That would explain your retard attitude. That can be turned on in Windows if it is desired. Of course, MacOS is the same retard-OS that requires you to use the mouse for basically everything. One can do effectively bugger-all on a Mac without a mouse.
Well, I know it's just a troll, but what the hell.
I bought the Mac to see how good a Unix OS X is. I'm rather a bit happier with how much real stuff I can do with it from the command line that I have ever been in my brief encounters with Winblows.
So what can I do without a mouse? I can log in, switch to the terminal app (I have it auto start), fire up ssh-agent and start some ssh tunnels (Apple nicely provides ssh, but it also pretty much compiles out of the box). I can read my mail with mutt (I had to compile it myself). I will note that Apples GUI mail reader is pretty nice, it does need a mouse for some things though. Let's see, what else? I haven't bothered with w3m, so no mouseless web browsing, but I don't really do that on Unix boxes anyway (i.e. I use the mouse there). I can vi files, which I like more then Apple's textedit app. Pretty much whatever you could do on a "real" unix without a mouse.
With a little mousing I can get a nice VNC windows (over the ssh tunnel) to a "real" Unix box and,um, use the mouse remotely:-)
To me, TV news is there to keep its audience and make money via ads.
You'll note they haven't been showing commercials (at least most channels haven't).
I do think TV news is (normally) mostly crap, newspapers are better, but still not so hot. I don't know of much better then that though. TV news never seems to go in depth, has way to many puff items, and loves the tease ("Is a normal household item killing you? Find out at 11!"). It's not as bad this week though, on the flip side it is about all you can find on TV...
Since you're on FBSD, you'll want to download the source from wherever it came from, or just grab the original tarball from the Debian archive.
Thanks, it looks like one can just cd to/usr/ports/misc/unclutter and type make install.... now that one has a clue as to what the program is named.
Re:What can be done about terrorism?
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It's incredibly dangerous to have any firearm on a plane, no matter who it belongs to.
Alot of people have been saying it isn't like the movies, so I guess that means the side of the plane doesn't rip right off, but the O2 masks probably drop. That's likely to be modestly better then a normal hijacking, and far far better then not only being killed, but killing 10,000s of others in a collision. In fact even if having a bullet fired magically makes the plane come apart that's still better then flying into a building full of people.
And if you don't give the air marshall a gun, he's just another passenger, who perhaps knows a few self-defense techniques
Current reports are the planes were taken over by 3 to 6 guys with knives and boxcutters. There were 50-100 people on each plane. They were unwatched enough to make phone calls. If there had been an unarmed air marshal they may well have been able to "organize" a rush on the armed men. The maybe 15 people would have died rather then 10,000s. Not a good thing for sure, but far better then what happened.
It will cost a bundle. I know that sounds very callous right now, but think about how much money it would take to keep an air marshall on every flight within the United States at any one time
It was cheep enough to do in the 70s. More over assume for a moment it is funded solely with a ticket surcharge. How much more does it cost to put an undercover passenger on a flight? One less seat they can sell. One more person they have to pay (I assume they will make more then a flight attendant, but likely less then two), a tiny bit of extra fuel, an extra meal. Do you really think that on a large flight the cost will go up by more then $10? That's $500 to $1000 per flight to pay the guy and the costs. Small flights may either have to pay more, or not get coverage on every flight (as I understand it air marshals use to be undercover and random).
You would need literally thousands of air marshalls, perhaps even tens of thousands
So like one for every four flight attendants?
The costs would be tremendous, and would either drive the cost of flying sky high (no pun intended)
It seems doubtful that the cost will go up by even 10% on large flights, and small ones might not be patrolled as much.
People wouldn't like it. It might be well recieved at first, but once shock of this event wear's off, it will be seen by most as just another flying inconvenience. Most people wouldn't like the idea of firearms on board their flight. Also, an air marshall would presumably have the authority or even responsibility to search anyone getting on the plane, which is sure to be ill-recieved.
We had them in the 70s. I don't recall any civil resistance. Oh, and if the air marshall is undercover they won't search anyone. I expect them to be undercover since that will work better, plus that's what we did last time. Besides we already have searches, why blow the marshall's cover to re-do something that's already done? There was eventually some objection to the cost because there were no hijackings after a while. So we stopped using them. Maybe this time we won't.
Your right, there are no perfect solutions here
That's for sure. Air marshals will make this harder to pull off. They will have to get guns rather then knives, or figure out who the undercover guy (or woman!) is and kill them first. It makes it harder, but not impossible. It also doesn't prevent other kinds of attacks (say non-airplane).
The British are still gone from the United States after the little hullaboo in the 1770's.
Except for that rather irritating war of 1812 where they burned the capital building to the ground.
Not that I disagree with the need to find out who was responsible for the attack and to punish them (and equally importantly not to harm those not responsible)
Your point being...now we should regulate Diablo II commerce?
No, just that despite neither dollars nor Diablo trinkets being tied to real world materials (at least not since we went off the gold standard) there are differences between "backed by the full faith of the United States Treasury" and "um, we kinda try to prevent counterfeiting".
I'm pretty much against adding regulation to anything, I would like less of it.
How many of you wouldn't buy extravigant computer hardware (that is worth it) if given the money and chance, then think about how many people would call that a waste
Well, other then having a pretty good mid-end notebook, I don't own any high end computer gear (unless something with a 20G SCSI drive counts). Given a ton of money I would be more likely to "waste" it on all manner of photography crap.
I'm pretty happy if other people would rather buy different things. In fact if they all wanted the same crap I did that would rather drive it's price up, and make it hard for me to buy.
