder Options->View->Hidden Files and Folders".
I) File previews are built into this widget, and you can toggle this on and off. Moreover, if you go into KDE's configuration gui, you can tell the system which file types should be previewed.
J) At any time, you can separate the files and folders into two separate window panes, or you can put them in the same pane.
K) As with the Win2k file dialog widget, there are dropdown widgets for the active directory ("Look in"), file name and file filter ("Files of type:"). But while Win2k only makes the file name editable by the user, KDE allows you type into any three of the fields. This means that I can change to another directory easily without having to worry about accidentally mangling the file name. Sometimes, Win2k takes a while to pop up the "Look in" bar when I click on it, and while I could type a directory location into the "File name" widget, I'd lose the file name itself (in a "Save As" situation)! And if I wanted to look at all *.html files to open up in notepad, the filter widget is useless (it only lets me pick "*.txt" or "all files"), and the only way to do it -- typing into the "File name" widget -- also destroys the existing file name.
L) The KDE file dialog box is fully network aware. I could load from or save to a file via ftp or ssh (sftp), and it'll even remember the passwords during my current session.
I'm sure that Windows XP has most of these improvements built-in. I'm not trying to suggest that putting the latest KDE against Windows 2000 is a valid comparison. But I do like that I can get the above capabilities without having to spend even more money on Windows than I already have.
> > I wist[sic] windows would have the grep command =( > Windows NT/2000/XP/2003 and the Win 98 Resource Kit has a similar command in findstr. A basic set > of regular expressions are included like character classes, ranges, beginning and end of > words and lines, and multiple matching.
Better yet (imho), just install Cygwin, which gives you a full unix environment with all the tools necessary to use Win32 without feeling the need to gut yourself. That includes grep, find, locate and similar tools.
Plus, if you're insane enough, you can use it to install X11 and run KDE 3.1 or GNOME 1.4 instead of explorer.exe. Well, except that they're not yet mature on this platform (KDE runs extremely slowly, while GNOME is both not up to date and a bit less stable than what you'd expect from GNOME).
--
-JC
coder, needs FT work, Long Island, NY
http://www.jc-news.com/parse.cgi?coding/main
> Bottom line: this sucker is going to be over, one way or another, in less > than three years because SCO can't afford to keep it going any longer.
Although I suspect that the SCO situation will end sooner than many expect, it is always possible for large company to purchase SCO's assets and continue the legal actions. Offhand (for example), I can think of three multi-billion dollar video game console manufacturers with the lack of ethics necessary to do that.
But, yeah, SCO's probably not going to be so lucky.
> Oh really?? how did they manage to login? let > alone install a distro (redhat and suse included).
Most home users I know didn't install their own copy of MS Windows. Either the OEM did, or the local computer geek did. Similarly, a stupid person could either get a preinstalled Lindows box, or they can get the block's smart kid to install Mandrake Linux so that it automatically logs in to KDE or GNOME.
Hmmm. Now that I think about it, a lot of normals sit in front of a Tivo. Does that count?
> What's currently broken in Win98 that needs fixing?
Resource handling. Regardless of how much physical RAM you put into your machine, Windows 98 reserves the same small amount for system resources. Programs that stay in memory (like MSIE, Mozilla, MS Office 97, OpenOffice.org) all the time often hog the resources, and when there's no more GDI resources (for example), you start to notice widgets and icons disappearing. And then your system crashes.
In any decent OS (and I count Windows 2000 in that class), Mozilla is a pretty fantastic program. But version 1.4 had a small resource leak issue. Only in Win9x/ME, all-day usage of the program will often end in disaster as resources get eaten more and more.
Naturally, the easy fix (other than solutions like "use a competing product") would be to upgrade to Mozilla 1.5 or higher. Even more naturally, the people here at my job only consider "Microsoft" and "Netscape" to be respectable vendors of web browsers, so Mozilla (even though Netscape is just a Mozilla clone with a couple preinstalled plugins) isn't an option. And, of course, Netscape is no longer being developed (even though developing it requires minimal effort, given that it's a skin and an installation wrapper for an already-existing project). And, yes, the last Netscape is based on the earlier version of Mozilla, the one that has the leak.
But none of this would be a problem if you could just simply edit a registry setting to increase the maximum allocation for GDI resources in Windows 98.
