Here's how I handle email. Keep your inbox empty. When you come to your email you probably have some messages in your inbox. Decide if you need to read something. If not, delete it (spam, stupid forwards). After you read it, decide what you want to do about it. If you need to take some action on it, and it will take less than 2 minutes, do it now. Some messages the only action was to read and enjoy or benefit from the information, but now you can delete it. Other quick actions are to mark appointments on a calendar, put something on your project list, or otherwise capture the relevant information. Other things that need to be done, but must be done in some other context (location or time). Move messages that you want to act on into an "@action" folder. (The @ puts it at the top of the list of mail folders usually.) Review this folder regularly. You can move messages to reference folders, but prefer deletion over storage. Also, get off as many mailing lists as you can.
Even though this BIOS was intended for embedded machines, fast boot is also important for desktop PCs. Consider the Canon Cat designed by Jef Raskin (see "The Humane Interface" by Raskin). It takes a very short amount of time to boot, all you have to do is start typing and the computer powers on and loads the operating system, putting the cursor in the document exactly where you left it off. Not only that, but there is a hardware buffer for the keyboard so that it doesn't even lose the keys you typed while it was booting up. Now that is a computer designed with the user in mind. I'd like to make a PC operating environment and the first thing I'd do is make sure it boots fast. I was thinking the BIOS would be the slow part but if it's possible to speed that up, then that is all the better.
If you want to use code written for a previous version of DirectX with new releases of the SDK, all you have to do is #define what version of the API you want to write to. Using COM the DLL also supports previous versions of the interface, giving backward compatibility. (At least, that's my understanding of it.)
"Mode X" was 320x240 (square pixels). But you could also go into the equivalent mode in 320x200, which is is the same resolution as standard "Mode 13h" linerar frame buffer. Whether you were in 320x240 or 320x200 mode X (or several other "undocumented" tweaked modes) you still have a buffer where the next byte in the buffer is the next 4th pixel on the screen. One cool part was that you could use the hardware in the card itself to copy data between buffers as long as the copy was aligned on the same x-pixel (modulo 4). Mode X also let you do page flipping. The linear frame buffer would only let you access 64KB of video memory in mode 13h, so you couldn't do page flipping. ModeX gave you access to the full 256KB available on VGA and up, but you lost the programming simplicity of a linear frame buffer. You would have to do an "OUT" to a port to select which set of pixels you wanted to work with, like set 0 would be column 0, 4, 8, etc.
The LHA file is actually an Amiga demo. It won first place. I wonder if it would work in an Amiga emulator. I also wonder why they combined the PC and Amiga compos. They used to be separate.
Re:Badass compression algorithm?
on
Share The Pi!
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· Score: 2
No, "100" is three digits so you have to look about 10^3, not 10^100. (I'm not so sure that's right, but if you follow what he said...)
I have DSL from McDonald's and get 55 MPH except between noon and midnight and/or from partners.nytimes.com and goatse. Therefore, Cablemodem is longwinded except for the tech support which is galvanized.
Cryptic messages began to scroll up the screen. If you had booted a commercial OS, you would, at this point, be seeing a "Welcome to MacOS" cartoon, or a screen filled with clouds in a blue sky, and a Windows logo. But under Linux you get a long telegram printed in stark white letters on a black screen. There is no "welcome!" message. Most of the telegram has the semi-inscrutable menace of graffiti tags.
Then he cuts and pastes the entire scroll of his bootup sequence. Now his book is going to be outdated.:)
Excerpt 1:
(Then again, when it comes to erotic self-delusion, the average game boy is probably their peer. "I was all flirting with her and I gave her my business card," said a chunky, fish-lipped E3 attendee, proudly reporting back to his friends. "She said she'd send me some pictures, and call me.")
Excerpt 2:
It's the dearth of women, among other things, that consigns games to their geek ghetto, with no genuine celebrities, or pop-cult recognition outside its narrow subculture. So at E3, you're treated to the sight of hot young developers swaggering across the floor, tricked out in pimp daddy raiment and boy-band hair, whose only groupies are mouth-breathing dudes in "Akira" T-shirts.
Excerpt 3:
It only takes a couple of hours of floor gossip to grasp how deep the social retardation among most game developers runs -- and how not ready for prime time they truly are.
And I won't even mention the number of times that dreaded term "mainstream" was touted as some kind of desirable trait...