It is no more real, but there are more people trying to make it hard to duplicate, and the penalties for being caught duping money is much higher then being caught duping a Helm Of Random-Name-Here...
Plus there is a whole government agency that attempts to keep the value fairly stable (and like most government workers their success rate is pretty variable -- but sometimes it beats nothing).
So I think that makes money a better long term investment then game bits.
The value of a $20 bill is *whatever people will give you for it*.
Plus the strong likelihood that most people will give you almost the same stuff for it next week as they will now (this is sometimes a disadvantage, frequently an advantage).
(If i were to plant a garden, is it (for lack of a better term) ethical for you to pick my flowers and sell them?)
If you sold me the right to come into the garden and pick the flowers (and don't explicitly prohibit selling them), they yes, I would say it is ethical.
If you just had the garden, and I came in without asking and picked some flowers, well, no, clearly not.
Why should virtual property be different from real property in that respect?
Really? FreeBSD+Xfree86 does not, and I would have assume that was going to be driven by the X server not the OS under it. Which version of Xfree86? Maybe I'll have to get X running on my Linux box and see if it really does blank there...
"I can tell because when you read a webpage, you do one of a couple of things. You either shovel the mouse off to the right so that it is out of the way, or you will walk down the page with your mouse," he told the BBC's Go Digital programme.
Yeah....or I'm one of the 5% of the computer market with a Mac and I'm one of the 90% of Mac users that have discovered that when I type the mouse goes away. So I press down arrow and *poof* I don't need to move the mouse out of the way, and my finger is right where I need it to scroll down to read more of the story.
(Or I could turn off JavaScript, which is a good idea because it gets rid of a lot of irritating popup and popunder ads -- which is a pretty good idea, even 'tho it breaks a few sites)
Don't they have bombs and other ways of dieing? Does that count as nonviolent? (I know I think of it as a not so violent game, but if you are in a zero tolerance world....)
There use to be a amusement park simulator, I don't recall any violence in that. There are other sim games, but many have traces of violence (like that nasty hand in SimAnt...or riots in a poorly managed city...).
Of corse sim games may be a bit hard for people with low literacy, but that may be an advantage since their game play will improve as they manage to read more:-)
Emacs compiles into byte-code. Perl compiles into byte-code. So does Python, Java,
Actually perl can be "compiled" into C, and then a native executable. There are also Java to native compilers (see current versions of gcc), as well as incremental Java compilers that make machine code. I don't know about Python, and I'm pretty sure there isn't anything more then byte-coding for elisp, 'tho there have been projects to make it machine code in the past.
Python, programmers are prevented from using the wrong form of comparison
Sure, except we have already seen in another strongly typed language (SQL) where programmers chose to store time_t's in char (or varchar) variables, so the built in sorting can screw them.
Now I think Python programmers are frequently smarter then SQL programmers:-) they can still make the same mistake. (I actually do think they are on the whole a little smarter, but only because many SQL users are forced to use it, and don't want to, while most Python programmers chose to use Python...)
So you see strongly typed languages don't remove all type errors...
It very much does, which brings up the point that the reason many MySQL databases suck is not due to the engine itself, but rather due to the newbies who create them
That is true of a great many databases...however there are some good reasons to store time as a time_t in a (wide enough) int field. Many (not all!) DB dates don't handle times. Some have bugs (XDB's day of week was off by a day in 2000 for example -- they patched that in October '99). Many have timezone problems, or problems with switching from "standard" to "daylight".
Sure for the most part storing things as time_t's just papers over this sort of thing, as the problems can crop up if you don't manipulate them correctly (and not all libc's do!), but I do think it is a little simpler to fix your own code then the DB itself (...except for MySQL, and Postgress, where you at least have the chance to fix the date handling code in the DB...and where I would assume they don't think they are smarter then libc and break things like many commercial venders...)
Don't be a moron and store numeric data like time_t's in char fields though:-)
The immature mind I don't believe can distinguish from good ideas that are poorly produced and bad ideas that are well produced.
I think he is giving the typical "mature" mind some unwarranted credit as well...
Think about how frequently a broken payware program gets bought because the free version doesn't have a song and dance, or how bad laws sneak through with convincing sounding (but wrong) stories.
I do want to see what he is planning on doing with AI though...
The articles both seem to say Short bases his theory on online conversations with the mysterious player, not on playing style.
I think it is based on both. If the play hadn't been top notch the talk wouldn't have mattered. The quality of the play and talk are both clearly part of it. The odd moves less so.
I dont know if its naive but i find it a bit depressing that someone with bobby's intellect has to exist anonyomously to avoid the public limelight and scrutiny just to survive
On the other hand it is delightful that even in his self-imposed exile he has found a way to continue doing what he does pest, one one would imagine what he quite enjoys.
Real dogs tend to scare away robbers, I don't think robot dogs have been found to do that. At least not yet.
There is in fact a good chance that a robot dog attacking a robber might be legally declared a trap, and that could be very bad for the owner, and maybe the maker. A real dog attacking a robber on the other hand tends to get declared as some sort of hero dog (of corse dogs attacking UPS delivery people get put down, which is sad).
Besides real dogs make good pool toys, fake ones die in the water:-)
I don't like editing makefiles. I don't like meta-languages. I don't like switching back and forth between an editor and a set of development tools. My tastes in development are towards the simplest possible solution for the problem at hand; I'm no good when a refined, elegant application is called for.
Other then the dislike of meta-languages, that's all fine. After all none of that will significantly lower your productivity as long as a decent IDE is available.