Bastards.
--
-JC
Programmer (Win32, Linux, Qt, Perl, Zaurus, Game Boy Advance)
http://www.jc-news.com/parse.cgi?coding/main
PS: To their credit, I'm pretty sure that Microsoft did actually increase the resource limit when they moved from Win95 to Win98.
Rather shockingly, on my cygwin bash instance here, the perl method is faster than your alternative (roughly 0.155s versus 0.105s). This surprised me quite a bit.
> I always hated the error windows telling the user he or she cannot > do something and then requiring "ok" to be clicked.
> I always thought it would be neat to write something that > would add a "Fuck you!" button or something similar - clicking > on it would be the same as clicking on the "ok" button, but at > least the user would feel better.
In EditPad, there's a certain error (I think it's when you try to save to a read-only filename) where the button to proceed says "Bummer".
> I really wonder what kind of leash they have tied around Eddie Murphy's neck > to force him to do that crud.
Check his filmography. Eddie Murphy has been doing exactly this sort of crud for a good many years now.
On the flip side, while I thought this movie was indeed of rather low calibre (eg, it more or less sucked), I must defend it in a small way by noting that Terrence Stamp and Wallace Shawn gave spot-on performances.
> you know damn well that not-so-good-intentioned 'patches' will soon follow. Post some source on a > site, provide an EXE(that of course didn't come from the source) and you've fished in countless joe users before the real word is out that a copy > cat has duped you. Too late for some.
If the source is published, then somebody will eventually compile the code and compare it against the executable. If the source is not published, then there is NEVER, EVER any possible way to figure out if the executable is legit. So basically with open source patches, you might dupe people for as long as a couple days. But with closed source patches, you can dupe people for ten billion trillion centuries.
I prefer the open source route here, as it slightly limits the amount of time that people can be duped.
> "To Kill a Mockingbird" is the best conversion IMO.
Does "Twelve Angry Men" count? If my shoddy, ADD-laden, underpaid brain's memory serves, I recall that It was a play that was converted into a film. And it was probably the best film I've seen in black and white.
I also thought that S. Morganstern's classic (cough) "The Princess Bride" was very well converted. They cut a lot of fat that wasn't needed from the book, so it wasn't an exact transfer, but I dearly loved it in both formats.
> then one browser window crashing doesn't take them all down as it does > using Mozilla or a tabbing enhancement for IE
I am not disagreeing with the bulk of your message, but I would like to add as an aside that session management takes away ninety-nine percent of the unhappiness caused by such crashes. Basically, if a page crashes in Opera or Mozilla (depending on the version, you might need an extension for this functionality) or even Konqueror, you just run the application and it start up where it left off.
Session management is one of my must-have features in nearly any application that I use.
> Shit. I hate to reply to myself but i forgot to > mention that i've got a Tbird 1200. Not that > great a computer.
Yeah, but at least it has four digits in the "MHz" number. My work machine is a 550MHz Pentium III running Windows 2000 (and X11 over Cygwin, naturally), and my home machine is an 800MHz Duron running (usually) Mandrake Linux 9.2. Granted, my utter lack of spyware (on both OSes), the use of a separate video card (my friend has a 1.7GHz Celeron with an "Intel Extreme" integrated crapola graphics chip), and a generally conservative habit of system efficiency tweaking makes this machine more capable than my friends' "faster" boxes, but it does kill me, especially since I run programs that kill the cpu (mplayer, parchive2, unrar, bittorrent, giFT, gcc, etc..).
Anyway, feel free to send me your 1200MHz chip when you're done with it. I wouldn't mind.
--
-JC
I can write code. ^_^
http://www.jc-news.com/parse.cgi?coding/main
DESCRIPTION
The tput command makes terminal-dependent information available to users
or shell applications. When invoked as the clear utility, the screen
will be cleared as if
tput clear
had been executed. The options to tput are as follows:
-T The terminal name as specified in the termcap database, for exam-
ple, ``vt100'' or ``xterm''. If not specified, tput retrieves
the ``TERM'' variable from the environment.
The tput command outputs a string if the attribute is of type string; a
number if it is of type integer. Otherwise, tput exits 0 if the terminal
has the capability and 1 if it does not, without further action.
