Don't the workers of that small company realize that the true path to prosperity lies not with simply attacking the enemy head-on, but rather applying the `distributed intelligence' of free markets? The small company could, for instance, seek a loan from one of America's fine banks, or perhaps find an 'angel' willing to invest in their bold scheme. Capitalism, after all, is more powerful than even a dozen vorpal swords --- and is the true source of prosperity in this great nation! For it is the virtue and cooperation everyday men (and yes, even women!) like yourselves, working hand-in-hand with investors and managers to increase production and cut costs, that will win this battle with Communism. To all the men (and yes, even women!) on the front lines with the Red Menace, to all the small companies out there 'chomping at the bit' to fight evil with affluence, America says: Thank you, and say No to Unions!
Um. Unless you're running a *serious* corporation's IT section, the degree to which DVD-RW\? is *already* proven is more than sufficient.
For a small business, you have the following options:
(1) Tape drive storage. More space than you probably need in the immediate future, high-ish price, proprietary format (usually) and the usual incompatibilities between various OSes. Large, but not infinitely so, MTBF. Unusual drivers. Exotic hardware. High TCO.
For instance, at work we used to have a setup with a DP-30 Onstream parallel port 'Windows Tape Drive'. Terrible story: When the drive died, we lost access to 2 years of backups. Furthermore, even before its demise, it never really worked right. The W2k drivers were almost completely broken, and in fact the blasted thing would refuse to install itself on W2k-server, apparently because the included software (incl. driver!) was intended for 'personal backup' (read: had crippled fileperm/ownership handling) and therefore wished us to buy a 'real' archiving package in order to store the measly ~4gb of critical data. Evil! Bad!
Since the dratted thing also wouldn't talk dirty to WinME, we eventually ended up re-installing 98SE on a machine in the corner, which would drag 4gb of server-side data across the network every friday night. I was almost in tears from the aesthetic trauma alone, not to mention frustration.
(2) DVD storage. Improved versatility, cheap-ish media (esp. if you're re-writing). Reliable media with a very nice lifespan.:) shorter MTBF, but high probability that the next one you're going to purchase will be $200 at Wal-Mart rather than $900 from a reseller specializing in obsolete media formats. Additionally, your media that can read from almost any modern computer, which can SAVE YOUR BACON during a serious crisis.
Yes, I hear you say, but what about that time when you *really* *really* need capacity? Well, with compression -- which is what all the tape drive figures are assuming, BTW -- you get ~9G of storage; having to swap CD's a couple of times for a large backup isn't that onerous.
Only when you're at the 5-6 swap-per-backup point -- that is, ~50gb+ -- do you really need to consider a more industrial solution. And at that point, you're interested in a $1700 tape drive, not a $400 model.
But what about Moore's law? Surely in a couple of years, your capacity needs will (at least) double?
Well, aside from being an incorrect application of Moore's law, this 'law' simply fails in the face of fact. We've been in business ten years, and in that time our data requirements have gone up from virtually nil to 4gb. Another 4gb in ten years is credible, so that's the figure we run with. (We're not a dot-bomb; no explosive growth, no explosive fall, just steady improvement in sales.)
Also, don't forget that a DVD backup solution (once the drives are cheaper) will allow 'localized' or 'workgroup' backups, wherein five or six computers handle their own data storage and backup. Rather than driving the whole wad of data over the LAN, we can just use cron to burn to disc in each workgroup, and collect those.
AAR, the small company I work for has had no problem with our DVD-backup solution. I should know; I'm the one who advocated and installed it.:)
...using bash (under cygwin) and sox? (Question: Does sox run under cygwin? I don't use windows, I don't really know...) I'm sure you won't have as many cool/funky/useful filters, but you might have *enough*; and the payoff, of course, is that you can just wrap the process in a big 'for' loop and come back in half an hour, switch sides, etc./dev/dsp goes in one end, a pile of MP3's comes out the other. (I'm assuming that you don't want to burn to audio-cd; why copy from one obsolete format to another?)
If you can't get sox or some other unix sound prog to work under 'doze, you might want to skip the cygwin/bash approach and learn enough VBscript in order to use the Windows Script Host. Icky, but probably effective; IIRC, you have access to most COM objects under WSH, so you might be able to invoke the necessary parts of your_favourite_doze_editing_suite from within that all-important. 'for' loop.