However meta-languages are extremely useful, if you ever do anything in their problem domain. I first had to use lex and yacc in collage. I never used them before that, I didn't really pay much mind to them. The first time I was forced to use them lex seemed clumsy, and inefficient. Yacc on the other hand, even the first time I used it saved me a ton of effort. Now that I have used lex once or twice it saves me a lot of time as well.
Of corse if your program never turns text into tokens, parses the tokens into something like statements....well then you won't gain anything form lex and yacc. Of corse now that I'm use to them I use them for things like config files where they can do far more then I need, but what little they are called on for they do with far more ease then writing the code myself.
So if you will ever do anything like that more then, say, once, you should go out and try them. Enjoy.
Perhaps this is also why I've never grown fond of sending man pages through grep filters: developing a comfort level with CLI tools requires effort, but it often pays off if you use the tools frequently. I like the way I can pick up a GUI tool after leaving it alone for six months and still know how to use it.
You really remember what all those little icons on the tool bar are? I have to scrub the thing with the mouse to find out. Esp. next vs. step. Of corse I only remember what three grep options are -v (show non-matching lines), -E (regex), -l (show matching files not lines). I hardly use most of those, but I practically never use the others. So I have to skim the man pages once in a while too (more frequently for cvs, for things like making branches, or getting a revision by date).
I have no doubt that if I was required to use CLI tools daily, I would grow to appreciate them as you have
You might, they have a few advantages. But other then meta-programming they are not earth shatteringly large, and GUI IDEs have their own advantages. I just don't think they are worlds apart like many people do.
I may even stumble across and IDE I like as much as the Unix CLI some day. This year I'm giving Apple's a try. IBuilder at least seems worth some time:-)
I can run the program and step through the source code in another window.
I do that with command line tools all the time. One xterm for vi, and another for gdb. I admit it is nicer to use a GUI tool to set breakpoints by clicking on lines of code, and to have a whole window of variables with current values (which GUI IDEs like Visual Studio do), on the other hand gdb hasn't ever harf'ed on my code and taken out my editor killing some unsaved changes. Visual Studio has, so has Code Warrior, and two different Symentic Java dev tools.
Oh, wait I see what you mean. You can do that as well, with gdb's attach PID. I tend not to bother, except when debugging a daemon. Normally having my debug session in the same output stream doesn't matter. Partly because I'm either debugging a server type process, or a GUI program. If I were debugging a curses type program it would be more of an issue and I would use attach (or a GUI)
The editor highlights my code in color, and I can expand or contract each class definition.
EMACS, and some vi clones (vim) can do the color thing (I find it distracting and useless for code, I do use it for HTML editing though). I think EMACS can do the class collapse and expand thing. That would be kinda nice, but not enough to make me leave vi.
In a project window, I can see all the files available and check them in or out of source code control.
I'm unconvinced that that is really better then using ls directly, but whatever floats your boat.
When I move my mouse over a function call, I get a popup with the list of arguments.
That is useful. I have to use ^] to get vi to search for the tag, or use another xterm to bring up a man page. It would be nice to have them unified. It would also be nice if vi could figure out what class x is so it can go to the right place when I do a tag search from x.foo()...
I can standardize my comments and have the development tool create new classes for me with my comment scheme already in place
Is that really simpler then typing:r ~/t/class to read in a class template? You could shorten that to a keystroke if you use:map...
If I forget a constant's name, I can call up a separate window where I can browse or search through constants defined in many modules
Did something prevent you from opening anew xterm window to search from things in a CLI?
Make scripts are generated for me automatically
That is nice, unfortunately it is frequently also a curse. I had a yacc-like program for Java that made java source, but the Java IDEs I used had no way for me to ask for it to be run on the.cup files. The vender had no idea why I would want such a thing, and after much tech support time finally bounced me to someone who did, but told me that it wasn't possible. For C++ I have a similar tool I use to generate lex files (it has simpler rules for generating "trivial" tokens)
But probably the best part is that I don't have to give up any of my command line tools in order to get these benefits. If I want to run it from the command line, or do a make from a batch script, that option is still there.
You do seem to give up the ability to make meta languages and have the make file apply them for you. That is a very powerful programming paradigm to be cut off from. I don't see why the IDEs have to cut you off from it, but the ones I have looked at either do, or have no obvious way to do it. If you know of any that do, please let me know. Or even good work arounds...
You did leave out the GUI bit that I do find very helpful, and have found no CLI equivalent. Layouts of GUI panels and dialogs. It is far easier to do that in a GUI environment then a CLI one. I know, I have done it both ways. The Apple Builder (based off NeXTs) is extremely nice, but even less capable ones like the Symantic Java Studio, or MegaMax's Atari ST GUI are very very helpful. Doing hand layout of widgets sucks. Even if it is a tad bit simpler to make sure resizes don't suck as much, the rest of the ease of using a GUI layout tool far offsets that one bit where GUI tools are a bit weak. GUI layout tools also get harder to use effectively as you get more and more custom widgets (the Java layout tool could let you make live custom widgets, but then bugs in your widget code can bring down the layout tool...and the rest of the IDE! Which sucks, esp. since exception handling should have let them limit that problem...)
Depending on what you are doing GUI dev tools can be more powerful, or less powerful then CLI ones.
I'm going to answer a slightly different question, why do I do it.
There are a few distinct reasons I do it:
Sometimes it the same reason I take photographs, I just want to do something creative. The goal isn't to solve a problem for myself, or anyone else, but just to have some fun. Once I've done that it seems like a good idea to share the code, in case others want to have fun. Sourceforge is nice here because I can share the code with minimal effort, and no commitment of my resources. To some extent both w3juke and xtank (anyone have a link? I stopped screwing with it almost a decade ago!) are explained by this.