If the attribute is of type string, and takes arguments (e.g. cursor
movement, the termcap ``cm'' sequence) the arguments are taken from the
command line immediately following the attribute.
The following special attributes are available:
clear Clear the screen (the termcap ``cl'' sequence).
init Initialize the terminal (the termcap ``is'' sequence).
longname Print the descriptive name of the user's terminal type.
reset Reset the terminal (the termcap ``rs'' sequence).
> In the external solar systems we've found, most have had a Jupiter like planet > orbiting near the star.
Just for clarification, the reason why we've found Jupiter-like planets around most discovered star systems is not necessarily because most star systems have Jupiter-like planets. It is merely because most of our detection schemes cannot detect anything lighter, so we have no way of discovering star systems *without* Jupiter-like planets.
> And, of course it has intelligent popup blocking > options. A simple option like "Open requested > popup windows only" is really a major user win. > I agree it's probably an effect of having a very > small core of people designing
Um. Mozilla had this feature before Opera did. I've been a happy Opera user since 3.x, and when Opera started popup blocking, it was dumb popup blocking. Mozilla later introduced popup blocking that didn't block popups when you click a link. Then, a few months later, Opera copied this "Open requested popup windows only" functionality.
Intelligent popup blocking is enabled by default in Mozilla. It is disabled by default in Netscape 7.1. There's no convenient Operaish F12-like quick access to this preference (there are some extensions that you can install that would help, though), but you can get to it by going "Edit -> Preferences, Privacy & Security -> Popup Windows -> Block unrequested popup windows".
> Sorry guys, but IMHO Firebird is what mozilla > should habe been : nice look, 'speed-o-light' > fast, IE killer...
Yeah, 'speed-o-light'... maybe in an alternative universe where c 10m/s
I have Firebird 0.7 installed here. To start it up (from an initial zero-window state) on this 550MHz Pentium III, I have to wait something like ten and a half seconds.
Mozilla 1.5 has this nice feature that lets you preload the application. Because of this, I can start from the same zero-window state and get a new browser window open in two seconds.
Until Firebird has this functionality, I can't use it.
For that matter, while I use a modified Qute skin (that's what Firebird uses) for Opera, I vastly prefer using the Walnut skin for Mozilla, since it looks a ton better. I don't think that I can use this skin with Firebird. I will check, though.
> All we need now are mouses with separate middle-button and scrollwheel, > so you don't accidentally scroll in the middle of opening a link...
That's an excellent point. I don't make that mistake often, but I do make it. Fortunately, there are multiple ways to open new windows that are generally standardized across multiple browsers.
In Opera, Mozilla (with the OptiMoz addon) and Mozilla-Firebird, you can mouse gesture down-up on a link to open in a background tab and mouse gesture down to open in a foreground tab. CTRL-click and CTRL-SHIFT-click handles this, as well (though I think that the browsers disagree about which throws the tabs into the background.
Sadly, MyIE2's gesture system doesn't seem to do anything with links, though I do have an outdated version.
> today, moz (and its variants) is a great > browser that all the geeks use. those > that don't, they're not hard core.
I dunno. I think Opera is pretty darned hard core. But then again, I also use Mozilla. Heck, usually, I have windows open for Opera, Mozilla and Mozilla Firebird, all simultaneously, and I usually fit some time in to pop up a terminal window with links.;)
--
-JC
Novice Game Boy Advance Coder
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/gbadev/
> isn't this what benchmarks and processor-buying-guides > have been repeating for some years now?
Yeah, kinda, but there is a bit of a shift from back when I was aggressively covering this industry. For one thing, the Celeron had very respectable performance back then. It was certainly not the case that the slowest on-market AMD chip beat the fastest Celeron by such a phenomenal margin across the board. Yeah, the AMD chips are faster, but the gulf is a *lot* more than it was when I last checked, and so it's a lot more than I had expected.
--
-JC
Novice Game Boy Advance Coder
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/gbadev/
> The lower end of the Intel chips has always been > worse at everything PC related then AMD. AMD is > the budget king, that is a known fact for some > time now.
It's been a "known fact" only by the people who are technically oriented. The masses only know that the number after the cpu name equals how fast it can display a web page (hah, I can kazaa that mp3 faster with my Tandy *1000* over the phone line than you can with your "broad band", because your Pentium 4 is only a *3.2*!).