<digression>
Moral of the story: Never use an OS that has paltry support for basic computational and logical constructs. These are the true building-blocks of a computer; the fact that they're hard to get to under 'doze would, in a nice world, immediately ban its mention from polite company. This is not a UI-issue, this fundamentally affects the power (in the strictest semantic/logical sense) of the expressiveness of the computer-as-language.
(course, the same could be said of Bash's pathetic support for recursion, but until I finish writing that Emacs bootloader, we'll just have to run it in userland, on platforms well-suited to emulating EmacsOS.;)
Sorry dude, but (AFAIK, IANAMB) airborne virii must satisfy some pretty nutty restrictions (sizewise, weightwise, clumping-together-wise). HIV, being one giant hairball of a mo-fu, fails. I'd imagine that a gen-eng virus sufficiently large to look anything like HIV would fail, too.
But the possibility of a new, non-airborne contagion is not out of the question, of course...
I'm sure you've thought of this before, but telecommuting is the ultimate answer for your all your crappy-work-environment needs.
I myself prefer telecommuting from a cafe. Cafes, I find, are ideal for working because:
(1) Nice persons bring hot tasty caffinated things right to you.
(2) No one cares if you get up and go for a half-hour walk.
(3) No one asks you annoying questions about how to "program" cells in Excel. (sigh)
(4) I live in Montreal in a Francophone neighbourhood, so (and this is utterly fantastic) I have *no* *idea* what people around me are nattering about! It's all the advantages of being around peeps enjoying themselves (which for some reason *always* relaxes me; it must be tribal psychological throwback) minus the drawback that you have to listen to fifteen-year-old girls psychoanalyzing each other and making grave pronouncements about each other's mental health or dateability or some such. At any rate, I imagine non-Quebequois can get a similar experience via a walkman.
<offtopic>The really weird thing is that I do, in fact, speak French, and not too badly at that; however, it's a second language learned after the childhood 'window'. For whatever reason, the consensus among myself and my friends with similar experiences is that comprehension for such languages is purely voluntary, whereas with your mother tongue eavesdropping is sometimes an uncontrollable fact of life. </offtopic>
I'm a junior engineer at a small company producing (a fairly killer, IMO) embedded-linux (ix86 atm, but that could change next release) device. Although the RT side of things is not my schtick -- I'm writing some custom web software and working on our in-house embedded-linux distro --- I *do* know that our RT guy is the biggest linux fanatic I know. He seems to have no problems using the RT stuff that's freely available for the linux kernel, and kernel-versus-license-wise, we're simply going to release the stuff we need to keep proprietary (FPGA drivers and firmware-adjustment/config stuff) as kernel module(s).
In fact, RT guy *regularly* slams anything that doesn't have adequate RT support, so I am left to assume that he deems to have a set of RT capabilities which is more than adequate.:)
We're a small company, and running (like everyone else) under some rather tight fiscal constraints.
AFAIK, linux is what is currently saving our collective bacon -- if we're going to compete with the economies of scale of the big boys (not to mention their 'Deep Pocket Error Correction Algorithm') we can't afford to license some proprietary OS or development environment and pass that cost on to our customers. We have to be clever; therefore, we use Linux.
(Aside: I wish I could provide more details, but really, I'm more of a CS geek. My ideal level of abstraction is somewhere just south of lisp and north of Java. Assembly makes me go *bew*bew*bew*bew* (imgine index finger oscillating in front of lip). )
Okay, although this has probably been pointed out by someone 'neath the +3 thresh that I browse at, I'd like to ask: What is this with the `geek tribe' inventing microsoft and stagnating tech?
I've always been under the impression that Microsoft was more a marketing-management invention; Aside from the founder-coders, Microsoft is actually (I've heard) rather rough on its geeks (outsourced labour and permatemps and all that 'Niaomi Klein' jazz. I would be more inclined to think of geeks as the usual Slashdot cast --- interested in technological innovation and (as a distant second) society in general, not so interested in thumbing through wads of cash made by market hammerlock (a lot of us write code for free, for chrissakes.)