Some times I'm a little more focused. I have a method I want to test out, and either no problem at work can benefit, or I'm a little leery of experimenting with that method at work. I learned how to use the STL on my own dime for example. This covers a lot of ground (w3juke was my STL playground for a while which is why it has odd uses of things like priority queues, and O(logN) algos used for datasets not likely to have more the 50 or so elements!). Again, if the code is sound, there is no reason not to share it.
Some times it really is to solve a problem I'm having (either not at work, or not one that justifies work time at least). My mkavi program (not currently up -- it was at my last employers anon ftp site, maybe I'll get it off to sourceforge soon) is an example of that. I really wanted to convert some raytracings I had made into movies, and didn't have a Windows box or anything. So I wrote a program that did it. I didn't have a 100% free license (it was a "free for noncommercial use" deal), and an aerospace firm actually ended up paying a little money for it, enough to buy me a windows machine if I wanted:-). However it counts for some definitions of Open Source, and more importantly it describes a motive I have for doing Open Source work sometimes.
Sometimes I do Open Source work on other people's code because it almost solves a problem I have (frequently I thought it did, but it turns out not to due to a bug). That is not quite the same as above, but pretty close.
That said, there are some reasons I don't do Open Source:
To get recognition. True, I got my first full time job as a result of writing xtank, but by and large few people get any real recognition for writing Open Source code. A few get to be Rock Stars (Linus for example), more get known only in "the field" (Keith Bostic for example), but very few people get much recognition. Esp. with the advertising clause of the BSDL being on the outs these days:-)
To change the world. The world ain't so bad, and my code seems unlikely to change it anyway.
To make money. It's too haphazard. Consulting work makes money, making money off Open Source seems too hard. I do try to get my (rare) consulting clients to let me Open Source code I produce for them, but it rarely pans out (it did for a Real Estate firm, anyone want some crappy DB code? It's free!).
To destroy Microsoft. Don't get me wrong, I would like to destroy them, I just don't think my software will do it.
Replay has wishlists. In fact, it had them before Tivo did.
Cool, I didn't know.
If you follow that, you rarely have to deal with conflicts, though occasionally it might not record exactly what you thought it would
Um, the whole point is for me to tell it what I want, how much I want it, and to never deal with it again. "it might not record exactly what you thought" sounds a whole lot like "the car may not take you to your work place, it might take you to someone else's"
For example, I kind of liked the sitcom Rossanne. I have a wishlist for it. It airs about 8 times a day. If it ever causes me to lose an episode of West Wing or ER I'm going to be really really pissed off (even if it is because the network moved one or both shows around!)
I kind of like Star Trek Deep Space Nine now that I actually manage to catch it, so I have a wish list for it too, it's more important then many shows, but less important then others. I'll be pissed if I get rossane and not DS9. I'll be pissed if I get DS9 and not (new) ER -- again even if the conflict is because one or both networks moved the shows.
I like West Wing a lot, but I like it less then ER. If the two are ever on at the same time, I want ER. I'll be pissed if West Wing gets recorded (unless the ER is a re-run, if it is and West Wing is new, I want West Wing). Even if one or both the shows are at a different time because of a special, or a schedule change.
My wife likes Gilmore Girls, so we record that too, if it is new, and doesn't conflict with West Wing, or ER, but we do get it rather then Rossane.
The TiVo deals with all of that because it doesn't have non-guaranteed/guaranteed, it has a numbered list. If I want ER (first-run-only) no matter what, I move it up to the top slot. If I want West Wing (first-run-only) almost as much I put it in the second slot. Rossane goes down around number 28.
Like most GUI things this is actually easier to do then to explain. And once done you never miss a show (unless it is to catch one you like more). It's not a minor thing. If it isn't real close to 100% it is way less useful. If it is real close something like To Do and Tivo's history (which is mis-named because it includes future events like "Won't record DS9 "Tribbles Again" wednsday at 10:00PM because it conflicts with a higher priority show ER "Wackyness with a Spleen") can help bridge the gap, but it requires a little effort (like for ToDo remembering that not seeing a show on Tuesday might be an issue -- you start to lose track of what days and times and networks things are on very quickly once you mostly don't need to know!! or for history having lots of "normal" conflicts will hide the abnormal ones).
It would be even better if I could say "DS9 after 1995 is in slot 7, before 1995 is in slot 40", but you can't do that. Yet.
If it sounds like I'm a TV addict, well, sort of I am. But I'm more just interested in simple problems that turn insanely complex, and scheduling to catch TV shows turns out to be one of them. Grab one of the XML show schedules some time and code up a storm. It's really a challenge!
P.S. I'm not belittling your Replay, before TiVo's 2.0 software Replay did a lot of stuff TiVo didn't, and even now it does do some things TiVo doesn't (and once the new boxes hit Replay will do a whole lot of stuff TiVo doesn't -- for at least six months, maybe years). Depending on how important "those things" are either unit could be a good choice.
If you want to spend some money and time hacking on the Tivo you can actually install an ethernet card in it (well, the stand-alone units at least) and use some software to extract the mpeg streams onto your PC.
Yes you can, but it seems more likely that TiVo will change things that will break this. In part because they don't want to piss off their partners (they also don't want to piss off their customers, some of which do this, so it is a hard choice for them). In part because those programs rely on the internal structure of files on the TiVo which might be changes for reasons that are completely unrelated to wanting to break the hack. (For example the much rumored VBR in 2.5)
Sonic Blue is less likely to change the way ReplayTVs send to each other because that would make a new one unable to send to an old one.