> Waste of time by Anandtech imho
Except that these reviews are what gives the techies a link to give to the normal people to show them why they should consider alternatives. Unless you see reviews like this repeated frequently, you can't move the opinions of the masses.
--
-JC
Novice Game Boy Advance Coder
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/gbadev/
> the extra five seconds I spend clicking just kills me....
Right. Five seconds. Hah.
The Mandrake way: $ su # urpmi --auto --no-verify-rpm mozilla evolution kmail OpenOffice.Org pan knode celestia kopete
And bam, you've just installed a web browser, an office suite, three mail programs, three newsgroup clients, one universal messaging client and a really cool 3D space navigating program. If you wanted to, you could put a hundred application names on that single command line, and everything gets automagically downloaded and installed. Other operating systems with similar capabilities include Debian, FreeBSD and probably Gentoo.
The Windows Way: Browse to http://www.mozilla.org using some other web browser. Go to the download page. Click on the Mozilla for Windows download link. Click the button or checkbox that enables the installer to run after downloading. Click "Next" a few times, then "Finish". Browse to OpenOffice.org, go to the download page, tell the page's drop-down bars your language, OS and preferred download site, then click the download button (or, alternatively, drive to the store and buy some random office suite and put the install disk into your CD-ROM drive), then click through the component selection screen and click "Nex" a few times then "Finish".
Congratulations. You've just downloaded one web browser, one office suite, one email program, one newsgroup client, zero universal messaging programs and zero astronomy programs. You spent a *lot* more time installing this stuff, and you may have spent as much as four hundred dollars (and to programmers/sysadmins/webmasters like me, that's more than a whole week of work, pre-tax) during the process. And you ended up with fewer programs , because the amount of work that you have to expend is proportional -- O(n), I guess -- to the number of programs you want. Using tools like Mandrake's urpmi, the amount of work increase per application added to that one single command is trivial -- O(1), which is a rather nice thing to see in your daily algorithmic routine.
--
-JC
Novice Game Boy Advance Coder
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/gbadev/
Re:Not bad for WebTV users
on
AOL's $299 PC
·
· Score: 1
After OpenOffice.org got mature enough, Sun switched to it as a codebase for StarOffice.
Slashdot Mirror
> Is there a version 2.0 for win32 ?
Apparently, the 1.3.22 development version *is* the same thing as the 2.0 beta. You can get it from the following url:
http://wiki.gimp.org/gimp/WindowsInstall
It's a bit annoying. You have to download a whole bunch of zip files listed there and put them into a directory like C:\gimp. Then, you have to unzip them (preserving directory structure). After that, you have to add c:\gimp\bin and c:\gimp\lib to the system path, and you'll have to rename some misnamed DLL files (the instructions only tell you about some of them, but gimp-1.3.exe will tell you which ones are missine), and you might have to search the web for a copy of msvcr70.dll (I had to), and keep in mind that they direct link to the 1.2 version of gettext, but the file isn't there. Just look in the directory from which the file is linked, and you'll find the 1.3 version of gettext, and that'll work.
A lot of effort to get it to work. Looks pretty cool, though. Still, I hate it when an app doesn't provide an optional MDI. I have too many task buttons on my taskbar as it is!
--
-JC
coder
http://www.jc-news.com/parse.cgi?coding/main
I'm taking a look at KDE 3.1's file open dialog box via an impromptu vnc session on a lonely ratpoison'd X session. I haven't played with the WinXP's dialog box, but here's the things that make the KDE dialog box more innovative than the one in Windows 2000:
A) You can right-click to add, delete and edit the shortcuts in the "Navigation Panel" (that's what KDE calls the "Places Bar"). In Windows, you'd have to add a registry key in a rather nonintuitive place ("HKCU\ Software\ Microsoft\ Windows\ CurrentVersion\ Policies\ ComDlg32\ Placesbar")
B) You can hide and unhide the Navigation panel via the mouse or the keybinding. In Win2k, you would have to play with the registry for this, which makes it rather annoying if you'd prefer to have the Places Bar hidden 90% of the time, only to be revealed when needed.
C) You can customize the Navigation Panel so that there are shortcuts common to all KDE apps and also shortcuts individual to each application. I frequently visit "/mnt/niven/code" from kate (a text editor with syntax highlighting), but I'd have no reason to go there from K3b (a rather sweet CD/DVD burning app).