And what is it with Bruce's prediliction for, you know, the second tense colloqualisms? Sorry. IMO speeches shouldn't read like character dialogue.
I made a *very* *similar* post about Matrix-style energy collection for the 'still suit' article. It got modded *down*, as a troll. Why? Why? Check my user history!
I am walking, talking proof that slashdot's moderators are all on crack.
My karma-whore mascara is starting to run... *sniff*.
What if, like, all these robots and shit found out about the energy we make, and, you know, like, totally put us in these vats and stuff, and sucked all the energy out, while our minds were placed in a prison that looked exactly like reality? That'd really suck, man.
Actually, I find that the interior of singularities usually has, like, a lot of blue-yellow plasma zipping around in it. Also, there are these weird five-dimensional aliens that look like your son, Dax, and Major Kira.
Also, use w3m (again, search freshmeat) to view your wiki.
W3m is a fantastic text-based browser has this great feature wherein TEXTAREA elements spawn an instance of YOUR_FAVOURITE_EDITOR. This makes large-scale wiki use more enjoyable by at least a factor of five.
I use them extensively for personal use (homework notes, accessible from everywhere, thanks to dsl!), LAN docs (at work), and, well, for fun.:)
Two excellent wiki implementations are available from freshmeat. I'm too lazy to provide urls, but hey, you can search, that's what that 'keyboard' thing in front of you is for:). (Yes, I know I'm giving up karma by not providing useless URLs you could find on your own. *I* do not whore; I only pimp. )
TWiki:
*Very* complete environment written in CGI/mod_perl. Comes with much documentation and is nice and featureful.
PHPWiki:
Fast, minimal, 'blackbox'esque wiki. I used to use this, but I've since moved to Twiki because of the user-management features (I need them for work).
Also, check out www.wikipedia.org for an example of what you can do with the medium.
A solution and rebuttal
on
Boredom Chasers?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
First of all:
* Paying attention in class is not necessarily necessary, especially if you already know the subject,/point finale/. Lectures in general, IMO, are rather pointless exercises in pseudo-education. For me at least, with a topic of anything more than nominal complexity, a textbook is invaluable while lectures, put simply, are a waste of time. I'm surprised that slashdot has turned up so many droids-in-training! Seriously, though. My suspicion is that people like the psychological kick in the ass associated with waking up early,going to class, etc.; it makes them feel as though they're sacrificing something to 'learn', and therefore that they have more to lose by slacking, and therefore they'll study harder on their homework, and therefore do better, and therfore attribute this to going to class, therefore, they go to more class, and the current educational model perpetuates itself. ( The model, I believe, is analogous to that used by many major religions to maintain piousness: Show up at place X at time Y every N days and you're saved! ) So long as you're disciplined enough to focus on the time on the homework w/o the psychological guilt-crutch, then you can skip almost unlimited amounts of time.
But whatever works for you...
* And as for your actual problem: Learn Go. (aka 'Wei Chi', which certainly yields more relevant hits in Google;) You can write the rules to the game in about four instructions, and it can be played on any size of board or grid. Better still, each individual piece is never moved after being placed on the board (until removed -- which doesn't happen frequently enough to be annoying (unless the pieces are your own;) ) ), which means that 'Go: Napkin Edition' can be played whenever you have a pencil handy.
Oh, did I mention that the gameplay requires more thought than Chess? And that GNU-based Go servers and clients are available at all over the known Internet, as well as (passable) AI oppoents?
Okay, so it's two players... but once you get good, you'll want to practice constantly, and it's the sort of game conducive to experimentation and situation-analysis. In particular, books of Go problems are quite fun... take a look at one of the problems, and go to your lecture. By the time lecture is over, you just might have solved it.
Given what we all know about the/. audience, and given the fact that everyone here seems to be busy bashing mailman, it must be either (a) very easy to use and/or (b) well-suited to many people's needs.
How strange. Up here in Canada, where Ma Bell still has a sanctioned and legally-enforced local-service monopoly, ADSL is more popular than the Beatles. Simply put, there *is* no reliability problem -- my service has worked perfectly since the day I installed it (although there *was* a one-month waiting list, IIRC.) Cable-internet is popular too, but generally more expensive (on the order of 17%) and slower to boot. Many of my friends have it, even the nontechnicals. It's the new 'cable' -- a somewhat-premium service that everyone desires.