Without a way to prioritize your "record all" stuff, these things quickly become a giant pain to use. Just try getting a season pass to the simpsons and anything else, and watch how quickly you get conflicts. Being able to prioritize is nice. I had to get my Tivo replaced under warranty (fried modem, of course) and use the old 1.3 software (no way to set show priorities) for a few days-- it was absolutely impossible to get it to record all of my shows, since some episodes always overlap with others. (Simpsons/Junkyard Wars, for example)
Well it does let you choose what wins in a conflict, it might be fine grained then (TiVo isn't -- you can set the new show to beat all old shows, none of the old shows, or not go at all -- to get anything in between you have to visit the SPM, and watch the "Please Wait" icon for a bit). So it might be better then TiVo's 1.3 software, I'm sure it can't be as good as the 2.0 software without a SPM.
I'm also not sure if it has wishlists, and I know it doesn't have suggestions. Not as important as the SPM though.
As much as I bitch, I do love my Tivo-- but I hope this is a swift kick in the rear for Tivo and that we see ethernet-enabled, commercial-skipping, internet-show-sharing, remotely-programmable, 480p-output Tivos with 320 hours of storage space in the near future.
I hope so, but I'm guessing the commercial-skipping is not coming anytime soon as they are trying to get money from advertisers (selling the iPreview stuff, and telescoping commercials). Show sharing, and seemless show sharing (making N ReplayTVs, or TiVos act as one unit with N tuners -- on Now Showing list, one ToDo list, one place to set a wishlist or pass and have the TiVo or Replay work out who records it, and what disk it lives on) would be enough to convince me to upgrade.
Hopefully TiVo catches up with sharing, or Replay catches up with scheduling. Either would make me buy again, even in this economy:-)
There isn't a feature I can think to add to this thing! I've been complaining since I got my Tivo
Sure you can, buy one and you'll miss a lot of the TiVo's scheduling features. The new "conflict catcher" is an improvement, but no session pass manager (for non-TiVo owners that lets you set up in advance which shows are more important, so if there is a schedule change the show that is most important will be recorded.
That isn't to say that TiVo's scheduling is the end all. Both units could do better padding. TiVo could do even better with show tracking (yes I said new episodes of Sopranos are more important the The Practice, but since The Practice only shows up on Sunday and Sopranos all week, it "should" be able to figure out that recording Practice at 9 then Sopranos at 11 would be better then doing the simple greedy algo). Of corse ReplayTV isn't even good enough to complain about that yet:-)
ReplayTV is also more irritating in the way it manages the disk space. You set aside disk for each show you want, so you can miss episodes of things you want even though there is ample free space. On the other hand that manages to deal with marathons without resorting to "Save at most N" on the TiVo (and "save at most" has similar problems to Replay's pre-allocate per show method).
Tivo has always been chicken to try anything like this, and it looks like it's going to bite 'em now that somebody else has the guts to do it. Why would you ever buy a unit now that didn't allow commercial skipping and content sharing?
Yes. But it is a harder sell now. Before TiVo's better scheduling was enough to make it a clear winner. Now it depends. Being able to move shows to a PC would win me over, moving between Replay's is not as exciting (but since it is likely that someone will manage to figure out how to make a PC accept the shows....). Commercial autoskip is nice, but not a super huge deal to me. It may be to others.
If sending shows around is seamless enough (and I doubt it is just yet) it can be a lot better then two tuners (like MS UTV, or the Direct TiVo with the 2.5 software). Want two tuners, buy two ReplayTVs, want 4 tuners? Buy four.
I'm glad someone has done it. It will be harder for TiVo to not do it now. The big questions is which happens first: TiVo gets networking, or ReplayTV gets better scheduling.
Until one of those things happens it is a hard choice either way!
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Well, I know it's just a troll, but what the hell.
I bought the Mac to see how good a Unix OS X is. I'm rather a bit happier with how much real stuff I can do with it from the command line that I have ever been in my brief encounters with Winblows.
So what can I do without a mouse? I can log in, switch to the terminal app (I have it auto start), fire up ssh-agent and start some ssh tunnels (Apple nicely provides ssh, but it also pretty much compiles out of the box). I can read my mail with mutt (I had to compile it myself). I will note that Apples GUI mail reader is pretty nice, it does need a mouse for some things though. Let's see, what else? I haven't bothered with w3m, so no mouseless web browsing, but I don't really do that on Unix boxes anyway (i.e. I use the mouse there). I can vi files, which I like more then Apple's textedit app. Pretty much whatever you could do on a "real" unix without a mouse.
With a little mousing I can get a nice VNC windows (over the ssh tunnel) to a "real" Unix box and,um, use the mouse remotely :-)
You'll note they haven't been showing commercials (at least most channels haven't).
I do think TV news is (normally) mostly crap, newspapers are better, but still not so hot. I don't know of much better then that though. TV news never seems to go in depth, has way to many puff items, and loves the tease ("Is a normal household item killing you? Find out at 11!"). It's not as bad this week though, on the flip side it is about all you can find on TV...
Thanks, it looks like one can just cd to /usr/ports/misc/unclutter and type make install.... now that one has a clue as to what the program is named.
Alot of people have been saying it isn't like the movies, so I guess that means the side of the plane doesn't rip right off, but the O2 masks probably drop. That's likely to be modestly better then a normal hijacking, and far far better then not only being killed, but killing 10,000s of others in a collision. In fact even if having a bullet fired magically makes the plane come apart that's still better then flying into a building full of people.
Current reports are the planes were taken over by 3 to 6 guys with knives and boxcutters. There were 50-100 people on each plane. They were unwatched enough to make phone calls. If there had been an unarmed air marshal they may well have been able to "organize" a rush on the armed men. The maybe 15 people would have died rather then 10,000s. Not a good thing for sure, but far better then what happened.