D) You can swap between large and small icon size for shortcuts in the Navigation Panel. Nice if your current program has a ton of shortcuts. Oh, there's a scrollbar for when you have too many icons to fit in the visible space.
E) There's a button to refresh the current directory listing. I have to hit "F5" in Win2k more often than you'd think, so mouse access for this is kinda neat.
F) A bookmarking system is built into the selector. I don't use this, but I can see how it might be useful for some people who need a little more flexibility than you'd get from the regular, flat Navigation Panel.
G) Sorting is a little more flexible, allowing you to sort in any view mode without having to right-click (in Win2k, you have to do this unless you're in "Detailed" view mode). It also allows you to decide whether the sort is case sensitive, and it's easier to reverse sorts. And you can specify whether you want directories all listed above the files or intermingled in the sort.
H) You can dynamically toggle the listing of hidden files (there's a menu button for it, or you can just hit "F8"). That's a far cry from the more time consuming "explorer.exe, Tools->Folder Options->View->Hidden Files and Folders".
I) File previews are built into this widget, and you can toggle this on and off. Moreover, if you go into KDE's configuration gui, you can tell the system which file types should be previewed.
J) At any time, you can separate the files and folders into two separate window panes, or you can put them in the same pane.
K) As with the Win2k file dialog widget, there are dropdown widgets for the active directory ("Look in"), file name and file filter ("Files of type:"). But while Win2k only makes the file name editable by the user, KDE allows you type into any three of the fields. This means that I can change to another directory easily without having to worry about accidentally mangling the file name. Sometimes, Win2k takes a while to pop up the "Look in" bar when I click on it, and while I could type a directory location into the "File name" widget, I'd lose the file name itself (in a "Save As" situation)! And if I wanted to look at all *.html files to open up in notepad, the filter widget is useless (it only lets me pick "*.txt" or "all files"), and the only way to do it -- typing into the "File name" widget -- also destroys the existing file name.
L) The KDE file dialog box is fully network aware. I could load from or save to a file via ftp or ssh (sftp), and it'll even remember the passwords during my current session.
I'm sure that Windows XP has most of these improvements built-in. I'm not trying to suggest that putting the latest KDE against Windows 2000 is a valid comparison. But I do like that I can get the above capabilities without having to spend even more money on Windows than I already have.
--
-JC
coder
http://www.jc-news.com/parse.cgi?coding/main
> > I wist[sic] windows would have the grep command =(
> Windows NT/2000/XP/2003 and the Win 98 Resource Kit has a similar command in findstr. A basic set
> of regular expressions are included like character classes, ranges, beginning and end of
> words and lines, and multiple matching.
Better yet (imho), just install Cygwin, which gives you a full unix environment with all the tools necessary to use Win32 without feeling the need to gut yourself. That includes grep, find, locate and similar tools.
Plus, if you're insane enough, you can use it to install X11 and run KDE 3.1 or GNOME 1.4 instead of explorer.exe. Well, except that they're not yet mature on this platform (KDE runs extremely slowly, while GNOME is both not up to date and a bit less stable than what you'd expect from GNOME).
--
-JC
coder, needs FT work, Long Island, NY
http://www.jc-news.com/parse.cgi?coding/main
> Bottom line: this sucker is going to be over, one way or another, in less
> than three years because SCO can't afford to keep it going any longer.
Although I suspect that the SCO situation will end sooner than many expect, it is always possible for large company to purchase SCO's assets and continue the legal actions. Offhand (for example), I can think of three multi-billion dollar video game console manufacturers with the lack of ethics necessary to do that.
But, yeah, SCO's probably not going to be so lucky.
--
-JC
coder
http://www.jc-news.com/parse.cgi?coding/main
> Oh really?? how did they manage to login? let
> alone install a distro (redhat and suse included).
Most home users I know didn't install their own copy of MS Windows. Either the OEM did, or the local computer geek did. Similarly, a stupid person could either get a preinstalled Lindows box, or they can get the block's smart kid to install Mandrake Linux so that it automatically logs in to KDE or GNOME.
Hmmm. Now that I think about it, a lot of normals sit in front of a Tivo. Does that count?
--
-JC
coder
http://www.jc-news.com/parse.cgi?coding/main
> What's currently broken in Win98 that needs fixing?