Price is $40CD/mo. , which is $30US.
Perhaps (and as a linux zealot I say this reluctantly) there's a place for limited (and legally enforced) monopolies in *some* markets (just not the OS market no thank you bob;)
* One Microsoft-bought double-agent at Cupertino: $4million
* Two covert lunch meetings with top RIAA officials: $120
* Steve Jobs' Facial Expression: Priceless.
The only thing that could possibly make it better (for the bad guys, you troll-modding trigger-finger amateur 'moderators'!) would to have the installer play the 'sosumi' System 7 beep
(for those not hip to the jive: Apple promised recording company Apple Records Inc. that it would never, ever record any sounds sohelpthembunny, but they did anyway, so they named the sound 'sosumi'.
)
'Terrorists send tacky overpriced office furniture to high-ranking politicians in an effort to break their spirit by way of their decor; Warning, this news segment contains graphic images of poor interior decoration'.
I have a dual-monitor setup; I feel your pain. Although being able to put, say, Maple on one screen and Emacs on the other has done wonders for my workflow (at least, I *feel* more productive;) I now have less room for those all-important back-of-the-envelope calculations.
Space-saving tips and tricks: Get rid of your speakers. Get wall- or ceiling-mounted lighting (preferably halogen track lighting; I don't care what you prefer, halogen track lighting's the best:P). Get an n-port KVM to handle your n-1 'other' computers, or run them headless if possible. (Neat point: When you switch computers w/ the KVM, only one monitor will change, so hook it up to your 'secondary' screen (google-search for it, man) because they have ridiculously small footprints. Get a trackball, or better yet one of those little 'mousing pads' (a la laptop); the latter is just amazing for workflow if you put it where you can get your thumb on it w/o leaving home row. Using the pointer becomes almost as efficient as the keyboard.;) If you go for the trackball option or don't like 'thumbing' the pointer, then see if (like myself) you can comfortably type with the keyboard on your lap (the trick is to lean back and keep the board as close to your knees as possible). Finally, take one or both of your dual heads, a stud-finder (the sonic kind for walls, not some sort of attractive-male GPS locator), some screws, a plank of plywood and some 0.40$ L-supports, and put one/both of the monitors (the smaller one, preferably! Really important that the shelf can bear the load! Do not do this with a 30" monstrosity!) on your wall, and then fiddle your XF86Config to give you a 'tall/narrow' Xinerama rather than 'short/wide' (assuming that you left one monitor on the desk, as I have). Now go and install a cool windowmanager, like Oroborus, and decorate your monitors with whatever stickers/ornaments appeal to you. This makes the workspace *feel* more comfortable and therefore more spacious. Or something.
Then, get some moist towelettes for your friends to clean themselves up with after they've stopped drooling.;)
In frame-based keyboard-nav, the user spends just as much (if not more) time switching between overlapping keyboard-contexts as a regular user does in a WIMPS. Ever run emacs from within 'splitvt'? Ever run into the 'now I can just switch to that other frame with ^x-o.. wait, doh' scenario?
'regular' Windowing systems, IMO, are probably better at providing psychological cues as to the appropriate command context; the issue of 'proper context' fades almost to irrelevance if you're using the mouse exclusively, as there is *very* little variation in the fundamental idioms of GUI apps, even when using different windowing toolkits (would you like that button to be regular, radio, or checkboxed, sir?)
Slashdot Mirror
(1) smbmount the C-drive (as /c, say) and then type rm -rf /c
/etc/aliases to contain the appropriate mailboxen. Use perl, use emacs, use sed, use whatever your heart desires.
:)
(2) Edit
(3) Unplug the W2k machine.