Re:Mixed Response on This One
on
Congress@Work
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· Score: 2
The Constitution of the USA guarantees neither anonymity nor even privacy. You're free to say what you want, but you're more than likely going to be held accountable for it.
That's an interesting perspective mister "WinDoze". I'd like to talk to you a bit more about it. What was your name and street address again?:-)
So, you NEVER make mistakes in vi? You never forget that you are are not in insert mode and start typing? You never accidentally use CAPS LOCK when inserting some caps text and then when you are back in command mode, start executing the shifted commands instead of the regular commands? If you never make a mistake, is it because you have to stop and think about it?
And then there is the fact that if you type 10 (as in your 10j example) and then change you mind and delete the current line (dd), you will have to stop and think whether you are in a mode before you hit esc. Otherwise you will delete 10 lines instead of one.
I use vi all the time, and I don't usually make mistakes, but when I do, it's always a modal mistake. (Even worse is a co-worker who uses caps lock just to type a capital letter. Then he uses vi. A lethal combination. It's painful to watch.)
Commands are gestures. If you are concentrating on your text and not the interface (after the gestures have become habituated) you won't have to think about the interface at all. You will execute the command before you consciously decide what buttons to push.
You are right, vi can become habituated. Once I am outside of vi, in other places I try to use all the same commands. I use ksh set to vi-editing mode so I can edit the command line. Sometimes when I am working on a particularly gnarly command I hit "ESC:wq" to "save" it, which of course doesn't work. Just another mode error. I'm in ksh, not vi. No big deal, just another mode error. But it is a distraction.
Read the book. It's good stuff. Or at least read the summary on Jef Raskin's web site.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's how I handle email. Keep your inbox empty. When you come to your email you probably have some messages in your inbox. Decide if you need to read something. If not, delete it (spam, stupid forwards). After you read it, decide what you want to do about it. If you need to take some action on it, and it will take less than 2 minutes, do it now. Some messages the only action was to read and enjoy or benefit from the information, but now you can delete it. Other quick actions are to mark appointments on a calendar, put something on your project list, or otherwise capture the relevant information. Other things that need to be done, but must be done in some other context (location or time). Move messages that you want to act on into an "@action" folder. (The @ puts it at the top of the list of mail folders usually.) Review this folder regularly. You can move messages to reference folders, but prefer deletion over storage. Also, get off as many mailing lists as you can.
Credits: Ideas mostly taken from here.
Whatever you type is the "current selection". When you're done, just cut and paste to where you want it.
Even though this BIOS was intended for embedded machines, fast boot is also important for desktop PCs. Consider the Canon Cat designed by Jef Raskin (see "The Humane Interface" by Raskin). It takes a very short amount of time to boot, all you have to do is start typing and the computer powers on and loads the operating system, putting the cursor in the document exactly where you left it off. Not only that, but there is a hardware buffer for the keyboard so that it doesn't even lose the keys you typed while it was booting up. Now that is a computer designed with the user in mind. I'd like to make a PC operating environment and the first thing I'd do is make sure it boots fast. I was thinking the BIOS would be the slow part but if it's possible to speed that up, then that is all the better.
Anyone who really knows the origins of the language "C" knows that its successor should be called "P" and not "D".
.pl is already taken. :)
BCPL. But
(credits to Larry Wall, I think.)
If you want to use code written for a previous version of DirectX with new releases of the SDK, all you have to do is #define what version of the API you want to write to. Using COM the DLL also supports previous versions of the interface, giving backward compatibility. (At least, that's my understanding of it.)
The overlooked R, reduce. Don't buy stuff you don't need.
"Mode X" was 320x240 (square pixels). But you could also go into the equivalent mode in 320x200, which is is the same resolution as standard "Mode 13h" linerar frame buffer. Whether you were in 320x240 or 320x200 mode X (or several other "undocumented" tweaked modes) you still have a buffer where the next byte in the buffer is the next 4th pixel on the screen. One cool part was that you could use the hardware in the card itself to copy data between buffers as long as the copy was aligned on the same x-pixel (modulo 4). Mode X also let you do page flipping. The linear frame buffer would only let you access 64KB of video memory in mode 13h, so you couldn't do page flipping. ModeX gave you access to the full 256KB available on VGA and up, but you lost the programming simplicity of a linear frame buffer. You would have to do an "OUT" to a port to select which set of pixels you wanted to work with, like set 0 would be column 0, 4, 8, etc.
who the @#%$@#% uses LHA these days?