Resource handling. Regardless of how much physical RAM you put into your machine, Windows 98 reserves the same small amount for system resources. Programs that stay in memory (like MSIE, Mozilla, MS Office 97, OpenOffice.org) all the time often hog the resources, and when there's no more GDI resources (for example), you start to notice widgets and icons disappearing. And then your system crashes.
In any decent OS (and I count Windows 2000 in that class), Mozilla is a pretty fantastic program. But version 1.4 had a small resource leak issue. Only in Win9x/ME, all-day usage of the program will often end in disaster as resources get eaten more and more.
Naturally, the easy fix (other than solutions like "use a competing product") would be to upgrade to Mozilla 1.5 or higher. Even more naturally, the people here at my job only consider "Microsoft" and "Netscape" to be respectable vendors of web browsers, so Mozilla (even though Netscape is just a Mozilla clone with a couple preinstalled plugins) isn't an option. And, of course, Netscape is no longer being developed (even though developing it requires minimal effort, given that it's a skin and an installation wrapper for an already-existing project). And, yes, the last Netscape is based on the earlier version of Mozilla, the one that has the leak.
But none of this would be a problem if you could just simply edit a registry setting to increase the maximum allocation for GDI resources in Windows 98.
Bastards.
--
-JC
Programmer (Win32, Linux, Qt, Perl, Zaurus, Game Boy Advance)
http://www.jc-news.com/parse.cgi?coding/main
PS: To their credit, I'm pretty sure that Microsoft did actually increase the resource limit when they moved from Win95 to Win98.
> > perl -e 'print "seconds left: ", ((2**30) - time), "\n"'
> Isn't perl kinda big for that?
> $ echo seconds left: $(((1 30) - `date +%s`))
Rather shockingly, on my cygwin bash instance here, the perl method is faster than your alternative (roughly 0.155s versus 0.105s). This surprised me quite a bit.
--
-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/
> I always hated the error windows telling the user he or she cannot
> do something and then requiring "ok" to be clicked.
> I always thought it would be neat to write something that
> would add a "Fuck you!" button or something similar - clicking
> on it would be the same as clicking on the "ok" button, but at
> least the user would feel better.
In EditPad, there's a certain error (I think it's when you try to save to a read-only filename) where the button to proceed says "Bummer".
--
-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/
> I really wonder what kind of leash they have tied around Eddie Murphy's neck
> to force him to do that crud.
Check his filmography. Eddie Murphy has been doing exactly this sort of crud for a good many years now.
On the flip side, while I thought this movie was indeed of rather low calibre (eg, it more or less sucked), I must defend it in a small way by noting that Terrence Stamp and Wallace Shawn gave spot-on performances.
--
-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/
> you know damn well that not-so-good-intentioned 'patches' will soon follow. Post some source on a
> site, provide an EXE(that of course didn't come from the source) and you've fished in countless joe users before the real word is out that a copy
> cat has duped you. Too late for some.
If the source is published, then somebody will eventually compile the code and compare it against the executable. If the source is not published, then there is NEVER, EVER any possible way to figure out if the executable is legit. So basically with open source patches, you might dupe people for as long as a couple days. But with closed source patches, you can dupe people for ten billion trillion centuries.
I prefer the open source route here, as it slightly limits the amount of time that people can be duped.
--
-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/
> "To Kill a Mockingbird" is the best conversion IMO.
Does "Twelve Angry Men" count? If my shoddy, ADD-laden, underpaid brain's memory serves, I recall that It was a play that was converted into a film. And it was probably the best film I've seen in black and white.
I also thought that S. Morganstern's classic (cough) "The Princess Bride" was very well converted. They cut a lot of fat that wasn't needed from the book, so it wasn't an exact transfer, but I dearly loved it in both formats.
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-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/
> then one browser window crashing doesn't take them all down as it does
> using Mozilla or a tabbing enhancement for IE
I am not disagreeing with the bulk of your message, but I would like to add as an aside that session management takes away ninety-nine percent of the unhappiness caused by such crashes. Basically, if a page crashes in Opera or Mozilla (depending on the version, you might need an extension for this functionality) or even Konqueror, you just run the application and it start up where it left off.
Session management is one of my must-have features in nearly any application that I use.