(4) ifconfig eth0:1 up
This is what I call 'failover, sunny-side up'
Don't the workers of that small company realize that the true path to prosperity lies not with simply attacking the enemy head-on, but rather applying the `distributed intelligence' of free markets? The small company could, for instance, seek a loan from one of America's fine banks, or perhaps find an 'angel' willing to invest in their bold scheme. Capitalism, after all, is more powerful than even a dozen vorpal swords --- and is the true source of prosperity in this great nation! For it is the virtue and cooperation everyday men (and yes, even women!) like yourselves, working hand-in-hand with investors and managers to increase production and cut costs, that will win this battle with Communism. To all the men (and yes, even women!) on the front lines with the Red Menace, to all the small companies out there 'chomping at the bit' to fight evil with affluence, America says: Thank you, and say No to Unions!
My real problem with XP is that it essentially bundles Enlightenment with the 'doze, you know?
They're stealing our memes!
Um. Unless you're running a *serious* corporation's IT section, the degree to which DVD-RW\? is *already* proven is more than sufficient.
:) shorter MTBF, but high probability that the next one you're going to purchase will be $200 at Wal-Mart rather than $900 from a reseller specializing in obsolete media formats. Additionally, your media that can read from almost any modern computer, which can SAVE YOUR BACON during a serious crisis.
:)
For a small business, you have the following options:
(1) Tape drive storage. More space than you probably need in the immediate future, high-ish price, proprietary format (usually) and the usual incompatibilities between various OSes. Large, but not infinitely so, MTBF. Unusual drivers. Exotic hardware. High TCO.
For instance, at work we used to have a setup with a DP-30 Onstream parallel port 'Windows Tape Drive'. Terrible story: When the drive died, we lost access to 2 years of backups. Furthermore, even before its demise, it never really worked right. The W2k drivers were almost completely broken, and in fact the blasted thing would refuse to install itself on W2k-server, apparently because the included software (incl. driver!) was intended for 'personal backup' (read: had crippled fileperm/ownership handling) and therefore wished us to buy a 'real' archiving package in order to store the measly ~4gb of critical data. Evil! Bad!
Since the dratted thing also wouldn't talk dirty to WinME, we eventually ended up re-installing 98SE on a machine in the corner, which would drag 4gb of server-side data across the network every friday night. I was almost in tears from the aesthetic trauma alone, not to mention frustration.
(2) DVD storage. Improved versatility, cheap-ish media (esp. if you're re-writing). Reliable media with a very nice lifespan.
Yes, I hear you say, but what about that time when you *really* *really* need capacity? Well, with compression -- which is what all the tape drive figures are assuming, BTW -- you get ~9G of storage; having to swap CD's a couple of times for a large backup isn't that onerous.
Only when you're at the 5-6 swap-per-backup point -- that is, ~50gb+ -- do you really need to consider a more industrial solution. And at that point, you're interested in a $1700 tape drive, not a $400 model.
But what about Moore's law? Surely in a couple of years, your capacity needs will (at least) double?
Well, aside from being an incorrect application of Moore's law, this 'law' simply fails in the face of fact. We've been in business ten years, and in that time our data requirements have gone up from virtually nil to 4gb. Another 4gb in ten years is credible, so that's the figure we run with. (We're not a dot-bomb; no explosive growth, no explosive fall, just steady improvement in sales.)
Also, don't forget that a DVD backup solution (once the drives are cheaper) will allow 'localized' or 'workgroup' backups, wherein five or six computers handle their own data storage and backup. Rather than driving the whole wad of data over the LAN, we can just use cron to burn to disc in each workgroup, and collect those.
AAR, the small company I work for has had no problem with our DVD-backup solution. I should know; I'm the one who advocated and installed it.
...using bash (under cygwin) and sox? (Question: Does sox run under cygwin? I don't use windows, I don't really know...) I'm sure you won't have as many cool/funky/useful filters, but you might have *enough*; and the payoff, of course, is that you can just wrap the process in a big 'for' loop and come back in half an hour, switch sides, etc. /dev/dsp goes in one end, a pile of MP3's comes out the other. (I'm assuming that you don't want to burn to audio-cd; why copy from one obsolete format to another?)
;)
If you can't get sox or some other unix sound prog to work under 'doze, you might want to skip the cygwin/bash approach and learn enough VBscript in order to use the Windows Script Host. Icky, but probably effective; IIRC, you have access to most COM objects under WSH, so you might be able to invoke the necessary parts of your_favourite_doze_editing_suite from within that all-important. 'for' loop.