The LHA file is actually an Amiga demo. It won first place. I wonder if it would work in an Amiga emulator. I also wonder why they combined the PC and Amiga compos. They used to be separate.
No, "100" is three digits so you have to look about 10^3, not 10^100. (I'm not so sure that's right, but if you follow what he said...)
Whew! I was 90% sure that's what it was going to say. Since I'm on a work computer I was a little worried, but what's life without a few risks?
Alternately, I'd be happy with a pair of those Dockers Mobile Pants.
"Hidden Pockets on the inside for your PDA?" WTF?
"Uh, hey... get I get your phone number? Oh, wait, gimme a second I gotta undo my pants real fast, and, uh... ouch!"
Now that [MS] documents can distribute themselves automatically, can we finally truely say that "information wants to be free" ?
I have DSL from McDonald's and get 55 MPH except between noon and midnight and/or from partners.nytimes.com and goatse. Therefore, Cablemodem is longwinded except for the tech support which is galvanized.
Why the hell should I be paying $40+/mo for that?
Assuming you haven't already, you could just do what I did. Cancel cable. It's funny when you call. They assume you're moving.
If possible, pairing them off with a mature, more experienced programmer might give them a dose of the Total Perspective Vortex.
"You've been in the Total Perspective Vortex?"
"Yes."
"And you've seen your true perspective relative to other programmers?"
"Yeah..."
"and?"
"Hey man! I'm John Carmack!"
That's cool... This book is #24 on the
Internet Top 100 SF/Fantasy List.
I live about 4 miles from there (near I-90 and I-405). Where can you see the remnants of the old bridge?
Liberated software sounds like a euphemism for warez.
And I'm sure have plenty of time to wonder exactly where all that pollution and traffic comes from as you SPEND 2 HOURS COMMUTING EACH DAY.
You have to admit, he's trying to fix that by telecommuting. Live close to work? How much closer can you get than working at home?
Anne: You are the weakest link, g'bye.
Ok, what is this, some kind of new "all your base" meme-storm?
Excerpt 1:
(Then again, when it comes to erotic self-delusion, the average game boy is probably their peer. "I was all flirting with her and I gave her my business card," said a chunky, fish-lipped E3 attendee, proudly reporting back to his friends. "She said she'd send me some pictures, and call me.")
Excerpt 2:
It's the dearth of women, among other things, that consigns games to their geek ghetto, with no genuine celebrities, or pop-cult recognition outside its narrow subculture. So at E3, you're treated to the sight of hot young developers swaggering across the floor, tricked out in pimp daddy raiment and boy-band hair, whose only groupies are mouth-breathing dudes in "Akira" T-shirts.
Excerpt 3:
It only takes a couple of hours of floor gossip to grasp how deep the social retardation among most game developers runs -- and how not ready for prime time they truly are.
And I won't even mention the number of times that dreaded term "mainstream" was touted as some kind of desirable trait...
The Constitution of the USA guarantees neither anonymity nor even privacy. You're free to say what you want, but you're more than likely going to be held accountable for it.
:-)
That's an interesting perspective mister "WinDoze". I'd like to talk to you a bit more about it. What was your name and street address again?
What sites do they want blocked? I want to get recruited... Sounds like fun.
So, you NEVER make mistakes in vi? You never forget that you are are not in insert mode and start typing? You never accidentally use CAPS LOCK when inserting some caps text and then when you are back in command mode, start executing the shifted commands instead of the regular commands? If you never make a mistake, is it because you have to stop and think about it?
And then there is the fact that if you type 10 (as in your 10j example) and then change you mind and delete the current line (dd), you will have to stop and think whether you are in a mode before you hit esc. Otherwise you will delete 10 lines instead of one.
I use vi all the time, and I don't usually make mistakes, but when I do, it's always a modal mistake. (Even worse is a co-worker who uses caps lock just to type a capital letter. Then he uses vi. A lethal combination. It's painful to watch.)
Commands are gestures. If you are concentrating on your text and not the interface (after the gestures have become habituated) you won't have to think about the interface at all. You will execute the command before you consciously decide what buttons to push.
You are right, vi can become habituated. Once I am outside of vi, in other places I try to use all the same commands. I use ksh set to vi-editing mode so I can edit the command line. Sometimes when I am working on a particularly gnarly command I hit "ESC:wq" to "save" it, which of course doesn't work. Just another mode error. I'm in ksh, not vi. No big deal, just another mode error. But it is a distraction.
Read the book. It's good stuff. Or at least read the summary on Jef Raskin's web site.