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-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/
> Shit. I hate to reply to myself but i forgot to
> mention that i've got a Tbird 1200. Not that
> great a computer.
Yeah, but at least it has four digits in the "MHz" number. My work machine is a 550MHz Pentium III running Windows 2000 (and X11 over Cygwin, naturally), and my home machine is an 800MHz Duron running (usually) Mandrake Linux 9.2. Granted, my utter lack of spyware (on both OSes), the use of a separate video card (my friend has a 1.7GHz Celeron with an "Intel Extreme" integrated crapola graphics chip), and a generally conservative habit of system efficiency tweaking makes this machine more capable than my friends' "faster" boxes, but it does kill me, especially since I run programs that kill the cpu (mplayer, parchive2, unrar, bittorrent, giFT, gcc, etc..).
Anyway, feel free to send me your 1200MHz chip when you're done with it. I wouldn't mind.
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-JC
I can write code. ^_^
http://www.jc-news.com/parse.cgi?coding/main
(from "man tput" on my company's FreeBSD server)
DESCRIPTION
The tput command makes terminal-dependent information available to users
or shell applications. When invoked as the clear utility, the screen
will be cleared as if
tput clear
had been executed. The options to tput are as follows:
-T The terminal name as specified in the termcap database, for exam-
ple, ``vt100'' or ``xterm''. If not specified, tput retrieves
the ``TERM'' variable from the environment.
The tput command outputs a string if the attribute is of type string; a
number if it is of type integer. Otherwise, tput exits 0 if the terminal
has the capability and 1 if it does not, without further action.
If the attribute is of type string, and takes arguments (e.g. cursor
movement, the termcap ``cm'' sequence) the arguments are taken from the
command line immediately following the attribute.
The following special attributes are available:
clear Clear the screen (the termcap ``cl'' sequence).
init Initialize the terminal (the termcap ``is'' sequence).
longname Print the descriptive name of the user's terminal type.
reset Reset the terminal (the termcap ``rs'' sequence).
> In the external solar systems we've found, most have had a Jupiter like planet
> orbiting near the star.
Just for clarification, the reason why we've found Jupiter-like planets around most discovered star systems is not necessarily because most star systems have Jupiter-like planets. It is merely because most of our detection schemes cannot detect anything lighter, so we have no way of discovering star systems *without* Jupiter-like planets.
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-JC
> And, of course it has intelligent popup blocking
> options. A simple option like "Open requested
> popup windows only" is really a major user win.
> I agree it's probably an effect of having a very
> small core of people designing
Um. Mozilla had this feature before Opera did. I've been a happy Opera user since 3.x, and when Opera started popup blocking, it was dumb popup blocking. Mozilla later introduced popup blocking that didn't block popups when you click a link. Then, a few months later, Opera copied this "Open requested popup windows only" functionality.
Intelligent popup blocking is enabled by default in Mozilla. It is disabled by default in Netscape 7.1. There's no convenient Operaish F12-like quick access to this preference (there are some extensions that you can install that would help, though), but you can get to it by going "Edit -> Preferences, Privacy & Security -> Popup Windows -> Block unrequested popup windows".
--
-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/
> Sorry guys, but IMHO Firebird is what mozilla ...
... maybe in an alternative universe where c 10m/s
> should habe been : nice look, 'speed-o-light'
> fast, IE killer
Yeah, 'speed-o-light'
I have Firebird 0.7 installed here. To start it up (from an initial zero-window state) on this 550MHz Pentium III, I have to wait something like ten and a half seconds.
Mozilla 1.5 has this nice feature that lets you preload the application. Because of this, I can start from the same zero-window state and get a new browser window open in two seconds.
Until Firebird has this functionality, I can't use it.
For that matter, while I use a modified Qute skin (that's what Firebird uses) for Opera, I vastly prefer using the Walnut skin for Mozilla, since it looks a ton better. I don't think that I can use this skin with Firebird. I will check, though.
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-JC
> All we need now are mouses with separate middle-button and scrollwheel,
> so you don't accidentally scroll in the middle of opening a link...
That's an excellent point. I don't make that mistake often, but I do make it. Fortunately, there are multiple ways to open new windows that are generally standardized across multiple browsers.