<digression>
Moral of the story: Never use an OS that has paltry support for basic computational and logical constructs. These are the true building-blocks of a computer; the fact that they're hard to get to under 'doze would, in a nice world, immediately ban its mention from polite company. This is not a UI-issue, this fundamentally affects the power (in the strictest semantic/logical sense) of the expressiveness of the computer-as-language.
(course, the same could be said of Bash's pathetic support for recursion, but until I finish writing that Emacs bootloader, we'll just have to run it in userland, on platforms well-suited to emulating EmacsOS.
</digression>
Sorry dude, but (AFAIK, IANAMB) airborne virii must satisfy some pretty nutty restrictions (sizewise, weightwise, clumping-together-wise). HIV, being one giant hairball of a mo-fu, fails. I'd imagine that a gen-eng virus sufficiently large to look anything like HIV would fail, too.
But the possibility of a new, non-airborne contagion is not out of the question, of course...
I'm sure you've thought of this before, but telecommuting is the ultimate answer for your all your crappy-work-environment needs.
I myself prefer telecommuting from a cafe. Cafes, I find, are ideal for working because:
(1) Nice persons bring hot tasty caffinated things right to you.
(2) No one cares if you get up and go for a half-hour walk.
(3) No one asks you annoying questions about how to "program" cells in Excel. (sigh)
(4) I live in Montreal in a Francophone neighbourhood, so (and this is utterly fantastic) I have *no* *idea* what people around me are nattering about! It's all the advantages of being around peeps enjoying themselves (which for some reason *always* relaxes me; it must be tribal psychological throwback) minus the drawback that you have to listen to fifteen-year-old girls psychoanalyzing each other and making grave pronouncements about each other's mental health or dateability or some such. At any rate, I imagine non-Quebequois can get a similar experience via a walkman.
<offtopic>The really weird thing is that I do, in fact, speak French, and not too badly at that; however, it's a second language learned after the childhood 'window'. For whatever reason, the consensus among myself and my friends with similar experiences is that comprehension for such languages is purely voluntary, whereas with your mother tongue eavesdropping is sometimes an uncontrollable fact of life. </offtopic>
I'm a junior engineer at a small company producing (a fairly killer, IMO) embedded-linux (ix86 atm, but that could change next release) device. Although the RT side of things is not my schtick -- I'm writing some custom web software and working on our in-house embedded-linux distro --- I *do* know that our RT guy is the biggest linux fanatic I know. He seems to have no problems using the RT stuff that's freely available for the linux kernel, and kernel-versus-license-wise, we're simply going to release the stuff we need to keep proprietary (FPGA drivers and firmware-adjustment/config stuff) as kernel module(s).
:)
In fact, RT guy *regularly* slams anything that doesn't have adequate RT support, so I am left to assume that he deems to have a set of RT capabilities which is more than adequate.
We're a small company, and running (like everyone else) under some rather tight fiscal constraints.
AFAIK, linux is what is currently saving our collective bacon -- if we're going to compete with the economies of scale of the big boys (not to mention their 'Deep Pocket Error Correction Algorithm') we can't afford to license some proprietary OS or development environment and pass that cost on to our customers. We have to be clever; therefore, we use Linux.
(Aside: I wish I could provide more details, but really, I'm more of a CS geek. My ideal level of abstraction is somewhere just south of lisp and north of Java. Assembly makes me go *bew*bew*bew*bew* (imgine index finger oscillating in front of lip). )
Okay, although this has probably been pointed out by someone 'neath the +3 thresh that I browse at, I'd like to ask: What is this with the `geek tribe' inventing microsoft and stagnating tech?
I've always been under the impression that Microsoft was more a marketing-management invention; Aside from the founder-coders, Microsoft is actually (I've heard) rather rough on its geeks (outsourced labour and permatemps and all that 'Niaomi Klein' jazz. I would be more inclined to think of geeks as the usual Slashdot cast --- interested in technological innovation and (as a distant second) society in general, not so interested in thumbing through wads of cash made by market hammerlock (a lot of us write code for free, for chrissakes.)
And what is it with Bruce's prediliction for, you know, the second tense colloqualisms? Sorry. IMO speeches shouldn't read like character dialogue.