It was cheep enough to do in the 70s. More over assume for a moment it is funded solely with a ticket surcharge. How much more does it cost to put an undercover passenger on a flight? One less seat they can sell. One more person they have to pay (I assume they will make more then a flight attendant, but likely less then two), a tiny bit of extra fuel, an extra meal. Do you really think that on a large flight the cost will go up by more then $10? That's $500 to $1000 per flight to pay the guy and the costs. Small flights may either have to pay more, or not get coverage on every flight (as I understand it air marshals use to be undercover and random).
So like one for every four flight attendants?
It seems doubtful that the cost will go up by even 10% on large flights, and small ones might not be patrolled as much.
We had them in the 70s. I don't recall any civil resistance. Oh, and if the air marshall is undercover they won't search anyone. I expect them to be undercover since that will work better, plus that's what we did last time. Besides we already have searches, why blow the marshall's cover to re-do something that's already done? There was eventually some objection to the cost because there were no hijackings after a while. So we stopped using them. Maybe this time we won't.
That's for sure. Air marshals will make this harder to pull off. They will have to get guns rather then knives, or figure out who the undercover guy (or woman!) is and kill them first. It makes it harder, but not impossible. It also doesn't prevent other kinds of attacks (say non-airplane).
Except for that rather irritating war of 1812 where they burned the capital building to the ground.
Not that I disagree with the need to find out who was responsible for the attack and to punish them (and equally importantly not to harm those not responsible)
No, just that despite neither dollars nor Diablo trinkets being tied to real world materials (at least not since we went off the gold standard) there are differences between "backed by the full faith of the United States Treasury" and "um, we kinda try to prevent counterfeiting".
I'm pretty much against adding regulation to anything, I would like less of it.
Well, other then having a pretty good mid-end notebook, I don't own any high end computer gear (unless something with a 20G SCSI drive counts). Given a ton of money I would be more likely to "waste" it on all manner of photography crap.
I'm pretty happy if other people would rather buy different things. In fact if they all wanted the same crap I did that would rather drive it's price up, and make it hard for me to buy.
It is no more real, but there are more people trying to make it hard to duplicate, and the penalties for being caught duping money is much higher then being caught duping a Helm Of Random-Name-Here...
Plus there is a whole government agency that attempts to keep the value fairly stable (and like most government workers their success rate is pretty variable -- but sometimes it beats nothing).
So I think that makes money a better long term investment then game bits.
Plus the strong likelihood that most people will give you almost the same stuff for it next week as they will now (this is sometimes a disadvantage, frequently an advantage).
If you sold me the right to come into the garden and pick the flowers (and don't explicitly prohibit selling them), they yes, I would say it is ethical.
If you just had the garden, and I came in without asking and picked some flowers, well, no, clearly not.
Why should virtual property be different from real property in that respect?
Really? FreeBSD+Xfree86 does not, and I would have assume that was going to be driven by the X server not the OS under it. Which version of Xfree86? Maybe I'll have to get X running on my Linux box and see if it really does blank there...
Yeah....or I'm one of the 5% of the computer market with a Mac and I'm one of the 90% of Mac users that have discovered that when I type the mouse goes away. So I press down arrow and *poof* I don't need to move the mouse out of the way, and my finger is right where I need it to scroll down to read more of the story.
(Or I could turn off JavaScript, which is a good idea because it gets rid of a lot of irritating popup and popunder ads -- which is a pretty good idea, even 'tho it breaks a few sites)
Don't they have bombs and other ways of dieing? Does that count as nonviolent? (I know I think of it as a not so violent game, but if you are in a zero tolerance world....)
There use to be a amusement park simulator, I don't recall any violence in that. There are other sim games, but many have traces of violence (like that nasty hand in SimAnt...or riots in a poorly managed city...).
Of corse sim games may be a bit hard for people with low literacy, but that may be an advantage since their game play will improve as they manage to read more :-)
Actually perl can be "compiled" into C, and then a native executable. There are also Java to native compilers (see current versions of gcc), as well as incremental Java compilers that make machine code. I don't know about Python, and I'm pretty sure there isn't anything more then byte-coding for elisp, 'tho there have been projects to make it machine code in the past.
Sure, except we have already seen in another strongly typed language (SQL) where programmers chose to store time_t's in char (or varchar) variables, so the built in sorting can screw them.
Now I think Python programmers are frequently smarter then SQL programmers :-) they can still make the same mistake. (I actually do think they are on the whole a little smarter, but only because many SQL users are forced to use it, and don't want to, while most Python programmers chose to use Python...)
So you see strongly typed languages don't remove all type errors...
That is true of a great many databases...however there are some good reasons to store time as a time_t in a (wide enough) int field. Many (not all!) DB dates don't handle times. Some have bugs (XDB's day of week was off by a day in 2000 for example -- they patched that in October '99). Many have timezone problems, or problems with switching from "standard" to "daylight".
Sure for the most part storing things as time_t's just papers over this sort of thing, as the problems can crop up if you don't manipulate them correctly (and not all libc's do!), but I do think it is a little simpler to fix your own code then the DB itself (...except for MySQL, and Postgress, where you at least have the chance to fix the date handling code in the DB...and where I would assume they don't think they are smarter then libc and break things like many commercial venders...)
Don't be a moron and store numeric data like time_t's in char fields though :-)
I think he is giving the typical "mature" mind some unwarranted credit as well...
Think about how frequently a broken payware program gets bought because the free version doesn't have a song and dance, or how bad laws sneak through with convincing sounding (but wrong) stories.
I do want to see what he is planning on doing with AI though...