In Opera, Mozilla (with the OptiMoz addon) and Mozilla-Firebird, you can mouse gesture down-up on a link to open in a background tab and mouse gesture down to open in a foreground tab. CTRL-click and CTRL-SHIFT-click handles this, as well (though I think that the browsers disagree about which throws the tabs into the background.
Sadly, MyIE2's gesture system doesn't seem to do anything with links, though I do have an outdated version.
I'm not sure about Konqueror.
> today, moz (and its variants) is a great
;)
> browser that all the geeks use. those
> that don't, they're not hard core.
I dunno. I think Opera is pretty darned hard core. But then again, I also use Mozilla. Heck, usually, I have windows open for Opera, Mozilla and Mozilla Firebird, all simultaneously, and I usually fit some time in to pop up a terminal window with links.
--
-JC
Novice Game Boy Advance Coder
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/gbadev/
> Bongs are not illegal to own or buy either
Actually, that Chong guy (of Cheech and Chong) is currently serving a jail term for selling bongs over the internet.
Granted, it *shouldn't* be illegal, but there it is.
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-JC
> isn't this what benchmarks and processor-buying-guides
> have been repeating for some years now?
Yeah, kinda, but there is a bit of a shift from back when I was aggressively covering this industry. For one thing, the Celeron had very respectable performance back then. It was certainly not the case that the slowest on-market AMD chip beat the fastest Celeron by such a phenomenal margin across the board. Yeah, the AMD chips are faster, but the gulf is a *lot* more than it was when I last checked, and so it's a lot more than I had expected.
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-JC
Novice Game Boy Advance Coder
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/gbadev/
> The lower end of the Intel chips has always been
> worse at everything PC related then AMD. AMD is
> the budget king, that is a known fact for some
> time now.
It's been a "known fact" only by the people who are technically oriented. The masses only know that the number after the cpu name equals how fast it can display a web page (hah, I can kazaa that mp3 faster with my Tandy *1000* over the phone line than you can with your "broad band", because your Pentium 4 is only a *3.2*!).
> Waste of time by Anandtech imho
Except that these reviews are what gives the techies a link to give to the normal people to show them why they should consider alternatives. Unless you see reviews like this repeated frequently, you can't move the opinions of the masses.
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-JC
Novice Game Boy Advance Coder
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/gbadev/
> Although I did see a girl today whose chest was
> as flat as the underside of a motherboard.
Ow. The underside of motherboards are filled with numerous tiny metal spikes.
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-JC
Novice Game Boy Advance Coder
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/gbadev/
> the extra five seconds I spend clicking just kills me....
Right. Five seconds. Hah.
The Mandrake way:
$ su
# urpmi --auto --no-verify-rpm mozilla evolution kmail OpenOffice.Org pan knode celestia kopete
And bam, you've just installed a web browser, an office suite, three mail programs, three newsgroup clients, one universal messaging client and a really cool 3D space navigating program. If you wanted to, you could put a hundred application names on that single command line, and everything gets automagically downloaded and installed. Other operating systems with similar capabilities include Debian, FreeBSD and probably Gentoo.
The Windows Way:
Browse to http://www.mozilla.org using some other web browser. Go to the download page. Click on the Mozilla for Windows download link. Click the button or checkbox that enables the installer to run after downloading. Click "Next" a few times, then "Finish". Browse to OpenOffice.org, go to the download page, tell the page's drop-down bars your language, OS and preferred download site, then click the download button (or, alternatively, drive to the store and buy some random office suite and put the install disk into your CD-ROM drive), then click through the component selection screen and click "Nex" a few times then "Finish".
Congratulations. You've just downloaded one web browser, one office suite, one email program, one newsgroup client, zero universal messaging programs and zero astronomy programs. You spent a *lot* more time installing this stuff, and you may have spent as much as four hundred dollars (and to programmers/sysadmins/webmasters like me, that's more than a whole week of work, pre-tax) during the process. And you ended up with fewer programs , because the amount of work that you have to expend is proportional -- O(n), I guess -- to the number of programs you want. Using tools like Mandrake's urpmi, the amount of work increase per application added to that one single command is trivial -- O(1), which is a rather nice thing to see in your daily algorithmic routine.
--
-JC
Novice Game Boy Advance Coder
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/gbadev/
After OpenOffice.org got mature enough, Sun switched to it as a codebase for StarOffice.