I know y'all gonna mod this one down too, but...
I made a *very* *similar* post about Matrix-style energy collection for the 'still suit' article. It got modded *down*, as a troll. Why? Why? Check my user history!
I am walking, talking proof that slashdot's moderators are all on crack.
My karma-whore mascara is starting to run... *sniff*.
What if, like, all these robots and shit found out about the energy we make, and, you know, like, totally put us in these vats and stuff, and sucked all the energy out, while our minds were placed in a prison that looked exactly like reality? That'd really suck, man.
Sorry, I just couldn't resist.
(/me imagines John Ashcroft pronouncing <blink> to be a terrorist act)
Actually, I find that the interior of singularities usually has, like, a lot of blue-yellow plasma zipping around in it. Also, there are these weird five-dimensional aliens that look like your son, Dax, and Major Kira.
...might want to spend that extra year in pre-school, till they perfect basic syntax and fine motor skills.
Oh, yeah, and lay off on the links to 'goatse.cx', you trolling wankers!
Also, use w3m (again, search freshmeat) to view your wiki.
W3m is a fantastic text-based browser has this great feature wherein TEXTAREA elements spawn an instance of YOUR_FAVOURITE_EDITOR. This makes large-scale wiki use more enjoyable by at least a factor of five.
Yes, Wikis are the key.
:)
:). (Yes, I know I'm giving up karma by not providing useless URLs you could find on your own. *I* do not whore; I only pimp. )
I use them extensively for personal use (homework notes, accessible from everywhere, thanks to dsl!), LAN docs (at work), and, well, for fun.
Two excellent wiki implementations are available from freshmeat. I'm too lazy to provide urls, but hey, you can search, that's what that 'keyboard' thing in front of you is for
TWiki:
*Very* complete environment written in CGI/mod_perl. Comes with much documentation and is nice and featureful.
PHPWiki:
Fast, minimal, 'blackbox'esque wiki. I used to use this, but I've since moved to Twiki because of the user-management features (I need them for work).
Also, check out www.wikipedia.org for an example of what you can do with the medium.
I prefer playing on a 5x5x5x5x5 grid.
First of all:
/point finale/. Lectures in general, IMO, are rather pointless exercises in pseudo-education. For me at least, with a topic of anything more than nominal complexity, a textbook is invaluable while lectures, put simply, are a waste of time. I'm surprised that slashdot has turned up so many droids-in-training! Seriously, though. My suspicion is that people like the psychological kick in the ass associated with waking up early,going to class, etc.; it makes them feel as though they're sacrificing something to 'learn', and therefore that they have more to lose by slacking, and therefore they'll study harder on their homework, and therefore do better, and therfore attribute this to going to class, therefore, they go to more class, and the current educational model perpetuates itself. ( The model, I believe, is analogous to that used by many major religions to maintain piousness: Show up at place X at time Y every N days and you're saved! ) So long as you're disciplined enough to focus on the time on the homework w/o the psychological guilt-crutch, then you can skip almost unlimited amounts of time.
;) You can write the rules to the game in about four instructions, and it can be played on any size of board or grid. Better still, each individual piece is never moved after being placed on the board (until removed -- which doesn't happen frequently enough to be annoying (unless the pieces are your own ;) ) ), which means that 'Go: Napkin Edition' can be played whenever you have a pencil handy.
* Paying attention in class is not necessarily necessary, especially if you already know the subject,
But whatever works for you...
* And as for your actual problem: Learn Go. (aka 'Wei Chi', which certainly yields more relevant hits in Google
Oh, did I mention that the gameplay requires more thought than Chess? And that GNU-based Go servers and clients are available at all over the known Internet, as well as (passable) AI oppoents?
Okay, so it's two players... but once you get good, you'll want to practice constantly, and it's the sort of game conducive to experimentation and situation-analysis. In particular, books of Go problems are quite fun... take a look at one of the problems, and go to your lecture. By the time lecture is over, you just might have solved it.
Given what we all know about the /. audience, and given the fact that everyone here seems to be busy bashing mailman, it must be either (a) very easy to use and/or (b) well-suited to many people's needs.