I think it is based on both. If the play hadn't been top notch the talk wouldn't have mattered. The quality of the play and talk are both clearly part of it. The odd moves less so.
On the other hand it is delightful that even in his self-imposed exile he has found a way to continue doing what he does pest, one one would imagine what he quite enjoys.
Real dogs tend to scare away robbers, I don't think robot dogs have been found to do that. At least not yet.
There is in fact a good chance that a robot dog attacking a robber might be legally declared a trap, and that could be very bad for the owner, and maybe the maker. A real dog attacking a robber on the other hand tends to get declared as some sort of hero dog (of corse dogs attacking UPS delivery people get put down, which is sad).
Besides real dogs make good pool toys, fake ones die in the water :-)
Other then the dislike of meta-languages, that's all fine. After all none of that will significantly lower your productivity as long as a decent IDE is available.
However meta-languages are extremely useful, if you ever do anything in their problem domain. I first had to use lex and yacc in collage. I never used them before that, I didn't really pay much mind to them. The first time I was forced to use them lex seemed clumsy, and inefficient. Yacc on the other hand, even the first time I used it saved me a ton of effort. Now that I have used lex once or twice it saves me a lot of time as well.
Of corse if your program never turns text into tokens, parses the tokens into something like statements....well then you won't gain anything form lex and yacc. Of corse now that I'm use to them I use them for things like config files where they can do far more then I need, but what little they are called on for they do with far more ease then writing the code myself.
So if you will ever do anything like that more then, say, once, you should go out and try them. Enjoy.
You really remember what all those little icons on the tool bar are? I have to scrub the thing with the mouse to find out. Esp. next vs. step. Of corse I only remember what three grep options are -v (show non-matching lines), -E (regex), -l (show matching files not lines). I hardly use most of those, but I practically never use the others. So I have to skim the man pages once in a while too (more frequently for cvs, for things like making branches, or getting a revision by date).
You might, they have a few advantages. But other then meta-programming they are not earth shatteringly large, and GUI IDEs have their own advantages. I just don't think they are worlds apart like many people do.
I may even stumble across and IDE I like as much as the Unix CLI some day. This year I'm giving Apple's a try. IBuilder at least seems worth some time :-)
I do that with command line tools all the time. One xterm for vi, and another for gdb. I admit it is nicer to use a GUI tool to set breakpoints by clicking on lines of code, and to have a whole window of variables with current values (which GUI IDEs like Visual Studio do), on the other hand gdb hasn't ever harf'ed on my code and taken out my editor killing some unsaved changes. Visual Studio has, so has Code Warrior, and two different Symentic Java dev tools.
Oh, wait I see what you mean. You can do that as well, with gdb's attach PID. I tend not to bother, except when debugging a daemon. Normally having my debug session in the same output stream doesn't matter. Partly because I'm either debugging a server type process, or a GUI program. If I were debugging a curses type program it would be more of an issue and I would use attach (or a GUI)
EMACS, and some vi clones (vim) can do the color thing (I find it distracting and useless for code, I do use it for HTML editing though). I think EMACS can do the class collapse and expand thing. That would be kinda nice, but not enough to make me leave vi.
I'm unconvinced that that is really better then using ls directly, but whatever floats your boat.
That is useful. I have to use ^] to get vi to search for the tag, or use another xterm to bring up a man page. It would be nice to have them unified. It would also be nice if vi could figure out what class x is so it can go to the right place when I do a tag search from x.foo()...
Is that really simpler then typing :r ~/t/class to read in a class template? You could shorten that to a keystroke if you use :map...
Did something prevent you from opening anew xterm window to search from things in a CLI?
That is nice, unfortunately it is frequently also a curse. I had a yacc-like program for Java that made java source, but the Java IDEs I used had no way for me to ask for it to be run on the .cup files. The vender had no idea why I would want such a thing, and after much tech support time finally bounced me to someone who did, but told me that it wasn't possible. For C++ I have a similar tool I use to generate lex files (it has simpler rules for generating "trivial" tokens)
You do seem to give up the ability to make meta languages and have the make file apply them for you. That is a very powerful programming paradigm to be cut off from. I don't see why the IDEs have to cut you off from it, but the ones I have looked at either do, or have no obvious way to do it. If you know of any that do, please let me know. Or even good work arounds...
You did leave out the GUI bit that I do find very helpful, and have found no CLI equivalent. Layouts of GUI panels and dialogs. It is far easier to do that in a GUI environment then a CLI one. I know, I have done it both ways. The Apple Builder (based off NeXTs) is extremely nice, but even less capable ones like the Symantic Java Studio, or MegaMax's Atari ST GUI are very very helpful. Doing hand layout of widgets sucks. Even if it is a tad bit simpler to make sure resizes don't suck as much, the rest of the ease of using a GUI layout tool far offsets that one bit where GUI tools are a bit weak. GUI layout tools also get harder to use effectively as you get more and more custom widgets (the Java layout tool could let you make live custom widgets, but then bugs in your widget code can bring down the layout tool...and the rest of the IDE! Which sucks, esp. since exception handling should have let them limit that problem...)
Depending on what you are doing GUI dev tools can be more powerful, or less powerful then CLI ones.
I'm going to answer a slightly different question, why do I do it.
There are a few distinct reasons I do it:
That said, there are some reasons I don't do Open Source:
Cool, I didn't know.
Um, the whole point is for me to tell it what I want, how much I want it, and to never deal with it again. "it might not record exactly what you thought" sounds a whole lot like "the car may not take you to your work place, it might take you to someone else's"
For example, I kind of liked the sitcom Rossanne. I have a wishlist for it. It airs about 8 times a day. If it ever causes me to lose an episode of West Wing or ER I'm going to be really really pissed off (even if it is because the network moved one or both shows around!)