;)
-Tongue firmly in cheek,
Snafoo
How strange. Up here in Canada, where Ma Bell still has a sanctioned and legally-enforced local-service monopoly, ADSL is more popular than the Beatles. Simply put, there *is* no reliability problem -- my service has worked perfectly since the day I installed it (although there *was* a one-month waiting list, IIRC.) Cable-internet is popular too, but generally more expensive (on the order of 17%) and slower to boot. Many of my friends have it, even the nontechnicals. It's the new 'cable' -- a somewhat-premium service that everyone desires.
;)
Price is $40CD/mo. , which is $30US.
Perhaps (and as a linux zealot I say this reluctantly) there's a place for limited (and legally enforced) monopolies in *some* markets (just not the OS market no thank you bob
* One Microsoft-bought double-agent at Cupertino: $4million
* Two covert lunch meetings with top RIAA officials: $120
* Steve Jobs' Facial Expression: Priceless.
The only thing that could possibly make it better (for the bad guys, you troll-modding trigger-finger amateur 'moderators'!) would to have the installer play the 'sosumi' System 7 beep
(for those not hip to the jive: Apple promised recording company Apple Records Inc. that it would never, ever record any sounds sohelpthembunny, but they did anyway, so they named the sound 'sosumi'.
)
Mmhm! Yeah, I can see it now:
'Terrorists send tacky overpriced office furniture to high-ranking politicians in an effort to break their spirit by way of their decor; Warning, this news segment contains graphic images of poor interior decoration'.
Would you really let ThinkGeek or anyone else ship you something labled 'Anthro' or 'Biomorphic' ?
You'll have the Minister of Fatherland^H^H^H^H^H^H^HHomeland defence on your ass in an instant.
I have a dual-monitor setup; I feel your pain. Although being able to put, say, Maple on one screen and Emacs on the other has done wonders for my workflow (at least, I *feel* more productive ;) I now have less room for those all-important back-of-the-envelope calculations.
:P). Get an n-port KVM to handle your n-1 'other' computers, or run them headless if possible. (Neat point: When you switch computers w/ the KVM, only one monitor will change, so hook it up to your 'secondary' screen (google-search for it, man) because they have ridiculously small footprints. Get a trackball, or better yet one of those little 'mousing pads' (a la laptop); the latter is just amazing for workflow if you put it where you can get your thumb on it w/o leaving home row. Using the pointer becomes almost as efficient as the keyboard. ;) If you go for the trackball option or don't like 'thumbing' the pointer, then see if (like myself) you can comfortably type with the keyboard on your lap (the trick is to lean back and keep the board as close to your knees as possible). Finally, take one or both of your dual heads, a stud-finder (the sonic kind for walls, not some sort of attractive-male GPS locator), some screws, a plank of plywood and some 0.40$ L-supports, and put one/both of the monitors (the smaller one, preferably! Really important that the shelf can bear the load! Do not do this with a 30" monstrosity!) on your wall, and then fiddle your XF86Config to give you a 'tall/narrow' Xinerama rather than 'short/wide' (assuming that you left one monitor on the desk, as I have). Now go and install a cool windowmanager, like Oroborus, and decorate your monitors with whatever stickers/ornaments appeal to you. This makes the workspace *feel* more comfortable and therefore more spacious. Or something.
;)
Space-saving tips and tricks: Get rid of your speakers. Get wall- or ceiling-mounted lighting (preferably halogen track lighting; I don't care what you prefer, halogen track lighting's the best
Then, get some moist towelettes for your friends to clean themselves up with after they've stopped drooling.
In frame-based keyboard-nav, the user spends just as much (if not more) time switching between overlapping keyboard-contexts as a regular user does in a WIMPS. Ever run emacs from within 'splitvt'? Ever run into the 'now I can just switch to that other frame with ^x-o.. wait, doh' scenario?
'regular' Windowing systems, IMO, are probably better at providing psychological cues as to the appropriate command context; the issue of 'proper context' fades almost to irrelevance if you're using the mouse exclusively, as there is *very* little variation in the fundamental idioms of GUI apps, even when using different windowing toolkits (would you like that button to be regular, radio, or checkboxed, sir?)