I kind of like Star Trek Deep Space Nine now that I actually manage to catch it, so I have a wish list for it too, it's more important then many shows, but less important then others. I'll be pissed if I get rossane and not DS9. I'll be pissed if I get DS9 and not (new) ER -- again even if the conflict is because one or both networks moved the shows.
I like West Wing a lot, but I like it less then ER. If the two are ever on at the same time, I want ER. I'll be pissed if West Wing gets recorded (unless the ER is a re-run, if it is and West Wing is new, I want West Wing). Even if one or both the shows are at a different time because of a special, or a schedule change.
My wife likes Gilmore Girls, so we record that too, if it is new, and doesn't conflict with West Wing, or ER, but we do get it rather then Rossane.
The TiVo deals with all of that because it doesn't have non-guaranteed/guaranteed, it has a numbered list. If I want ER (first-run-only) no matter what, I move it up to the top slot. If I want West Wing (first-run-only) almost as much I put it in the second slot. Rossane goes down around number 28.
Like most GUI things this is actually easier to do then to explain. And once done you never miss a show (unless it is to catch one you like more). It's not a minor thing. If it isn't real close to 100% it is way less useful. If it is real close something like To Do and Tivo's history (which is mis-named because it includes future events like "Won't record DS9 "Tribbles Again" wednsday at 10:00PM because it conflicts with a higher priority show ER "Wackyness with a Spleen") can help bridge the gap, but it requires a little effort (like for ToDo remembering that not seeing a show on Tuesday might be an issue -- you start to lose track of what days and times and networks things are on very quickly once you mostly don't need to know!! or for history having lots of "normal" conflicts will hide the abnormal ones).
It would be even better if I could say "DS9 after 1995 is in slot 7, before 1995 is in slot 40", but you can't do that. Yet.
If it sounds like I'm a TV addict, well, sort of I am. But I'm more just interested in simple problems that turn insanely complex, and scheduling to catch TV shows turns out to be one of them. Grab one of the XML show schedules some time and code up a storm. It's really a challenge!
P.S. I'm not belittling your Replay, before TiVo's 2.0 software Replay did a lot of stuff TiVo didn't, and even now it does do some things TiVo doesn't (and once the new boxes hit Replay will do a whole lot of stuff TiVo doesn't -- for at least six months, maybe years). Depending on how important "those things" are either unit could be a good choice.
Yes you can, but it seems more likely that TiVo will change things that will break this. In part because they don't want to piss off their partners (they also don't want to piss off their customers, some of which do this, so it is a hard choice for them). In part because those programs rely on the internal structure of files on the TiVo which might be changes for reasons that are completely unrelated to wanting to break the hack. (For example the much rumored VBR in 2.5)
Sonic Blue is less likely to change the way ReplayTVs send to each other because that would make a new one unable to send to an old one.
Well it does let you choose what wins in a conflict, it might be fine grained then (TiVo isn't -- you can set the new show to beat all old shows, none of the old shows, or not go at all -- to get anything in between you have to visit the SPM, and watch the "Please Wait" icon for a bit). So it might be better then TiVo's 1.3 software, I'm sure it can't be as good as the 2.0 software without a SPM.
I'm also not sure if it has wishlists, and I know it doesn't have suggestions. Not as important as the SPM though.
I hope so, but I'm guessing the commercial-skipping is not coming anytime soon as they are trying to get money from advertisers (selling the iPreview stuff, and telescoping commercials). Show sharing, and seemless show sharing (making N ReplayTVs, or TiVos act as one unit with N tuners -- on Now Showing list, one ToDo list, one place to set a wishlist or pass and have the TiVo or Replay work out who records it, and what disk it lives on) would be enough to convince me to upgrade.
Hopefully TiVo catches up with sharing, or Replay catches up with scheduling. Either would make me buy again, even in this economy :-)
Sure you can, buy one and you'll miss a lot of the TiVo's scheduling features. The new "conflict catcher" is an improvement, but no session pass manager (for non-TiVo owners that lets you set up in advance which shows are more important, so if there is a schedule change the show that is most important will be recorded.
That isn't to say that TiVo's scheduling is the end all. Both units could do better padding. TiVo could do even better with show tracking (yes I said new episodes of Sopranos are more important the The Practice, but since The Practice only shows up on Sunday and Sopranos all week, it "should" be able to figure out that recording Practice at 9 then Sopranos at 11 would be better then doing the simple greedy algo). Of corse ReplayTV isn't even good enough to complain about that yet :-)
ReplayTV is also more irritating in the way it manages the disk space. You set aside disk for each show you want, so you can miss episodes of things you want even though there is ample free space. On the other hand that manages to deal with marathons without resorting to "Save at most N" on the TiVo (and "save at most" has similar problems to Replay's pre-allocate per show method).
Yes. But it is a harder sell now. Before TiVo's better scheduling was enough to make it a clear winner. Now it depends. Being able to move shows to a PC would win me over, moving between Replay's is not as exciting (but since it is likely that someone will manage to figure out how to make a PC accept the shows....). Commercial autoskip is nice, but not a super huge deal to me. It may be to others.
If sending shows around is seamless enough (and I doubt it is just yet) it can be a lot better then two tuners (like MS UTV, or the Direct TiVo with the 2.5 software). Want two tuners, buy two ReplayTVs, want 4 tuners? Buy four.
I'm glad someone has done it. It will be harder for TiVo to not do it now. The big questions is which happens first: TiVo gets networking, or ReplayTV gets better scheduling. Until one of those things happens it is a hard choice either way!